Democracy

A Real Comparison of Economic Policies

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Since both Biden and Trump have records as President, the press is full of articles like this one attempting to compare their economic policies and evaluate the results.  Now that Harris has replaced Biden and announced a few measures, she’s in the game too.  Unfortunately most such articles completely miss the mark.

The reason is that you cannot judge anyone’s economic policy except in the context of the problems he or she faced.  And you cannot make any judgment of how good he or she would be as President now without assessing the problems we face today and comparing our needs against the candidates’ demonstrated approaches.

That may sound obvious, but I haven’t seen a single article that tried hard enough to be serious.  Let’s start with Trump.  Obama left the country in pretty good shape, but one has to understand that his whole Presidency was spent trying to recover from the 2008 crash.  In that he had done pretty well (compared to other western countries), but he had one serious problem:  particularly in his second term the Republican Party decided to sabotage the recovery.  Looking ahead to the 2016 election they essentially shut down government—promoting a “balanced budget amendment” as a reason to block all stimulus spending.  That left some work to be done with unemployment, for example. So that’s what Trump inherited—a good economy that had been throttled short of complete recovery.

As soon as Trump took office the “balanced budget amendment” discussion vanished, and Trump stimulated the economy with a 2 trillion dollar budget deficit.  That completed Obama’s recovery at enormous cost to the country. For comparison, the largest stimulus Obama was able to get through Congress (in his first term) was about $500 M.  The vast part of Trump’s $2 T did not go into jobs or corporate investment; it went into stock buybacks.  Trump bought maybe $500 M of progress with a $1.5T contribution to inequality in the US.  Further, despite all the talk of reviving manufacturing, US manufacturing (as a sector) was in recession before Covid hit.  Once Covid happened, Trump simply retreated from running the country.

Biden inherited a mess.  First we had to recover from Covid, so there was much time and effort spent on getting the vaccine to everyone.  In this the biggest single problem was sabotage by misinformation from Republicans in general and Trump in particular.  During Covid there was a series of bipartisan deficit-funded bills to keep the country running with progressively less Republican support.  Once recovery started, however, there were some big surprises.  In key areas supply and demand were badly mismatched—there was a massive shortfall in computer chips needed for cars and other big-ticket products, new patterns of demand appeared for housing reflecting living arrangements during the pandemic, and the shipping industry took many months to be fully back in business—causing shortages of all kinds of imported products.  There were also shorter-term spot shortages, which led to longer-term price increases from major suppliers happy to take the chance.

Biden’s last (Democrat-only) stimulus has been blamed for all inflation that followed Covid.  Many articles have been written about his terrible mistake—the money delivered to US families didn’t even cover the inflation of the following year!  That conclusion ranks with the “balanced budget amendment” for self-serving dishonesty.  Given the magnitude of those other inflationary pressures, there is no question that the stimulus payments covered considerably more than any inflationary effects of the stimulus itself (and inflation in the US was lower than anywhere else in the Western world—stimulus or not).  Biden was correct in deciding that there was a fair chance that the post-Covid recovery would not be painless, and that stimulus money was needed to help people. In so doing he violated the mantra that the Republican Party is most desperate to defend: “you can’t spend money to help people”.  Help only comes top-down, from money spent on us.  The best commentary on this subject comes from Adam Smith himself:

“The proposal of any new law or regulation of commerce which comes from this order [merchants and manufacturers], ought always to be listened to with great precaution, and ought never to be adopted till after having been long and carefully examined, not only with the most scrupulous, but with the most suspicious attention. It comes from an order of men, whose interest is never exactly the same with that of the public, who have generally an interest to deceive and even to oppress the public, and who accordingly have, upon many occasions, both deceived and oppressed it.”  (Wealth of Nations, Book 1, Chapter 3)

Before we leave this subject of inflation there is one more question that needs to be answered:  why, despite the huge budget deficit, was there no inflation under Trump?  The main part of the answer has already been noted—the country was not yet completely out of the 2008 crash.   There was no wage pressure, and people were not ready to spend.  Furthermore we had actual downward pressure on prices from those evil Chinese—all that cheap stuff in Walmart was keeping prices low.  By Trump’s third year there were signs of a rise in wages, but then Covid hit and that was the end of that.  As far as inflation was concerned, Trump was “saved by the bell”.  As we noted at the beginning, you cannot say anything sensible about a President’s economic policy without putting it in the context of the time.  Trump did not prove that he knew how to run up a huge deficit without inflation any more than he proved he could fight Covid with bleach.

