Blog Credo

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.

H.L. Mencken

Sunday, April 28, 2024

We Need To Remind People

 The most horrifying thing in American politics - aside from the Assembly of Religious Experts taking away women's rights - is that Trump and Biden remain in a dead heat. That so many Americans look back on Trump's regency as anything but a chaotic clusterfuck is a testament to the faulty structure of memory.

Biden needs to be filling the airwaves with ads about those first few months of the pandemic under Trump. The food lines, the shuttered businesses, the injecting bleach nonsense, the refrigerator cars full of corpses. Right now, people's memories of Trump are focused on the tail end of the recovery from 2008-9. It was a generally strong economy, but 2020 was obviously not. The baseline of 2020-21 needs to be tied to Trump, so that Biden can benefit from the truly impressive economic gains.

Trump has reminded us that the central conceit of democratic government - that people make reasoned choices based on both self-interest and national needs - is untrue. We need to remind people of what is at stake economically, because that's important, too.

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