As long as I can remember, when bad jobs numbers come out, the President reacts by talking about how he will act, or how he wants Congress to act, to get the economy back on track. Today, when a bad job reports came out, the Presidential response was to fire the (non-partisan) head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Shoot the Messenger at its finest.
Speaking of heroes, I note that the 2028 Olympics are currently scheduled for Los Angeles. Two problems there:
1) Getting international tourists, or even just Olympic athletes, into and safely back out of the country. I belong to an organization which holds international conferences. It is sufficiently difficult for would-be attendees to get visas that attendance plummets when we hold one in the US. Which will doubtless hold down Olympic tourism. Not to mention the increasing fondness of the current administration for arbitrarily holding up travelers, even those with impeccable paperwork.
2) Trump would doubtless find it impossible to resist (not that he'd try) showing up and making the whole thing all about him -- see "hero in his own mind". To see how this might go, consider the 1936 Olympics in Berlin.
I'm already seeing calls here for Los Angeles to bail on the whole thing. Those tend, so far, to focus both on those issues, as well as the legal requirement that major international events like this have security handled by the Secret Service, with help from the FBI and Homeland Security. Currently Federal law enforcement agencies are, thanks to ICE, not in good oder in LA (or California generally).
Plus, staging the Olympics is expensive. Local government budgets are already strained, and nobody can see Trump kicking in financial support. If anything, he might decide to bill LA for the security costs.
I wish I could say I'm surprised.
I think a more accurate opening line might refer to "the Attorney General" or "senior political appointees in the Justice Department". Something that would make clear that this is not (hoping that it is not, at least yet) something that everybody in the Department of Justice is on board with, and rolling out to attorneys in the rest of the government.
Michael, this is just way cool!
When you feel like the software is mostly together, is it something you would be willing to share? Sell? (I hesitate to suggest beta test. ;-)
Perhaps the greatest calculator ... was Kepler
Perhaps. But the ladies who did all the calculations for the Mercury and Apollo Projects were no slouches either. Men's lives hung on their work. As the story goes, John Glenn asked explicitly for Katherine Johnson to do the calculations for his flight. He wouldn't trust anyone else with his safety.
Why spent minutes (at minimum) on the screen when a sketch on paper takes seconds?
Tablets are getting better at imitating what paper and pencil do. But it's still a pale imitation. And, from what I've seen, the rate of progress towards duplicating it as slowed markedly.
I suppose I can see how, if everybody who knows how to read** has a phone/computer in their hip pocket, knowing basic arithmetic might be less critical than it once was. I'm not convinced, mind, but I can see that it might be.
** At the rate software is improving, I suppose computers will be able to read to us, and write down what we say as well. The reactionaries will no doubt be delighted if illiteracy once again becomes the norm. /snark
New Math was the same sort of thing. It pushed a much broader view of what math was than just the algorithms. Look, long division is done the way it is because hundreds of years of experience informs us that it's the best way to get the right answers when you have to do a hundred division problems a day, day after day. New Math failed when the teachers pushed the broader view but didn't teach the mechanics.
The trouble with New Math was that it was (apparently) designed by mathematicians. Mathematicians who had forgotten that a) you have to build the foundations (mechanics, as Michael says) first. And that b) normal people are not mathematicians -- and that's 99.99% (or more) of the population. They neither care nor need to know the theoretical underpinnings. They just need to know how to do basic arithmetic reliably.
Camel notation* from computer programming would possibly be better: InternalCompustionEngine.
It is interesting that it is widely used in domain names, e.g. KaiserPermanente.org Clearly the sales and marketing folks think it will be easier to parse that way.
In Latin one has to invent new words for concepts Cicero&Co. did not yet possess and would probably not understand. Greek (unlike classical Latin) allows composite words that can transport about any meaning with little to no loss.
No offense, but I wonder if being a native speaker of German might be coloring your view here. Composite words being one of the most noticable things (after gendered nouns) for English speakers when learning it.
I admit that I don't have a wide enough base to know how common composite words are in languages generally.
