Category: Millennials

Getting Younger is Key to Democrats’ Future

The Daily Escape:

Canyonlands NP, UT – photo by Xymic

Like Biden, Wrongo is a member of the Silent Generation, but he always confuses the names and age groupings of the generational cohorts. Here’s the breakdown by cohort, age and number of each:

  • Silent Generation: Born between 1928 and 1945. There are about 23.6 million in the US
  • Baby Boomers:  Born between 1946 and 1964. There are about 68.7 million in the US
  • Gen X: Born between 1965 and 1979/1980. There are 65.1 million of them
  • Gen Y, or Millennials: Born between 1981 and 1994-1996. There are 82.2 million of them
  • Gen Z:  Born between 1997 and 2012-2015. There are 86.4 million of them in the US

Gen Z is now the largest demographic cohort, with Millennials just behind them. Boomers now represent 21% of America’s population, and Silents are 7%.

But Boomers and Silents still control our political lives. While true for both Parties, leadership in the Democratic Party skews really old: Biden is 78, Sen. Dianne Feinstein is 87, and House Speaker Pelosi is 80. Majority Leader Steny Hoyer is 81, Majority Whip Jim Clyburn is 80, while Senate Majority Leader  Chuck Schumer is a relatively young 70.

NY Mag’s Eve Peyser:

“If you’re starting to get the feeling that the country is governed as a gerontocracy, you are correct. People over 50 make up 34% of the US population, but 52% of the electorate, according to Pew. And it’s not only political power that baby-boomers and the Silent Generation have a tight grip on: Americans over 55 own two-thirds of the wealth in this country.”

Here is a chart from Pew that shows the distribution of the new Congress by age:

There are 31 Millennials in the House, and only one in the Senate. According to another Pew survey, in 2018, the most common age for all Americans was 27, while the most common age for White Americans was 58! The over-representation of Boomers and Silents in Congress means that White interests are similarly over-represented in US politics.

This isn’t happening everywhere; it’s a distinctly American problem. More from Peyser:

“If you look at other countries, they’re not similarly controlled by older politicians. I think that the explanation here is the two-party system….[A multiparty system gets] young people involved in politics, voting, organizing, running things, organizational politics, [which] means that they are able to start accumulating institutional power.”

Democrats must let younger politicians have a crack at leadership. That was the point of Sen. Chris Murphy’s (D-CT) successful push in January for a change in the Senate’s rules to allow more junior Senators to chair better and more influential subcommittees.

It was also tried in the House. Rep. Katie Porter (D-CA) pushed Pelosi and House Financial Services Committee Chair Maxine Waters (D-CA) to be more confrontational in some committee hearings. But Porter lost the argument and is no longer a member of that Committee. However, she remains on the House Oversight Committee, and like Murphy, she has a bright future.

The Democrats have a few other young stars that can become future national leaders. In 2016, Frank Bruni showcased a few in the NYT. Among others, he mentioned Stacy Abrams, Julian Castro, Pete Buttigieg, Hakeem Jefferies, and Gina Raimondo. Two (Buttigieg and Raimondo) are now in Biden’s cabinet, while Abrams and Jefferies are already powerful Party leaders.

Several House members, including Jamie Raskin, David Cicilline and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez are emerging leaders who help skew the Party younger, but change will be slow. From Peyser:

“We have not yet reached the peak of Boomer culture. We’re going to see the highest number of people turning 65 in US history in 2023,”

By 2028, Millennials and Generation Z will make up almost exactly half of eligible voters. In other words, things will change, but only as the Boomer generation retires from politics, and when we actively help convert eligible voters into registered voters.

Increasing their number could pivot on the fate of HR-1 in the Senate. It would ease the way for more young people to participate in politics, since it requires every state to create systems for automatic, same-day and online voter registration. That could significantly reduce the biggest barrier to more young people voting in American elections: our complex registration system. So far, fewer younger voters have been willing, or able to navigate it.

Strategically, the Republicans will continue trying to suppress voting, while also trying to woo more Boomers to their side. Democrats will work to expand the voter rolls and also get them to turn out, particularly in swing states.

Younger voters are likely to be more progressive than the older Democrats. But even the oldsters in the Party will follow them, as Biden is doing today.

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Saturday Soother – August 3, 2019

The Daily Escape:

Wotans Throne, North Rim, Grand Canyon NP, AZ – photo by phantomcloud.

The WSJ has an important story on how people with what seems like pretty good household incomes, are getting more and more indebted trying to keep up a middle class lifestyle:

“The American middle class is falling deeper into debt to maintain a middle-class lifestyle.

Cars, college, houses and medical care have become steadily more costly, but incomes have been largely stagnant for two decades, despite a recent uptick. Filling the gap between earning and spending is an explosion of finance into nearly every corner of the consumer economy.

