Here is Peggy Noonan a couple of days ago:
Deep down a lot of hard-core Trump supporters, and many not so hard-core, think it’s all over. They love America truly and deeply but think the glue that held us together is gone. Religion and Main Street are shrinking into the past, and in the Rite Aid everything’s locked up. School shootings, mass shootings, nobody’s safe, men in the girls’ locker room, race obsessions, a national debt we’ll never control. China, Russia, nukes and cooked-up plagues. If they decide to do a mass cyberattack and take out our electricity for six months we’ll never get through it. Once we would.
I don't doubt that Noonan is right—about some Fox News neurotics, anyway. But she's old enough to know better than to write this and pretend it's something new, especially since she herself has written it numerous times. Here's a version from around 1970:
Respect for elders and the five-and-dime are shrinking into the past, and in the Rexall we sell condoms out in the open. Saturday night specials, gangs, nobody's safe, women demanding equal pay, Black Power,
inflation over 6%. Vietnam, Russia, MAD, long hair and LSD. If the Arabs decide to embargo oil and take out our automobiles we'll never get through it. Once we would.
Come on, folks. There's always something. But here in the real world, GDP is up, employment is strong, wages are up, inflation is over, the abortion rate is down, teen pregnancy is down, crime is down, cigarette smoking is down, racism is down, teen bullying is down, the divorce rate is down, education is in good shape, homeownership is higher than in the 1980s, US universities are the best in the world, America owns the global software market, the US military is by far the world's strongest, and American workers are among the best paid in the world.
Even the bad stuff isn't generally as bad as people think it is. Illegal immigration is up, but that's probably temporary. Social media is scary, but evidence suggests it doesn't really have a negative effect. School shootings are also scary, but they cause fewer deaths than you probably think. Climate change is bad, but the surging rate of technological solutions is promising. Fentanyl is a scourge, but we've had drug scourges before and they eventually burn out. The national debt could be solved via some genuinely modest tax hikes. The Black-white education gap is the only big problem I can think of that literally has no silver lining at the moment.
We all live in the richest country in the richest era of history. We're mostly well paid, well fed, and get good medical care. We have so many entertainment options we barely know how to handle them. If we'd all just buck up and stop being scared of the monsters under our beds, maybe we'd finally figure out just how much of life there is to enjoy.
Your post is spot on. Our country is mostly in great shape.
That said - the Trump cult scares me. And I'd like to think it is a passing phase, but I think the Reich-wingers will just find a new hero to worship and keep on with their destructive ways.
They know that chaos and negativity works to their advantage, which is why they work so hard to promote it, with the ever-present help of their TV network.
Take illegal immigration, for example. Big scary thing, right? But how many people out there have ever actually had their lives impacted in any negative way by immigration? Very damn few if any. Most of them have probably never seen an immigrant.
Unfortunately, the Climate Doomers and "We'll never own a house" Leftists are doing their best to put TFG back in office.
As a boomer I am so humiliated. We all grew up facing nuclear holocaust without flinching. We agitated to stop the war in Vietnam and push social justice. Then when we reached 30 or so, too many of us took off the bell bottoms, shaved, and voted for Reagan. Now too many of my cohorts are listening to Faux or Newsmax and totally freaking out about stuff that either doesn't exist or doesn't really affect them. Xer's, Millennials, Zer's. Alpha's, please forgive us. We aren't all ignorant assholes.
+1
Yeah, it was the boomer generation that gave us Trump. That will be our shame and humiliation forever.
I'd say it wasn't so much the boomer generation as it was the left tail of that generation. The boomers born post-1960 an entirely different outlook compared to those born pre-1950.
That leaves out ten years (but I presume you meant pre-1960 vs post-1960).
So who are the ones who gave up Trump? The pres or the posts?
I don't feel humiliated but I'm sadly disappointed in the majority of my age cohort.
Humans are humans, and never act like as intellectual abstractions, to the perpetual permanent disappointment of the idealist intellectual class. Whether such abstractions are "fellow believers" or "workers"" or Generation whatever"
Don't be so ashamed. Yeah, too many of us voted for Trump, but overall I think that we left the world a better place. More rights for various minorities, the Internet, Obama, winning the Cold War, etc. You know, we did not exactly inherit paradise on earth either...
Did you mention rock n roll?
I mostly agree, but the sad truth is that a large number of us didn't agitate to end the Vietnam war but were eager to get over there and kick Commie butt.
Peggy Noonan is not a reliable source of information.