Sorry if I misunderstand you, but are you saying that the use of national languages in the native countries will disappear or be reduced? I don't think that would be realistic.
Yes, that is exactly what I am saying. Not that it will necessarily be quick. But it will happen.
See, for example, the various Native American / First Nations languages. They haven't, quite, died out and there are various efforts to save one or another of them. But the reality is that native speakers are overwhelmingly old. Children may retain some fluency, in order to speak to their grandparents. But for everyday use, they speak English. And the children's children will be straight Anglophones.
We see the same phenomena in immigrants. My wife's immigrant grandparents were functional in English, but spoke Japanese with family and friends. Her parents were fluent in Japanese (from talking to parents and aunts and uncles when growing up), but generally spoke English except when talking to the older generation. My wife and her siblings? Even having lost virtually all of the Japanese I studied in college, I still speak more than they do.**
Granted, there is more inertia when it comes to languages with a big population base. So it will take longer. But modern communications mean that the next generation will be exposed to English far beyond the classroom. And anyone who interacts with the outside world, from academics to taxi drivers, will need to use it routinely. Already do, actually.
** When my wife and I first got together, we made occasional trips half the length of California to see her family. About the third trip, I got taken off to see Grandma. My future mother-in-law gave Grandma an explanation of who was this blue eyed blond, then introduced us. I remembered enough to say Hajimemashte. Grandma just lit up; from that moment, as far as she was concerned, I was in.
I am involved in an international organization (ICANN, if you care). I have a nagging (unspoken) embarrassment because everybody speaks English. Most of them barely distinguishable from native speakers.** Partly that turns out to because they did college or grad school in the US, or perhaps the UK or Australia.
But there I am, speaking only English. The German I learned in high school is mostly gone. The Japanese I studied in grad school is also gone. And, of course, because I grew up in California I know a few bits and pieces of Spanish. (Actually, taking a few Spanish classes is on my Really Need To Get Around To This list.) For the moment, I try to at least learn how to say thank you in the language of wherever we are meeting.
I have the suspicion that English will eventually end up as the world language. There will no doubt be long and bitter fights to preserve the national language. But they will, in eventual history, be seen as futile fighting tetreats.
These days, the world requires a common language to function. One will come: the only question is which one it will be. The Chinese will argue, as their economic power increases, for Chinese (Mandarin), but a tonal language is simply too difficult for anyone not raised in one. Spanish might be a viable option, but it lacks a serious economic power to push it. French might have a chance, except that its spelling is nothing approaching phonetic, which makes it hard to learn.
English, thanks to British and then American economic dominance (plus the fact that India, with its huge population, already uses it because its people speak 5 mutually unintelligible native languages), is already getting there. A lot of countries, not just Japan, start English lessons in grammar school. I won't claim that nothing could displace English. But it would take, at minimum, a couple of centuries of economic and cultural dominance.
** Working groups typically work in English (even if there are no native speakers involved), with a few having simultaneous translations for French and Spanish. For the three major meetings, we get translations in the 5 UN languages (English, French, Spanish, Russian, and Chinese) plus Arabic. And the language of wherever we are meeting, if it isn't one of those.
It's as if someone had deliberately did a lot of work to make it really, Really, REALLY look like a high-level conspiracy.
Of course, it doesn't take much work to make a conspiracy look like a conspiracy. And how likely is it that the incompetents involved could manage to fake one convincingly? Or even do a lot of work to try to?
The evidence could go missing, but to the people who have built influencer careers out of Epstein conspiracies, that would likely just fuel the fires of speculation.
And if I were Bondi, I'd be sure to stash the evidence somewhere that Trump couldn't get to it, rather than destroying it.
And she doesn't even have to stash the evidence. A copy of the evidence would be just as good, maybe even better, for convincing the conspiracy theory enthusiasts that it's real. "The Elites destroyed the original. But we've gotten a copy out and we'll destroy them with it!"
Of course, the minute there's one copy out, there will be a dozen (hey, I said the first minute) variations splashing across the Internet. No doubt Trump will feature in at least some of them.
“It’s much easier to be angry at an immigrant than to wonder whether you’ve been lied to for the last eight years.”