Consumer debt, not counting mortgages, has climbed to $4 trillion—higher than it has ever been even after adjusting for inflation. Mortgage debt slid after the financial crisis a decade ago but is rebounding.

Student debt totaled about $1.5 trillion last year, exceeding all other forms of consumer debt except mortgages.

Auto debt is up nearly 40% adjusting for inflation in the last decade to $1.3 trillion. And the average loan for new cars is up an inflation-adjusted 11% in a decade, to $32,187, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis of data from credit-reporting firm Experian.”

The Journal gives a generally sympathetic portrayal, provided you don’t go deeply into their comments section, where readers spout platitudes about Millennial’s lack of fiscal responsibility. Here’s a chart from the WSJ using some recent work by Georgetown bankruptcy law professor Adam Levitin showing how much certain costs have risen relative to wages:

More from the WSJ:

“Median household income in the U.S. was $61,372 at the end of 2017, according to the Census Bureau. When inflation is taken into account that is just above the 1999 level.

Average housing prices, however, swelled 290% over those three decades in inflation-adjusted terms, according to an analysis by Adam Levitin, a Georgetown Law professor who studies bankruptcy, financial regulation and consumer finance.

Average tuition at public four-year colleges went up 311%, adjusted for inflation, by his calculation. And average per capita personal health-care expenditures rose about 51% in real terms over a slightly shorter period, 1990 to 2017.”

Of course, in Wrongo’s youth, few young people were carrying large amounts of student debt. And if they went to coastal cities to build their careers, the cost premium over living in a city in the heartland wasn’t as high as it is now (except for San Francisco and New York, which have always been very expensive). Also, it isn’t just tuition that has gone up. All the other college costs, housing, meals, books, and fees, have also gone up more than 300% in the past 30 years.

It is notable that college costs have far outpaced the ability of those in the middle class to afford them. That is why student loan debt has become so high: working your way through college is no longer as realistic as it once was.

Turning to housing, the WSJ quotes Domonic Purviance of the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, who says that people earning the median income can no longer afford the median-priced new home, which cost $323,000 last year, and barely have the means to buy the median existing home, which is now about $278,000.

Failure of wages to keep up with costs is a huge problem, and it has to be emphasized that this is not some inevitable outcome of our so-called “free markets” – it is driven by neo-liberal policy.

A few of the Democratic candidates are addressing the health and education cost burdens now adding to the debt load of all Americans. But we need more discussion that leads us to better policy.

With so much wrong in the world, we surely need to take a step back, and de-stress. To help with that, here’s your Saturday Soother. Let’s start by brewing up a large mug of Finca Las Nieves Green-Tip Geisha coffee ($35.00/8 oz.). This coffee is grown and roasted in Mexico. Located at an elevation of 4,000 feet, Finca Las Nieves is a 1,000-acre coffee farm located in Oaxaca State. It is completely off the grid — both solar- and hydro-powered. In addition to growing, harvesting, processing and roasting coffee, the farm also offers vacation bungalows for rent on the property.

Now, settle into a comfy chair and listen to Bach’s unaccompanied Cello Suite No. 1 in G Major, movements 1-3 of 6, by Yo Yo Ma. The video uses a painting by Hudson River School painter, Thomas Cole. It is called “The Oxbow”, located on the Connecticut River in Massachusetts near Northampton, MA. Here is Yo Yo Ma:

Those who read the Wrongologist in email can view and listen to the video here.

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Biden?

The Daily Escape:

Azulik Hotel, Tulum Mexico, – 2019 photo by Phoebe Montague

A long-time friend of Wrongo and Ms. Right who is also a reader of the Wrongologist, emailed that a friend who is a well-placed Democrat in DC, said the Party plans to push Joe Biden for a single four-year term “to bring us together in healing”. He would also appoint a younger VP who would appeal to Millennials.

After a little digging, it seems that may be the plan. CNN reports that Biden is considering:

“The early selection of a running mate, which one aide said would help keep the focus of the primary fight on the ultimate goal of unseating Trump.”

If Biden would commit to one term, selecting his VP candidate early would lay hands on that person as the presumptive Democratic nominee in 2024. It sounds like a really bad idea, one that also would preclude Biden’s selecting one of the existing candidates for the 2020 nomination.

This strategy would have precluded Biden getting the VP nomination in 2008. Obama couldn’t have picked Biden early, because Biden was also running for president. And even once Biden dropped out, he wasn’t prepared to immediately back Obama over Hillary Clinton for the nomination.

Biden has tons of history for his primary opponents and the Republicans to pick through. Ryan Cooper, writing in The Week, said:

“Joe Biden is about to ruin his reputation….The most immediate problem for Biden personally is that he has #MeToo written all over him…..there are already vast compilations of footage of him being far too handsy with women in public settings.”