In fact, I'll go further and say that she is full of s**t, and always has been.
Reading anything that she writes is a waste of your time. You won't get smarter, and you won't get those seconds back.
My Lord if she was negative back in the '80s she never would have been hired for the Reagan Administration.
Noonan was negative when she was attacking Democrats, not her idol St. Ronnie. Her good pals were the uber nasty Pat Buchanan and the snotty, elitist Sally Quinn which tells you who she truly is. Noonan has been having a fit of the vapors over imagined or wildly exaggerated threats since the 80s.
Baffler has a great take on Noonan’s inanity:
“As a thinker, Noonan is a curious mashup of the Red Queen and the White Rabbit—someone prone to alarmist end-times visions even as she moves around the world in a fog of unremitting, faintly contemptuous privilege. As a writer, Noonan resembles Henry Luce coming off a bad acid trip —i.e., she’s prone to a kind of overripe, endlessly suggestible brand of hallucination-in-prose that gets briskly projected onto the American civitas at large……
In other words, Peggy Noonan is describing a political reality that exists only in her eerily echoing cranium, and the Wall Street Journal accepts that as trenchant political analysis“
https://thebaffler.com/latest/that-peggy-noonan-feeling
As for this current article, Noonan needs to get out of her bubble. I live in a large urban area with a lot of minorities and our stores don’t have products locked up.
Yeah, Kevin, you're not paid to read these has-beens anymore. You don't have to read it so we don't have to because they're out of touch with even the median Republican.
Who is, of course, just looney.
Yeah, as soon as I saw the words "Peggy Noonan," some of my more rude synapses began to torture me with video clips of her pinched pink face and whining voice on long-past Sunday shows. I deeply despise her and everything she stands for.
This was the woman, the so-called 'journalist' who devoted many, many words to the Bush package, as she called it.
She also wrote that Hillary was one of the kinds of girls who were so mean to poor Peggy in high school. Something tells me Hillary was much nicer than Peggy.
Noonan's vest-pocket reactionary shtick is so consistent maybe she should, like Villon, end each peroration with a refrain: Mais où sont les neiges d'antan?
Her refrain is: we'll never get through it.
Or even "Carthago delenda est!" (Google translate says this is wrong...)
I think people are bored. With nothing else meaningful to fill the gaps in their lives, crazy shit takes over. Just a guess…
A very educated guess.....
We're in pretty good shape, sure. My main complaint at the moment is our addiction to Middle Eastern war. I don't get it. Let the damn ships go around Africa until, you know the people in that part of the world sort out the Houthis.
(I'd be a lot more sanguine about the situation if I thought there was a remote chance for success—Does anyone think there is? I'm all ears.)
OK, but it’s been years since we actually invaded another country …
Kevin fails to mention demographic change. Steven Levitsky, author of How Democracies Die said this is 2021:
The Republican party represents the demographic group, the social and cultural group, that founded and dominated this nation for two centuries. White Christian men, in effect. And the loss not only of the electoral majority, the electoral dominance of white Christians in this country, but also the social status, the dominant social status of white Christians, which if you go back even half a century, when I was a kid, white Protestants really filled every top position in every social, political, cultural, economic hierarchy in the country. In over 50 years that's changed dramatically. That is deeply threatening. And that is fundamentally what I think is polarizing our country. There are very few societies - I can't name a single democracy in the world - that has undergone a transition in which a dominant ethnic group loses its majority and loses its dominant status.
IAN BREMMER interview France24 Jan 12 2024:
America democracy is in crisis despite the fact that the economy is robust ... ... the US today is the only advanced democracy that is incapable of having a free and fair election transferring power that's seen as legitimate by its population. That's not a problem in France, or the UK, or Japan. It is in the United States.
...
As we look ahead to the election itself, there is so much more to play for. It is so much more existential. ... If Trump wins, Biden and his supporters, many of his advisors believe, that when Trump politicizes the DOJ, the FBI, the IRS, that they will face legal jeopardy themselves. The new McCarthyism that will chill opposition in the US and make the US no longer a consolidated democracy, but instead, a hybrid system that feels closer to a one party outcome. That is unprecedented in the United States. Certainly we've seen nothing like it post Civil War and it's very very disturbing.
While I’m inclined to agree with this, how does it account for Great Britain?
"I can't name a single democracy in the world - that has undergone a transition in which a dominant ethnic group loses its majority and loses its dominant status."
The dominant ethnic group of the American past is not the dominant ethnic group today. The dominant ethnic group is always losing its dominant status. What happens is that a new, expanded dominant group asserts itself.
