Despite everything you think you know, America is on the right track
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
The argument basically boils down to "America has survived turmoil by adapting before - so we should assume it will again".
But that has nothing at all to do with "America is on the right track". If anything, I'd argue that the current pessimism is fairly warranted, and a crucial step in the process of adapting.
The current format doesn't work for most people, in the same way that it didn't in the 1890s. The way we adapted was by tanking the financial industry (great depression) taxing the ever loving fuck out of the "robber baron" class (90%+ taxes) and creating an entirely new social contract (the "new deal").
We also lucked out with our industry remaining intact while the rest of the world dealt with the fallout of the world wars...
Basically - If anything, we are decidedly NOT on the right track right now, but we arguably have the ability (and may be moderately well prepared) to change course.
Optimism about the status quo is... not exactly warranted in my opinion - although pointing out our strengths is a good reminder that we have the ability to change. But it still requires... you know... actually changing.
Having trouble taking a David Brooks opinion piece seriously is…not a bad sign.
The reason the new social contract was able to hold was because America was the economic engine that rebuilt the Western world, and enjoyed monopoly industrial status for a while. That a.) created plenty of excess economic value that could support a large middle class b.) created enough social cohesion that the working class could remain unified politically and c.) took away all the other options for would-be capitalists to play governments against each other. They were forced to accept those 90% tax rates and unionized labor contracts because nobody else had any physical capital stock.
There were plenty of efforts to establish a social contract for workers starting in the 1890s, but they never took until the Great Depression, and during the Depression there was a significant chance they would be rolled back. Roosevelt's most ambitious reforms (eg. the NRA [1]) were found unconstitutional by the Supreme Court, and there was an active coup attempt [2] against him. For the first few years after WW2 it was very uncertain if the U.S. would end up sliding back into the Great Depression, until it became clear that the Marshall Plan and other reconstruction efforts would stimulate plenty of demand to keep money coming in and give workers bargaining leverage.
Similarly, the era of the great American Middle Class collapsed in the 1970s, and the catalyst was foreign competition. By then other countries had rebuilt their capital stock and domestic industries. This let them put out products just as good as American ones at prices just as cheap, and because Americans had fat union contracts that allowed them a high standard of living, foreign competitors were able to undercut them. Having a good union contract with your employer does you no good when your employer goes out of business, and that was the situation for many of the dominant 1930s-1970s companies in America in the late 70s through the 80s.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Deal#NRA_%22Blue_Eagle%22_...
Actually, some of the competing products, like cars, were significantly better than American ones. In the 1970s and 1980s, American cars were notoriously unreliable gas guzzlers, and Japanese cars grabbed a large chunk of the U.S. car market (which they have to this day). The resulting loss of jobs in the U.S. auto industry (and in all the industries that supply the auto industry) played a part in the collapse of the middle class in the 1970s, bringing down once thriving cities like Detroit.
See the "The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order, 1930-1980" by Steve Fraser and Gary Gerstle — and even more relevant to today, "The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order: America and the World in the Free Market Era" by Gerstle.
Wickard v Filburn is case in point of the destruction caused by the New Deal. A man cannot even grow feed and feed it to his own animals without falling into "interstate commerce."
Saying things are fine by the standards of the 1940s isn't helpful either; I'm not sure that's ever really been an appropriate yardstick (I think public health and wellness opportunity costs are often more relevant). I also think you can take many of these same sorts of arguments, go back in time, and find out that many positive indicators preceded very horrific periods in world history. For instance, there were a lot of societal advancements that coincided with the emergence of the world wars, and they still happened despite (or maybe even because) of those advancements.
I also have come to believe that many forms of societal collapse or crisis emerge fairly rapidly; things seem good by many objective indicators until they really don't. If you track some of these public indicators, they often seem to covary relatively weakly with the sorts of things you might expect, and no one really understands why. Seen from a distanced perspective those indicators don't seem to work as measures of what you'd like them to.
I'm not trying to adopt a pessimistic position, as I tend to think a lot of that is equally poorly posed, and I think the article is correct that if you look to history simply for benchmarks of what to expect when something bad happens, things aren't as catastrophic as you'd think. But in the absence of some kind of rigorous understanding of what to look to for societal collapse or catastrophe, these kinds of discussions in either direction are kind of pointless. What seems more relevant are more focal discussions of specific issues, or how to predict what is important.
- GDP gains might reflect an overall loss to society, as the previously untracked work (homemaking) was more valuable than the GDP-tracked work that replaced it… and families are doing substantially worse just to survive
- GDP per capita might not reflect that 99% of society is doing worse as we experience de-industrialization and destruction of our communities because paper gains like ownership stakes in foreign companies and hyper inflated real estate “mask” the losses experienced by most people
I’m curious what US metrics look like if you exclude the top… 5% over the past 50 years. What has life been like for 19 out of 20 people?
https://cepr.org/voxeu/columns/stagnating-median-incomes-des...
It shows all the ways that life has actually improved in the last 100 years across the world, for all people.
There’s a reason that populations have risen sharply to all time highs during this period. Infant and maternal mortality have reduced, deaths from deadly diseases have reduced through proliferation of antibiotics and vaccines, people don’t die of starvation from famine anymore in most of the world.
And you can actually see the effect of all of these things. When people are secure that their children will live to see adulthood, they drop from having 5-6 children to 1-2.
Things aren’t perfect, but on that one heartbreaking metric - the % of parents who mourn the loss of a child - the progress is phenomenal.
And that’s just one thing. I could give as many examples as you’d like, some of which might resonate more than others. Here are two more.
- the existence of the internet, smartphones and software powering those phones. We can stay in touch with nearly anyone we want to. We can find communities of like minded people online. It’s safe to say there are many on HN who fit right in but might not fit in their physical neighbourhoods. Companionship and community are critical to our well being.