Biden got the country going again and finally started rebuilding the country’s decaying infrastructure and  undertaking changes that will be required (whether we like it or not) for climate change.  He recognized the importance of education, although he was blocked from doing as much as is needed to provide opportunities for all (and the costs of his programs were hugely exaggerated).  Manufacturing is now in vastly better shape than under Trump.  He has also started with the task of finally doing something about decades of consolidations and monopolies during our period of non-enforcement of anti-trust laws.  It needs to be emphasized that anti-trust activities are NOT examples of overreach of government against the free market.  Even Adam Smith (again) emphasized the need to combat monopolies, and not just because they make things more expensive—they block innovative new businesses, make the country less competitive, and even weaken a nation’s military strength.

At this point it’s time to stop describing the historical context and consider where to go from here.  The first conclusion is probably the most important:  there is nothing in Trump’s historical performance that shows competence in managing the economy.  He gave himself (and his ilk) a big tax cut, that helped an artificially-stunted recovery (at very high cost), and avoided inflation only because of the incomplete recovery and because Covid bailed him out. That history is no recommendation.  We cannot let ourselves be tricked by the blindness of all of those economic analyses without context:  “Trump’s tax cuts led to full employment last time, so maybe they’ll be good this time too.”  ARGH!!

So the question of Trump’s economic competence comes down to his economic plans.  While Trump has been vague about many things, there are three items about which he has been absolutely clear:

  • A complete tariff wall around the US protecting all US industry, 10% overall and 60% on imports from China.
  • Deporting all undocumented immigrants, amounting to at least 11 million people
  • A huge tax cut modeled on his last one, currently estimated to cost $4 T.

The attitude of economists on this subject was summarized in a recent NY Times article:  not just bad but catastrophic.  We have to get used to that idea.  The fact that Trump got through his first term is not proof that he knows what he’s doing.  The plan can really be completely crazy.  Remember Trump’s six bankruptcies. Also, we have to get used to the idea that economic stability is not guaranteed.  The Brits voted for Brexit, and their standard of living took an immediate hit from which it may never recover.  This plan is actually worse.

We’ll go briefly through the items one-by-one

The Tariff Wall

Tariffs (including Trump’s tariffs from last time) are effectively a tax paid by the buyer in higher prices.  A universal tariff like this one is therefore massively inflationary and not just for imported goods.  Historically (and in Trump’s last term) domestic producers also have taken the chance to raise prices. Universal tariffs also invite retaliation and diminished US clout worldwide.  Given the level of consolidation in the US economy, the tariffs will significantly reduce competition and dynamism of business domestically, as many markets will be monopoly or cartel controlled.  And by isolating the US from developments elsewhere, it guarantees that the US will be left behind for any developments that don’t originate here, making us a second-class power.

Deporting 11 million people

These people are working today.  We’re eliminating the lowest tier of the workforce, with no obvious new population to take over.   Both the loss and the disruption are massively inflationary.  Many of those jobs may never be filled.  The Brexit people found that they had to import a whole new bunch of foreigners to replace the ones they were so happy to get rid of.

The $4T tax cut

The huge deficit is again massively inflationary.  The only reason that didn’t happen last time is that the economy was still short of recovery—which is not the case now.  Further the huge deficit would be on top of all other spending issues we will have to face, including for climate change and defense.  Businesses didn’t need it last time–they spent it on stock buybacks, not on investment in the business or on the employees. Last time’s claim that it would pay for itself proved completely untrue.

We are talking about a real hit to everyone’s well-being with no short-term path to recovery.  And that’s before even thinking about the threats to democracy.

Finally we need to end this with a look  at the other side.  If that’s what we’re getting from Trump what would we be getting from Harris?  After all we’re told she’s a wild-eyed radical.  Her running mate was so far left that he spent government money giving meals to school kids!

There’s nothing in the Democrats plans that talks about anything close to a 4 trillion dollar deficit.   There’s nothing in the Democrats plans that talks about engineering of people’s lives the way Vance is so eager to do.  Isn’t freedom from that sort of thing what made us different from the hated communists?