More from Cooper:

“Biden’s actual policy record is probably almost as big of a potential problem. The Democratic Party has shifted markedly to the left over the last decade, as the consequences of the party’s policy record from the mid-1970s to 2008 have become clear
.he was personally involved in almost every bad policy decision of the last 40 years.”

Democrats use identity politics to help win elections. They try to knit together disparate groups of voters to counter the GOP’s solid South and Western states. Biden is tragically flawed in this regard. When you have a long history, people can learn that he gave the eulogy at Strom Thurmond’s funeral.  Thurmond was one of the most notorious segregationists in history.

In 2020, Biden’s eulogy works with Democrats in South Carolina, but how Biden confronts his 2003 praise for a former segregationist elsewhere in the primaries could prove a big challenge. Biden would be trying to lead a party that says it’s committed to fighting racial inequality, but would he be seen as the right person for the job? Some in the party will reject whatever explanation he gives, while others will say he’s trying to persuade more white voters to join Democrats in 2020.

Many black voters failed to support Hillary Clinton in 2016 for much less than Biden’s praise of Thurmond. Like Clinton, Biden has already expressed regret for supporting criminal sentencing laws that disproportionately punished people of color. He needs to clearly explain his treatment of Anita Hill, who accused Clarence Thomas of sexual harassment during Supreme Court confirmation hearings that Biden chaired in 1991.

Biden’s old Senate votes in favor of the Iraq War, the Defense of Marriage Act, and the North American Free Trade Agreement will be difficult to explain to young Democrats.

He has long said he believes in bi-partisanship, saying that the differences between Republicans and Democrats are superficial disagreements, not fundamental differences over matters of principle. Given Biden’s success in early Iowa polling, some might say that message is resonating. After all, according to orthodox wisdom, there is no more commendable virtue in American politics than bipartisanship.

Candidates always try to assure voters that they will strive to “work across the aisle” to deliver “commonsense solutions”. But, Wrongo thinks his ratings are due largely to Joe Biden being widely considered a likable guy, genial Uncle Joe. A father who has suffered family loss, there’s also a halo effect from his relationship with Obama that drives his favorability.

Biden is 76. He’s one of a cohort of elder politicians running for President, including Bernie Sanders (77) and Elizabeth Warren (70 in June). There are several candidates in their 60’s, 50’s, 40’s and a few in their 30’s.

Biden starts with strength among Democrats who think a safe pair of hands is a tested white man, and with Independents nostalgic for the Obama administration.

He will be opposed by Millennials eager for a new generation of leaders, and people of color who won’t buy his explanations about Anita Hill and Strom Thurmond.

He looks like a divisive candidate to Wrongo.

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Who’s Electable?

The Daily Escape:

Valley of Fire State Park, Nevada – 2019 photo by trolleg

Ultimately, that question will be about Donald Trump vs. whichever Democrat is chosen as the Party’s nominee in 2020. Today, it’s a way to try to make a cut from among the 15+ Democrats that have announced their intention to seek that 2020 nomination.

Wrongo talked last week about the landscape of the 2019 primaries, saying:

“The internet is full of comments about which of the 14 are most worthy, and plenty of hot takes on who can’t win vs. Trump.”

We know that in past presidential elections, a few candidates always emerge early as having the ability to “excite the voters”. The press starts to say that “this one might have a chance”. It works out sometimes, as it did for Bill Clinton vs. Paul Tsongas and Jerry Brown, or Barack Obama vs. Hillary Clinton. Both Clinton and Obama had charisma, which their opponents lacked. What hasn’t worked so well is being a policy wonk or having a bulletproof resume. Every candidate has a resume, a story to tell about themselves, but some try to parlay long careers in politics to the winner’s circle.

Think about Nixon and his resume squeaking past Hubert Humphrey, also with a long resume in politics. GHW Bush took his long resume to the White House for one term. The idea is that you can’t ask voters to look ahead while looking backwards at the same time. For Baby Boomer politicians, there are things in the rear-view that aren’t pretty, or even relevant today.

This is Joe Biden’s problem: When you’re challenging the status quo, ahead is the only winning direction. For another Boomer, Elizabeth Warren, her political resume is short, so less baggage in the 2020 primaries, and more new ideas.

It isn’t totally clear how the electability equation works. The media’s biases have a lot to do with deciding who gets the early buzz. It should be pretty simple to sort them into electable/not-electable categories, but think about Obama in January 2008: (emphasis by Wrongo)

“Senator Barack Obama’s victory in Iowa has improved his standing within the party on a critical measure: his electability. The percentage of Democrats who say he would be the strongest candidate against the Republicans has more than doubled in a month, to 35% from 14% in December.”

So today, we have no idea who is electable, and probably won’t know until after Super Tuesday (March 3rd), when 54% of Democratic primary votes will have been cast.