- conscription is at an all time low. You, reading this, probably will never have to do military service or die for your country. Even many nations that do require service, like Finland, Singapore and South Korea have been at peace for a long, long time. Not dying in wars started by others is fantastic.
- we have access to wider variety of foods - both ingredients and cuisines. Variety that previous generations could only have dreamed of.
- we’ve never had more or better entertainment options. There are more movies, books, TV shows and video games than ever. Even if you felt they were better in the old days, you can enjoy all the entertainment from the old days on your smartphone for the cost of a cheap subscription.
Life isn’t perfect, but it’s a lot better than it used to be. This idea that life sucks because billionaires exist is a sad, small minded philosophy.
I don't blame you. You're acting exactly how most people act in most situations. Dwelling on what they don't have and getting angry about it.
Even if you won the lottery and could afford to have 20 kids and a nanny for each one you still wouldn't be happy. Not because you're bad, but because that's how brain chemistry works. The hundreds of millions from the lottery starts to feel "normal" and you'd be complaining about something else. Like your yacht not being big enough or whatever.
Ultimately the thing that is keeping you unhappy isn't the childcare cost or the spectre of CPS. You're unhappy because it's inherent in the human condition.
It certainly would be. So I think you should consider why else people say what they say.
People are more sensitive to changes, especially negative ones, rather than absolutes. It doesn't matter how many things are good. If things are wrong, they need to improve, and anything that impedes improvement is perceived as negative. If things get worse, that is a big negative score -- especially if somebody says "Hey, it was worse in the past, so be happy that it's not that bad".
A number of things appear to be getting worse now, and a number of it has to do with the very wealthy:
* We just had four years of a Presidency who was very intent on antagonizing his opponents. He is wealthy, and was supported by the party that appealed to the wealthy.
* Even with him (temporarily) out of office, the impulse that put him there is still present. Those same smartphones bring us a constant stream of people who intend to aggravate -- not just bad news, but people who want them to be unhappy.
* Some of that is driven by wealthy people who profit off that unhappiness. It drives engagement, and they sell attention.
* A lot of people feel that their rights are decreasing. Sometimes it's literally true; sometimes it's merely a threat; sometimes it's engagement as in the last point. It doesn't matter, for example, that white people are in zero danger of becoming an oppressed minority; many are certain that it is, and that drives acting out in a way that is harmful.
* It is difficult to ignore a threat with high consequences and low probability. It does no good to tell people that there's a 99.9999% chance that their children won't be shot today -- especially if it's coupled with people dismissing the ones who are shot.
And so on. My point is that it is not "life sucks because billionaires", and in fact life sucks because people think that they only thing they're complaining about is "because billionaires". That means nobody is helping as things get worse, and even standing in the way.
I meant things like income or other household metrics, but only for the bottom 95%.
Precisely because GDP doesn’t give us that insight.
Paper gains and real estate holdings/transactions are not part of GDP.
His point is people think American is much worse off than it actually is and he backs that up.
Complete nonsense. Discussing what the temperature of an object is overall is meaningless, because it's made of individual atoms and molecules that do their own thing...
His new grift is that merica is on the right track because religion and China is done for because heathens.
Another hilarious one was Fukuyama and the whole the end of history grift of the 1990s.
As for Brooks, he defended the invasion of Iraq for years.
The "foreign army that's been accused of war crimes" is the Israel Defense Forces. Jeffrey Goldberg appears to have written a book about some aspects of his time as a prison guard at Ktzi'ot Prison: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/139269.Prisoners
I was surprised by this claim. I was always under the impression that poorer people spent more time consuming news media, and that the wealthier a person was, the less news they consumed. I don't know where I got such an impression, and I think I may have confused the statistics for television watching in general. Does anyone have a good source showing a correlation in either direction?
Perhaps David Brooks believes the working class get their news from Facebook memes. It's the only explanation that allows me to make his statement congruous.
I haven't had cable for over two decades now. I only catch cable news in the early morning when I'm in a Best Western lobby trying to pull a waffle out of the waffle iron.
An example; the ruling class promoting unfettered immigration and “Our Democracy” does not make people at least a bit suspicious of their motivations? Billionaires pushing immigration to import cheap labor? Billionaires pushing the populace having a supposed vote?
But then again, this forum is very much a body representing ruling class agents at the very least, and it is immensely difficult for people to admit, let alone just contemplate that they are possibly not the good and great people they think themselves of. This YN forum isn’t all that different than a palace parlor where the aristocratic strata of the past who told themselves all kind of things about how they need to impose their ideas on the working class … for their own benefits, which magically happen to coincide with only advantaging the aristocracy. It’s really no differ than in the past; be it the feudal European aristocracy, the Southern aristocracy, or the technocratic modern aristocracy that is deceptive and secretive about what they need to impose on the commoners but not on themselves.
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/09/t-magazine/vacation-four-...
Decline is an interesting metric. Will America fail as a country? Probably not.
Will America cause more suffering with the current trajectory than it would have if choices were made to better society rather than treating humanity as a zero-sum game? Certainly! It's easy to find evidence of that whichever side of politics you come from.
> Productivity levels and living standards have increased so dramatically that it takes people less time to earn the money to buy the things they need. During the Middle Ages, an English laborer had to work 80 hours to pay for a pound of sugar. By 2021, an English laborer had to work only 1.89 minutes to do that. In 1800, it took 5.4 hours of work to buy 1,000 lumen-hours; in 1992, it took only 0.00012 hours of work for someone to light their home for six weeks.
> From 1980 to 2018, the average amount of time a person had to work to afford the basket of commodities—energy, food, raw materials—that make up a typical middle-class lifestyle fell by 72 percent, according to the book Superabundance, by Marian L. Tupy and Gale L. Pooley. That, too, frees up a lot of time and resources that can be spent on other things.