(I don't like the word "dominant" here. It implies superiority, when the issue is really inclusion/exclusion. For the moment, let's define that status as meaning fully entitled to the fruits of middle-class life and the prerogative to serve in roles of leadership without question.)
Unless you were an aristocratic, property-owning, male WASP, you were a second-class citizen for the first generations of Americans. Then a Dutch-speaking guy like Martin Van Buren becomes president, and there goes the neighborhood. My white Christian parents did not grow up as part of the dominant group. They were Irish Catholic and excluded; they couldn't even apply for jobs during the Depression. But after JFK was elected, we're now just part of the boring white majority. Future generations will see a similar pattern post-Obama.
The country has had a special problem with race. It's taking longer to erase the divisions of color, but the country that has knocked down the walls of exclusion for every other ethnic group can do the same for Blacks and other people of color. That may seem impossible at times in a country with Trump and the MAGA cult, but there will be a day when they are gone. The country had unbelievable progress from the civil rights era up to Obama, and it will do so again. Keep your eye on the long-term trend.
For the record, we are not like other countries. Germany was founded to unite the German peoples (Austria excepted). America was founded on a set of principles, not by an ethnic or cultural identity. If we let the identitarians (on the right or the left) define us in ethnic terms, then America is over. Our ethnicity is a mix and always changing, and at any time it can describe us, but not define us.
I really love this analysis. And agree completely. Personally, I went from an accepted part of the dominant community to a persecuted minority and it sucks. Still, it' so much better 30 years later. You are right. Progress does happen.
@Dana --- Check out Canada. They are admitting like a half million immigrants a year in a nation of just 35,000,000.
I suspect that, as with most democracies (including ours) that experience heavy immigration, there is going to be a strong nativist reaction soon north of the border.
Canada's population just topped 40 million. However, the existence of Francophone Quebec has ensured that Canada has never had a single dominant ethnic group.
Perhaps Levitsky is correct about nations, but as a longtime New-Englander-by-choice (not birth), I question the applicability to the local level, where town meetings are still routine, despite a demographic shift from English Protestants to Irish and Italian (and Portuguese and French and Hispanic) Catholics. Not only that, but the economic base of the region has turned over multiple times — agriculture and iron-making went west, textiles and furniture went south, and so on. Yet despite the upheavals, politics, at the state level as well, is less polarized than elsewhere, imho. I’m sure it helps that most of the region keeps finding ways to remain prosperous; I think excellent educational institutions have something to do with that.
Spot on Kevin. If only people would think a bit more logically and rationally, broaden their news sources (i.e. see Faux News for what it is and ignore it), the country would be in great shape.
I'm still baffled why people take anything Republicans say seriously.
Nationalist Christians (Nat-Cs) are upset that they are losing their ability to rule over Americans they don't identify with.
Nat-Cs don't give a fuck about anything Jesus Christ ever said or taught, the national debt, the mental or physical health of children, or coming together as a country to get through a national emergency.
They care about maintaining their power over others.
When you're accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression. Full fucking stop.
Exactly!
"I'm still baffled why people take anything Republicans say seriously."
See Dave Viebrock above.
"Nat-Cs don't give a fuck about anything Jesus Christ ever said or taught"
Right, but they are good at saying that they do.
"When you're accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression."
Full fucking stop.
The general vibe in the comments seems to be: Things are fine apart from my enemies—they scare me.
They are not my enemies. They are democracy’s.
Dude, they're writing laws to make criticizing them illegal.
https://newrepublic.com/post/177920/florida-bill-fine-defamation-racist-discrimination
Exactly!
Instead of diversity of thought, a survival element in our ecology, they want to compartmentalize themselves into caves.
“If we'd all just buck up and stop being scared of the monsters under our beds, maybe we'd finally figure out just how much of life there is to enjoy.“
Especially when so many of the monsters were created by the people who benefit by telling us to be scared of those monsters.
Nope. The former energy secretary, Steven Chu recently (late last year) suggested we'll likely hit close to +3C. That pretty much takes us past every climate tipping point there is, altering the climate for centuries.
Have you thought through how pervasive petrochemicals are throughout the economy? Every manmade fabric owes part of its chemistry to petrochemicals or natural gas. Same goes for gaskets, seals, the most common forms of insulation, and just about every manufactured product used in building construction, including most coatings, that aren't solely from raw materials.
