We came close to political Armageddon under Donald Trump. Luckily our institutions seem to have held under this extreme pressure test.
Will we be so lucky next time?
Join us as we discuss some possible fixes to the political, communication and policy challenges we face as a nation.
We came close to political Armageddon under Donald Trump. Luckily our institutions seem to have held under this extreme pressure test.
Will we be so lucky next time?
Join us as we discuss some possible fixes to the political, communication and policy challenges we face as a nation.
Welcome to Podcastis I’m your host Andrew Roof. We’re back with another commentary episode.
This will be the last commentary episode for a while. I’m going to get back to focusing on long form. More specifically our series on segregation and the civil rights movement in St. Augustine Florida. If you haven’t checked out episode one and two of that series I suggest you do.
It’s Dec 17, 2020
And I’m distracted most of the time by a very simple question…
What the hell is happening to the United States of America?
If you’re listening to this shortly after it was released, you understand what I’m saying…. But If youre listening to this a few years down the road… - it’s hard to describe the situation in the US right now. We’re at one of those points in history thatll be studied 20 or 50 years down the road - and not for good reasons...
First off, the covid-19 pandemics at its peak right now - its raging across most of the country - killing somewhere around 10,000 - 15000 people a week…and the federal gov, and a lot of state governments are still pretending its not that big of a deal… We have governorers like Floridas Rick Desantis stately flatly that there will be no measures put in place to prevent the spread of the virus…
Secondly we have President Donald Trump still refusing to accept the fact that Joe Biden won the 2020 Presidential Election - The electoral college recently confirmed Biden Wide, but Trump and his hardcore supporters are vowing to fight on… I honestly don’t know how they’ll fight on as they’ve lost every court battle… and the states and the electoral college have made things official…
Short of armed resistance Trump has no path to contest the election…
As bad as the pandemic is… and as exhausting as Trumps mania has left me… if I was forced to pick what posed the most long term danger to our nation, I’d have to go with the deteriorating relationship between ordinary Americans. The We have vaccines coming in the next year to slow covid-19, and its looking more likely that Trumps gonna abandon the white house and move to florida soon…
… but the divisions splitting the US apart don’t seem to be getting better… in fact they seem to be growing worse by the day.
A lot of people who lean left are placing the blame on Donald Trump alone… as if everything was fine before he came into office… but that’s not the case…
The growing rift between Americans is like a fire we’ve all noticed smoldering in the woods … over the years weve heard a few “we need to come together and put this fire out speech” but no ones done anything substantial to extinguish it..… and then in 2016 Donald Trump walked up to the fire with a propane cylinder and a can of gasoline and asked if he should throw them in?
Half the country screamed no - --- and the other half chanted THROW THEM IN… and this has gone on for 4 years… and now the fires grown out control…
Politics has always been messy - and it’s never been perfect… clearly a lot of our citizens, especially minorities and people on the lower end of the economic ladder have been severely underrepresented in government since this nation was founded… but for a brief period of time during Obama era it felt like we had a chance to turn a corner and move in a more positive direction as a nation… but that hopeful feeling is gone… we’re in a really bad spot right now…
I’m only 42 but I remember a time when our elected representatives seemed to be interested in governing… but that’s not the case anymore… If an alien came to earth and observed our elected representatives for a week they’d probably report that these people did interviews, tweeted, raised money, made fun of people and worked to get jobs for their friends and family...
Which is most Americans view the federal gov with such contempt that the approval rating of congress is down to around 13%.
Even in the dark days of the 1960s, when the nation was being perpetually rocked by assassinations, Ku Klux Violence violence and social revolution, enough elected representatives from both sides of the aisle somehow managed to come together and pass the civil and voting rights acts…
Would it be possible to pass challenging bipartisan legislation today? I don’t think so.
b/c Our government’s seriously damaged… and neither party would be willing to step across the aisle and work together on anything that would jeopardize their ability to raise money or win elections
The parties and a lot of elected representatives have shifted their focus from working to make the us a better place for its citizens.. to simply getting reelected at any cost using any strategy that appears to be working...
I’d argue that 30 years ago the democratic and repubs national parties were like rival car clubs… ford and chevy… mustangs and corvettes… the members gave each other a hard time at the car shows they attended, but in the end they were both there to appreciate cars and go on drives… they had a common goal
But today the political parties - are like opposing forces in a well financed, demolition derby. They don’t seem to have a common goal… they’re not interested in governing… or making ordinary americans lives better… they just want to raise money all the time… and destroy the other side.
