Thoughts on the Tsunami

 Waking this morning with a slight hangover, I reflected on my position about there not being a margin large enough to redeem the American electorate for their decision making in 2024. I still kind of feel that way, but maybe I should lighten up. There are still irredeemably cruel people who think that - at best - cruelty isn't important. Vivek Ramaswamy won over 2,000,000 votes in Ohio. Ken Paxton got over 4,000,000 votes. The size and geography of the wave is impressive - apparently the largest margin since the post-Watergate midterm of 1974 - but as wounded as MAGA is, it's not dead. 

It will important to keep an eye on what happens between now and January. Trump has said he will abide by the election results, but the gathering realization of what happened yesterday is going to start eating at him. He picked Graham and Paxton. He installed policies that led to inflation. The Times already has a story out about finger pointing within the GOP. Ideally, Trump - wounded, angry and desperate -turns his ire on the Republicans who he feels didn't support him enough. At least until the new Congress is seated, it's important that Republicans don't coalesce around something like, say, replacing Samuel Alito or Clarence Thomas on the Supreme Court. "Confusion to my enemies."

I've seen people, especially on Bluesky, talking about the need to replace Jeffries and Schumer. Uh...no, that's not how this works. Schumer did great work recruiting candidates, even if they didn't always win. Jeffries oversaw a massive reallocation of House seats. That was their job and they did it. People are noting that they tend to say DC things like "We are willing to work with the President to bring down costs." Yes, that's what you say. The idea that Hakeem Jeffries doesn't understand Donald Trump as well as you do is...quite the take.

The most important elections could very well be all the Governor's mansions and state houses that flipped. This will give Democrats an opportunity to actually govern. I really think Mamdani offers some good lessons here. Be cheerful and telegenic, pick high visibility projects that reflect good governance, be present in people's lives. You want to keep the Governor's mansion in Texas? Be good at governing. People are genuinely hungry for it.

If there's one thing that has me optimistic it's that it seems that the nasty, angry politics of MAGA - transgender for everyone! communists! - didn't work. I certainly wouldn't run back to culture war issues if I were the Democrats. Focus on Iran, tariffs and corruption. Rein in ICE. Maybe impeach Hegseth, because I think there's a decent chance enraged Republicans make him the fall guy for Iran. Start to build the case against Trump without filing articles of impeachment on Day One. Have hearing after hearing. Pass a health care bill that dies in the Senate or under Trump's veto pen. Address the things people say they care about.

Well

 It didn't suck.

Looks like 55 votes in the Senate. A massive advantage in the House. 

Came agonizingly close in Florida. Louisiana, Nebraska and Mississippi. Lots of governor's races and state assemblies.

We won't know the aggregate vote until Friday or so, because California counts on their fingers, but it will be interesting to see what that number looks like. It won't be 65%, so that's not great.

I'll take it, though.

Trauma Induced Elections

 In 2000, I was surprised that the electorate tossed over the successful policies of the Clinton Era with Bush's "win." In 2004, I was aghast that after Iraq and Abu Ghraib, we would return the same people to power, but 2006 gave me hope and 2008 was a balm. 

When Trump "won" in 2016, it reminded me a lot of 2000. The Democratic candidate was objectively better suited to the role, but people are fickle and superficial, and it wasn't like it was a landslide. In both cases, the electorate generally preferred the Democrat. 2018, 2020 and even 2022 all gave me hope in the American people.

Then came 2024. Trump had been convicted of multiple felonies. He would have been convicted of more, if Merrick Garland wasn't such a loser. The chaos and incompetence of the Covid pandemic somehow got grafted onto Biden and the Democrats. Trump was obviously diminished and he was vowing authoritarian governance. And for the first time, he won the popular vote.

At that moment, it was hard to have any faith in the American electorate. Fueled up on their algorithmic feed and a weak grasp of chronology and basic economics, they turned to the fucking guy who did January 6th. 