The scale of our reliance on oil and natural gas is massive and they've been ingrained into the economy for a very long time. Not a single car, not even BEVs, can escape the reliance on oil. Whole manufacturing processes will have to be reinvented. Whole new material production will have to be ramped up.
And we still haven't solved for concrete manufacturing, asphaltic concrete roads, and the billions of miles of sheathing of cables sourced from oil.
You're thinking provincially about oil solely as an energy source. I envy the naivete.
Gaskets made of fossil oil don't increase climate change.
Burning that oil does.
That is fundamentally innumerate. Every step of fossil hydrocarbon extraction and reprocessing (as it is all reprocessed) has CO2 emissions that are climate change contributory. Not merely fuels burning.
The embeddness of fossil hydrocarbons is indeed contributory to climate change.
However one problem at a time.
True, but irrelevant. *All* manufacturing uses energy, not just manufacturing that involves materials made from petroleum. And much of that energy is generated by burning fossil fuels.
Crissa's point stands: Gaskets [and other materials] made of fossil oil don't increase climate change. Burning that oil does.
No, no it does not. All petrochemicals involve cracking and besides the energy in that processing from a general industrial process pov, itself involves release.
D ohrk observation was perfectly correct to ID petrochemicals emissions ex fuel. The point was innumerate
Decarbonisation of the industrial heat and other industrial enetgy use is technically feasible across most usees but not yet fully economic, but petrochemicals themselves, even with decarbonisation of heat, process driving via generally electrification, are emitters.
Similarly the challenges of ciments and fundamental carbon is a problem
Crissa is basically correct. Yes, of course, refining of oil into petrochemicals to make gaskets results in emissions, but those emissions come from the burning of the oil and gas in those processes. Besides, what else are you going to make the gaskets from?
Émissions do not only result from fuels usage but in ma0ny cracking, ex the hea0t usage.
W0hat else make gaskets well that's part of the challenge isn't it. Substitutions are possible but challenging.
as like steel and ciment
The one and only way to solve the climate problem is to tax carbon-bearing fossil fuels as soon as they come out of the ground, before they enter the economy. Raise that price annually so that all industries know that they have to take steps to minimize their exposure by embracing climate-friendly technologies. And the problem of rising consumer prices can be easily solved by distributing ALL the proceeds of the carbon tax equally to the citizens. A large majority of people will come out ahead because a HUGE fraction of energy use is at the tippy-top of the wealth pyramid, so the wealthiest will be paying the lion's share of the tax.
It would work. That's why it hasn't been done here.
"one and only way" hat is neither technically nor economically correct, even if most directly economically, it is more than evidently politically infeasible as multiple backlashes as Frances Yellow Vests show.
Sweeping ideological assertions are typical Activist "perfect as the enemy of the good"
In real world only step wise pushing is working and there it is being undercut by NIMBYism, outdated régulation and permitting régimes.
Crushing hydrocarbons at energy price level requires unprecedented grid expansion and upgrade at unprecedented speed. That's where your activist declaration should be aimed, otherwise hydrocarbons will strike back on logjam of grid connexions and maxing out of régional grids on RE intermittancy and frequency collapse
When we are discussing numeracy, what fraction of the oil the world produces goes into petrochemicals versus the amount that is burned? I think you will find that petrochemicals account for a small fraction of oil consumption and an even smaller fraction of CO2 produced. When hydrocarbons are burned, their entire carbon content is released as CO2; when they are used as petrochemicals much of the carbon content remains locked up in the products, so a tonne of crude oil used as petrochemical feedstock will release much less CO2 than a tonne of crude oil burned.
12-15% re petrol. natural gas as feedstock 5-10%.
you will note no characterisation of the importance of ratio was made, rather correcting the erroneous idea that cracking does not itself emit
Of further relevance to avoid static thinking, barring controls reduction of fuels usage will certainly lead to usage substitution, I.e. availability to non fuel usage that presently is crowded away by fuels demand.
Every hydrocarbon pulled out of the ground is a hydrocarbon that is not stored below ground.
When that gasket, plastic, or foam outgasses, it's releasing some of the chains of carbon compounds into the air. As those gaskets, plastics, and foams decompose, those carbon compounds break down.
If we're pulling carbon out of the ground, we have to put back the same amount to reach net zero.
The enormity of the problem is poorly understood.
No one has a substitution for asphaltic concrete. In 2020, the US produced 21 million tons of asphalt. That goes into your asphalt shingles, your tar paper, and all sorts of waterproofing and roofing applications.