And does anyone have a reliable metric for “electability”? We can’t really say that John Kerry was un-electable. Hillary was chosen FOR her (supposed) electability, as opposed to the (supposedly) “un-electable” Bernie Sanders.

The GOP have usually played the most electable hand. That gave them Bob Dole, George Bush 43, John McCain and Mitt Romney as candidates. Only one winner among them.

Ultimately, are we capable of analyzing “electability”?  We want it to be useful and true, but is it? The media and the pundits think that moderate political views make a candidate electable, but it’s really more like charisma and authenticity.

At this point Wrongo wants to give a brief plug to Pete Buttigieg. He’s met the Democratic National Committee’s threshold of 65,000 individual donors, which means he’ll be included in the Democratic primary debates. He’s 37 and gay. He’s a Harvard and Oxford grad who served in Afghanistan and speaks Arabic. All of that probably signals to Establishment Democrats that he’s un-electable.

Wrongo thinks he has charisma and authenticity, along with very rare smarts. Here’s a quote from a Buttigieg profile in the New Yorker:

“If you thought in terms of the effects of public policy on millennials, he said, you began to see generational imbalances everywhere. The victims of school shootings suffered because of the gun liberties given to older Americans. Cutting taxes for the richest Americans meant that young people, inevitably, would have to pay the bill. Climate policy, he said, was the deepest example of the imbalance…”

Buttigieg may be strong in the Mid-West, and may be able to bring out non-voters. Non-voters were the biggest cohort in 2016. Many don’t vote because they don’t believe any of the candidates will make things any better. America needs a candidate that is committed to meeting increasingly desperate needs. Maybe Buttigieg would bring non-voters to the polls.

And haven’t Baby Boomers done enough to screw up both America and the planet?

Maybe we should give a Millennial a shot. At least for Vice-President.

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The Power of Messaging

The Daily Escape:

Buttermere Lake, Cumbria, England – photo by Matt Owen-Hughes

On Monday in El Paso TX, Trump attacked Democrats, calling them:

“The party of socialism, late-term abortion, open borders and crime…To pave the way for socialism, Democrats are calling for massive tax hikes and the complete elimination of private health care…They’re coming for your money and they’re coming for your freedom.”

Trump’s focus on “socialism” is based on the few liberal Democratic presidential candidates who have called for Medicare-for-all, or environmental proposals intended to lower carbon emissions.

He brought up the “Green New Deal”, saying it would virtually eliminate air travel and that it sounds “like a high school term paper that got a low mark.”

This is just the latest stage in the war waged by the right against the ideals and programs of the New Deal. Kim Phillips Fein, reviewing the new book “Winter War: Hoover, Roosevelt, and the First Clash Over the New Deal” by Eric Rauchway, writes: (brackets by Wrongo)

Throughout the [1932] campaign, Hoover had attacked what he considered a “social philosophy very different from the traditional philosophies of the American people,” warning that these “so-called new deals” would “destroy the very foundations” of American society. As Hoover later put it, the promise of a “New Deal” was both socialistic and fascistic; it would lead the country on a “march to Moscow.”

2020 will be all about messaging. Once again, just like 88 years ago, Republicans will run on socialism. Trump will add the threats posed by open borders and abortion to the right-wing stew.

The question is what will be the 20+ Democrats who are running for president be talking about? Michael Tomasky in The Daily Beast suggests: (emphasis by Wrongo)

I am saying, though, that Democrats should stop pretending they can unite the country. They can’t. No one can. What they can do, what they must do, is assemble a coalition of working- and middle-class voters of all races around a set of economic principles that will say clearly to those voters that things are going to be very different when they’re in the White House…

There is a power to fashioning a new political coalition around the concept of economic justice. We live in a time when politicians of both parties have followed a consistent strategy: massage the economic numbers and the media, keep the rich and powerful happy, and make sure you stay on the “fiscally conservative” side of the line.

Now, a few Democrats are pushing the party elders to re-consider economic justice as FDR did in the1930s. These Democrats intuit that most Americans are trying to reconcile the life they were told they would have with today’s reality. The gulf between what they were told, and what actually happened is wide. And it looks as if it will only get wider.

Many Americans feel that they can’t pay their bills anymore, and they are afraid. Their jobs aren’t stable, they can’t look forward to retirement. About 20% say they have more credit card debt than savings. The lives they thought they’d live are upside down, and they’re not sure they can do anything about it. Quite a few followed their preachers and a few charlatan Republicans, and can’t understand why things are so scary and bad for them.

America is divided, but maybe not in the way you are thinking. It’s the left behinds and millennials who are worried about their future. And it’s both of them against the politicians, corporations and the oligarchs. As David Crosby sang:

“There’s something happening here, what it is ain’t exactly clear”

In 2020, we’ll be fighting for not just the soul of our country, but the meaning of American life: Should the one with the most toys win?

