This was a bit of a mixed bag for me. I liked the stuff about taking things down a notch and listening to the other side more. I think social media is definitely fueling and exacerbating extremism on both the right and the left.
But I didn’t think Tim and Frank did very well with the discussion about pessimism or doomerism. It sounded lik…
This was a bit of a mixed bag for me. I liked the stuff about taking things down a notch and listening to the other side more. I think social media is definitely fueling and exacerbating extremism on both the right and the left.
But I didn’t think Tim and Frank did very well with the discussion about pessimism or doomerism. It sounded like two British Aristocrats puzzled why the poors are complaining.
“Frank do you think perhaps they are angry because they have too much?”
“Why..yes Timothy, methinks you have the right of it. I mean..we aren’t making them forage for their own food after all. What’s to complain about?”
“Indeed. Indeed. Perchance they are doing too many power point presentations at their office meetings and are unfulfilled..”
“Yes, they should pray more.”
Good lord..really guys? As though Amazon warehouse workers or Walmart employees or Uber drivers are doing power point presentations in the Facebook offices. Or anywhere else for that matter. People feel doomed because it feels like capitalism has left a lot of people behind.
Trump and MAGA are a symptom of the larger problem, not the cause. And while the specifics of Trump’s conspiracies are complete fabrications, he isn’t wrong about there being a shadowy network of corruption in Washington working against the people. He’s just wrong about who they are.
It’s the revolving door of lawmakers and lobbyists making decisions to help corporations get wealthier, squeezing more and more work out of the bottom for less buying power from their largely stagnant wages. People in their 40s suddenly having to find roommates because they just can’t afford to live alone anymore. People getting second jobs later in life just to survive.
Tim brought up the diminishing of optimism over the last 20 years. The cost of college tuition has increased about 136% during that time. Median cost of a home about 160%. Have wages increased that much? Avg household I think is like 20% over the same time period.
It feels like we are living in another gilded age where you have industrialists like Musk and Zuckerberg and Bezos..but no FDR on the horizon with a plan. It’s just an endless series of people willing to let the inequality continue to expand while the middle class vanishes.
The MAGA crowd today wrongly believes Trump will fix a problem we all agree is there, although they mischaracterize it. People on the left and in the middle know Trump will actually make it much worse so we are trying to stop him. But even we don’t see anyone in the wings ready to fight against the true enemy, which is the corporate capture of American democracy…to the detriment of us all.
And until we find someone to address that corruption and bring back some semblance of equity for all Americans and expand the middle class again, the pessimism Tim spoke of is going to continue. And so is the parade of MAGA maniacs ready to give American Democracy a final hard shove, toppling Lady Liberty into the dustbin of history.
So, the "vanishing middle class" is more of a political trick (though a good one) that is reliant on the general public's lack of understanding of percentages and history (which makes it doubly good tactic, because no one will ever know). Whenever there is a new technology, say computers, the first people in have free reign in an uncontested marketplace, and thus quickly become very rich. That exclusive marketplace doesn't last more than a couple of generations, as more and more people move into the space. But while it lasts, there are a few that have a lot of wealth, and the "Middle Class" being a group in a flat percentage band below the top of the wealth chart, there is a "Vanishing Middle Class." aka, the wealth those few rich people are getting isn't from the poor, it's from lack of competition from other rich people, and that wealth bottleneck wrecks all of the simplistic percentage-based modelling designed for media quick hits.
In real terms, though, we started tracking wealth in the 30s because of the 30s, and Keynes had a dream of a distant future of wealth and prosperity. And the crazy wealth numbers he dreamed of, we achieved those in the 80s, and the amount of wealth people have has actually continued to increase since. And because of the systems but in place back then to track all this, we know that the period of greatest poverty in the US was... the 50s. And the period with the greatest deep poverty was... the 50s. The amount of racial violence back then was absolutely horrific, that was one of the last gasps of lynching after all, cops beating protesters, etc. Followed by KKK bombings and all the assassinations of famous people.
Notably FDR stayed president by making a number of bigoted appeals to the MAGA Nationalists of the time, who also marched through the streets with MAGA placards, but very different hats. It wasn't just the WWII camps, either. Strict anti-immigration, some of it anti-semitic. His comments about mixing blood are pretty horrific and MAGA-esque too.
All of which is to say, Trump ran an FDR-style campaign in 2016. So, that's what an FDR style savior figure looks like. Never look for saviors. They don't exist.
There was a very good article in this weeks Economist, "America is Uniquely Ill-suited to Handle a Falling Population" that discusses the hollowing out of big areas of the country, the despair that's brought, and how that convinces some people to turn to MAGA just searching for someone to pay attention to their plight.
There are undoubtedly a lot of people in the prosperous coastal regions and the upper reaches of the income brackets who spend a lot of time complaining about trifles. There's a whole other population that they never see, who can't think about trifles because they're just trying to make it to tomorrow.