Every single sign - but most notably the signs Republicans themselves are giving off - says that tonight will be a good night for Democrats, and we will inject at least some sort of check on Trump's behavior. 

I can see a clear path to 52-53 Senate seats. I can see a path to 55 seats. 

The pain of the past few elections can also show me a path to 49. 

My wife and I started building our retirement home in a lovely spot in rural Connecticut. If we see another massive failure of democratic accountability today, I wonder if we can really stay in a country that so blithely embraces evil - yes, evil - the way that they have with Donald Fucking Trump.

If it truly is a 56-44 night, that's great. But it should be 65-35 and it won't be and that sucks.

48 Hours

 

Well, in 48 hours, we should have a pretty good idea if we will have guardrails to American democracy in the face of a massively corrupt authoritarian. The final polls all seem to be moving in Democrat's direction, which was not true in years when Trump was actually running. Pundits constant refrain about polls missing Trump voters is true, but only if you look at presidential elections. When Trump says "Imagine I'm on the ballot" this is what he's getting at. He has some weird juice with some weird voters, but they typically don't show in midterms.

Democrats appear to be taking advantage of early voting, locking their votes in. If late breakers move their direction or some simply don't vote, we could be in for the Blue Tsunami we desperately need to avoid the collapse of democracy. 

I know I'll be disappointed though, because Trump and Republicans should be losing in Mississippi and South Carolina, but they likely won't. Anything less feels like a missed opportunity. When Orban went down in Hungary, he went down beyond the ability of his minions to steal the election. Despite Trump's attempts to try and suppress the vote, I think he will fail. Hopefully partisanship isn't so baked in that people can't course correct.

Haley's Vomit

 So, Michigan Senate runner up, Haley Stevens, has endorsed Mike Rogers, the Republican. This take does a bit of bothsidesing it, but I understand why Chait would have qualms about El Sayed. He has said he doesn't share the venomous antisemitism of some of his high profile supporters, but it always comes with a weird lack of enthusiasm. There was the moment when a GOP plant asked him to disavow the Muslim Brotherhood, and he did immediately, but then pivoted to nailing down his interlocutor. I get that, and he's good at it. To a certain degree, he's not humoring those attacks on his Muslim faith and identity. 

There's still a glibness to his dismissals that can cause people some pause. Cenk Uygar and Hasan Piker are very much beyond the Pale in their antisemitism and AES has disassociated himself with their ads without entirely calling them out for their antisemitism. 

I get it.

Still, Stevens moving towards Rogers is - as Chait notes - to exchange some implied anti-Jewish bias or lack of vigor in denouncing antisemitism with virulent islamophobia. Naked, seething bigotry. And frankly, if you're going to call out AES for his lack of energy in denying Piker, what are you to do with the entire GOP's embrace of people like Tucker Carlson? Carlson's antisemitism is just as rankling as Piker's. 

With Stevens, there was always a weird manic energy behind her eyes. I remember when the preferred candidate of normies, Mallory McMorrow, failed to catch fire - perhaps because of the ratfuckery of Wedgewood polling fraud. I wanted to see in Stevens a legitimate alternative to AES, who despite some real political skills also has some real liabilities, as noted above. But man, Stevens always gave off a really cuckoo energy. 

Now, it sure looks like her fiancé - who is already mostly a Republican - has leaned on Stevens. This sure feels like "choose me or choose El Sayed." She chose him, which isn't a powerful rejoinder against the antisemitic argument that Jews are controlling American politics from behind the scenes. 

Weirdly, I agree with some commentators that this might actually unify the Democratic Party behind El Sayed. Stevens weird behavior and self-immolation - whoever named her Fetterwoman deserves a Pulitzer - is likely to repel more people from her than drive people to Rogers. 

