Social Cohesion – Page 22 – The Wrongologist

Monday Wake Up Call – November 15, 2021

The Daily Escape:

Autumn, Seven Lakes Basin, OR – October 2021 photo by Valledweller33

With Congress’s dancing around (and not passing) Biden’s social welfare bill, we’re now to the point where there are less than 20 days until the government’s funding runs out in early December. There are other issues that must be dealt with as well. The federal debt limit needs to be raised. The National Defense Authorization Act must be passed.

The Democrats and Biden are entering yet another critical time. Wrongo wrote about this two months ago, and since then, just about the only thing that Congress accomplished was passing the infrastructure bill. That wasn’t chump change, but the 2021 legislative calendar has only three weeks left to accomplish a long list of must-pass items.

But this is far from the only concern for Dems. With the 2022 mid-terms looming, they need to take a careful look at their policies on immigration, crime, and inflation. These will all be issues that Republicans use against them at election time. The Dems response is usually to deny that an issue is a problem for them, or for the country.

The Dems start by saying there’s nothing to the problem. They reframe it as a different and more complex issue, and say that the White House is already on top of it. This is what Ruy Texeira calls the Fox News Fallacy.

“This is the idea that if Fox News…criticizes the Democrats for X then there must be absolutely nothing to X and the job of Democrats is to assert that loudly and often. The problem is that an issue is not necessarily completely invalid just because Fox News mentions it. That depends on the issue.”

If there’s something to the issue and persuadable voters have real concerns, Democrats won’t assuage those concerns simply by embracing their Fox News Fallacy of denial and deflection. Texeira offers a few examples including the debate over CRT, border security, and crime:

“Start with crime. Initially dismissed as simply an artifact of the Covid shutdown that was being vastly exaggerated by Fox News and the like for their nefarious purposes, it is now apparent that the spike in violent crime is quite real and that voters are very, very concerned about it.”

Clearly this includes the Democrats’ traditional base of Black and Hispanic voters. A Pew poll found that Black and Hispanic Democrats are significantly more likely than white Democrats to favor more local police funding.

This is more of the disconnect that Wrongo wrote about last week. Democrats need to deal with how their pet issues may play differently to different parts of their coalition. As blog reader D. Price said in comments, we assume that our liberal values and the language we use to frame those values must fall on others’ ears just like it does on ours. He points out that Dems need to listen more and take seriously the different perspectives in the Democratic coalition.

Some Democrats, like NYCs mayor-elect Eric Adams, openly highlight their commitment to cracking down on crime and criminals. Consider a recent NBC poll that shows Republicans are favored over Democrats on the crime issue by 22 points.

And in heavily Black Detroit, a USA Today/Suffolk University//Detroit Free Press poll found that Detroit residents, by an overwhelming 9-1, say they would feel safer with more cops on the street, not fewer. On a list of eight concerns, police reform ranked last, at 4%.

The poll also found a significant racial divide on the question. Black residents ranked crime at the top of their list of concerns: 24% cited public safety, and just 3% named police reform, while White residents were only slightly more concerned about police reform than public safety, 12% compared with 10%.

Democrats have to stop saying that they suck at messaging, as if there’s nothing that can be done about it. They must create messaging that emphasizes what Americans have in common and their right not just to economic prosperity but to public safety, secure borders and a world-class (and maybe) non-ideological education for their children.

That’s much more likely to work than simply denying that these issues are problems.

Time to wake up Democrats! There’s no time to lose. Despite the messaging from DC that all will be fine in the mid-terms if the Dems just pass a few pieces of legislation, their problems are much deeper. To help them wake up, listen and watch Della Mae, an all-woman American bluegrass band perform their 2021 tune, “The Way It Was Before“.

Sample lyric:

I left my home and rolled the dice
Followed the promise of a better life
Now I work at the factory
On the third shift while my kids sleep
They say our job’s a necessity they turn the lock and hide the keys
They call us heroes on the killing floor but a day off is something that I can’t afford

We can’t go back to the way it was before
While some profit off the ones who just endure
We all know what’s broken won’t get fixed by wishin and hopin
We can’t just go back to the way it was before

Expanding The Dem’s Voter Base

The Daily Escape:

Artist’s Point, Monument Valley Navajo Tribal Park, AZ-UT – October photo by Alan Seltzer

Ruy Teixeira explains the political (and messaging) dilemma facing Democrats in 2021:

“A recent Gallup release confirmed that Democrats now have about as many liberals in the party as moderates or conservatives. That liberalism has been mostly driven by increasing liberalism among white Democrats which has spiked upward 20 points since the early 2000s. White Democrats are now a solidly liberal constituency. Not so black and Hispanic Democrats who are overwhelmingly moderate or conservative.”