Healthcare spending from 1970 to 2020 has increased by 10x (394 billion to 4124 billion in 2020 dollars). Salaries have not increased by quite so much :D
We had a half baked coup attempt in 2020.
People are polarizing in ways that weren't around only a few years ago.
The congressional deficit has ballooned to unsustainable levels. Our annual interest payments are ~400B/yr.
Social Security is projected to default next decade.
We’re back to fighting proxy wars with the Russians, which the supposedly progressive author presents as a positive!
We’ve destroyed South America and the Middle East in pursuit of our strategic goals.
I hope we don’t provoke china into a war over Taiwan…
I love my country but shit is seriously fucked up right now.
> We had a half baked coup attempt in 2020.
Which failed and had little popular or organized military support. We've had a lot worse throughout our history. McVeigh, civil war, et cetera.
> People are polarizing in ways that weren't around only a few years ago.
But compared to the polarization of late 1800's?
> The congressional deficit has ballooned to unsustainable levels. Our annual interest payments are ~400B/yr.
Much of that is left hand owing the right hand type stuff, and it's all in our sovereign currency. It's not nothing, but it's not nation-busting levels either.
> Social Security is projected to default next decade.
Only if you make really stupid assumptions.
> We’re back to fighting proxy wars with the Russians, which the supposedly progressive author presents as a positive!
Russia is self-destructing on the Ukrainian bulwark.
> We’ve destroyed South America and the Middle East in pursuit of our strategic goals.
Which we've been doing for the last 150 years or so.
> I hope we don’t provoke china into a war over Taiwan…
We're not substantially closer now than we were at many other points in the last 70 years.
> I love my country but shit is seriously fucked up right now.
If the country is seriously fucked up right now, it's pretty much always been seriously fucked up. I could agree with that statement.
Yes, it did fail. Thank God. But the coup plotters have been left to keep plotting for the past two years. If you haven't noticed, the person who committed the coup is still out there telling his millions of followers that he's the rightful President, and that the election he tried to steal was stolen. What happens when he does the same thing in 2024?
To say that McVeigh was worse than Jan6 completely missed what the danger was on that day. The danger isn't to be measured in number of lives lost.
And all that's true if the electorate were static. In reality the Republican's largest voting bloc, the Boomers, are starting their mass die-off. Remember, the oldest Boomers are now 77.
Indeed he lost in 2020, but he still nevertheless almost became President through illegal administrative tricks, abuses of power, and physical force.
Although the 2020 administrative coup failed, the autopsy of that election and the subsequent Jan6 insurrection show exactly the weak points in the plan and why it failed. It wasn't due to some resilient institutional safeguards, like the DOJ, FBI, or even National Guard. All of those institutions failed to protect us. The coup attempt failed because rank-and-file people did their jobs, rather than bend to overt political pressures. Clerks, elections officials, secretaries of state, the VPOTUS - individual people doing their duties and upholding their oaths of office.
By and large, since 2020 these people have been purged and the power of their offices have been usurped by state GOP parties where they have control. These places will never again have the problem of elections officials doing their duties rather than bending to partisan political pressures.
> Trump is losing ground amongst conservatives, even if only a little bit.
If Trump is the nominee, he will have all the support he needs.
> In fact, the clowns that were just elected to the House are only going to reinforce the idea that Republicans are not the party of responsible governing.
Many of those clowns are in fact insurrectionists. Remember, the purpose of the mob on Jan6 was to stop the lawful functioning of Congress to certify the 2020 election. But what may seem clownish is in fact exceedingly dangerous. Republicans have proven they will use their slim majority to completely stall the function of Congress when it serves them politically. There's no need for a mob to stop the business of Congress anymore, there are some elected Representatives who are empowered to throw a wrench into the whole machine if it serves them politically.
The fact that these people were just elected proves their electorate doesn't even care that they're completely ineffective. They can behave as irresponsibly as they like, and they'll be reelected.
> And all that's true if the electorate were static. In reality the Republican's largest voting bloc, the Boomers, are starting their mass die-off. Remember, the oldest Boomers are now 77.
You're not the only one who notices this. You don't think the rise in pro-authoritarian, pro-political violence, anti-democratic rhetoric from Republicans is a coincidence, do you?
You are quite correct. The Republicans are acting like a wild animal trapped in a corner. The Democrats have been a bit, ah, slow, to update their playbook accordingly. The next two years will see us move from one preventable "crises" to another. They may as well make the most of it - their shenanigans are only going to cost them more conservative moderates. I think this Congress will be the last one where the Republicans hold a majority. The big question is how long will it take conservatives to realize the Republican party is no longer viable and create a new party? How will they gate keep the bozos?
The coup attempt is somehow a GOOD sign for American politics?!
The debt is absolutely an existential threat. The “right hand left hand” BS is directly responsible for the growing wealth gap.
Social security is not sustainable. The default projections are not controversial. Go look it up!
We’re single-handedly financing the war in Ukraine.
The president announced he would defend Taiwan with force but don’t even recognize it as a sovereign nation. The CCP has begun unprecedented military activity around Taiwan. They’re violating their air space on a daily basis probing for weakness. Same as always?! What planet are you on?
Which raises the possibility that we're looking at the nasty part of a regular oscillation.
However. The very low birthrate is genuinely new. Drugs/homelessness not new but astonishingly severe. Steep housing prices due to collusion (vs manufactured homes, housing laws, and more) are a large cause of both.
Did you read the article?
Also the 6 rounds of QE post 2008 is absolutely %100 unprecedented in US history. We have never ever increased the money supply like this. This activity combined with an abundance of cheap credit is what’s creating bubbles in housing, equities and other assets.
QE is a very recent invention. Inflation, such as during the Civil War, not at all. The money supply went full bonkers - and during the revolution itself; much worse, still. A "Continental" (the dollar of the time) came to mean "worthless."
Single handedly helping a country defend itself from an invader that is attempting to eradicate it.
But none of it is new or unique.
