Quote:
Originally Posted by Did you just call me Coltrane?
I think the American experiment is over. These are not serious people who are going to be running our government.
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I think it's more of an interregnum. Neoliberalism had delivered for a few decades, but did so in a very uneven manner that a lot of the population found unfair. At the same time, the Democratic Party had pivoted toward the center, governing during Clinton's and Obama's administrations in an almost "liberal Republican" manner. The usual counters to globalization and free trade savaging workers, unions, were also marginalized.
Net result: Massive inequality.
This led to populism on the left (Bernie) and right (Trump). But it didn't work, as Trump largely governed as a garden variety Republican, effecting little more than a typical GOP tax cut. Neoliberalism remained the economic policy de jour. In fact, manufacturing jobs left the country during his tenure.
Covid undid some of the inequality, temporarily. People had cash and got a respite from the daily grind, and a lot of them liked it... a lot. Now the free $$$ is over, however, and most of the people long ago exhausted their excess Covid savings. Now many of them, the lower working classes most notably and acutely, feel the pinch from an absence of Covid stimulus and the inflation that stimulus caused. And as this happens, all that excess liquidity caused by the Covid stimulus enriches the already affluent even further.
That's a recipe for really angry middle and working classes.
The pundits like to focus on wokeness as a cause of Trump's win. That's part of it, of course, but not for the reasons pundits assume. I'd surmise people who are upset with out of touch progressives are also upset with out of touch conservatives. Nobody wants to hear progressive culture nonsense because it's not a solution to any of the problems in the country. No one wants to hear from country club Republicans about how free trade is the answer because that's not a solution, either.
Mercantilism and curbs on immigration all but assuredly aren't solutions either, but they're ideas that haven't yet been attempted.
People want ideas that they think will lead to broad prosperity. And neither party, pitching either of their preferred forms of capitalism, is meeting the demand. Because they can't.
AI is going to render a lot of white collar folks obsolete. And at the robotics level, it's going to do the same to blue collar folks. We don't have these conversations because there's no easy solution, and politicians would rather avoid them. But the public isn't entirely stupid. They know that what we're doing is unsustainable.
We will have to modify the current systems, somewhat significantly, going forward. Will we be more socialist? More libertarian? Will the future be rule by strongmen? Who knows. But Trump's stickiness (I figured him a spent force after Jan 6) and broadening appeal speak to a desire, IMO, by much of the public to see the system shaken up and reordered. They don't want more of the same, only run better. They want different.
Trump, of course, is not the answer. He's the hatchet man who precedes what I think will be the next phase of governance. The Chainsaw Al Dunlop of DC for the next four years who'll (probably unwittingly) create the environment in which a subsequent more serious President and Congress start running a country for a 21st century reality, instead of based on policies and assumptions of the mid to late 20th Century.
The past 80 years were an artificially prolonged status quo. The experiment isn't over. It's just starting.
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