The contrast is particularly striking among Whites who are college graduates and working class (non-college) nonwhites. The Gallup data show that two-thirds of White college grads are liberal while 70% of Black working class and two-thirds of Hispanic working class Democrats are moderate or conservative.

This takes on additional relevance because in 2020, 63% of voters did not have college degrees, and 74% of voters came from households making less than $100,000 a year. This should make it painfully obvious that, if issues and rhetoric that appeal mostly to college-educated White liberals are promoted, Democrats could see serious attrition among Democrat working class nonwhites who dislike those issues and rhetoric.

It’s hard to build a majority if you’re focused on a minority of the electorate. The internal conflict between Democrats, displayed by the Gallup poll mentioned above by Teixeira, pits the Party’s progressives against its moderates, its college-educated against its working class.

Like the modern Democrats, the Whigs cobbled together their party in the late 1830s out of an assortment of constituencies, many of whom had little in common. The Whig Party was formed to counter President Andrew Jackson and the Jacksonian Democrats. They were one of the two major political parties in the US from the late 1830s through the early 1850s and managed to elect two presidents: William Henry Harrison and Zachary Taylor.

By the mid-1850s, the Whigs were divided by the issue of slavery, particularly as the country had to decide whether new states would be admitted as slave or non-slave states. The Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 overturned the Missouri Compromise and allowed each territory to decide for itself whether it would be a slave or free state. Anti-slavery Whigs then spun off to found the Republican Party in 1854.

Is the modern Democratic Party on the precipice of becoming the new Whigs? The Whigs were a coalition of bankers, lawyers, and the Eastern mercantile class. In the South, Whigs worked to put a moral face on slavery. This allowed the Whigs to cultivate political distance from what was becoming a party of southern Democrats happy to extend slavery in new states, and a northern base of what we call “blue collar” (white) workers.

The Whigs couldn’t continue bridging the ideological distance between the Northern industrial states section of the party and the Southern agribusiness/slavery Whigs. Faced with this dilemma, the party broke apart.

If the Democrats are to remain one Party, a new poll by Jacobin, YouGov, and the Center for Working-Class Politics offers a perspective on how to win among working-class voters. They found that:

Candidates who prioritized bread-and-butter issues (jobs, health care, the economy), and presented them in plainspoken, universalist rhetoric, performed significantly better than those who had other priorities or used other language. That preference was even more pronounced in rural and small-town areas, where Democrats have struggled in recent years.
Candidates who named elites as a major cause of America’s problems, invoked anger at the status quo, and celebrated the working class were well received among working-class voters.
Potential Democratic working-class voters did not shy away from candidates who strongly opposed racism. But candidates who framed that opposition in identity-focused language fared significantly worse than candidates who embraced either populist or mainstream language.

The survey proposed multiple sound bites spoken by potential candidates to survey respondents to rank. The most popular sound bite was the “progressive populist” one:

“This country belongs to all of us, not just the super-rich. But for years, politicians in Washington have turned their backs on people who work for a living. We need tough leaders who won’t give in to the millionaires and the lobbyists, but will fight for good jobs, good wages, and guaranteed health care for every single American.”

This has implications for the 2022 mid-terms. Keep Trump off the table unless, by some miracle, the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attempted coup refers charges to the DOJ and the DOJ acts on it. Another key finding was that those surveyed felt Democrats run too far left on certain priorities:

This is also key for building Democrats’ messaging in 2022. You can read the full report here.

Democrats need to think about what it will take to do two things simultaneously: How to stay together as a Party, and how to retain majorities in the House and Senate.

It won’t be simple, but everything depends on it.

Dems Must Persuade the Persuadable

The Daily Escape:

Sunrise, Jensen Beach, FL – November 2021 photo by Patrice Ostradick

More about the Dem’s messaging problem. The latest jobs report showed that we added more than 530,000 new jobs in October. And the DOL also revised its estimates for September and August, confirming an additional 235,000 positions were created.