We’re discussing the article right?
Fighting and winning. We've managed to degrade the Russian army to the point where they are fielding tanks from the 1970's and all for less than $50 billion and 0 US casualties. If that's not a positive, I don't know what is.
I agree it’s working to destabilize the Russian federation. The question is: “is it worth it?”
100B+ in military spending, destroying Ukraine, dramatically weakening the European economy seems like a pretty steep price for fighting the ghost of the USSR.
In general we have a pretty terrible track record for acting as world police. Arming the Mujahideen during the Soviet-afghan war did defeat the soviets…but the aftermath was horrendous for the region.
You should keep in mind that Ukraine would be more destroyed without American and other western help, not less.
The US for the first time in a long time is supplying a side in a war that has a clear good a bad side.
That’s the difference in this situation—we’re not acting as world police. We’re helping an allied nation defend itself.
David Brooks is absolutely not a progressive. The very first sentence of his Wikipedia page is:
> David Brooks (born August 11, 1961)[1] is a conservative political and cultural commentator who writes for The New York Times
The same term applies to neo-conservatives as well. Ideology is more a means to maintain power and less about a realistic goal.
And speaking of South America and the Middle East, that's now mostly in the past. To the author's point, the shit we did in the 70s was way worse than now. The shit we did in the 30s was worse than the 70s. You don't have to go back very far to see almost everything being worse than now. So the point isn't so much "Everything is Great" as much "(Almost) Everything is as good or better than it ever was despite not being so great". The assertion is very much that we have a long ways to go, but are absolutely moving in the right direction and pretty consistently so at that.
The west absolutely has some blame for the Ukrainian invasion. It’s a lot more complicated than the narrative of “naked aggression” and has been brewing for decades.
Also we just ended occupation of Afghanistan 18 months ago. It’s not exactly ancient history.
This one gets me the worst. America's political landscape is forever changed. 1. Political discourse between sides is so aggressive that morals, the truth, etc, are trumped by 'Who cares? My team is winning.' 2. Congressional cooperation has fallen to levels where the entirety of the government is incapable of making simple, easy decisions, and even when they do, it must help a talking point. 3. This divide has spread outwards into other branches of government in such a way that breaks the entire intent of checks and balances. At this point, the Supreme court is just doing a congressional party's bidding. This seems like 'balance' to other branches but it actually limits the ability for the supreme court to make impartial choices and means that a regime change in congress/ president will fully eliminate checks and balance. The government will answer to a party's bidding rather than the constitution or people. 4. A majority of people in one party no longer trust the electoral system while a majority in the other party see signs that the game is rigged against them (Gerrymandering). This causes a general feeling of 'We lost because of X, not because of us.'
But finally, to me, the worst item...
5. Politics in America are now about feeling right and 'winning' rather than promises and goals. This was always in the background and any marketer will tell you this is how human minds work...but this change accelerates the rest. It doesn't matter what policy is passed or how it plays out, as long as 'I feel right.' Politics now realize that success is a 'sick burn' or a 'scary claim about "them"', not actual improvement of the country. Why? One of these is publicity and moves individual donations...it helps get you elected. It fires up your base because it is way easier to sell negative emotions ("I hate them", "They are going to kill america, we have to save it") rather than positive ("Our government is doing good things.")
This means you need puppets, people in your party for their party to hate and people in their party for your party to hate. Alas, you get Trump, AOC, McConnell, Pelosi, Gatez. Each party knows this agreement is fantastic, or has learned it at least. Why? Because if, say, the GOP did not have a 'them' it would be impossible to sell.
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/16/nyregion/gop-path-recalls...
I'm not American and I'm only interested in this for the entertainment value. I enjoy very much the lack of self awareness.
You should just make your comment clearly idk what you’re getting at.
There has been a regression in abortion rights in some states, but there is still significantly better access to abortions than any time prior to the 1970s.
There has been a hint that there might be a regression in LGBT rights, but there are still far more rights than any time pre-2010.
We have entire states where abortion has been effectively outlawed. Transgender people, a tiny minority of the population have been relentlessly targeted:
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/republican-states-aim-...
If it doesn't affect you or someone you care about, it might be a "hint", for the people it does affect, it's a disaster in the making.
Last time I heard it is closer to 700B per annum
America has a lot of positive attributes as a visitor, but this is a deeply unconvincing article and it would take a monumental evolution for me to want to live there long-term.
They do have a certain tenacity though, I'll give them that.
> Take out a piece of paper. In one column, list all of the major problems this country faces—inequality, political polarization, social distrust, climate change, and so on. In another column, write seven words: “America has more talent than ever before.”
Life isn't great because a pound of sugar has a lower labor-cost than it did 200 years ago. Here's another nugget:
> From 1980 to 2018, the average amount of time a person had to work to afford the basket of commodities—energy, food, raw materials—that make up a typical middle-class lifestyle fell by 72 percent
I notice housing isn't on that list.
I mean this whole piece could be summed up as "Isn't capitalism, and by extension America, amazing?"
Debt is built into your existence. Student debt, housing debt, medical debt. We have a system ibuilt on the exploitation of labor and the only way for profits to keep increasing is for labor to be squeezed ever more. Every part of your life is being financialized. A workforce living paycheck-to-paycheck is a compliant workforce. This is the road to neufeudalism.
Too bad. I believe that change brought about through violence will only lead to a violent regime.
France is one that came to mind. Violent regime? Of course not. But they did have to tread through a reign of terror after their Révolution française.
Perhaps you eventually get to a peaceful regime. But it's hard to imagine power sweeping into control on a wave of violence suddenly shuttering that same violence.
Historians point to this behavior by George Washington as essentially one-of-a-kind in human history.
I'm reminded of the scene in "Seven Samurai" when the villagers bring the seven samurai armor and weapons from dead samurai and Toshiro Mifune's character explodes at the peasants — always pretending to be afraid, humble, powerless, but all the while hoarding weapons, food....
