This year was supposed to be one of recovery, but it has been far from that.
It began with the insurrection at the Capitol, a second impeachment of former President Donald Trump and President Biden's inauguration. As the year went on, Trump continued to lie about the election results while he remained one of the most popular figures among Republicans.
With new coronavirus variants, the deadly pandemic has continued to drag on. And even though the stock market has boomed and unemployment is down, Americans have felt the pinch of rising prices. Biden has paid the political price, ending the year with his approval ratings at their lowest point since his taking office.
American workers are reaching a breaking point. We’re seeing a wave of resignations and labor strikes, and a supply chain that’s cracking under the pressure. At the turn of the 20th century, one man faced a similar world and dreamt of something more – Eugene V. Debs.
He was a bold and irreverent labor organizer, and the first socialist candidate for president. He believed in welfare programs, early childhood education, and the collective ownership of public resources. To him, there was nothing more American than standing up against oppression. When he spoke to the masses, people leaned in to listen. This week, the founder of American socialism and the legacy he left behind.
It is super naughty of former President Donald John Trump to keep throwing bones to conspiracy theorists who believe the election was stolen. It’s also naughty that states with Republican lead legislatures are using false claims of fraud to try to manipulate voting laws to give them an advantage in edge cases – you know when the election is 49-49 or something close to that.
The thing is that throwing an election in an edge case is just that – maybe a subversion of democracy but hardly a big one or a novel things. Incumbents have long used their lawmaking powers and disbursement of public funds to enhance their chances of re-election. Elbridge Gerry was governor of Massachusetts a very long time ago. And it’s not like the lawmakers writing the laws to enhance their chances of re-election weren’t elected themselves.
Will we see the second coming of the Trumpster through election chicanery in 2024? It’s possible but he’ll still have to be quite popular and the Democratic nominee particularly weak leading to a very close election. Legal chicanery works but it’s not necessarily popular or giving of legitimacy.
It seems like a lot of small town businesses in Central New York State and probably other places use the term hometown in their name. I guess living in the suburbs temporarily, with only a somewhat vague idea about where I want to live in the future, I’ve never really had a place to call home, and I certainly don’t have hometown pride.
But it must at some level be nice to have a place to call home, a community to be proud of. A place where you cherish your neighbors and friends, a place still not completely dominated by the anonymous big box stores that dot the freeway interchanges.
In recent years with the candidacy and election of Donald Trump, he has made a lot of the more rural counties much redder, although it’s hard to say how long that will last now that Trump is no longer a (likely) candidate going forward. While there has been a shift back towards the blue column in 2020, Trump changed the map over the past two elections in many less populated counties.
New York State is decidedly more blue than Pennsylvania, even in its more rural outlying counties.
New England, especially Vermont and Massachusetts are quite blue, especially after the most recent elections.