What is more important, universal health care, or outlawing abortion? Better roads and bridges, or keeping out immigrants? A better environment, or lower taxes?

Ocasio-Sanchez’s Green New Deal (GND) can easily be dismissed, but what really is the difference between how the Green New Deal might be financed, and how the Federal Reserve spent nearly $4 Trillion on its Quantitative Easing (QE) schemes?

The big difference is who profits. QE was welfare for the banks. For the GND, society at large would benefit.

You will get to decide, and plenty of people are already fighting for your attention.

Some are worth listening to. What will you choose to do?

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Nothing Is More Important Than Voter Turnout

The Daily Escape:

Cau Vang (Golden Bridge) Da Nang, Vietnam. This footbridge opened to the public in 2017 – photo via themindcircle

The next few elections will determine if the US remains a minority-ruled country for the foreseeable future. And is there a significant number of non-voters who are predisposed to vote for Democrats.

Check out Adam Bonica’s article in Sunday’s NYT. Bonica, who is a political scientist at Stanford, says that generational shifts are under way that are more powerful politically than people realize. By 2020, half of eligible voters will be Millennials, or Post-Millennials (Gen Z). They will be two-thirds of voters by 2032, and they skew toward the Democrats:

The bottom chart shows that, while the nation is on the cusp of a generational revolution, Millennials and Gen Z’ers haven’t turned out to vote in the way that their elders do. This negates a 31 point Democrat edge in Millennials.

Bonica says that as they age, Millennials will become more likely to vote. He cites a general rule of thumb that turnout increases by about one percentage point with each year of age. This makes it possible to forecast how the generational advantage will grow over the next decade: By 2026, Millennials are expected to account for 19% of votes cast, up from 12% in 2014, with Democratic-leaning Gen Xers and Gen Zers accounting for an additional 34%.

As this happens, the Republican-leaning Silent Generation is projected to account for only 8% percent of votes cast in 2026, down from 23% in 2014. Their participation is bound to go down, the oldest members of the Silents will be 101 in 2026.

But, getting younger voters to turn out is a problem. Bonica says that among advanced democracies, turnout in national elections is a strong predictor of income inequality. The US has both the lowest turnout and highest share of income going to the top 1 percent. He has a very interesting chart showing turnout graphed against income inequality:

Virtually all other western democracies have higher voter turnout than the US. This is unlikely to be a coincidence. Bonica says:

This makes democracy an issue to campaign on. The Democratic base understands that it is waging a battle for the future of the country….They are also painfully aware that our electoral system is biased against them. A rallying cry to put democracy back on the offensive will get the base to sit up and pay attention. Delivering on the promise will get them to the polls.

This year, the Democrats need to focus with laser-like attention on winning the House. They are unlikely to get the Senate. Possibly, they can limit their losses to few, or maybe zero, net.

The Democratic message, assuming they can get their messaging act together, needs to be about these four points:

  • Better jobs
  • Ensuring democratic elections
  • Healthcare for all
  • Higher taxes on corporations

The Democrats can point at the GOP, saying they are the party of corruption, and of doing the bidding of the rich elites. From the Democrats’ point of view, ensuring democratic elections means: Less hacking, easier registration, more days of early voting, and vote-by-mail. All encourage civic engagement and participation.

The fact that Republicans generally do worse when more people turn out to vote is their own fault. We need to point out that their plan is to use vote suppression to weaken democracy, replacing it with a Trump-branded authoritarianism.

And there’s the issue of the Republican-controlled Supreme Court. It will have a strong conservative majority for the next few decades, and that’s going to mean Citizens United isn’t going away, and the Voting Rights Act won’t be strengthened.

Our only weapon is turnout.

We can’t just sit back and let demographics deliver us to power. Democrats will have to fight for these policies. We shouldn’t care that the odds seem stacked against the people who back these values.

Generational change is coming, and with it an opportunity to fundamentally transform the American government and who it serves.

To help with that, Democrats must insist on making voting easier, and more universal.

Then, hone their message.

Then, do everything in our power to make it happen.

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Sunday Cartoon Blogging – July 29, 2018

They found water on Mars. It appears to be salt water. Maybe we’ll build a giant desalinization device, and a few survivors of this hell on earth can give a fresh start to humanity on Mars. Also, Russian scientists found nematodes in Siberia that have been frozen for nearly 42,000 years. With climate change, they were visible to scientists. A few came back to life in the lab:

After being defrosted, the nematodes showed signs of life, said a report today from Yakutia, the area where the worms were found. ‘They started moving and eating.’ One worm came from an ancient squirrel burrow in a permafrost wall of the Duvanny Yar outcrop in the lower reaches of the Kolyma River….Another was found in permafrost near Alazeya River in 2015, and is around 41,700 years old….They are both believed to be female.