On one hand you have a brave but tragic resistance like Iran right now where dozens of young people have protested and been brutally cut down or publically executed.
On the other hand you have numerous times in history where a government has learned the phrase "Governments are supposed to fear their people". Usually fire is involved.
Both will eventually achieve their aims, but the first example is usually slower and more costly to do so.
Many conflicts start as the first type and become the second.
I know it's not the main point of this essay, but I am always turned off by this appeals to evolutionary psychology. They are "just so" stories: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just-so_story
From a theology standpoint, evolution being a property of existence itself means one could read Evolution as ‘God’ and the two terms become interchangeable.
It is not possible for America to be on the right track when it is not no longer on the America track. Those are mutually excluding things, like a man abducting a child having the child’s best interest in mind.
No matter what track we are on, we are clearly no longer on the American track when America is being denigrated and abused and destroyed in all aspects but the name.
Is it the right track? That’s a different question altogether, but if the person making such a statement is being deceptive and manipulative in their language, it is reasonable to assume they are also not honest in their motivations and intent, hostile even.
This is possibly a bad example; the overwhelming majority of "kidnappings" of children are by one parent as a result of a dispute with the other parent. In that case, the "abducting" parent might well have (and almost certainly think they have) the best interests of the child in mind (never mind that the other parent and/or the state apparatus might disagree).
The free, liberal world order. A myth that doesn't exist but needs to be preserved as an ideological weapon. The "free, liberal" world is responsible for genocides, invasions, bombings of civilians, supporting far-right dictatorships and massacres around the world. Meanwhile, the "closed" world invests in Africa and Latin America as partners and not as a playground to invade and plunder. The "closed" world keeps their billionaires and mega-corporations in check instead of being governed by them. The "closed" world applies rent control and considers housing a human right not a market variable. The "closed" world develops vaccines and distribute them at no-cost to underdeveloped countries.
The "free liberal" world order is a stomach-turning myth that needs to be put to sleep.
The specific dynamic of the last decade has been that as GenX has taken the reins of institutions, the one thing standing in the way of their weilding government as a blunt and absolute instrument of social reinvention is the democratic cohort of working class and rural voters who don't recognize the legitimacy of their elite self-identity and could vote to keep them out of power.
Margins in popular elections are in single digit percentage points, and so to remedy this, they realized that if they couldn't persuade voters to keep them in power with their policies at the voting booth, they could use immigration to mass import voters who would depend on their promised policies, and whose relative poverty would make those votes much cheaper to be bought with small promises like cash benefits. The logic goes that if you have an objection to this and think being born in a country entitles you to membership in a nation state whose government is accountable to said nation, you are a racist and beneath contempt - so much so that if you are killed by your prescriptions (opioids) or as a consequence of emergency policy, nothing of value is lost.
This was not merely right or left either, as the neocons of the 90s and 00s, led by the same cast of characters we have today were also an anti-national movement that sought to make nations subject to international governance. Then, it was via the WTO and use international institutions to subordinate "emerging market" countries by offering their leaders bribes for resource policy concessions. This isn't their first rodeo.
America is not on the right track. It has been purposely derailed by someone who, unlike 20th century demagogues whose ambitions were limited by their nation state orientations, understood that power is inversely proportional to its visibility. Its institutions have been compromised by networks he has been building over 35 years via WEF. He has subordinated entire countries (CAN/AU/NZ) by infiltrating their universities and political parties, and installing their leaders.
This isn't a conspiracy theory, it's a real time critical observation with precedents of how the men we learn about, from Napoleon to Mao, as single political minds, shift history in the course their own lifetimes. The author of this piece is providing bromides to neutralize the uncomfortable sense of dissonance about the absurdities of official narrative, which are unavoidable without actively suppressing criticism of them. I have no doubt it's being passed around at Davos to as a talking points sheet.
China was a potential threat to the US global technological, industrial and military superiority, but since the 10 year change of leadership was abandoned I don't think they are a real threat anymore. Their dictator will concentrate on keeping his power and not on developing the country.
I'm no Trump fanatic, but I still do not understand what people's real problem is with him either. Most of their problems seem to be made up. You can see it most clearly in the Jan 6th committee, who were committed by any means to suggesting that Trump incited violence even though he directly and plainly called for peaceful protest and spoke against violence that day, yet they showed none of that during the "trials".
And aside from that - pretending fraud isn't real or is an impossibility in an American election is incredibly naive. That's like saying Chicago can't have gun violence. Elections should absolutely be questioned and audited regularly.
You'll need an industrial grade lube to get a slope that slippery.
> And aside from that - pretending fraud isn't real or is an impossibility in an American election is incredibly naive. That's like saying Chicago can't have gun violence.
Nice and a strawman too.
> Elections should absolutely be questioned and audited regularly.
Ballot counting is watched by representatives of both parties. Neutral third parties agree that systemic voter fraud is unlikely to be happening at scale, and we do try to catch the dumbasses that try to cheat on an individual scale fairly easily. We can also add a false equivalence to your rapid fire fallacies.
"Questioning" an election is not the same thing as decrying fraud and trying to convince courts to overturn the results when you have no evidence of fraud.
It's quite another to go to a court, not because you have evidence, but because you want to avail yourself of their power to overturn the election by making some convincing argument. Or, short of that, to use the context of a court battle to give a patina of legitimacy to otherwise baseless accusations and FUD (lawyers are great at making bullshit sound convincing in a lawsuit).
That's what the Trump team did, and those are not the kind of people we should be letting near power (those who show an eager willingness to use institutions corruptly).
"No, ban the vocal disbelievers from social media, and ban their candidates from participating. Or imprison them."
Sure there's no problem with that. But that's not what Trump and his team did.