What is different is positive.   There is a role for government in making people’s lives better.  That means education, jobs, a future.  Harris’s initial proposal talks about aid for families with children and combating the kind of post-Covid price-fixing mentioned earlier. There is also a role for government in helping the private sector with things it doesn’t do well—like anti-trust, like educating the population for the jobs that need to be filled, like preventing business from croaking on climate change because doing something reduces immediate profits.  No one is talking about hurting business competitiveness, but it is the task of government to act in the interest of everyone.

This is an election where the country needs to reject what is radical egomania and return to what are in fact our long-time values.

Message for Business

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We’ve spoken here before about how the evangelical community needs to understand that Trump is not their guy.

However the issue is more general.  It’s too easy to dismiss evangelicals as disconnected from reality and perhaps swayed by self-interested leaders. In fact all of us have spent lifetimes insulated from the reality of authoritarian government.  The US elections and democratic system are certainly not perfect, but we the people still do have power.  It’s hard to recognize that once that goes, the world is different.

Even the well-heeled and well-educated business community has that problem.  Much was made of Jamie Dimon’s comment at Davos that Europeans in particular should stop worrying about Trump, because ultimately nothing serious was going to happen.  A recent Edsall piece pointed out that many other business leaders believe the same thing.  Like the Evangelical’s focus on abortion, the business focus on the Trump tax cuts has convinced business people that he’s their guy.

As Edsall’s article points out, the history of authoritarian takeovers tells another story.  Once government is unaccountable, what follows is massive corruption and shakedowns of all players.  That’s in addition to the whims and the uncorrectable mistakes of the leader.  Businesses–and in particular their leaders–have much to lose, as their counterparts elsewhere have found out to their shock and surprise.

For now Trump’s threats–combined with the taxcut carrot–seem to hold sway with much of the business community.   But the Trump people have made no secret of their plan to end democracy in favor of an  Viktor Orban-like regime.  As a threat, there is nothing in Biden’s program that comes close to matching that one.

Republicans and Guns

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With all the conversations about guns in this country, it’s worth being clear that the Republican Party is, was, and will ever be the party of guns. 

As we’ve noted before, the big donors to the party don’t care about guns—they care about money.   But guns are important as a means to that end.  Guns elect Republicans, and Republicans deliver tax cuts and relief from regulation.  All of that money has certainly pumped up guns as an identity issue.

However guns are not just one issue among many being promoted.  Guns are central to the whole Republican project.

Going back to Nixon’s “southern strategy” and before, Republicans are all about fear.  They have institutionalized and spread the long-term Southern terror of black insurrection.  There’s a big dangerous black man (or an immigrant) behind every tree, and he’s out to get you and your family.  Blacks control the Democratic Party, so it’s complicit.   Democrats want to take aware your guns and leave you exposed and unprotected.  Joe Biden refuses to help.  You’ve got to take matters into your own hands.  Republicans are the only thing between you and chaos.

As always in this election campaign the big issue is crime.  This isn’t about statistics or really addressing crime in any organized way.  It’s all about that big dangerous black man you have to be ready to shoot.  This isn’t a matter of convincing individual politicians–Republicans can never give up on guns.

The only option is to defeat them.

Civics

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There was a perfectly reasonable article today in Foreign Affairs: “Afghanistan’s Corruption Was Made in America”.  Reasonable except for the surprise at what happened.  Afghanistan was a case of colonial corruption—whether we want to call it that or not—and the mechanisms of colonial corruption have been well-documented.  The classic work on the subject, which got just about everything right, was written in 1860.  The only problem is that for all the intervening years many societies, including ours, have tried hard to avoid learning.

That blind spot brings up the subject of Civics—what is it that we all ought to know? That’s despite the fact that it’s hard to say the word Civics without wincing. My high school Civics course was a giddy paen to American democracy and its perfections.  One sentence sticks in my mind:  “Propaganda is a neutral term despite its unfavorable connotation; what makes it good or bad is what is propagated.”  Take that for wisdom.

But it strikes me that we can point to a few things that belong in a real Civics course.  I’m going to give three titles.  I’ll start with Max Havelaar (the just-mentioned 1860 classic) for international relations, to disabuse people of the notion that we can be white knights to go fix the rest of the world.  This is not a plea for isolationism, but for recognition that our interests will dominate and corruption will likely follow.  At the very least we should be suspicious about our motives and about the reality of what we create.