That’s 766,000 jobs we didn’t know about until last Friday.

The news sent the Dow Jones upward (again). It ended at another all-time high, 36,327. Since Biden was elected last year, the market is up 40%. That’s $14 trillion in new wealth that has landed in quite a few pockets. But the media still covered a Biden administration in disarray. From Eric Boehlert:

“…on Friday, news consumers visiting WashingtonPost.com had to scroll down past 75 different stories and links before they found the first mention of the blockbuster jobs report…..at the top of the Post site Friday afternoon was a column about how the White House is having trouble spreading good news about the economy.”

Again, the media going all “gotcha” on Biden. And it’s having an impact on his poll numbers, which took another dive in a USA Today poll over the weekend that shows Republicans holding a lead on the 2022 Congressional ballot. It found that Biden lost support among the Independent voters who delivered his margin of victory over Trump one year ago:

46% said Biden has done a worse job as president than they expected, including 16% of those who voted for him. Independents, by 7-1 (44%-6%), say he’s done worse, not better, than they expected.
64% said they didn’t want Biden to run for a second term in 2024. That includes 28% of Democrats.

Democrats need to understand their peril. The NYT’s front-page story, “Americans Are Flush With Cash and Jobs. They Also Think the Economy Is Awful” shows their dilemma. The economy is by all accounts on fire, but consumers and voters think it’s floundering. You might question just who is flush with cash, but the negative views of the economy seem to be tied to the effects that rising prices and shortages have on families. Regardless of the exact causes, after decades where the lack of jobs drove economic sentiment, inflation now appears to be a force driving opinion about the economy.

Prices for many consumer goods are rising, and as we said yesterday, it’s impossible to win elections by telling voters that their concerns are imaginary. From Bloomberg (paywalled):

“It’s not all negativity: A record-high 74% of respondents told Gallup in October that this is a good time to find a quality job, and 65% told AP-NORC pollsters that their personal financial situation was good. The Conference Board’s Consumer Confidence Index rose in October and, while lower than before the pandemic, is higher than at any time between 2001 and 2017.”

The reality is that consumer prices have risen faster over the past six months than at any time since the early 1980s. And there’s increasing evidence of a partisan bias in consumer sentiment, with most people judging the economy more favorably when the person they voted for is president.

Remember that the USA Today poll says 64% think Biden shouldn’t run in 2024. Maybe some of today’s economic pessimism has to do with people downgrading their view of Biden’s competence after the surge in the Delta variant that killed so many, while our messy withdrawal from Afghanistan was seen by many as humiliating.

The Democrats’ conundrum is how to respond both to the economic concerns and the cultural attacks. They can’t win by simply pointing to their actual policies on specific issues. They must respond to the attacks on “wrong way for the country” by honing a message that works for the persuadable Independents. We live in a 40-40-20 country in which 40% percent are hard-wired for either Party, and 20% are swing voters, who are primarily located in the suburbs. They largely control the outcome of elections.

Democrats need to study the art of persuasion. The Right is driven by nostalgia: they want to go back to a “simpler time”. The Left is motivated by change, to ensure rights for all, whether that’s healthcare or fair wages. if Democrats want to win against the highly organized right-wing media ecosystem, they must find a series of messages to persuade Independents.

We need a tune for Tuesday. Here’s Willy Nile with something brand new, “The Justice Bell” a tribute to John Lewis, from his August 2021 album, “The Day The Earth Stood Still”:

Monday Wake Up Call – Messaging Edition, November 8, 2021

The Daily Escape:

Catskill Mountains and Hudson River from Rhinebeck, NY – October photo by hikingfordonuts

Wrongo on Sunday pointed out that polling shows that only 30% of Americans think the US is on the right track, despite tons of good economic news. The poll was by NBC just before the November elections. It showed that 70% thought the US is moving in the wrong direction. It also showed Biden’s job performance approval rating at 42%, a sharp drop from 49% in August and 53 % in April.

In addition to the great jobs report, the record stock market, and a booming economy, in less than a year, Biden has withdrawn forces from Afghanistan and passed a substantial Infrastructure Bill. These are two Trump priorities that he couldn’t accomplish during his four-year administration.