Trump claimed there was fraud so loudly not because he wanted to find actual fraud (which he had no reason to believe existed), but because he wanted people to be very concerned with the idea the election was potentially fraudulent. He wanted people to be concerned with this idea because it legitimized his true motivations - he wanted power for himself.
Trump's team didn't actually want to find fraud; no, their goal was to create an environment of suspicion about fraud, but they had absolutely no intention whatsoever to prove their case. We know this because in all of the 60+ court cases they brought, they never alleged fraud, let alone attempted to prove it. If they did, they would have revealed they had zero evidence for their claims. Of course for this reason, they lost every single case (except I think an early PA case that didn't even relate to claims of fraud).
And it needs to be said that the elections were investigated. Georgia investigated every claim made by the President, and found none of them credible. If Trump were genuinely concerned with finding fraud and simply questioning the results of the election, he would have been satisfied with their process. But the process didn't end up with him winning Georgia, so he wasn't satisfied, to the point that he threatened Georgia elections officials with prosecution when they refused to overturn his loss there.
So yes, when it comes to elections generally, they should absolutely be questioned and audited regularly. But we must also say in the same breath that we cannot let disingenuous concerns about "election integrity" actually undermine elections. That's a problem too, which has demonstrably lead to a coup attempt and violent insurrection. So I would say "voter fraud hysteria" is actually a worse problem than voter fraud itself, which is proven to be rare and hasn't caused any coups or insurrections.
Were you not alive for Bush v. Gore ? All of us on the left denied the legitimacy of that election, loudly, repeatedly, and I don't remember that being considered an "enormous threat to the nature of democracy".
Virtually every other institution has lost credibility in public opinion polls. Why should elections be any different? The losing side will always cry foul, as they have for multiple elections now: 2000, 2004, 2016 and 2020. It is tempting to look the other way, when the one you voted for happened to win.
Dems response to this was not good in my opinion. There is obviously a large population of voters that believe that fowl play is happening in elections, instead of working to increase transparency - there are a lot of things we can do like increased auditing or coming up with a more open way to verify votes - they doubled down and are attacking those who are asking questions. These are fellow Americans, they should not be demonized, we should work to improve election integrity and openness, increase everyones' confidence in election integrity.
If you believe this is what Jan 6 was about, you didn't pay attention to what the Committee found.
In fact it was an administrative coup first, which involved various state GOP parties, various GOP House Reps (Biggs, Gosar, Greene, and Jordan among them), various GOP Senators (Johnson and Cruz among them), the White House (President, Vice President, Chief of Staff, and various lawyers including Rudy Giuliani, John Eastman, and Sidney Powell). It was a conspiracy to commit fraud at the highest levels of the government, and the Committee lays it all out.
Trump knew he lost the election very early on, but wanted to stay in power nonetheless. He admits this to many advisors and the Jan6 committee proves this through under-oath testimony which is not hearsay. They've released the transcripts, you can read them for yourself.
John Eastman comes to him with a plan. This was the coup plot he called the "Green Bay Sweep":
- Forge state certificates of the vote electing Trump, transmit them to the VP. This is illegal.
- Have senators and house members object to real certificates of the vote electing Biden. This is legal
- Have VP toss out real certificates. He does not have the power to do this.
- These contests start a clock, that when it runs out, if a President Elect is not certified, it goes to state delegations for a majority vote. Republicans controlled the majority of state delegations at the time, so they would have installed Trump despite him losing the popular and electoral college votes.
- The next step would probably be the Democrats would sue, it would make it to SCOTUS, and SCOTUS at that point likely wouldn't have taken the case, citing separation of powers (Constitution makes clear the only way to remove POTUS is impeachment or 25th amendment. SCOTUS has no power to do so, and how would they enforce it anyway?). DOJ wouldn't prosecute anyone because it would be controlled by Trump. This would have effectively ended democracy in America.
BTW that speech in question? Why did he need everyone there on Jan6? To pressure Pence. He was the key to the whole thing, as he was tasked with overstepping his clear duties as VP at the Jan6 vote counting ceremony, and in doing so would have violated the Constitution. But in the days leading up to Jan6, Pence made clear to Trump that he was going to do the right thing, and that would have been the end of Trump's administrative coup plot. That's where the insurrection comes in.
The Jan6 committee found that Trump knew the audience were armed. He instructed his SS to stop taking their weapons. He told the audience to go to the Capitol and "fight like hell". He told them there was a massive fraud and the election was stole, and the rules are very different in those circumstances. He was preceded by his lawyer, who told the audience that a "trial by combat" was in order. He instructed them to go to the Capitol to obstruct the vote count ("stop the steal"), which was exactly what his administrative coup plot required.
And they did. They did everything Trump wanted, and he played his part by sitting back and letting it happen, instead of doing, well.... anything. Well, aside from further inciting the mob over Twitter as he watched them attack the Capitol on TV. He did do that.
It would have worked too if it wasn't for two things:
1. Pence didn't leave the Capitol.
2. McConnell/Pelosi reconvened the Senate/House and they worked through the night to certify Biden as President Elect.
If those two things hadn't happened, Trump's plan (really Eastman's) could have very well worked, and we'd be living in a very different country right now.
That is why people don't like Trump -- because he's the kind of person (an authoritarian wannabe dictator) who worked to make that happen. We were saying so the whole time, yet people somehow still don't see it even after an attempted coup, only because he said the word "peaceful" once in an otherwise bloodthirsty and completely fraudulent series of speeches. There was no voter fraud and Trump knew that. Lying to a mob you know is armed that they are being defrauded, and telling them what to do about it, is incitement.
And if he gets elected again, he'll do it again except next time he'll have the benefit of experience; failed insurrections usually beget successful ones if the insurrectionists are left unprosecuted and free to try again.
> He told the audience to go to the Capitol and "fight like hell"
You're using the quoted part with the first part of your sentence to spread false information. Anybody that reads the full quote and context of the speech [2] knows he wasn't talking about fighting at the Capitol. Biden and Harris have said "fight like hell" many times, but nobody uses their quotes out of context to insinuate advocacy for some theoretical coup.