I think this is where the Lewis goes wrong. They don't have to struggle with the idea that they've been lied to. They just have to maintain their outrage at the Elites for covering this up. Doesn't matter that Trump might have lied to them (ya think he might have?). All that matters is that they are heavily invested in the idea of a conspiracy to cover up massive Elite morality. And that now there is a chance to drag it into the open.
In the end, they're more wedded to their conspiracy beliefs than they are to Trump. And massively more so than to anybody else in his administration. Hence the immediate demands for Bondi's removal. I agree with hsh that his best course would be to just shut up about it. Let the ravening hordes focus of the rest of the administration, and throw them to the dogs as necessary. But he's probably incapable of that. His loss is the country's gain.
Just for the benefit of anyone coming to this in the future, the last three entries in the Plus ça change... thread are also on this topic.
Apologies to those here for not making it a thread initially. Unfortunately, I was on my phone and didn't have easy access to create a new thread. (Probably ought to fix that....)
A somewhat different case of Plus ça change...:
One of the favorite obsessions of the MAGA-verse, for the past decade, has been the Epstein Files. Trump used it to smear his opponents. And to demonstrate how he was in sync with the common folks against the Elites. He regularly demanded that they be made public.
But then, Trump's Attorney General, after saying shortly after taking office that she had the file on her desk, announced that there was nothing there that warranted publication. And Trump posted various suggestions that it was old news and people should just move on.
No surprise: while a few cultists followed directions, a substantial majority are having none of it. They want to see those files. They are demanding to see them. (And, incidently, demanding that the AG be fired for not publishing them.)
A lot of us have wondered what would hit the MAGAts hard enough to wake them up. Which, we innocently assumed, was what would get them to abandon Trump. Lots of discussion of economic pain, loved ones dying for lack of medical care, other real stuff. Somehow nobody (that I saw) suggested that one of the conspiracy theories would turn around and bite him.
My guess is that, if they'd just published them, no matter how damning the contents the true believers would have come up with a conspiracy theory to explain it all away. SStereotypically,it's not the crime, it's the cover-up.
That's because you don't have Amazon Prime. Being #2, you aren't prime, which means you have to try harder.**
** For those outside the US, back in the day (and, for all I know, today) Hertz was the biggest car rental company. Avis, the next largest, advertised "We're #2, We try harder."
I can't wait for the ocean to swallow Mar-A-Lago like a bad case of reflux.
Personally, I'd like to see the site become a sewage treatment plant. (A real one, not a metaphor.) Give the cult a focus for pilgrimages.
But your alternative does have merit. Not to mention a high probability.
there are simply no "good" Republicans today, and they need to be politically neutralized root and branch, even the one's who wj avers are "good ones".
If they were "good" they would not be Republicans.
I'd agree with you that there are no good Republicans on the national level, I think the situation is a bit different on the local level. Not that there aren't a lot of terrible local Republican office holders. Just that there are also some good ones.
You suggest that, if they were good, they wouldn't be Republicans. But that's simplistic. In some areas, the Republican primary essentially is the general election. If you want to hold office and do some good, you run as a Republican. (If tilting at windmills is your thing, you run as a Democrat.) Gerrymandering has made that worse. But it would be true in a lot of places even without that.
The other thing is, most people find it hard to change parties. Call it psychological momentum or something. But even if their voting habits in the general election shift, they resist changing their party registration.
It's even harder if you are already an elected official. It can be done; my Congressman was originally elected to the state legislature as a Republican. But it's hard. And you probably need some years in office to build a personal brand to get you through.
I might accept that good young people, in a lot of places, would find it hard to look at the current Republican Party (especially as the national party is so high profile) and register with them. Twenty years down the line, that will make your observation more true. But there will still be places where you can't get elected and do good, especially the first few times, without the label.
But we're still a prosperous country. People aren't pushing wheelbarrows full of cash to the grocery store because of hyperinflation. Unemployment remains low.
We're still a prosperous country for now. Whether we remain one rather depends on how Trump's trade wars play out. But individual areas are going to get hit hard, and sooner rather than later.