I, like many others, are sick to fucking death of the internecine online flame wars between "the Left" and the "Democrats." I hated it in Maine with Platner, and this is just a new flavor of the same old bullshit. I imagine El Sayed will win, but underperform relative to the climate. Whitmer or even McMorrow would be ahead by 15 points. The incessant taking of sides, the digging in, the hatred that multiplies over multiple versions of the same tiresome fight is just so sadly typical of leftist politics and really, really not helpful at this moment when the future of American democracy is at stake. 

Anyway, I hope El Sayed wins, and Stevens can fuck all the way off. 

UPDATE: Sure seems like it's the fiancé. 

MAHA and Influencers

 This Atlantic piece profiles a - wait for it - MAHA, socially conservative podcaster and influencer. This is not really another Cleetus Safari, where the Times sends someone to those famous Ohio diners to talk to Real Muricans. This is a profile of a fairly high profile figure in the MAHA space. She's also supposed to be part of the Republican Party's outreach to women.

It's a fascinating and only slightly disturbing read. The disturbing part is really just extrapolating from what she says to find our how she got there and where she's going. Basically, it starts by rejecting a lot of consensus science. Like...A LOT. Sure, there are aspects of MAHA that are common sense. Whole foods are better than processed foods. Critically, there really are some aspects of wellness culture that are probably a needed corrective to "take a pill for the rest of your life." 

But! The pills DO work, and supplements are really a perfectly Republican product, as they largely exist outside of good regulatory oversight. If supplements really do work, we need to know that through rigorous studies, not the anecdotal musings of a podcaster. This is how you get weird shit like the Ivermectin craze. 

The overall vibe from MAHA is that expertise is a conspiracy against them, largely because they are at least ignorant if not outright dumb. Vaccines are the obvious prime example of this. The more evidence you present as to the safety of vaccines, simply proves to them that the conspiracy just goes deeper than they thought.

Living in an evidence-free world is both liberating and deeply imprisoning. At first, you've freed yourself from having to follow advice, but soon you've simply traded the strictures of the "medical establishment" to the fever swamps of conspiratorial nonsense. The thing about conspiratorial thinking is that it is really difficult to unwind. You can't produce evidence that refutes, because the evidence is just part of the conspiracy.

This runs hand in hand with the rise of podcaster/influenced ecosystem. This requires precisely no really expertise. You can just be Joe Rogan "asking questions" and suddenly people are taking a horse antifungal drug to treat a virus. This democratization of knowledge means that experts are wrong because they are experts. It's the perfect complement to MAGA, because of the fervid embrace of ignorance as a virtue. 

Trump's one real success before 2016 was as a reality TV star. Reality TV fakes reality, of course, which again is a perfect metaphor for all this. Trump's authenticity is a scripted sham, that decries expertise on things like economics or military and foreign policy. This is deeply tied to evangelical Christianity and it's own rejection of modern knowledge and the scientific method.

TL;DR: We're fucked as long as these people vote in large numbers. 

Solving Problems

 Kamala Harris and others have come out and said that should Democrats win control of the House and Senate next week, they should not focus on impeachment. The argument is that Democrats will have been elected to fix things, including the War in Iran, tariffs and "affordability." 

There are a host of problems here. The first is that almost all of Trump's deeply unpopular actions have either at their root or branch the connecting issue of corruption. If you want to address his tariff powers, you also have to look at how he's squeezing companies for bribes to repeal tariffs in their specific industries. There is fundamentally no profound distinction between solving affordability and ending Trump's abuse of power.

Next, there is the simple math of what even the most profound of Blue Tsunamis can bring. Let's say that it's just an absolute crushing defeat for Trump. Not just Mississippi and South Carolina, but Arkansas flips Senate seats. Harris and other would note that if you get to, say, 58 Senate seats that this isn't enough to remove Trump from office. This is accurate. However, it's also still not enough to override a presidential veto. What's more, fundamental to Trump's abuse of power is his contempt for laws passed by Congress and his refusal to abide by court decisions. As an autocrat, he cannot work within the separation of powers. Focusing on "affordability" isn't going to lead to "solutions" anymore than impeachment will lead to removal. 