Everything the President said related to the activities at the Capitol was about keeping it peaceful.
On Jan 6, 2021, the President tweeted:
"Please support our Capitol Police and Law Enforcement. They are truly on the side of our Country. Stay peaceful!" [0]
and
"I am asking for everyone at the U.S. Capitol to remain peaceful. No violence! Remember, WE are the Party of Law & Order – respect the Law and our great men and women in Blue. Thank you!" [1]
In addition, at the rally prior to the protest at the Capitol, he said:
"I know that everyone here will soon be marching over to the Capitol building to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard." [2]
> The Jan6 committee found that Trump knew the audience were armed.
Armed with what? Firearms? And how could he know that? Exactly zero protestors at the Capitol were found to have been carrying firearms.
> That's where the insurrection comes in.
"insurrection" | noun | a violent uprising against an authority or government
Surely an actual insurrection would have involved at least one protestor bringing at least one firearm.
> Trump knew he lost the election very early on, but wanted to stay in power nonetheless.
The whole claim that he tried to stay in power is facially absurd. He didn't try to stay in power... he willingly handed over power as evidenced by the fact that there was a peaceful transition of power.
It's fine to disapprove of Trump, but this rambling unproven conspiracy stuff the January 6th Committee did was on a whole new level. Their entire goal was to get Trump disqualified and tarnish his image, no matter where the facts actually led.
[0] https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/13469041109693153...
[1] https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/13469127807005777...
[2] https://www.npr.org/2021/02/10/966396848/read-trumps-jan-6-s...
> What you're bringing up--particularly the actions of the Senators, Representatives, and lawyers--are legitimate and legal avenues to pursue if one disputes election results.
Of course legislators and lawyers enjoy certain rights. However, those rights are not without limitations. For example, it's fine for a lawyer to file a lawsuit, but it's not fine to do so frivolously or fraudulently. Doing so would incur professional consequences. And indeed, Trump's lawyers who worked with him have faced professional consequences for their roles: Giuliani has lost his right to practice law in NY [1], and Sidney Powell is currently undergoing professional review [2] which might result in the same.
> Democrats have used those avenues in the past, too.
As for legislators, it's fine for them to raise an objection about an election. They enjoy that right. They can do so for a legitimate reason, or than can do so to make a political statement, as you note Democrats have done. What they can't do is use their position to obstruct the proceeding with corrupt intent.
In order for an objection to be raised, a House Rep and Senator must both object. This happened in this case and is fine. But the reasons for their objections had already been litigated. By the 1/6 ceremony, exactly 0 claims of fraud were raised in the appropriate venue (a courtroom), so to raise them exclusively on cable news and the House floor does not evidence a good faith concern about "election integrity".
I'm not the only one who thought the role of various House members on and surrounding 1/6 was suspect; we know several of them sought pardons, and they all have yet to answer why. Why seek a pardon if you don't have consciousness of guilt?
Furthermore, while it may be the right of some state lawmakers to certify federal elections, it's not okay for them to do so in a clandestine and manner in order to transmit a fraudulent certificate of the vote to the Vice President. That happened and it's not okay.
> You're using the quoted part with the first part of your sentence to spread false information.
If we're going to take the out-of-context utterance of the word "peaceful" during a speech to be prima-facie evidence of the intent of the speaker to be peaceful, then we must also take the out-of-context utterance of the word "fight" to be evidence of intent of violence.
The context of the event was that Trump summoned those people to that place based on a lie, one he knew to be false. There was and still is no proof of any of his claims. Not a single one. To stand up there and repeat them in front of a massive crowd is to effect a fraud. He then asked them to do something very specific: march to the Capitol, and "stop the steal", which was a euphemism for obstructing the proceeding. And how did he want them to do it? Trump told them. He said that because of the fraud (for which he had no evidence) that it was fair to play by a very "different" set of rules. Different how? Well Rudy had told them just minutes before: "Trial by combat!" (he screamed to thunderous applause from the armed crowed).
Then Trump directed them to the Capitol, and combat ensued. If you read the court transcripts, defendant after defendant says they thought they were doing what Trump wanted. They thought they were acting on the orders of POTUS.
This is a pretty cut and dry cause and effect. He got people mad over a lie, told them what to do about it, and then watched it happen, as they did exactly what he wanted.
> Everything the President said related to the activities at the Capitol was about keeping it peaceful.
I notice you've left out the crucial tweet he sent during the riots, wherein he expressed displeasure at his VP's failure to follow the plan, which was met by the crowd with renewed calls for violence and death.
Look, I am well aware of the tweets you are posting here. But to determine Trump's state of mind that day it's not enough to look at his Tweets, we have to look at what he did that day. Talk is cheap as they say. In the intervening 3 hours while Trump watched the violence unfold on TV, he did nothing to thwart the violence. When insurrectionists are invading the building and lawmakers are barricading themselves in their offices, a limp-wristed tweet about "peace" isn't enough.
> Armed with what? Firearms? And how could he know that?
An aide to Trump's Chief of Staff heard Trump say the following before his event:
"When we were in the offstage tent, I was part of a conversation, I was in the vicinity of a conversation where I overheard the president say something to the effect of, ‘I don’t effing care if they have weapons. They’re not here to hurt me, take the effing mags [magnetometers] away, let my people in, they can march to the Capitol from here. Let the people in, take the effing mags away,’" [3]
> Exactly zero protestors at the Capitol were found to have been carrying firearms.
You need to update yourself on the facts, as this is not true; there were plenty of guns there that day [4][5]. People did bring guns, and police radio chatter played during the 1/6 hearings makes clear that police were aware on that day of armed individuals in the crowd (some setting up positions in trees).