To take just one example, without USAid, the prairie states are going to get hammered starting next year. The silos are still pretty full from last year's harvest. This fall, they're not going to be able to buy what the farmers produce. Of course some of the grain might be diverted to cattle feed. Except that, with ICE rounding up all the workers from the slaughter houses, the market for cattle will be tanking also. Those states are going to be hurting big-time -- and while Trump might talk about "family farms" on the campaign trail, he's basically a city boy who just doesn't really relate.
Between that and the damage to the vegetable farming here and tariffs on imports from (mostly) Mexico, food prices will be going up. Probably not to hyperinflation levels, but enough that discretionary spending will drop, which will hurt industries far beyond the farm.
That, in turn, will join with the other side of the trade wars (why should they, or can they, buy our stuff if we won't buy theirs?) to kick unemployment up. Some of those unemployed might try some of the agriculture jobs that ICE is opening up. "Try" being the operative word. Farm work is nothing like office work -- I've done it, and I know. Some of the unemployed might eventually get in shape to do it. But even if you spend a lot of time in the gym, that's nothing like doing hard work 40+ hours a week.
Short story shorter, it's going to get ugly. Republican Congress critters may not feel the impact next year. But by 2028, they're going to join the ranks of the unemployed. (And their usual post-Congress positions as lobbyists aren't going to be interested -- few members to the next Congress are going to go anywhere near them.)
So, there's your summary predictions from the resident optimist.
I sincerely appreciate, as always, your unflagging optimism, wj
I truly wish I was optimistic at this point. But, while I have hopes, I don't really have expectations. (At least, not positive ones. :-)
I suspect that the question is just how bad it will get, and how long it will take us to repair the damage.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.
On “An open thread”
As long as I can remember, when bad jobs numbers come out, the President reacts by talking about how he will act, or how he wants Congress to act, to get the economy back on track. Today, when a bad job reports came out, the Presidential response was to fire the (non-partisan) head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Shoot the Messenger at its finest.
On “The law of the letter”
Still be way sooner than I'd get anything similar coded myself.
On “Everyone is a hero in their own story”
Speaking of heroes, I note that the 2028 Olympics are currently scheduled for Los Angeles. Two problems there:
1) Getting international tourists, or even just Olympic athletes, into and safely back out of the country. I belong to an organization which holds international conferences. It is sufficiently difficult for would-be attendees to get visas that attendance plummets when we hold one in the US. Which will doubtless hold down Olympic tourism. Not to mention the increasing fondness of the current administration for arbitrarily holding up travelers, even those with impeccable paperwork.
2) Trump would doubtless find it impossible to resist (not that he'd try) showing up and making the whole thing all about him -- see "hero in his own mind". To see how this might go, consider the 1936 Olympics in Berlin.
I'm already seeing calls here for Los Angeles to bail on the whole thing. Those tend, so far, to focus both on those issues, as well as the legal requirement that major international events like this have security handled by the Secret Service, with help from the FBI and Homeland Security. Currently Federal law enforcement agencies are, thanks to ICE, not in good oder in LA (or California generally).
Plus, staging the Olympics is expensive. Local government budgets are already strained, and nobody can see Trump kicking in financial support. If anything, he might decide to bill LA for the security costs.
"
I wish I could say I'm surprised.
I think a more accurate opening line might refer to "the Attorney General" or "senior political appointees in the Justice Department". Something that would make clear that this is not (hoping that it is not, at least yet) something that everybody in the Department of Justice is on board with, and rolling out to attorneys in the rest of the government.
On “The law of the letter”
Michael, this is just way cool!
When you feel like the software is mostly together, is it something you would be willing to share? Sell? (I hesitate to suggest beta test. ;-)
"
Perhaps the greatest calculator ... was Kepler
Perhaps. But the ladies who did all the calculations for the Mercury and Apollo Projects were no slouches either. Men's lives hung on their work. As the story goes, John Glenn asked explicitly for Katherine Johnson to do the calculations for his flight. He wouldn't trust anyone else with his safety.