Both of those news items are more believable than much of what we hear from Washington, DC these days. For example, Trump’s speech to the Veterans this week included his caution about believing the news media. That led to this cartoon by Darin Bell:

And consider the gloating about “historic growth” in GDP by Trump. John Harwood schools us on the data:

If you think that’s fake news, check out the data.

Trump went off on Iran. What could be behind President Rouhani’s provocations?

Michael Cohen stayed in the news again this week. He’s gonna get a TV series:

Tariffs are always a tax on consumers. Donny is here to collect:

Americans no longer have unlimited voting rights, or election security in the US. This is believable:

Establishment Democrats always react the same way:

Wrongo isn’t on board with the democratic socialism platform, but he believes that corporations should be subjected to tighter regulations. They should pay more in taxes. They should be forced to reimburse the people for the deleterious impacts of their activities, like cleaning up factory sites that have polluted the land.

And every American should have access to healthcare, childcare, and some form of employment. We could make the choice to provide a free education to every American if it were a higher priority than new bombers, or aircraft carriers. ICE should be reformed, not abolished.

Establishment Democrats are trying to scare voters away from candidates who support the democratic socialism agenda. They should relax, democratic socialism isn’t about taking everything what you have away, and making it government-owned.

When you consider the perils and benefits of democratic socialism, you should think about Europe. Five of the top 10 happiest nations in the world (according to the UN) are Scandinavian: Finland, Norway, Denmark, Iceland, and Sweden. And they are all democracies.

Ever since Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez upset the 4th ranking House Democrat by running on a democratic socialist platform, Dems worry that what worked in the Bronx won’t work in Kansas. They’re right, it won’t work in Kansas. That’s why candidates need to run on issues that are important to their districts. A voter in Kansas is probably more concerned over the price of wheat than he is about gay marriage.

But, running on the economy and jobs works everywhere.

Ocasio-Cortez campaigned with Bernie Sanders in Kansas. James Thompson, a centrist Democrat running for Congress in Kansas, said she might as well come out, because the local Republicans were going to call him a socialist anyway.

Democrats were called socialists in 1992 when Bill Clinton won. They shouldn’t panic – they should own the accusation.

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You Say You Want a Revolution

The Daily Escape:

Waimea Canyon, Kauai Hawaii

Wrongo has suggested many times that America needs a revolution. He thinks that the US political process has been so captured by large corporations and the very rich that the average person no longer can have any impact on policy. In many states, the average person isn’t even totally confident that he/she will be permitted to vote the next time they go to their local precinct.

We are in the midst of a political crisis: The people have lost faith in systems which they feel don’t respond to real people and in representatives that won’t represent us, or the society at large. Rather than debate issues thoughtfully, we are whipsawed by the appeals to emotion launched daily into the ether by the tweeter-in-chief.

Two current issues demonstrate the danger. First, Jerusalem. It turns out that Tillerson and Mattis opposed the president’s decision to recognize Jerusalem as the capitol of Israel, and move our embassy there. You know from the headlines that Trump wouldn’t listen to anyone who told him this would be a very bad idea. The State Department’s response was to issue a worldwide travel alert for those Americans who think they’re still welcome around the world. The WaPo reported that a Trump confidant said:

It’s insane. We’re all resistant…He doesn’t realize what all he could trigger by doing this.

Second, North Korea. Maybe you read this headline: North Korea says war is inevitable as allies continue war games.

Martin Longman asks the pertinent question:

The so-called adults in the room utterly failed on the Jerusalem issue, so are we supposed to put our trust in them to steer a sane course on the Korean peninsula?

What are we talking about here? Can we wait out Trump, and just work like hell to replace him with a better president in 2020? Would nuclear war get him re-elected?

What about the GOP’s control of both houses of Congress? On Thursday, Speaker Ryan told us what we face next year: the GOP will tackle the budget deficit and national debt by cutting Medicare and possibly Social Security, now that the GOP’s donor class has their tax cuts.

Things have to change, and there are only two options, neither very good. First, we can try and excise the moneyed influence via the ballot box. That is the “democratic revolution” that Bernie championed in 2016. The definition of democratic revolution is:

A revolution in which a democracy is instituted, replacing a previous non-democratic government, or in which revolutionary change is brought about through democratic means, usually without violence.

Since we no longer have a functioning democracy, a “democratic revolution” to bring it back is what we require. Is it the only way to right the American ship of state?

The second option is a coup of some kind.