The Infrastructure Bill is an unambiguous case in which Biden succeeded where Trump failed. You may think that the Afghanistan exit was messy, but both Biden and Trump were on that same page, and now, we’re out with minimal casualties.

So, what’s the disconnect between Biden’s performance and perception of his performance? It’s that Democrats have a huge messaging problem. Don Draper suggested that when you don’t like what’s being said, you should change the conversation.

From Diane Feldman: (emphasis by Wrongo)

“Most people want to feel safe in their communities, have health care when they need it, and have the opportunity for economic advancement for themselves and their children. Wanting those things is not very divisive along political lines nor by race, class, or gender….Voters are more likely to trust someone who articulates the goals and connects the policies to them than someone who argues the details of a particular policy or spending level. While there are differences between Democratic progressives and moderates on policy, most voters really don’t engage with those.”

It’s questionable if the Democrats could have pushed an upbeat, optimistic message in the election while they were also insisting that America urgently needed funding for social policies. That contradiction may be worth them exploring in more depth.

Virginia’s governor-elect Youngkin demonstrated that Republicans who use identity politics without embracing Trump’s extremist rhetoric can be highly competitive, including in solidly Blue states like New Jersey. And it’s worrying that Dems seem to believe that Youngkin was an extremist posing as a suburban dad (he is), who MSNBC’s Joy Reid said incited “white backlash” by exploiting “fake” and “imaginary” fears about the teaching of “critical race theory” (CRT) in public schools.

But that doesn’t explain the inroads Youngkin made in Blue suburbs. Voters usually consider education to be an important issue. They tend to trust Democrats to handle it better than Republicans. But, according to one Virginia poll the week before the election, Youngkin led McAuliffe by 3% among likely voters, but by 15% among K–12 parents.

So, like it or not, parental views about CRT and local control of public education were a real thing to Virginia voters.

Democrats must develop a plan for how they can avoid further political losses when Republicans across the country emulate Youngkin’s strategy. Here’s The Atlantic’s Yascha Mounk: (emphasis by Wrongo)

“For anybody who cares about making sure that Donald Trump does not become the 47th president of the United States, it is crucial that Democrats avoid repeating the mistakes that just put a Republican in Virginia’s governor’s mansion. It is impossible to win elections by telling voters that their concerns are imaginary. If Democrats keep doing so, they will keep losing.”

Democrats are led by a group of geriatrics who no longer are able to communicate. They have no real social media skills or traditional cable media machine (MSNBC isn’t the answer) to create messaging that resonates. Sadly, the traditional media is biased against them. If you doubt that, read the sub-headlines on Saturday’s front page of the NYT:

For the NYT, a Democrat win isn’t really a win. Democrats need to be crafting winning narratives. The only way that will happen is through ongoing, targeted, year-round campaigns. Not simply more speeches by geriatrics from behind podiums.

There are Democrats and Democrat-leaning voters out there. But in Red areas, they are demoralized and are sometimes hiding in plain sight. They think they are alone. Democrats have to show these demoralized Americans they are not alone, assuming the Party expects them to turn out and challenge the looming conservative majority.

Time for Democrats to wake up! Unless the messaging changes, the endgame is that Democratic voters will continue to sort into the most populated states, and Republicans will gain a permanent supermajority in the Senate. If current trends continue, in 2040 half of the US population will live in eight states.

To help them wake up, listen to Gil Scott-Heron’s “Pieces of a Man” from his 1974 album “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised”:

Sample Lyric:

I saw my daddy greet the mailman
And I heard the mailman say
“Now don’t you take this letter to heart now, Jimmy
‘Cause they’ve laid off nine others today”
But he didn’t know what he was saying
He could hardly understand
That he was only talking to Pieces of a man

Sunday Cartoon Blogging – November 7, 2021

A few start-of-the-week thoughts. First, compare and contrast: The result of New Jersey’s election for governor must be “legal and fair” no matter the outcome, Republican candidate Jack Ciattarelli said in his first comments after the AP declared incumbent Democrat Phil Murphy the election’s winner. BTW, Ciattarelli hasn’t conceded the election. Republicans say NJ’s Murphy won in a squeaker, an almost illegitimate (and certainly embarrassing) margin of 77,000 votes.

OTOH in Virginia, Republican Glenn Youngkin won a landslide victory by 79,000 votes. Terry McAuliffe the Democrat in the Virginia race, conceded. And Youngkin’s 17 year-old son was reported to have tried to vote twice for his dad. That’s a problem since he’s underage. And attempting to break the law twice, well, that’s just youthful exuberance.