Look all around you. Almost everything has petrochemicals included. The clear coating on your seemingly innocuous wood table, unless it's a vegetable or animal based oil, is most certainly derived partly from petrochemicals. Almost every metal that is color-coated owes its existence to petrochemicals.
You cannot build a modern house without petrochemicals. Net zero buildings owe their existence to offsets, not zero carbon construction. And so long as that carbon offset isn't the process of putting that carbon back into the ground, it is a lie we tell ourselves to avoid understanding the enormity of the problem.
Drum has posted in past he rather believes that geo-engineering action is likely inevitable so he's not being naïve in the fashion of fossil hydrocarbons as a fuel source only. (Also likely right insofar as nothing in global populist politics indicates that anything short of a climate-centred authoritarian regime can successfully maintain radical decarb policies in short time frames)
He is a techno-optimist fundamentally. Which I think is a quite reasonable position to hold relative to broad fuels replacement and driving down primary energy generation costs, which at least plausibly can led to carbon sequestration-extraction feasability from economic PoV. And geo-engineering plausibility as like cloud brightening or algal paths for oceanic decarbonation as anyway possibly necessary for ecosystems (https://sitn.hms.harvard.edu/flash/2022/reversing-climate-change-with-geoengineering/)
Plausibly of course does not equal "certainly will"
Nothing is going to be done about climate change until it’s super obvious that it’s happening (think: 70F temps in January in the Arctic Circle or the like) AND it negatively affects rich people more so than paying taxes or complying with the regulatory state does… and by then it’ll be too late to do much about it other than perhaps protect rich people from it (e.g. building huge walls to protect their beachfronts, building huge greenhouses to farm their produce that otherwise vanishes from supermarket shelves, etc.).
Geoengineering isn’t likely to work exactly how we plan it to, so I just hope it doesn’t go into effect until I’m gone from this earth. I don’t really look forward to an accidental new ice age like Snowpiercer predicts, or any other possible unintended consequences.
Where I live in the upper midwest the news in December and January has been a nonstop parade of UTVs falling through the ice, man dies after truck falls through the ice, dozens rescued after ice breaks off and floats away from shore, etc.
The guys driving pickups and UTVs onto lakes in the rural north are the climate denier demographic. They go out on the ice this time of year because they've always gone on the ice this time of year - apparently they didn't pay any attention at all to the extremely high temperatures we had up until a day ago.
But maybe not being able to snowmobile or go ice fishing will persuade them that climate change is real, and it's going to change their treasured way of life.
Don't join the Climate Doom religion
https://www.mattball.org/2024/01/the-surprisingly-1-most-popular-post-of.html
Probably for this audience Guardian piece of sa0me foundation useful, a clim0ate scientist
https://www.wired.co.uk/article/climate-crisis-doom
however as most things here the uni dorm room Drama Llama mode of déclaration is preferred, and the opinions more about My Tribe / (secular)Religion right and proper, other side evil and bad.
"...Illegal immigration is up, but that's probably temporary. ..."
Why would it be temporary?
Political convenience for the conclusion. Certainly nothing from climate change stress to economic stress in those same regions suggests that such immigration flows are likely to be "temporary" except if one leaves "temporary" conveniently undefined like "transitory."
Illegal immigration can be significantly reduced if there is no shortage of low-paid labor. This is the fundamental flaw with Kevin’s analysis. While I agree that all of the things he mentions are pretty much non-issues, the coming AI seismic shift worries me a lot. The question is, will people continue to go to Starbucks to have parasocial relationships which require staff, or is Starbucks actually in the coffee making business? If the efficient production of quality custom beverages is the main thing they are selling, then they don’t need much staff in the near future.
This will play out across a multitude of businesses throughout the developed world. The biggest impacts will first be in construction, then agriculture, and finally transportation. Halfway through that transition, illegal immigration will only be driven by non-economic forces. Certainly, the economic reshuffling will also bring political chaos as will global warming. Those will force migrations, but it is unclear to me that the US is all that great a destination if you take away the economic advantages of being here. This is particularly true because expansions of the welfare state will primarily be available only to those who are documented.
I tend to agree with Kevin's analysis on a lot of things, but I'm skeptical of his take on AI's effects on employment. In theory it would seem that, sure, eventually there's no way around the giant-in-scale replacement of human brains with machine brains. But in practice this has never resulted in skyrocketing unemployment. Just look at the last half century: there's been loads of automatization—and not just replacement of brawn and muscle—but also of brains. Think of how many millions of man hours used to be required just to handle simple banking transactions. Now it can be done online without any employee involvement at all. Or look at travel agencies: they employed giant numbers of Americans as recently as the mid 90s. Or newspapers.