"
Why spent minutes (at minimum) on the screen when a sketch on paper takes seconds?
Tablets are getting better at imitating what paper and pencil do. But it's still a pale imitation. And, from what I've seen, the rate of progress towards duplicating it as slowed markedly.
"
All this math talk has me celebrating pi, but not exactly.
Hmmm. I'm thinking exactly, but not precisely.
"
I suppose I can see how, if everybody who knows how to read** has a phone/computer in their hip pocket, knowing basic arithmetic might be less critical than it once was. I'm not convinced, mind, but I can see that it might be.
** At the rate software is improving, I suppose computers will be able to read to us, and write down what we say as well. The reactionaries will no doubt be delighted if illiteracy once again becomes the norm. /snark
"
New Math was the same sort of thing. It pushed a much broader view of what math was than just the algorithms. Look, long division is done the way it is because hundreds of years of experience informs us that it's the best way to get the right answers when you have to do a hundred division problems a day, day after day. New Math failed when the teachers pushed the broader view but didn't teach the mechanics.
The trouble with New Math was that it was (apparently) designed by mathematicians. Mathematicians who had forgotten that a) you have to build the foundations (mechanics, as Michael says) first. And that b) normal people are not mathematicians -- and that's 99.99% (or more) of the population. They neither care nor need to know the theoretical underpinnings. They just need to know how to do basic arithmetic reliably.
"
Camel notation* from computer programming would possibly be better: InternalCompustionEngine.
It is interesting that it is widely used in domain names, e.g. KaiserPermanente.org Clearly the sales and marketing folks think it will be easier to parse that way.
"
In Latin one has to invent new words for concepts Cicero&Co. did not yet possess and would probably not understand. Greek (unlike classical Latin) allows composite words that can transport about any meaning with little to no loss.
No offense, but I wonder if being a native speaker of German might be coloring your view here. Composite words being one of the most noticable things (after gendered nouns) for English speakers when learning it.
I admit that I don't have a wide enough base to know how common composite words are in languages generally.
"
Sorry if I misunderstand you, but are you saying that the use of national languages in the native countries will disappear or be reduced? I don't think that would be realistic.
Yes, that is exactly what I am saying. Not that it will necessarily be quick. But it will happen.
See, for example, the various Native American / First Nations languages. They haven't, quite, died out and there are various efforts to save one or another of them. But the reality is that native speakers are overwhelmingly old. Children may retain some fluency, in order to speak to their grandparents. But for everyday use, they speak English. And the children's children will be straight Anglophones.
We see the same phenomena in immigrants. My wife's immigrant grandparents were functional in English, but spoke Japanese with family and friends. Her parents were fluent in Japanese (from talking to parents and aunts and uncles when growing up), but generally spoke English except when talking to the older generation. My wife and her siblings? Even having lost virtually all of the Japanese I studied in college, I still speak more than they do.**
Granted, there is more inertia when it comes to languages with a big population base. So it will take longer. But modern communications mean that the next generation will be exposed to English far beyond the classroom. And anyone who interacts with the outside world, from academics to taxi drivers, will need to use it routinely. Already do, actually.
** When my wife and I first got together, we made occasional trips half the length of California to see her family. About the third trip, I got taken off to see Grandma. My future mother-in-law gave Grandma an explanation of who was this blue eyed blond, then introduced us. I remembered enough to say Hajimemashte. Grandma just lit up; from that moment, as far as she was concerned, I was in.
"
I am involved in an international organization (ICANN, if you care). I have a nagging (unspoken) embarrassment because everybody speaks English. Most of them barely distinguishable from native speakers.** Partly that turns out to because they did college or grad school in the US, or perhaps the UK or Australia.
But there I am, speaking only English. The German I learned in high school is mostly gone. The Japanese I studied in grad school is also gone. And, of course, because I grew up in California I know a few bits and pieces of Spanish. (Actually, taking a few Spanish classes is on my Really Need To Get Around To This list.) For the moment, I try to at least learn how to say thank you in the language of wherever we are meeting.
I have the suspicion that English will eventually end up as the world language. There will no doubt be long and bitter fights to preserve the national language. But they will, in eventual history, be seen as futile fighting tetreats.