Republicans are all about election integrity. It must be nice to not care about hypocrisy or inconsistency. Maybe that’s what Republicans mean when they say they are defending freedom — it’s the freedom to have no principles.

Second, the economy: The Dow is over 36,000, unemployment has dropped from 6.3% in Jan. to 4.8% today. Over 5.6 million jobs have been added, that’s more jobs added under Biden in 9 months than in the 16 years of the last three GOP administrations combined. We’ve managed to give 220 million shots of Covid vaccine in 10 months. But only 30% of Americans think the US is on the right track. Democrats have a huge messaging problem. On to cartoons.

NOW they don’t see a problem:

Will Dems get the message?

The message didn’t work for those nice Aryan people:

Kids ask questions. Answers are simple:

The GOP hits keep coming…

2006: Gay people will force you to gay marry
2010: Muslims will make you conform to Sharia law
2016: Bad brown people are coming in caravans to kill you
2020: Socialism is coming. It will give everyone healthcare, not just the elderly
2021: Teachers will teach white kids to hate themselves if they learn about Emmitt Till

Biden deals with two climate crises:

Republican wet dream:

Can Our Democracy Survive Trumpism?

The Daily Escape:

Bishop Creek, Eastern Sierras, CA – October 2021 photo by Scott McReynolds

CNN’s Brian Stelter asked on Sunday:

“We know what Trump will do….So what will the rest of us do?”

He’s talking about the continuing slow rolling coup inspired by the Big Lie, that’s rolling across America. Stelter presented a scenario about how Trumpism might dim our democracy between now and 2024. His perspective as a media reporter informs his view about how FOX news is reacting to the competition from OAN (One America News). He says that FOX is now simply feeding red meat to its viewers rather than reporting the news.

The result? Paranoia deepens, and Trump’s Big Lie becomes gospel to Republicans. External reality retreats into the background for the Red Hats. More from Stelter:

“There’s a clear difference between the people who pay for news…and want to know what is true, versus people who pay for views….of what they want to be true…”

Wrongo has been banging on about the state of journalism for the last few days, and not sorry, we’re doing it again.

After the attempted coup on Jan. 6, the prospect of political violence threatening a peaceful transfer of power has become a reality that America must face before it’s too late. Trumpists are dreaming publicly of violence, while a new poll by PRRI (margin of error of 2.1%), shows some scary data:

67% of all Americans disagree that the election was stolen.
But 68% of Republicans overall, and 82% of respondents who trust Fox News more than any other news outlet, say they believe the 2020 election was stolen from Trump.
That figure climbs to 97% for those who trust OAN and Newsmax more than any other news outlet.
18% of all Americans think resorting to violence may be necessary to save the nation. PRRI’s question was: “Because things have gotten so far off track, true American patriots may have to resort to violence in order to save our country.”
The scary part is that 30% of Republicans agreed, while just 11% of Democrats agreed.

Stelter’s apocalypse scenario is that by 2024:

“Neighbors turn on neighbors….Normally easygoing local elections turn into existential battles….Threats of violence become real violence….while MAGA-media apps, broadcasters, and commentators justify stomping all over the Constitution as an attempt to save it.”

Let’s emphasize that this is a worst-case scenario. Stelter says “We know it could happen because it has all happened before. Almost everything I have described has already happened in one form or another.”

Monday Wake Up Call – November 1, 2021

The Daily Escape:

Ricketts Glen State Park, PA – 2014 photo by Zev Steinhardt

We don’t know what’s going to happen tomorrow on Election Day. There are a few close races that grab the headlines, like the governor’s race in Virginia. There’s also a gubernatorial election in New Jersey. In addition, two of six special elections to the House of Representatives will also take place on Tuesday.

On Tuesday night, America’s pundits will start making far too much of whatever happens at the polls.

But today, let’s talk about the anti-Biden chant, “Let’s Go Brandon” that is sweeping Red America. The NY Post explains it. And The Post amps up the propaganda, as the article is titled: “4 versions of scathing anti-Biden rap ‘Let’s Go Brandon’ now in iTunes Top 10“.