Here's a running list of gun arrests around the 6th that are tied to insurrectionists [6].
The 1/6 committee details what the Secret Service collected that day:
“Secret Service confiscated a haul of weapons from the 28,000 spectators who did pass through the magnetometers: 242 cannisters of pepper spray, 269 knives or blades, 18 brass knuckles, 18 tasers, 6 pieces of body armor, 3 gas masks, 30 batons or blunt instruments, and 17 miscellaneous items like scissors, needles, or screwdrivers,” [7]
> a violent uprising against an authority or government Surely an actual insurrection would have involved at least one protestor bringing at least one firearm.
Well, they had guns, as I've proven. But even if they hadn't, the definition you quoted fits perfectly because the day was plenty violent. People died and were brutally maimed. You can't show me the videos of that day and ask me to believe it wasn't violent.
> The whole claim that he tried to stay in power is facially absurd. He didn't try to stay in power... he willingly handed over power as evidenced by the fact that there was a peaceful transition of power.
It blows my mind for you to say this, it really does. Because in my reality, 1/6 was the end of the streak of peaceful transitions of power in America. We really are coexisting in two different realities.
To be clear, the actual transition of power for POTUS happens on 1/6 during the counting of the certificates of the vote, not 1/20 at the inauguration. According to the US Constitution, on 1/20 the President's term expires automatically, and the Presidency is transferred to the next in the line of succession. On 1/20/2021, that would have been President Elect Biden. So no matter what Trump did on that day, he was done as POTUS at noon.
The only way to prevent that from happening would be to make sure he was next in line, and the last time to do that before it was set in stone was on 1/6 at the joint session of Congress, by either outright stealing it (by Pence abusing his power) or by at least delaying it (using the mob) to give more time for him to convince states to decertify their elections. Read this law for how that would work [9].
This is why the transition of power was not peaceful. That Trump slinked away to Florida on 1/20 without incident doesn't erase that what he tried to do on 1/6 was use violence to stay in power.
> the January 6th Committee did was on a whole new level. Their entire goal was to get Trump disqualified and tarnish his image, no matter where the facts actually led.
I've heard these charges against the committee, and I just don't see how that comports with the evidence they produced. It's one thing to make charges of bias and a persecution complex emanating from the committee, but you can't say the same for their under-oath witnesses, who were ex-Trump administration officials, top-ranking state GOP officials and lawmakers, law enforcement officers, non-partisan election officials, and regular citizens. They elicited truthful testimony from these individuals which painted a picture that is not good for Trump.
It seems to me that you haven't read the Committee's report, nor watched their public hearings. If you had, you would have been aware of simple facts like the possession of guns by insurrectionists. I really think you should and with an open mind. You might come away with a different perception of their work, because they let the evidence, witness testimony, and depositions do most of the talking.
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2021/07/07/rudy-giulianis-dc-law-licens...
[2] https://www.forbes.com/sites/alisondurkee/2022/06/23/sidney-...
[3] https://news.yahoo.com/cassidy-hutchinson-january-6-trump-we...
[4] https://www.statesman.com/story/news/politics/politifact/202...
[6] https://www.thetrace.org/2021/01/capitol-riot-firearms-arres...
[7] https://nypost.com/2022/12/23/capitol-riot-report-details-we...
[8] https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/justice-department/oath-kee...
Yes people pay more for housing, however in 1975 the average American home was 560 Sq Ft/person in 2015 it hit 1058 Sq Ft/person. https://thefioneers.com/average-home-size/
So people are paying more for housing, they are also getting a lot more of it. Similarly people keep moving to expensive cities which shockingly have expensive housing.
It costs exponentially more, but cancer is killing fewer people today than a generation ago. https://www.cdc.gov/cancer/dcpc/research/update-on-cancer-de...
Are more things really adding to our quality of life, or is that just consumerism talking?
Lots of families need multiple incomes to pay for those bigger houses, compared to 1975 [0]. And zoning regulations don't allow enough housing to be built in the cities with good job and social opportunities where people would like to live. Seems to be more optimized for investors than families and quality of life.
[0] https://listwithclever.com/research/home-price-v-income-hist...
Consumerism isn’t a need. Give up the large house in an expensive area, cellphone, high tech car, computer, cable TV, etc and suddenly you can get by without working so hard just like my parents generation.
The finishes have also gotten worse, in many ways. These expensive McMansions have worse trim, doors (interior and exterior), and sometimes flooring than cheap working-class houses in the '60s and '70s. Better windows I guess. At least as far as energy efficiency goes. Better insulation. Basically if code says it has to be better, it is, and everything else is worse.
People move to expensive cities because that's where the jobs are. Nobody moves to Fort Bragg, even though it has practically the same climate and coastline as San Francisco, because there's no money to be made.
Handwaving these economic forces away as "quality increases" is misleading.
Also as a home builder once you realize how expensive the permitting process can be you're suddenly motivated to build big. The permitting doesn't scale with structure size, it is fixed in most areas.
The USA and the UK were at the very top, being considered the best.
It might have been this one: https://www.statista.com/chart/20629/ability-to-respond-to-a...
Notice how Ireland is obviously worse than the UK.
Portugal also worse than Spain.
USA on the best tier. (No one is green I think)
Another one even better:
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/global-pandemic-preparednes...
USA at the very top followed obviously by all the anglosphere.
Brazil, Belgium and Japan at the same level!
Now contrast this with reality.
If this pandemic showed anything is that the premise of this post is completely wrong.
Look how that turned out.
Must really suck having to spend so much energy ignoring reality.
Then again, given the level of religiosity of the place I guess it really doesn't take that much extra energy.
Although I'm pretty sure it wouldn't have made much of a difference.
This is what winning looks like!
I also truly believe the Atlantic wants you think the same thing, as long as their preferred politicians are in office. When the other folks run things, the Atlantic screams that everything's horrible.
The Atlantic is part of the problem.