These days, the world requires a common language to function. One will come: the only question is which one it will be. The Chinese will argue, as their economic power increases, for Chinese (Mandarin), but a tonal language is simply too difficult for anyone not raised in one. Spanish might be a viable option, but it lacks a serious economic power to push it. French might have a chance, except that its spelling is nothing approaching phonetic, which makes it hard to learn.
English, thanks to British and then American economic dominance (plus the fact that India, with its huge population, already uses it because its people speak 5 mutually unintelligible native languages), is already getting there. A lot of countries, not just Japan, start English lessons in grammar school. I won't claim that nothing could displace English. But it would take, at minimum, a couple of centuries of economic and cultural dominance.
** Working groups typically work in English (even if there are no native speakers involved), with a few having simultaneous translations for French and Spanish. For the three major meetings, we get translations in the 5 UN languages (English, French, Spanish, Russian, and Chinese) plus Arabic. And the language of wherever we are meeting, if it isn't one of those.
On “Your Schadenfreude monitoring open thread”
It's as if someone had deliberately did a lot of work to make it really, Really, REALLY look like a high-level conspiracy.
Of course, it doesn't take much work to make a conspiracy look like a conspiracy. And how likely is it that the incompetents involved could manage to fake one convincingly? Or even do a lot of work to try to?
"
The evidence could go missing, but to the people who have built influencer careers out of Epstein conspiracies, that would likely just fuel the fires of speculation.
And if I were Bondi, I'd be sure to stash the evidence somewhere that Trump couldn't get to it, rather than destroying it.
And she doesn't even have to stash the evidence. A copy of the evidence would be just as good, maybe even better, for convincing the conspiracy theory enthusiasts that it's real. "The Elites destroyed the original. But we've gotten a copy out and we'll destroy them with it!"
Of course, the minute there's one copy out, there will be a dozen (hey, I said the first minute) variations splashing across the Internet. No doubt Trump will feature in at least some of them.
"
“It’s much easier to be angry at an immigrant than to wonder whether you’ve been lied to for the last eight years.”
I think this is where the Lewis goes wrong. They don't have to struggle with the idea that they've been lied to. They just have to maintain their outrage at the Elites for covering this up. Doesn't matter that Trump might have lied to them (ya think he might have?). All that matters is that they are heavily invested in the idea of a conspiracy to cover up massive Elite morality. And that now there is a chance to drag it into the open.
In the end, they're more wedded to their conspiracy beliefs than they are to Trump. And massively more so than to anybody else in his administration. Hence the immediate demands for Bondi's removal. I agree with hsh that his best course would be to just shut up about it. Let the ravening hordes focus of the rest of the administration, and throw them to the dogs as necessary. But he's probably incapable of that. His loss is the country's gain.
"
Just for the benefit of anyone coming to this in the future, the last three entries in the Plus ça change... thread are also on this topic.
Apologies to those here for not making it a thread initially. Unfortunately, I was on my phone and didn't have easy access to create a new thread. (Probably ought to fix that....)
On “Plus ça change…”
A somewhat different case of Plus ça change...:
One of the favorite obsessions of the MAGA-verse, for the past decade, has been the Epstein Files. Trump used it to smear his opponents. And to demonstrate how he was in sync with the common folks against the Elites. He regularly demanded that they be made public.
But then, Trump's Attorney General, after saying shortly after taking office that she had the file on her desk, announced that there was nothing there that warranted publication. And Trump posted various suggestions that it was old news and people should just move on.
No surprise: while a few cultists followed directions, a substantial majority are having none of it. They want to see those files. They are demanding to see them. (And, incidently, demanding that the AG be fired for not publishing them.)
A lot of us have wondered what would hit the MAGAts hard enough to wake them up. Which, we innocently assumed, was what would get them to abandon Trump. Lots of discussion of economic pain, loved ones dying for lack of medical care, other real stuff. Somehow nobody (that I saw) suggested that one of the conspiracy theories would turn around and bite him.