The essential burden that Democrats face is that they are a party devoted to government actually working and our system makes it difficult to make things work. What's more, you can pass a really impressive and beneficial program like the Affordable Care Act or nutrition assistance programs and agent provocateurs can simply gin up some small borderline act of corruption to try and discredit the whole project. The perils of running on "doing something" is that when you have partial power - and the system is set up so that one party always has partial power - you can't actually do anything. If el Sayed and Nixon win their Senate races, they aren't going to be able to pass Medicare for All at least until 2029 and likely not even then.

So arguing that Democrats should not focus on impeachment because it won't actually remove Trump doesn't make sense, because Democrats won't be able to really do anything until 2029.

Finally, people are pissed. The smooth brained swing voters are inherently distrustful of both parties. They are - seemingly - pissed at Trump because things suck. Democrats will not be able to make things magically not suck in January, no matter how many seats they win next week. They will have to show that they are prepared to hold corruption accountable. They will have to investigate everything WHILE SIMULTANEOUSLY PASSING BILLS THAT TRUMP WILL VETO OR SIMPLY NOT IMPLEMENT. You can do both! I know Mike Johnson didn't believe in actually having the Congress meet, but you can stay in DC and legislate while ALSO investigating and impeaching.

The criticism from the insurgent left is that institutional Democrats are wimps. El Sayed has some serious political deficits, but he understands the need for combative politics. Even someone as mild mannered as Ossoff gets that. If Harris can't see that and if Chuck Schumer can't see that, then we are right back where we were in spring of 2021, when we let Trump slide for January 6th. 

Impeach him for murdering fishermen in the Caribbean. The impeach him again for accepting bribes. Then impeach him again for Iran or for not supporting Ukraine as required by law. 

MAKE HIM FUCKING MISERABLE.

75-25

 Let's posit that the Democrats win the House and Senate next week. Unless the margins are 75% to 25%, it will still feel like a failure of democratic accountability. I know that Democrats suffer from a perpetual Eeyore problem, but after the American electorate fucked up so incredibly badly before, there has to be some sign if complete and utter rejection of all Trump has done and stands for. 

Sadly, that almost certainly will not come to pass. 

Decompressing

 This Times expose of Trump and the White House's mental and emotional state these days is...woof. We've known for decades that Trump is a narcissist, but the combination of a squadron of lackeys and lickspittles to cocoon him in the warm light of adulation and the increasingly obvious reality that he is deeply unpopular could be truly explosive if it really is a Blue Tsunami next week. 

If, for instance, Democrats pull of incredible wins in Texas and South Carolina, that will be directly because Trump saddled the GOP with Paxton and Graham. His instincts are shit when it comes to "normal" politics. He actually thinks these rallies will save the GOP in the midterms. How could they not, because Trump is amazing, just ask Natalie Karp!

Look, my seething hatred of the man and all he represents makes me want him to suffer a crippling narcissistic wound, but it would also mean that democracy is saved. Of course, anything less than a 75%-25% popular vote drubbing would still constitute a sort of failure of democratic accountability, but let's just try and win the House and Senate and go from there. 

Lawfare Is The Stupidest MAGA Neologism

 When the Biden DOJ began - slowly, oh so slowly - to investigate and prosecute Trump for his many crimes, his partisans screamed "Lawfare! They're weaponizing the Justice system!" The reality, of course, is that Trump WAS guilty of crimes. We know this because he was fucking convicted by a jury in NY. The other indictments never made it to trial, but there's a pretty good chance that he would have been convicted. 

The Lawfare idea was an example of two different aspects of MAGA. The first is that every accusation is a confession. Trump has treated the DOJ as his own private law firm to sue, bully and persecute his enemies. The other day, they went looking for a third indictment against James Comey. They couldn't even get an indictment against Cassidy Hutchinson. 