  • It could be via impeachment, assuming there were high crimes and misdemeanors that Trump had committed, and assuming a Republican House would impeach him, and a Republican Senate would convict him.
  • It could come via a 25th Amendment action, which might be marginally more acceptable to Republicans, but is as unlikely as impeachment.
  • Least desirable, and least likely would be a true coup, where the “adults in the room” (in the oval office, or the Pentagon) get leverage over the Commander-in-Chief. Could a real coup stay bloodless? That seems highly doubtful, and Wrongo would rather trust Trump than a junta.

Removing Trump won’t fix what’s wrong with the Republican Party. We need to prioritize and triage this situation, focusing first on taking back the House and Senate before 2020.

Who can we count on to right the ship?

Not today’s Democrats. They are led by Chuck Schumer who approves of Trump’s Jerusalem decision. The Democrats must fire Pelosi and Schumer, or die.

What about America’s largest voting bloc, Millennials? Can they step up to the challenge?

What about America’s women? In 2016, women supported Clinton over Trump by 54% to 42%, while Trump carried non-college educated white women 64% to 35%. The #metoo movement promises to become much more than the outing of bad guys: It could weaken both male privilege, and their power.

Firing a few slime balls isn’t revolutionary, but voting them out of office would be a paradigm shift.

The stock market is in the stratosphere, and consumers are happily clicking on Amazon’s “place order” tab.

Measly tax cuts will trickle down to rubes like us, while the plutocrats will die of laughter.

Can women and millennial voters look beyond the GOP’s messaging that the Muslims are always to blame, and Israelis suffer the most?

Will they care enough about whatever Mueller turns up on Trump to go out and vote?

Revolution is in the air. Why should the right have all the fun?

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Why Are Today’s Parents so Fearful?

The Daily Escape:

Matterhorn – 2008 photo by Wrongo

Overnight guests at the Mansion of Wrong started a discussion about how parenting styles have changed since the 1950’s. The primary focus of our near-geriatric group was on how our children parent their kids, as differentiated from the way our parents parented us. We talked about the difference between yesterday’s “free-range” parenting, where the kids were (relatively) unscheduled, and free to play outside until dark, and today’s helicopter parenting, where the kids are highly scheduled and the parents monitor their every move.

Today, Wrongo read an article by Pratik Chougule in the American Conservative entitled, “Is American Childhood Creating an Authoritarian Society?” Its sub-title, “Overprotective parenting is a threat to democracy” gives the article’s viewpoint:

American childhood has taken an authoritarian turn. An array of trends in American society are conspiring to produce unprecedented levels of supervision and control over children’s lives. Tracing the effects of childrearing on broad social outcomes is an exercise in speculation. But if social scientists are correct to posit a connection between childrearing and long-term political outcomes, today’s restrictive childhood norms may portend a broader regression in our country’s democratic consensus. 

That is way much too much speculation for Wrongo, but Chougule offers some interesting facts:

  • The amount of free time school-aged children enjoyed plummeted from 40% in the early 1980s to 25% by the mid-1990s.
  • The time young children spend in school jumped from 5-6 hours in the early 1980s to almost 7 hours beginning in the early 2000s.
  • By 2006, some 40% of schools had either eliminated recess or were considering doing so.

Chougule also offers the following:

More so than any other factor—identity, religiosity, income etc.—it was voters’ attitudes on childrearing that predicted their support for Trump. Those who believe that is more important for children to be respectful rather than independent; obedient over self-reliant; well-behaved more than considerate; and well-mannered versus curious, were more than two and a half times as likely to support Trump than those with the opposite preferences.

This leads to the conclusion that voting for Trump = Authoritarian tendencies in the family. Wrongo disagrees. He fails to see the link between helicopter parenting and authoritarianism in today’s kids. He isn’t even sure that today’s kids are little authoritarians.

Overprotective parenting has more to do with parental anxiety that started in the 1970’s when our kids were growing up, seeing high-profile incidents of abducted children. Then there were (and still are) the hyperventilating pundits warning about freak accidents affecting kids.

Most of all, it is driven by two trends: First, the two-career family has created guilt and fear that at least one parent won’t be around if something terrible happens. Second, the increasingly prevalent one-child family means that the psychic investment in the precious single offspring is huge, and by definition, fragile. If all your eggs are in the basket of one kid, it makes sense for him/her to wear a helmet at all times, and never speak to strangers.

When Wrongo’s kids were growing up, it was safe to send kids out to play in the neighborhood, because you knew there were going to be a dozens of adult eyes watching whatever was going on, as opposed to today’s  neighborhoods, which are vacant from 8am – 6pm.

Today, overprotecting is achieved largely in the form of monitoring where the kids are via cell phones. Parents do this in the name of protecting their kids. This is a major difference, as these devices didn’t even exist until the 1990s.

An unfortunate reality is that many kids today get too little direct supervision from their parents. The slack is being taken up by day-care centers and schools, neither of which should be the primary source of guidance for today’s kids.

