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.
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.
Are most modern problems caused by selfishness or a lack of it? Ayn Rand, a Russian American philosopher and writer, would say it’s the latter — that selfishness is not a vice but a virtue — and that capitalism is the ideal system. Everyone from Donald Trump, to Alan Greenspan, to Brad Pitt have sung Ayn Rand’s praises. The Library of Congress named her novel Atlas Shrugged the second most influential book in the U.S. after the Bible. Ayn Rand wasn’t politically correct, she was belligerent and liked going against the grain. And although she lived by the doctrine of her own greatness, she was driven by the fear that she would never be good enough.
In this episode, historian Jennifer Burns will guide us through Rand’s evolution and how she eventually reshaped American politics, becoming what Burns calls “a gateway drug to life on the right.”
If there is an individual in America who epitomizes one central aspect of our political moment, it might well be Crystal Mason. The story of Mason, a Black woman, illuminates the extraordinary efforts the Republican Party has made to demonstrate that fraud is being committed by minority voters on a massive scale. That false notion is now an article of faith among tens of millions of Americans. It has become an excuse to enact laws that make voting harder for everyone, but especially for voters of color, voters who are poor, voters who are old, and voters who were not born in the United States.