The second is the idea of muddying the waters so thoroughly that you can't distinguish the actual criminality with the firehose of scandals and quasi-scandals and outrages that flood your media. They are seeking to inoculate themselves from future prosecutions, by complaining about what is effectively their own behavior. Launch vindictive prosecution after vindictive prosecution and then you can complain that every prosecution is vindictive. 

This even has international implications, with the recent treatment of Flavio Bolsonaro. MAGA screams about criminal entering the country illegally, then illegally bring in a criminal. Not just Bolsonaro, but the Tate Brothers qualify as opening the doors for right wing criminals. 

This drives home the fundamental truth of Trump and MAGA: this is a group that is completely devoid of principles. Trump has always been intensely transactional in his relationships. A wife is not life partner (ha), best friend and helpmeet, but an ornament that exists as long as she looks good on his arm. A business deal is only successful if it screws over the other guy. Political figures only exist to serve him. 

The idea of "justice" as an abstract principle is so foreign to the marrow of MAGA that it cannot even occur to them that people might want to prosecute people "on their side" for crimes. Democrats aren't perfect, but they have moved pretty quickly to disown Graham Platner, Eric Swalwell and Bob Menendez when their misdeeds became apparent. Meanwhile, MAGA wants to shove Ken Paxton - a cartoonishly evil character - into a 6 year Senate term. Is he a criminal? Almost certainly, but he's on the team.

What's more, a criminal investigation of Paxton is not about finding whether he committed crimes but "lawfare." 

Recently, Elissa Slotkin said that there needed to be criminal investigations and prosecutions of low level MAGA people to dissuade the lawless behavior that is swirling through the People's Government. The equation was inherently conservative: If you have committed a crime, you should fear prosecution. It was not, however, "Conservative" in Wilhoit's Law, which says, "Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect." 

In MAGA, the in-group is, well, MAGA. The law should protect them from swarthy brown criminals, but not bind their own rampant criminality. 

If History is to be our guide, there will come a reckoning for MAGA. Perhaps it starts in a few days. Perhaps the true reckoning comes in 2029, but it will come. When it does, there will be voices suggesting that prosecuting the tsunami of corruption would be bad because Trump engaged in frivolous prosecutions and prosecuting him and his cronies would be the same. These are terrible voices and we should punch them in the fucking mouth. 

AI's Risk

 AI overlords made headlines over the past year, talking about how their business model could lead to the end of life on earth. Fun! Exciting!

After the usual hyperventilating, many experts on issues like nuclear safety or biological engineering wondered how this extinction event could occur. Seemed very unlikely. One writer I recall differentiating between existential and catastrophic threats. The idea that AI is an existential threat seems overblown and melodramatic, but the idea that AI poses some sort of catastrophic threat seems distressingly real.

The main issue - as Krugman notes - is from a proliferation of hacking that makes life fundamentally different. Best case scenario is that everything becomes stickier and more labor intensive as AI actually unwinds some of the digitization of the modern world. Over the past 40 years, countless forms of commerce and other means of interacting have moved into the digital world. Much of the code undergirding that world is very old. AI - it seems - is very much adept at exploiting that ancient code. 

Best case scenario is therefore a slowing down of economic activity as we cope with the various threats from hacks. Every transaction becomes suspect, and the world of two-factor authentication is therefore not really enough. The process of enshitification is when websites start out easy to use, but then are designed to be harder to use until you pay them for premium access. It's the proliferation of paywalls and other hurdles to access in order to maximize returns.

AI has the potential explode enshitification without actually gaining anything from it in terms of ease of access or additional content. Every website will become a pain in the ass to access.

The worst case scenario is the erasure or hostage taking of critical realms of the digital world. Imagine, for instance, major brokerage firms suddenly having all of their accounts just erased or taken over by hackers. AI makes hacking easier, it's not that AI itself is doing the hacking (necessarily). We worry about someone using AI to bioengineer a supervirus that kills everyone, but far more likely is just a rampant proliferation of hacking. 