An argument can be made that today’s parents have become more authoritarian and conformist because they are fearful in a world that seems to be getting more dangerous. It may be a fear of physical danger, like terrorism, but it can also be fear of downward mobility. The perception is that good jobs and other economic opportunities are getting fewer, so that only the highest-performing young people will have a shot at getting them.

We know that in times of peace and prosperity, society loosens up. People become more tolerant and trusting. When opportunities are limited or when external enemies threaten, tolerance erodes. People want their neighbors, their kids and their kids’ teachers to hew to their world view.

The politics of fear breeds ever more fear. We need to break the cycle.

Here is a tune. It is London Grammar doing a cover of Fleetwood Mac’s “Dreams”, recorded on June 9, 2017:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gLTVQugvros

Takeaway Lyric:

Now here you go again, you say
You want your freedom
Well who am I to keep you down?

Those who read the Wrongologist in email can view the video here.

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Are We Facing an Undemocratic Future?

What do you think when Trump appoints so many retired generals to cabinet-level posts in his administration? The positive side of the argument is that these are talented, well-educated individuals who bring a worldview and experience on the global stage that Trump himself lacks.

The other side of the argument is that the authoritarian president Trump risks making his government much more authoritarian than it needs to be. This from Roger Cohen in the NYT:

A quarter-century after the post-Cold War zenith of liberal democracies and neoliberal economics, illiberalism and authoritarianism are on the march. It’s open season for anyone’s inner bigot. Violence is in the air, awaiting a spark. The winning political card today, as Mr. Trump has shown…is to lead “the people” against a “rigged system,”…The postwar order — its military alliances, trade pacts, political integration and legal framework — feels flimsy, and the nature of the American power undergirding it all is suddenly unclear.

We sound like a nation that is ripe for political upheaval. Citizens are not only more critical of their political leaders, they have become more cynical about the value of democracy as a political system, less hopeful that anything they do might influence public policy, and more willing to express support for authoritarian alternatives.

Yascha Mounk, a lecturer in government at Harvard, has spent the past few years challenging one of the bedrock assumptions of Western politics: That once a country becomes a liberal democracy, it will stay that way. That bedrock assumption is called “democratic consolidation” in political science, but Mounk’s research suggests that isn’t correct anymore.

In fact, he suggests that liberal democracies around the world may be at serious risk of decline. Data from Freedom House, an organization that measures democracy and freedom around the world, showed that the number of countries classified as “free” rose steadily from the mid-1970s to the early 2000s.

But since 2005, Freedom House’s index has shown a decline in global freedom each year. According to Mounk and his research partner Roberto Foa, who reviewed the data, early signs of democratic destabilization exist in the US and in other Western liberal democracies. They found that the percentage of people who say it is “essential” to live in a democracy has plummeted, and it is especially low among younger generations. The survey was based on 2014 data. Here is a graph from the Mounk-Foa study:

percent-who-say-democracy-is-essential-us

The graph shows responses by age cohort. Younger Americans have substantially less need to live in a democratic society than do older individuals. (The grey shaded part of graph is the 95% confidence limit for the responses to the survey). Remarkably, the trend toward acceptance of nondemocratic alternatives is especially strong among citizens who are both young and rich.

Mounk and Foa found that support for autocratic alternatives is also rising. Drawing on data from the European and World Values Surveys, they found that the share of Americans who say that authoritarianism would be a “good” or “very good” thing had risen from 18% in 1995 to 35% of rich Americans:

support-for-authoritianism-by-income-us

While citizen support for authoritarian rule remains in the minority, it can no longer be dismissed as a fringe group. They support “a strong leader who doesn’t have to bother with parliament and elections” and they want “experts” rather than the government to “take decisions” for the country. (In the study, “Upper income” is defined as the top 20% of income. “Lower Income” was defined as the bottom 50% of income.)

Overall, the rich are also now more likely than lower income citizens to express approval for “having the army rule.” While 43% of older Americans, including those born between the world wars and their baby-boomer children, do not believe that it is legitimate in a democracy for the military to take over when the government is incompetent or failing to do its job, the figure among millennials is much lower at 19%. In the US, only 5% of upper-income citizens thought that army rule was a “good” or “very good” idea in 1995. That figure has since risen to 16%, so the young rich are much more autocratic than their rich elders.

The clear message is that our democracy is now vulnerable. What was once unthinkable should no longer be considered outside the realm of possibility. This is partially the result of an educational system that does not teach even basic civics, much less the meaning of the Constitution.

Generations have grown up believing that they can casually read the document and understand what constitutional law is. Young Americans have never known the threat of an undemocratic system, so their fear of autocracy is far less than it is in the minds of their elders.

Trump is the prime example of this. And according to Mounk’s findings, he has a receptive audience in the young and the wealthy.

Would that be enough to undermine democracy in the US?

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