This was a bit of a mixed bag for me. I liked the stuff about taking things down a notch and listening to the other side more. I think social media is definitely fueling and exacerbating extremism on both the right and the left.
But I didn’t think Tim and Frank did very well with the discussion about pessimism or doomerism. It sounded like two British Aristocrats puzzled why the poors are complaining.
“Frank do you think perhaps they are angry because they have too much?”
“Why..yes Timothy, methinks you have the right of it. I mean..we aren’t making them forage for their own food after all. What’s to complain about?”
“Indeed. Indeed. Perchance they are doing too many power point presentations at their office meetings and are unfulfilled..”
“Yes, they should pray more.”
Good lord..really guys? As though Amazon warehouse workers or Walmart employees or Uber drivers are doing power point presentations in the Facebook offices. Or anywhere else for that matter. People feel doomed because it feels like capitalism has left a lot of people behind.
Trump and MAGA are a symptom of the larger problem, not the cause. And while the specifics of Trump’s conspiracies are complete fabrications, he isn’t wrong about there being a shadowy network of corruption in Washington working against the people. He’s just wrong about who they are.
It’s the revolving door of lawmakers and lobbyists making decisions to help corporations get wealthier, squeezing more and more work out of the bottom for less buying power from their largely stagnant wages. People in their 40s suddenly having to find roommates because they just can’t afford to live alone anymore. People getting second jobs later in life just to survive.
Tim brought up the diminishing of optimism over the last 20 years. The cost of college tuition has increased about 136% during that time. Median cost of a home about 160%. Have wages increased that much? Avg household I think is like 20% over the same time period.
It feels like we are living in another gilded age where you have industrialists like Musk and Zuckerberg and Bezos..but no FDR on the horizon with a plan. It’s just an endless series of people willing to let the inequality continue to expand while the middle class vanishes.
The MAGA crowd today wrongly believes Trump will fix a problem we all agree is there, although they mischaracterize it. People on the left and in the middle know Trump will actually make it much worse so we are trying to stop him. But even we don’t see anyone in the wings ready to fight against the true enemy, which is the corporate capture of American democracy…to the detriment of us all.
And until we find someone to address that corruption and bring back some semblance of equity for all Americans and expand the middle class again, the pessimism Tim spoke of is going to continue. And so is the parade of MAGA maniacs ready to give American Democracy a final hard shove, toppling Lady Liberty into the dustbin of history.
So, the "vanishing middle class" is more of a political trick (though a good one) that is reliant on the general public's lack of understanding of percentages and history (which makes it doubly good tactic, because no one will ever know). Whenever there is a new technology, say computers, the first people in have free reign in an uncontested marketplace, and thus quickly become very rich. That exclusive marketplace doesn't last more than a couple of generations, as more and more people move into the space. But while it lasts, there are a few that have a lot of wealth, and the "Middle Class" being a group in a flat percentage band below the top of the wealth chart, there is a "Vanishing Middle Class." aka, the wealth those few rich people are getting isn't from the poor, it's from lack of competition from other rich people, and that wealth bottleneck wrecks all of the simplistic percentage-based modelling designed for media quick hits.
In real terms, though, we started tracking wealth in the 30s because of the 30s, and Keynes had a dream of a distant future of wealth and prosperity. And the crazy wealth numbers he dreamed of, we achieved those in the 80s, and the amount of wealth people have has actually continued to increase since. And because of the systems but in place back then to track all this, we know that the period of greatest poverty in the US was... the 50s. And the period with the greatest deep poverty was... the 50s. The amount of racial violence back then was absolutely horrific, that was one of the last gasps of lynching after all, cops beating protesters, etc. Followed by KKK bombings and all the assassinations of famous people.
Notably FDR stayed president by making a number of bigoted appeals to the MAGA Nationalists of the time, who also marched through the streets with MAGA placards, but very different hats. It wasn't just the WWII camps, either. Strict anti-immigration, some of it anti-semitic. His comments about mixing blood are pretty horrific and MAGA-esque too.
All of which is to say, Trump ran an FDR-style campaign in 2016. So, that's what an FDR style savior figure looks like. Never look for saviors. They don't exist.
There was a very good article in this weeks Economist, "America is Uniquely Ill-suited to Handle a Falling Population" that discusses the hollowing out of big areas of the country, the despair that's brought, and how that convinces some people to turn to MAGA just searching for someone to pay attention to their plight.
There are undoubtedly a lot of people in the prosperous coastal regions and the upper reaches of the income brackets who spend a lot of time complaining about trifles. There's a whole other population that they never see, who can't think about trifles because they're just trying to make it to tomorrow.
https://www.economist.com/briefing/2024/04/18/america-is-uniquely-ill-suited-to-handle-a-falling-population