And yet the economy is in something of a golden age of full employment.
You'd think we'd at least begin to start seeing signs of the coming jobsocalypse. But there aren't any. Oh sure, some fields may be in the cross hairs of AI. But that's always true: there have always been some fields that are seeing big job losses due to technology.
What you say is true but only because the technological advances in the past weren’t self directing. A computer can replace loads of secretaries and paper filers and mail room couriers and whatever in the office, but the computer still needs a human body sitting at it clicking keys. Once the computer is being directed by another computer being directed by another computer, etc etc… in theory* there only needs to be 1 worker at the very top (we currently call them the CEO) pushing the first buttons on their terminal to direct all the computers on what the goals of the company are, and then the computers themselves will figure out how to achieve those goals and also fulfill the goals.
*you might also need a handful of people to walk around responding to broken computers in wave 1 of the AI revolution, but eventually AI will also develop robot technicians to do that task too.
Meanwhile the unemployed secretaries, mail room couriers, paper filers etc all used to get jobs in other industries when technology wiped out the need for their prior jobs, but those new jobs all pay crappier than before (think: retail cashiers and fast food workers). Eventually AI will wipe out those jobs too, leaving just (1) CEO, (2) artists whose work people are willing to pay for specifically because it was created by a human and (3) jobs in which human interaction is vital (things like priest or caregiver). None of those remaining jobs will be scalable to absorb the tens of millions out of work from AI… how many CEOs or artists or priests or caregivers do we really need?
Oh, don't get me wrong: I fully understand the theory that you expound on here and that Kevin has often written about. For a couple of centuries, automation mostly meant replacing muscle with machines powered by fuel. It's obvious why you'd still need plenty of people (to run the machines). Then brains did start to get replaced in the early days of IT, but it was mostly rote, repetitive work that was being automated. Again, still lots of jobs for the human supervisors. But I suspect where the gloomy predictions have gone awry is in underestimating the new fields of employment that expand in tandem with new technology. ("ChatGPT Project Manager" is already a rapidly growing job category.) Also, your line about secretaries having to settle for poorly paid work seems flat out wrong: it's true people in today's society needs a lot of training to take advantage of the opportunities, but if they get that training, wages are as high as ever. Software engineers and MBA-level managers tend to make good money!
Again, in the fullness of time, completely replacing the human brain sure seems like it'll create a lot of net joblessness. No argument. But again, when is the evidence of this going to start showing up? Seems like it's always just over the horizon.
(Also, if you're going to go with that line of argumentation, have the courage of your convictions: why on earth couldn't AI-powered robots be CEOs? If GenAI is perfected and we really do reach the singularity, there's literally nothing they won't be able to do, including run Apple or Goldman Sachs or indeed the White House.)
There is always a shortage of low-paid labor, in the view of employers. Big business are in principle in favor of anything that reduces wages, and it has the political power to shape the laws. The more immigrants especially who are willing to compete for jobs the better. The fact that low wages and unemployment reduce aggregate demand for their products is not something that influences business decisions, even at the national lobbying level - they are looking at reducing labor costs.
My understanding is that Texas, the biggest whiners about "immigration", need some 5 million laborers. Seems to me that Texans have a problem with an answer that is at their front door. Refusing to answer that doorbell will be very expensive.
Why would it be temporary?
Why would it be perpetual? Nothing ever is in this world except death and taxes. Illegal immigration is unlikely to an exception. If nothing else, the changing demographic profile of our hemispheric neighbors suggests a drop in migrant inflows is in store for the US in the fullness of time.
"Why would it be perpetual? ..."
Okay if you are going to say a million years is temporary then it is temporary and Drum's statement is pretty meaningless.
In the meantime they will keep coming until something is done to stop them. And Biden doesn't seem inclined to do anything. Anything effective anyway.
Okay if you are going to say a million years is temporary then it is temporary...
I wrote nothing of the sort. It's highly likely that, in mere decades, the demographic change sweeping the our hemisphere (and the world) will create a downturn in unauthorized immigration to the US. Indeed, we're probably already seeing its effects. By the end of the 1990s, the United States was probably seeing upwards of 2 million undocumented immigrants annually enter the country. We're not getting anywhere near that number currently, even with the spike of the last two years. One issue driving media coverage of the phenomenon these days is that large percentages of migrants into the US are arriving openly, in order to claim asylum. This is a big change from earlier eras, when nearly all such people would have been sneaking into the country or overstaying tourist visas.