That makes it sound like America has turned on Biden so badly that he shouldn’t even come back to the country after his Glasgow trip. Throughout the Right Wing press, conservatives are doing their best to ramp up their publicity machine, including all of their bloviators on social media pushing the ‘Brandon’ message, but it doesn’t mean much. From Bob Lefsetz: (emphasis by Wrongo)

“Go to Spotify, ‘Let’s Go Brandon’ is not in the Top 50, as a matter of fact it has almost no impact at all. As of this writing the track has a grand total of 565,434 streams on Spotify….’Freaks’ by Surf Curse, has 364,314 streams A DAY! As of this writing ‘Freaks’ has 287,974,290 streams on Spotify. In other words, the right wing tried to own the libs, and nobody noticed, it had no impact, other than in the echo chamber they reside in.”

Americans could debate whether Biden is doing a good job. But, as Lefsetz says, there is no longer real political debate in America. We have silos on the left and the right, which talk over each other. And the truth doesn’t even matter, so why debate?

If the Republicans are using high tech methods to try and show us that they have a winning political narrative, we need to look beyond the headlines to the actual facts. Lefsetz reminds us:

“BTS fans signed up for tickets to Trump’s Oklahoma rally and changed the outcome, the Trump team thought there was huge demand, they even erected a secondary stage outside, but this wasn’t the case, most of the ticket requests were fake”.

That October 2020 rally’s attendance was poor, and it made Trump look bad. That was our first indication of the power of social media to swing opinion, but that isn’t what happened with the anti-Biden track on iTunes. Lefsetz:

“If someone in the music business starts quoting iTunes numbers, laugh. They’re really stretching for a metric to make their case….there’s always a number to support your case, which means savvy people investigate and dig for the truth.”

What’s going on is a tug of war between people who want facts to stand and those who want to manipulate the facts to say something else. And if you’re a casual news consumer, you might get a completely inaccurate picture of what is going on, especially in an environment where it’s extremely difficult to get people’s attention without deceptive, sensational headlines.

We all thought the internet would propagate truth, but the opposite has happened.

And yet they’re succeeding with the deception tactics. They’re creating a frenzy over Critical Race Theory and trans athletes, two of America’s most over-hyped issues, and yet Greg Youngkin, the Republican gubernatorial candidate in Virginia may ride this made-up crisis to victory.

With the “Let’s Go Brandon” meme, we see again that the anti-Biden’s are avoiding truth (and hard numbers) to try and win. Their game is confusion. Government being good or bad is irrelevant to the Republicans. Their calculation is that if they block and insult and channel it all through their propaganda networks, they’ll win back power again.

Burn it all down to the ground. It’s politics as an ash heap.

Time to wake up America! We don’t want to live in the same nation with idiots who believe “Let’s go Brandon” means “Fuck Joe Biden”. We should be weary of their perpetual mendacity and stupidity.

To help you wake up, listen to Santana and Chris Stapleton do a tune that they wrote jointly, “Joy”. It’s from Santana’s new album, “Blessings & Miracles”. This is a musical collaboration that Wrongo didn’t know he needed:

Sample Lyric:

Joy, rolling like the thunder rumbles
Time to let the teardrops tumble
Listen to the hatred crumble
Now that I have joy, flying on the wings of angels
Rattling the chains untangled
I see me from a different angle
Now I have joy

Climate Change Summit, Part II

The Daily Escape:

Mt. Princeton, Buena Vista, CO – October 2021 photo by Haji Mahmood

Biden sees the Glasgow Climate Summit as a legacy event that will bring about substantive change. But nobody believes that. Change doesn’t occur easily, and in the case of climate change, the forces arrayed against it are overwhelming.

Corporations will not give up profits easily. Individuals will not willingly pay more for goods once companies jack up their prices to maintain margins. Countries will try desperately to avoid being the first to bend the CO2 curve, knowing that their economic growth will slow precipitously.

Sometimes a change in culture has to occur before political change can begin. Think about the civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s, or the anti-war movement in the early 1970s. Those great political changes were built on a foundation of cultural change. One came from Black churches, and the other from college students.

We’re in the middle of a 2-year Covid debacle on top of a 13-year economic debacle. Before the Great Recession, if people weren’t making it, they (and everyone else) thought the problem wasn’t America’s politics or our economic system, but it was mostly about their laziness or lack of skills. Back then, we believed that anyone could make it. Few thought the system was rigged, and there wasn’t a widespread push for serious change.