A second title is Jane Mayer’s Dark Money.  This book has been around since 2016 and has had nowhere near the impact it should have.  It documents the very successful effort of the Koch organization to take over the political system in United States and reorient it to their objectives.  It explains most of what passes for incomprehensible in the press today—why the country has become ungovernable, why democracy is at risk, and how we got saddled with a mind-boggling Supreme Court. All of that was the plan from the beginning, and unless we’re clear on what happened, we’re not likely to be able to change it.

A third title is Heather McGhee’s book The Sum of Us. This book has some issues from trying to satisfy multiple constituencies, but its main message is clear: the different racial and other groups in this country have been turned against each other in a deliberate campaign of divide and conquer. And the only way to counter that is to recognize common interest and act for the common good. This was deliberate policy for Martin Luther King among others, but it’s not easy to do–group militancy will always fight it. However there is no alternative in taking on the powerful forces described in Dark Money.

Those books alone could give a big dose of reality to our political process. We can contrast that with what passes for Civics in public discourse today.

Most of what we hear about Civics today comes from the far right, where it’s back to the future–the contemporary version of what I had all those years ago with the John Birch Society. In the interim it hasn’t gotten better: this is still God’s country, above criticism and chosen to rule in His name. One particular feature worth noting is the weakness of the support for democracy. Democracy is defined as whatever it is that we’re doing, and it’s good because it’s ours.

On the left the world view is different, but fragmented. One person who does talk about Civics is the strange and (I find) worrisome figure of Danielle Allen.  Ms. Allen presents herself as standing above the messy political discussions of the day and as a pure advocate for civic virtue.  But her Civics lives in a world where there are no bad actors, and the primary issue is alienation of voters from the political system. In that world, the monumental importance of the 2024 election is hidden behind tales of civic involvement that ignore the real forces at work. In the end she’s cover for the people who have put us where we are.

For today, the kind of Civics outlined here doesn’t exist. But it’s worth recognizing that a real, substanitive Civics course is not so hard to describe. Maybe someday it could happen.

Democracy is Not Natural

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There is a fundamental misunderstanding of democracy that undermines much domestic and foreign policy.  One way to put it is that democracy is seen as a kind of natural way for societies to organize themselves.  What could be more normal than a bunch of people getting together for mutual benefit?  Just get rid of the autocrats, and the people will rule.

Unfortunately it’s the autocrats who are natural, and democratic societies are fragile, rare, and in dire need of careful cultivation.

For starters we can go back to the classical Greek models.   Democracy in Athens was both a sham and a disaster.  The Athenian democracy was created by Pericles as a way of wresting power from aristocrats.  Under its auspices he ruled with enormous personal power, and when he died things went to hell quickly.  The chaos led first to an authoritarian takeover (stopped only by the army) and then to the defeat of Athens by Sparta in the Peloponnesian wars.  Plato, writing later, dismissed democracy as nothing more than a prelude to dictatorship. 

As another example, a whole raft of new democracies were created in eastern Europe in the wake of World War I.  By the end of the 1920’s every single one of them was a dictatorship.  Once you’re in power there’s no reason to give it up.  And without a broad societal commitment to democracy, there’s nothing to prevent that.  Hitler of course was installed by a democratic election, and the conversion to dictatorship followed quickly and easily.

In the US today we’re so accustomed to this idea of democracy as normal, that we’re unprepared for today’s anti-democratic Republican party.  Since we don’t even ask why democracy is good, the question “why should we give up when we’re winning?” has no answer. Republicans today and their Supreme Court are unapologetically all about winning and maintaining power indefinitely. We’re surprised how easy it is to subvert our institutions, but that‘s what happens if society is not prepared to fight.

There are in fact a strong arguments for democracy.  We can look today at what goes on in China and Russian.  With authoritarian leadership you can never correct disastrous mistakes or deal effectively with corruption.  Further, autocrats once installed are beholden to no one. Rule of law goes out the window, so there is no protection from the rich and powerful. As we’ve pointed out here before, the enemies of democracy are no one’s friends. One problem is that people tend to think that the status quo is permanent, since they’ve always lived it.  So real consequences tend to come as a surprise.  Think of Brexit and the Supreme Court Dobbs decision.

Democracy is important, fragile, easily lost, and very hard to recover.  The powers that be (e.g the ever-present Koch organization) will always want to stand above rule of law.  They have enormous powers to sway the population, and once the population loses interest it’s hard to keep them out.  It is everyone’s responsibility to stand up for democracy.  There’s plenty of publicity these days about the threat to democracy in Israel, but the threat is just as real here and now.  It may take the same kind of mass movements to fight it.  As we all know the Supreme Court already has an end to democracy on its docket, and we can expect to hear about it in June.