We are already seeing some aspects of this in electoral interreference in places like Brazil, but so far people have been able to outlast the bots and other issues. How long will that last? That seems more or less the oligarchs placing their thumbs on the scale, but how soon until AI fueled mis and disinformation overwhelm the voting public? How long before AI's risk become so profound we wind up unraveling the digital revolution?

Cuba

 This is a striking story about the current situation in Cuba. It is a familiar tale of the collapse of communist institutions in the face of economic stagnation and the rush of people to turn to religion as society seems to collapse around them. 

What was interesting in the piece was that no one in Cuba blames the US for their plight. Despite the embargo that we have had forever and that Trump made considerably more stringent, Cubans blame their local leaders for their misery. And they are clearly miserable. This gibes with what I saw in the Museum of Remembrance in Santiago, Chile. There was no mention of the role the CIA played in supporting Pinochet's coup, but rather the blame was kept squarely on the military and industrial leaders who ushered in those decades of brutality.

Of course, if you ask an overeducated leftist in the US, we are responsible for the repression of Pinochet and the junta in Buenos Aires; we are starving the people of Cuba with our embargo. This is the dark twin of American Exceptionalism on the right, which is that the US is a uniquely evil place that does uniquely evil things. The reality, I think, is much more complicated.

The US absolutely contributes to misery and repression by its actions. We supported and support military dictatorships, if it serves our national interest. Of course, that's what national interest means. Until recently, however, we also funded things like USAID and tried to help countries that were not actively hostile to us. This could vacillate between Democratic and Republican administrations, but the rest of the world at worst tended to tolerate us, because we tended over time to be on balance more benevolent than malign.

Trump has, of course, tilted the scale so far towards malevolence that he has burned bridges all over the world. The one area where he seems to be - if not exactly admired than at least tolerated - is Latin America. Perhaps it is the long tradition of caudillismo -  strongman politics - that they tend to respond to. I actually think that accounted for some of his gains among Hispanic voters in the US in 2024. They saw in Trump the sort of machismo leader that they've traditionally admired. That's why he tended to outperform Harris among that demographic.

We will know in a little over a week, if Trump has surrendered all those gains and more with Hispanic voters, through the reckless brutality of his policies. I have to wonder and perhaps hope that the all the "mini-Trumps" springing up in Latin America will also see their popularity and grip on power recede. We saw Luna win in Brazil, and Sheinbaum in Mexico, but overall, there almost has to come a reckoning for the new cynical brutality of American policy towards Latin America. The people there want to believe in the US, because often their home grown leaders are terrible - as in Cuba.

If the Cuban communist regime finally does collapse Trump will take some credit for it, and some of that will actually be deserved. However, the real issue is that communism doesn't really work and that problem is not a problem of the United States' making, though we have ostracized and deprived that country of so much for so long, that I don't think a non-communist regime would have fared much better.

Harbingers?

 The news from overseas elections is pretty good, actually. Brazil rejected a second generation Trump clone and Serbia ousted their long time pro-Russian government at the polls. Brazil got more coverage, because Brazil is a huge country and represents one of the few rejections in Latin America recently of Trumpist style politics. I remember talking to people in both Buenos Aires and Santiago that they needed a Trump-style president. Brazil had one, ejected him and have now rejected his son.

Krugman notes that Meta has been up to some serious fuckery surrounding first the recent No Kings Rally and now the Brazilian election. We've obviously seen Musk throw hundreds of millions to elect Republicans, and he has been openly supportive of Orban and Putin. Zuckerberg apparently looked at Elon destroying any institutional goodwill among people to the left of Dick Cheney and decided he wanted in on that action.

I've said before and I will say again, the intellectual ecosystem among the Broligarchy is fundamentally barren. They have about three ideas on how the world works, and they are going to ride those three ideas into the ground. Any smart business leader - think Jamie Dimon of JPMorgan Chase - would be very careful to hedge their bets between the two political parties. The Lords of Ones and Zeroes think that they have no need of a party that might criticize them and hurt their fee fees by pointing out that their products have enormous societal costs. 

