I can’t decide if the parties are naively over-reading their mandates or cynically blackmailing the public, but whichever is true, what’s obvious is that the public wants normalcy, but we’re trapped in a cursed cycle: we’re so far from normalcy that an extreme correction is required to get there—but we seem to be unable to get a carefully measured extreme connection. The only thing on offer in each cycle is so extreme that we immediately require the counter-extreme, and so on. Hence we get Trump to correct Obama—and we’re even farther off the rails. Then we get Biden to correct Trump, and we’re farther off the rails still. So we get Trump again to correct Biden, and now we’re plunging headlong into the abyss.
What’s not on offer is any corrective that will get us somewhere back near “normal.” It just isn’t what anyone is offering, and while the public gets to “vote,” what the public chooses between is not up to the public.
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A couple generations ago, all the jobs that people had trained for were suddenly squeezed out of the U.S. economy, and after that, for a couple of generations we have ruthlessly told people to learn to code, and to learn “next-generation, service and information economy skills.”
Now that we have a generation that has finally internalized this message and done so, we are squeezing all of the “next generation, service and information economy skills” out of the economy once again in a quest to return to the manufacturing job base that we tore away from people that had trained for it a couple generations ago.
Basically, it seems as though the elites, whichever side they are on, are first and foremost in the business of betraying the public—destroying the village to save the village as a flavor of the morally righteous do-good.
This is a corollary in ways to the last thing.
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None of this seems to get any better, because at the end of the day, nobody wants it to get any better—because what people value, more than anything else, is revenge—or, as one t-shirt in my old collection used to say, “Hate drives us.”