My guess is that, if they'd just published them, no matter how damning the contents the true believers would have come up with a conspiracy theory to explain it all away. SStereotypically,it's not the crime, it's the cover-up.
On “Like encountering stone age tribes in the Amazon”
I'm confident that 2 is, in fact, prime.
“This is the type of arrant pedantry up with which I will not put.”
"
That's because you don't have Amazon Prime. Being #2, you aren't prime, which means you have to try harder.**
** For those outside the US, back in the day (and, for all I know, today) Hertz was the biggest car rental company. Avis, the next largest, advertised "We're #2, We try harder."
On “Plus ça change…”
I can't wait for the ocean to swallow Mar-A-Lago like a bad case of reflux.
Personally, I'd like to see the site become a sewage treatment plant. (A real one, not a metaphor.) Give the cult a focus for pilgrimages.
But your alternative does have merit. Not to mention a high probability.
On “An open thread on July 4th”
there are simply no "good" Republicans today, and they need to be politically neutralized root and branch, even the one's who wj avers are "good ones".
If they were "good" they would not be Republicans.
I'd agree with you that there are no good Republicans on the national level, I think the situation is a bit different on the local level. Not that there aren't a lot of terrible local Republican office holders. Just that there are also some good ones.
You suggest that, if they were good, they wouldn't be Republicans. But that's simplistic. In some areas, the Republican primary essentially is the general election. If you want to hold office and do some good, you run as a Republican. (If tilting at windmills is your thing, you run as a Democrat.) Gerrymandering has made that worse. But it would be true in a lot of places even without that.
The other thing is, most people find it hard to change parties. Call it psychological momentum or something. But even if their voting habits in the general election shift, they resist changing their party registration.
It's even harder if you are already an elected official. It can be done; my Congressman was originally elected to the state legislature as a Republican. But it's hard. And you probably need some years in office to build a personal brand to get you through.
I might accept that good young people, in a lot of places, would find it hard to look at the current Republican Party (especially as the national party is so high profile) and register with them. Twenty years down the line, that will make your observation more true. But there will still be places where you can't get elected and do good, especially the first few times, without the label.
"
But we're still a prosperous country. People aren't pushing wheelbarrows full of cash to the grocery store because of hyperinflation. Unemployment remains low.
We're still a prosperous country for now. Whether we remain one rather depends on how Trump's trade wars play out. But individual areas are going to get hit hard, and sooner rather than later.
To take just one example, without USAid, the prairie states are going to get hammered starting next year. The silos are still pretty full from last year's harvest. This fall, they're not going to be able to buy what the farmers produce. Of course some of the grain might be diverted to cattle feed. Except that, with ICE rounding up all the workers from the slaughter houses, the market for cattle will be tanking also. Those states are going to be hurting big-time -- and while Trump might talk about "family farms" on the campaign trail, he's basically a city boy who just doesn't really relate.
Between that and the damage to the vegetable farming here and tariffs on imports from (mostly) Mexico, food prices will be going up. Probably not to hyperinflation levels, but enough that discretionary spending will drop, which will hurt industries far beyond the farm.
That, in turn, will join with the other side of the trade wars (why should they, or can they, buy our stuff if we won't buy theirs?) to kick unemployment up. Some of those unemployed might try some of the agriculture jobs that ICE is opening up. "Try" being the operative word. Farm work is nothing like office work -- I've done it, and I know. Some of the unemployed might eventually get in shape to do it. But even if you spend a lot of time in the gym, that's nothing like doing hard work 40+ hours a week.
Short story shorter, it's going to get ugly. Republican Congress critters may not feel the impact next year. But by 2028, they're going to join the ranks of the unemployed. (And their usual post-Congress positions as lobbyists aren't going to be interested -- few members to the next Congress are going to go anywhere near them.)
So, there's your summary predictions from the resident optimist.
"
I sincerely appreciate, as always, your unflagging optimism, wj
I truly wish I was optimistic at this point. But, while I have hopes, I don't really have expectations. (At least, not positive ones. :-)
I suspect that the question is just how bad it will get, and how long it will take us to repair the damage.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.