There is absolutely no reason for Democrats not to haul Musk and Zuckerberg before Congressional committees and grill them, with an eye towards either changing their behavior or punishing them the next time they have a trifecta. 

This week, Israel has an election and if Netanyahu's coalition loses, that would be a massive boost to the hopes for peace in the region. Whether these elections mean anything for the US midterms is entirely up for debate. Everyone seems to concede that Democrats will win the House. 

Many of the marquee Senate races are entirely within the margins of error. Some Republican analysts have suggested that they are seeing a wipe out election, but that is based at least somewhat on early voting, which figures to favor Democrats regardless. Early voting is great; it's votes in the bank. It allows Democrats to target their voters who haven't voted and get them to the polls.

Still, it does not predict what the electorate will look like in a week or so. All the signs - foreign and domestic - point to a strong midterm, but...damn, does anyone feel confident in the sagacity of the American voter?

Collapse

 Richardson cheerily relates the circumstances of the Market Crash of 1929. Krugman, meanwhile, looks at the situation from today forwards. 

The three things Krugman looks at are a possible stagflation cycle, a liquidity trap caused by the bursting of the AI bubble and a debt crisis. All three are very, very bad. 

The stagflation argument has to be linked - though Krugman doesn't do so explicitly - to rising energy costs. The Iran war has caused energy prices - and therefore the price of everything that requires oil to be produced or shipped - to spike, and as businesses begin to price this in, that can create rising prices, even as the economy does not grow. There is some evidence that we are seeing to productivity gains related to AI, but the real economy - as opposed to the stock market - does not seem to be growing at the same rate as prices are rising.

The liquidity trap is related to the AI situation, because if that's a bubble (and it sure seems to be) and it bursts, the US is not in a great position to escape the downturn with monetary stimulus, because interest rates are already fairly low. We could spend our way out, but that leads to the third risk, which is a debt crisis.

It seems unlikely that the US could enter a debt crisis - France might -  because of the way the dollar functions. But the extraordinary costs of borrowing means that interest payments on US debt are rising at a time when we already have problems with revenues - Thank, Republicans! - and, oh, yeah, we are fighting a war with Iran.

Krugman also notes that there are risks we can't see. He talks about how Covid screwed everything up without warning, but what about a massive hack or crash of the digital world because of AI. That seems far more likely than SkyNet becoming self aware and wiping out humanity.

What goes unstated by Krugman, but Richardson nods at, perhaps without realizing the connection, is that we have absolute fucking morons running things in DC. Andrew Mellon's policies were a leading cause of the Great Depression, blinkered as he was by ideology. Trump is both blinkered and an idiot. The creatures he surrounds himself with warp themselves into his image. 

If any of these risks become reality, we don't have anyone in the Executive branch who seems capable of pulling us out. 

The market crash of 1929 didn't lead immediately to the "Great Depression." It led to one crisis, then another, most of which were met with poor or underwhelming responses. A depression was likely inevitable by the spring of 1929, but the Great Depression was created after October of '29.

Buckle up.

The ActBlue Industrial Complex

 Josh Marshall notes an article that breaks down the broad dysfunction of consultant class in Democratic politics. The focus of the article is the perverse incentives of political consulting that siphons off money that should be going to win elections that instead goes to a sort of circular economy of ad buys and consultant fees.

He notes that it certainly seems that Democrats are winning the small donor wars, whereas the GOP relies on billionaires, Dark Money and Super PACs. I can say for my own experience that I really wanted to give money this year, but the literally non-stop barrage of emails and texts has made me balk at making a donation that will open my up to more emails and texts. 

There is a clear reform agenda for Democrats in attacking the ability of billionaires to buy elections. There also needs to be an effort to clean up their own house and change the dynamics of how they run campaigns.