"...One issue driving media coverage of the phenomenon these days is that large percentages of migrants into the US are arriving openly, in order to claim asylum. ..."
And apparently also room and board. Lots of people see that as a good deal. So hard to see why they will stop coming.
Because it always fluctuates with our economy. It goes down when we have massive recessions, for example, since most immigrants want to make money when they get here, and they do that by taking jobs. Hard to take jobs that don’t exist.
I hope Peggy NoonanAI is more insightful.
Change anxiety combined with status anxiety, notaby relative to combined socio-economic relative decline and increased stress - the emergence of a blue-collar MAGA base for the Repubicans which used to be solidy D....
Of course this is then sneered at by the comparatively comfortable socially Left leaning professional classes and Left activists, but is electorally rather dim-witted to write-off although for activists more interested in academic style activism and purity posturing this will be ignored and violently sneered at as well.
Which Republican policies are going to relieve their anxieties? Massive upper income tax cuts? Tariffs?
People who support trump are afraid and suffering? Awesome! What can we do to make it worse? Anyway - they ruined their own religions by being hateful SOB. Eventually people looked at it and decided it was silly.
However, as Vladimir Putin learned as a young boy, the rat who's been backed into a corner is the most dangerous. Why would any decent person want to make others suffer?
The idea that they are afraid is nonsense. So we ought not take these claims seriously.
'Real feel' 33 below when I woke up a few minutes ago.
Remaining huddled inside, where the cold won't see me.
Doomerism is a fundamentally reactionary psychological orientation toward the world. The road to fascism is paved with pessimism. If everything is terrible and nothing ever really gets better, then it becomes easy to give into the notion that there was once a golden age that was stolen from us and a strong leader can restore it.
Yes. As FDR said, "the only thing to fear is fear itself". The problem is that right now, technology and boredom has given people the time to cultivate fear. If you cultivate doomerism, then at least you are not bored.
Yesterday I watched a video on the Scottish war on England-dominated Ireland in the early 1300's. I couldn't avoid thinking about the misery of life back then. Hunger, war, lack of shelter. How would I have ever survived, or even wanted to survive if I lived then?
Today, our material lives are orders of magnitude more comfortable for most of us. Still, we find ways to torment each other and ourselves. Humans are evidently hooked on that.
From the header when I opened this webpage:
Fear is such a powerful emotion for humans that when we allow it to take us over it drives compassion right out of our hearts. —Thomas Aquinas
The world is a scary place when you protect yourself in an "anyone that disagrees with me is an idiot" cocoon because it creates the illusion your welfare depends on idiots. Getting from there to a "the idiot was me" understanding involves an ancient process that goes by different names, one of which is "growing up."
As he often does Kevin ignores economic inequality, which is not really decreasing. The overall rate of increase of inequality has slowed a little lately, but there have been no changes in economic policy which would alter the basic factors determining income distribution.
But there is nothing new about this, in particular anything which would make things look worse now than in the Trump administration. Inequality began to increase about the time of Noonan's piece of 1970, although this is not something she complained about at the time. Before about that time the outlook for middle- and lower-income people was improving. Their income as a fraction of the highest-paid such as CEO's was much greater and increasing. Relative status is very important.
Of course what lower-income people on the right are really dissatisfied about is the decline of White Christian Supremacy, certainly not economic matters. Group supremacy is more important for some people, and for most people at times, than life itself. This instinctive reaction is what causes people to lose touch with reality. It is what causes them to support someone like Trump.
Thank you for bringing up your first point: increasing inequality. Its rate of increase may have slowed a bit lately, but that is far different from decreasing. And your mention is the first time that’s come up in this discussion. Thank you for that.
In no way do I discount the reaction to white Christians losing dominance, but I wish you hadn’t stepped on your important contribution here by that last paragraph.
I don’t think these are unrelated though. People who are confident of their economic future are inherently less likely to fall for scapegoating.
Kevin, you've said it many times: this is the product of the Faux news dystopian echo-chamber ecosystem.
Is this like that time you asserted things are peaceful if you remove several continents from.countanle conflicts?
Kevin wrote, “ Social media is scary, but evidence suggests it doesn't really have a negative effect. ”. You also argue that the same messages have been around forever. Yet today, social media is the reason we’re having this conversation. We all get to know what everyone is thinking all the time. The sheer cacophony of crap that floods us every second is amplifying the “old messages” to a frightening degree.