Finally it’s worth recognizing that this same misunderstanding of democracy contributes to foreign policy goals that are to say the least delusional.  Most countries are corrupt dictatorships, and they’re going to stay that way.  Further our own attempts at state building (as in Iraq or Afghanistan) will continue to fail in chaos and corruption, because belief in self-evident democracy means there is no recognition of the magnitude of the job (or our own contributions to the problems). In one of Elena Ferrante’s novels she speaks of the power of expectations in controlling behavior—you cannot suddenly have democracy and the rule of law if that’s contrary to the everyone’s experience: 

“It was a world of favors, of services exchanged for other services, of debts contracted and debts called in, of concessions obtained and never returned, of pacts that could be broken and others that held until death. It was a world based on friendships and animosities, on associations and affiliations, on old enmities and new alliances. How could one change that world? By oneself, no one could. There was only one possibility: to become part of it, accept its conditions, go along with it to survive.”

Our biggest responsibility to the world is to build a working democratic society.  At the moment that’s a tall order, but that’s the job we’ve got.  In this juncture in history the US and EU are critical–the West is on the line to show it is a model that can be believed in. That’s not self-evident.

What To Do About TikTok

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It seems to me that the discussion of TikTok is distorted by the kind of xenophobic paranoia that frequently gets in the way. It’s not that there isn’t a problem, it’s that the real problem is not solved by a fixation on nasty foreigners.

There are two frequently discussed problems (that often get confused with each other):

  1. We’re giving a whole lot of information to TikTok that could be used by the Chinese government for nefarious purposes.
  2. The Chinese government could use their state-sanctioned control of TikTok to propagandize to TikTok’s base of customers.

The first point is pretty close to nonsense. Monumental amounts of information on the American population are already being collected, organized, and merchandized by companies who do this for a living. The last time I looked at this issue, more than ten years ago, you could already match what TikTok knows. Today it’s far worse. We need legal controls on information gathering. The fixation on TikTok for this issue is a distraction.

The second point is a more serious issue, as we’ve had more than enough experience with the coercive effects of social media. The problem, however, is that the dangers from TikTok are not an awful lot different than the dangers from good old American social media. There’s nothing that stops the Chinese government from putting propaganda on TikTok, but we’ve already had the Russians (and the Koch people) doing the same thing on Facebook. Unless we put up legal barriers to deliberate manipulation, social media are for sale to the highest bidder. Banning TikTok is just plain not the issue. (To my mind, any network operator that selects content for unsolicited distribution to users should be legally responsible for that content.)

You can even say flatly that the reason there is such bipartisan agreement on banning TikTok is that it is a handy way to make it seem that you’re doing something about a serious problem–without upsetting the real perpetrators much at all.

Education—Student Loan Debt and the Rest

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The public discussion of Biden’s student loan plan seems to be about some other country—certainly not this one.

Much of the discussion takes the point of view that Biden’s plan is a wildly-expensive and unnecessary change, since post-secondary education is functioning the way it always has.  And further the plan isn’t sufficiently targeted to the poor, so there is no point in doing it.

In fact post-secondary education in this country is so broken you hardly know where to start.  And the people targeted by the plan were so badly screwed by us that we have a responsibility to notice. 

Let’s look at the history.  The following chart is a point of departure:

It’s obvious from the chart that around 2008 something happened to the cost of college—it took off.  A prime ingredient was the George Bush’s 2008 crash, which was a double whammy:  states had less money to spend—so tuition went up—and students and their parents had less money to pay it.  As we all learned during the Covid crisis, states have limited ability to deal with new expenses, as many are prohibited from running deficits.  They need to rely on the federal government to help them out. 

However the Republican Congress blocked all stimulus (remember the “balanced budget amendment”) to provoke dissatisfaction for the 2016 election.  So there was no help to be had.   Unsurprisingly people had to take on new levels of debt.  And with Republicans continuing to sabotage the recovery, there were few jobs for these people when they graduated (or didn’t) and went immediately into arrears.  Student load debt didn’t grow because students were irresponsible, it grew because government was.