Now, young people are tumbling to the fact the problem isn’t them – it’s the system. Think of it as a game of musical chairs, where the people sitting down never stand up when the music plays. From Ian Welsh: (Brackets by Wrongo)

“They [the young] think, ‘it’s you, not me’ where ‘you’ = society and politics. They may have…student loans, but they know boomers paid….[only] a nominal amount for university. They know they can’t afford a home or apartment, not because they don’t earn enough, but because wages have effectively gone down, and real home prices have gone up….They know medical care is too expensive and that drugs didn’t used to cost nearly this much.”

Young people are beginning to understand that without political change, their lives aren’t going to get better. In fact, they will probably get worse. This is true for the climate as well as for the basic inequalities in our society.

We need a political revolution to change these things, but America’s political system doesn’t like big changes. It does enable smaller cultural and political changes all the time. Our politicians give us intermittent reinforcement: They are amenable and sometimes eager to serve up limited forms of change, but not what most people want, or what the planet needs.

And the longer we rely on today’s politicians to save us, the farther we will be from the changes we need. Our political system is very resistant to change, as the prolonged debate over Biden’s social spending bill shows.

And there’s no political will at any level to change the system.

Still, it has to change, or it will self-destruct. When you are at Wrongo’s advanced age, the temptation is to say, “the future is hopeless.” But America’s youth will soon replace the elders in both political parties. They will not be staying quiet.

What must happen is a cultural change that a significant portion of the population will buy into. It doesn’t have to be everyone, but it has to be compelling to at least a 10%-20% minority which can then influence the other 80%-90%.

We live in a culture that values greed, power, and control over other people’s lives. So, the new culture must be built on a different set of values. Insisting on a different set of values is something we can all do both individually and collectively.

The Trumpists have attempted this with middle-aged White Americans. Steve Bannon knew that change must first happen culturally, that the culture has to want it, or at least allow it. But so far, the Trumpist appeal seems limited to 30% of the population.

The other 70% are on the sidelines, waiting for a reason to believe in something else.

If you doubt that young people can have an outsized impact, watch “The Children Will Rise Up!” an climate change anthem written by Nandi Bushell, who gained social media fame as a drummer, and Roman Morello, son of Rage Against the Machine’s Tom Morello. Here these two 10 year-olds perform with cameos by Jack Black and Greta Thunberg:

Sample Lyric:

They let the earth bleed to feed their greed.
Stop polluting politicians poisoning for profit.
While they are killing all the trees, now we all can’t breathe
As the temperature’s a rising, nothing is surviving.

Sunday Cartoon Blogging – October 24, 2021

Last Friday, Wrongo and Ms. Right got their Covid booster shots. It’s a sample of one, but at our local drugstore here in a very conservative part of Connecticut, there was a line to get shots. Some were there for their first vaccinations, but most were waiting for a booster. There’s never a line around here for anything, except when the lobster food truck rolls into town.

But sadly, this isn’t the story for the rest of the country, particularly for cops and heath care workers. Some are saying that the vaccine mandates do little. But health workers who don’t really believe in science are leaving the job. And cops who don’t really care about public safety are leaving policing. Sounds like mandates are working just fine. On to cartoons.

Mandates are nothing new:

Most Republicans want boosters:

Texas got two new districts. Then the GOP redrew urban districts so that incumbent minority congresspeople are now running against each other:

One of our two political parties thinks that elections shouldn’t be the basis for choosing our representatives. That means democracy doesn’t matter to them anymore. They say it’s because there’s too much voter fraud, and no one can trust the result of any election now, anywhere.

So, the Dems think the next step is to change the Senate rules, modifying the filibuster. That would pave the way to pass the Protect the Vote Act. But there’s real danger that when the Republicans inevitably regain the majority, they will change that law to whatever the next Trump-like Republican leader wants voting rights to be. Could it be that Republicans are blocking the bill, not just to deny voting rights to minorities, but to lure the Democrats into changing the filibuster?

The economic ship sails on, and 40 years later, there’s zero thought to changing the message:

Biden compromises on the social spending bill. Still, it’s not certain to pass:

If only there was a solution to our supply chain problems:

The Wrongologist

Geopolitics, Power and Political Economy

Category: Social Cohesion