This is saying Russian utilities infrastructure in multiple cities is collapsing simultaneously, not because of sabotage but because everyone who would be doing maintenance has been shipped to Ukraine,
https://twitter.com/jaanus/status/1746543494338928813
Russia hadn’t planned for heavy losses of armor, artillery, radars, etc. People with maintenance/mechanical/electrical skills are no doubt being pressed into service refurbishing mothballed materiel and repairing battle-damaged equipments. Others may be augmenting the workforce for manufacturing munitions.
Forever chemicals, which is a problem with no current prospect to get better, prions and runaway climate change are definitely things to be worried about, as is continuing the arrogance that humanity can control nuclear weapons and energy without destroying ourselves (and successfully manage waste for thousands of years, when industrial society only dates back a few hundred years, and global conflict still pretty much the story).
Empirically/scientifically minded folks can go on flights of imagination to come up with solutions for our various challenges, several of which are grave threats, but these people don't run our country let alone the world, and we have a small window to have a mass movement to get big money out of politics, corporations not to be persons, and full-stop transparency, accountability and the freedom of information, all of these constitutional amendments, or we'll find out where greed and avarice lead us.
The Rexall in my neighborhood became a Revco.
Caucuses are inherently disenfranchising but Iowa Democrats have taken it to the next level,
they won't be voting on the President at all, they'll be filling out 'voter preference cards' which you can request online and that have until March 8th to be returned. So you don't have to show up at all, but they're not doing much to advertise it.
The caucus will be all about crap no one cares about, like electing delegates to the county conventions, which they hope 'will be a catalyst for enthusiasm',
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/8000-iowa-democrats-have-requested-mail-in-caucus-cards-for-2024-presidential-primary/ar-AA1mSOv0
This isn't purposely disenfranchising, it's not purposely designed to keep everyone away, planting it in the coldest part of January is just magical chance, it's simply the aggressive next-level banality of monologuing bores.
The Iowa caucuses have always been about choosing pledged or unpledged delegates to next-level meetings, not casting votes directly for a presidential choice. This year's process is less disfranchising than previous years, essentially allowing mail-in as well as in-person declaration of support. Delegates are selected proportionately to the size of their supporting groups.
There won't be any in person declarations of support at the caucus though they might have a round of applause for Joe Biden or something. The vote is the mail-in ballot and most people aren't aware of it, so some may be surprised when they arrive to find they can't do the one thing they'd like to do.
But I think almost no one will show up.
Mail-in ballots will be handed out at the caucuses, I read.
This kind of doomsaying is the cornerstone of conservative media messaging (when Democrats are in power) for a good reason. All these wonderful economic and social statistics fail to reflect the fact that the reality they reflect exists for relatively few Americans. Economic growth (and the lifestyle perks that go with) it has disproportionately benefited the already wealthy and the well educated population of the coasts and some other big metropolitan areas. But the big red swath of misery on electoral maps that covers most of the country represents the audience that conservative messaging is aimed at. These are the older, white, hyper-religious, downtrodden folks who have seen the pleasant, middle class towns they grew up in literally disappear over the course of their adult lives. They don’t care what the fentanyl statistics are. All they know is that it has devastated every family in town. Drive through rural PA, IN, OH. Take a trip to the rural southeast or upper Midwest. Experience the hellscape that is the Deep South aside from Atlanta. Observe the once prosperous agricultural lands of the Great Plains. The people living there are the ones left behind after everyone smart or ambitious enough has gotten out. And they are perfect marks for conservative demagogues who convince them that their problems are not due to corporations that were once the source of good jobs moving those jobs offshore or replacing them with robots and other labor saving tech - and now the best you can do is a part time gig at Dollar General. No! They convince these poor fools that the causes of their despair are immigrants, homosexuals and trans people, government spending, women getting equal rights and equal pay and abortions, and too many non white people getting benefits that they don’t get. This resentment is right now the most powerful political force in the country and it is based 100% on bullshit. Yes, we have a big problem in this country that makes those left behind in rural/working class America angry. But the radio/tv programs and websites they watch and listen to every day have constructed an alternate reality that is even more powerful and dangerous than fentanyl. And the beauty of it is that because it has nothing in common with the real world, the problems these people face are never solved. And this makes the outraged mob of suckers even easier to fool as time goes on.
Honestly? That one segment looks like she took the exact same column from years ago, updated some proper nouns, and called it a day.