I'm retired and in my late sixties. I've always been interested in politics and now I have the luxury of time to read and jot down some of what I'm thinking. Yeah, yeah, I got a lot of free time. It's kinda nice. Everybody got that?
I have a long memory for things I witnessed in real-time. I often find myself wondering why someone doesn't know a particular thing or see a past event with the shading it had at the time. I find myself thinking, 'Don't you remember.' Of course, they don't remember. They either hadn't been born or were children when the things that shaped today actually happened. The kids are held to task for a kind of 'age snobbery' but really, geezers like me are just as bad.
Let's take Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. She's been dismissed as a youngster. She's 29. She actually has a mainstream education in economics and isn't proposing anything radical. It's the way things were done for decades and it was obviously more successful and responsible than what we've been doing since the '80s. In addition; the way business and investment income is managed will continue to mean most people at the very top will still be paying an effective tax rate of about 15%. It does mean some people who haven't been taxed at all are in for a new experience. I think they'll survive.
She hasn't started this argument but I will: Pretty much every economic proposal advanced by Reagan has been an unmitigated disaster. There are reliable metrics to apply to these things and the only real conclusion, looking back, is, Muy Malo or the more technical, Bad Ju-Ju.
She seems to have decided it's pointless to argue with the leftover, Reaganite dinosaurs. Make the proposal and let others carry the freight. It's not a bad approach and it has the useful feature of actually addressing reality. It does make me wonder about the whole Democratic Socialist thingy. Why start that argument with a bunch of people you already know to be a collection of ignoramuses? I honestly think it's a bit of snobbery from the east coast, intellectual establishment. They think it gives them a sort of continental cache. Bullshit, they're New Deal Democrats. Just say so. You're old enough.
The debate about taxation acknowledges the Trump tax cuts have the shelf life of a gnat. It's just an effort to get ahead of and contribute to the question of what's next.
What's next? I was reading about the Rosenbergs the other day. No matter what you think of that case from the dim past, you can't help but conclude they were actually murdered by a wave of mass hysteria motivated by public officials; elected officials. When you consider the near future, that's scary. It does have a serious chance of being what's next.
Most people would expect this old liberal to go off on a screed about the excesses of Trumpism. Nah, Trumpism is as dead as Casey's nuts. It's the inevitable reaction to Trumpism we have to look out for. These Trump people can't find work in their fields. They're facing truncated careers. In the private sector, they are being fired in droves. Businesses aren't being necessarily boycotted but they are being shunned. Kids are being thrown out of universities. Other kids, like these guys from Covington, will never see the inside of a decent college. They can save the postage. The problem with naked appeals to the half-formed emotions of the crowd is, the crowd's attention wanders.
The American Right loves their boycotts and their blacklists and their condemnations. They never notice these things become badges of honor over a very brief time. The American Left controls the culture and thus, eventually, the economy and they are far more thorough and damaging in condemnation and marginalization. There is no real rehabilitation. The American left can be relentless and deadly.
That may be a good thing. It may be a bad thing. It might be totally understandable. It is a dangerous thing in its pervasive power and certainly bears consideration and watching.