Adding to that, Republicans spent years protecting fraudulent private pseudo-educational institutions because of the supposed superiority of the private sector.  At such places you could earn a degree in “culinary arts”, for example, which was considered valueless in any real restaurant.   Essentially all students at those institutions incurred monumental levels of debt and no skills.  The worst of those have now been shut down, but Betsy DeVos did everything she could to defend them.

As a country we screwed a generation of students.  From the numbers on the chart, $10 or $20 thousand seems relevant, but assuredly not profligate. As for inflation, the risk has been exaggerated by false comparison to the stimulus packages.  The cost here is budgeted over decades; its current impact is minimal.

However we should be clear that this is a Band-Aid on a God-awful wound, because for the most part things have only gotten worse.

First of all, averaging over all institutions in the country gets a rather diverse mix of good and bad colleges. That’s appropriate for addressing needs of borrowers.  However If you want to go to a good institution to get yourself a good job, the numbers are basically twice what’s on the chart:  around $20 thousand yearly for a good public institution.   For private colleges, we can be more exact since they act as a cartel:  $80K.   Even applying to these places can cost thousands.  So much for equality of opportunity. 

What’s more the public university system, instead of being strengthened, is under attack.  That’s not just a matter of the well-publicized politization of education, bad as that is.   Public funding in many states has been reduced to the point that public colleges are admitting out-of-state (or out-of-country) students in preference to in-state ones, because they need the extra money.  That has actually become a major contributor to student loan debt!  The financial situation is so dire that colleges are spending more on administrators to raise money than on education itself.

All of that sounds like a hard problem, but as with healthcare, just about every other developed country has found a way to do it.  We need to strengthen the public system with necessarily more of a role for federal funding.  Public education has to be first-rate and affordable—and available to everyone in every state.  We’ve got to banish the preposterous model of education as a severely-limited resource with parents ready to kill to get their children into the right places!  In addition we need to limit the size of loans people need to take and be rational about the payback.  The Australian system, with payback based on ability to pay, is one working option.

It’s worth stating the obvious fact that with the current cost of education, the only way we’re keeping this country going is by importing foreign graduates (and telling them how much we hate their being here!).  We’d have to shut down Silicon Valley otherwise.  We should also be clear that when we talk about national security we’re talking not about aircraft carriers but about our national competence in key technologies.

It is also worth stressing the problem is NOT (despite rumblings from both the left and the right) that we’re sending too many people to college.  Good jobs need sophisticated training.  You can look at the government’s own (or anyone else’s) expectations of the jobs we’re going to need to fill.  Sure there should be more specifically vocational training also, but that’s not the answer to the problem we know we’ve got. Also we’ve learned from the Covid experience that online instruction is no silver bullet to replace teachers.

Finally it’s worth responding to the charge that we’re not sufficiently targeting our payments to the poor.  The fact is that the only route to equality of opportunity is making sure that there is a first-class system available to everyone.  We used to understand that.  We were the first to recognize that secondary education needed to be available to everyone.  Eventually other countries caught on, because there was a big advantage to the country in doing it.

This has been proven so many times it’s ridiculous to have to state it—education is the backbone of the strength of the country.  Despite some rhetoric, there’s nothing either left-wing or right-wing about this. Even Adam Smith knew it—he didn’t futz around wondering how little training poor people could get by with, he wanted universal literacy in the eighteenth century.  If we want to succeed as a nation, we need to succeed at education.

Democracy’s Enemies are No One’s Friends

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Today about half the United States electorate seems to think that the end of democracy would be great—they could just keep on winning.  It’s not said enough: that’s a fallacy regardless of where you sit on the political spectrum.  The end of democracy means the end of leverage.

As history has proved over and over again, the winners when democracy dies are the real elites who hold power.  In this case were talking about the Kochs, the Thiels, the Mercers, the Murdochs.  In the absence of democracy, no functioning elections means no power for anyone else.  All other leverage is gone.

Those people have been very clear about what that means.  What they want is what’s good for them.  No taxes on rich people and corporations.  No regulation.  No government services they don’t need—that is no social security, no Medicare, two-tier education, nothing for climate, no safety net.   Back to the glory days of the nineteenth century, when businesses could get away with anything.

For now a section of the population finds common cause with those people on guns and abortion, but those were never the main issues.   The only reason we’re talking about those issues today is that we do have a democracy today and voting matters.  Guns and abortion are a path to power, but not a commitment to support anyone in any way.

Once democracy goes, we’ll have nothing to say.  And nothing is what everyone—both their supporters and their opponents—is going to get.