Instead of encouraging Americans to be better for the sake of the nation and each other… a lot of our politicians encourage us to hate each other… all the time… because thats the strategy that theyve settled on to stay in power
The GOP’s has been especially vicious on this front. Trump’s spent the past 4 years accusing not just his political enemies - but ordinary citizens -- of being anti-american, of being communists, terrorists, RHINOS and god forbid socialists …
Senator Ted Cruz, who has an undergrad from Princeton, and a law degree from Harvard… spends his days a twitter troll… stoking the flames of online hatred...
But its important to be honest and be clear… The left which i include myself as a member of is not completely innocent in this either… but our responsibility lies more in promoting and going along with policies that have have helped to create the tinderbox that allowed this fire to grow so quickly -
For decades, the democratic party has paid lip service to working class people - of all races and creeds…
Our elected representatives took our votes and loyalty for granted… jobs went overseas, labour unions were snuffed out, and real opportunity vanished for a lot of hard working Americans who went from working 40 hours a week and having a little money to save to working 40 hours a week and being poor.
Instead of realizing their mistakes, and making changes… Democratic leaders have stayed the course and have attempted to funnel all the frustration and anger felt by the middle class into defeating republicans at the polls… as if the GOP was solely responsible for the plight of the middle class.
I’m baffled that the media continues to be confused by middle and lower middle class dedication to Trump. To be clear, there are a lot of factors at play - including racism and intolerace… but To me it’s obvious that a lot of these voters are fleeing the democratic party because they feel abandoned.
Trump said all the things they wanted to hear…. All the things the dems used to actually do… like fighing for manufacturing jobs… and taking on the wall street
Voters aren’t as dumb as a lot of the media makes them out to be…
Over the past couple decades they’ve watched their elected representatives spend a lot more time cozying up to big wall street investment firms and passing legislation that makes it easier for well paying jobs to go overseas, and a lot less time making sure people that work 40 hours aren’t going broke...
Our system’s been corrupted by corporate interests and cash… and a lot of the electorate has become so disenfranchised they’re willing to follow Trump, who was in a lot of ways just making the same promises the Democrats had failed to deliver on.
I’m very interested to see what the Biden Administration has planned as far as a governing strategy.
If they continue using the same playbook Obama and Clinton used… I think we’re in real danger. The average american citizen isn’t going to put up with being ignored much longer… especially with the financial uncertainty we’re facing now.
We came close to political armigedon with Trump… but we were lucky that trump didn’t know how to operate the controls of government.
If we keep going down this path, and happen to find ourselves in a major recession or god forbid a depression - all bets are off… Our game of democratic demolition derby reached it’s fever pitch when the economy was roaring… when joblessness was low…
Historically that’s when people get along… the shit usually hits the fan when the economy goes off the rails.
So what can be done to fix the situation we’re in?
There’s the policy side and the communication side. We’ve already talked a little about the policy side, and I’m no policy wonk so I won’t bore you pretending I am… but the simplest way to tell if the Biden Administration is making any progress is to pay attention to how much howling you hear coming from corporate america and wall street…
In my eyes, If they’re silent… Biden isn’t doing something right.
When they start screaming about how some new policy is going to leave average workers poorer, or out of jobs… or the economy will collapse if they’re forced to follow some new rule… that’s when real change is happening…
They screamed when child labour was taken away from them… they howled when a minimum wage was put in place… the same with the 5 day work week and workers compensation….
now they’re battling against paid sick days, 15 dollar an hour minimum wage and maternity leave. Every other western nation has a better social safety net than the US does and it hasn’t caused their economies to collapse. It’s time we start to catch up. I live in Canada now, after spending my first 37 years in the states... and the relief of having health care, maternity leave and a better overall social safety net can’t be overstated…
The Biden Administration needs to push hard against corporate america. The average american voter - from the left and the right will know if the efforts are real or just more speeches and meaningless slogans…
American workers aren’t going to put up with working 40 hours a week and still being poor much longer...
The other part of ending our demolition derby is communication. More specifically communication on social media.
The Biden Administration needs to come up with a creative solution to deal with the dumpster fire that is social media. I’d love to see Biden or VP Harris give a speech that calls on all politicians to end the online wars. At the very least they can push for Democratic politicians and voters to stop engaging in online trolling wars...
So when Ted Cruz or Tom Cotton post some drivel about the left wanting to take away Christmas… the left would just let it go. Don’t engage.
We’ve been eased into this situation… In the year 2020 it seems normal to look at your phone the second u wake to see if Trump said something outrageous. If he did, you might scroll through the comments and get into an early morning twitter war with a complete stranger...
It’s easy to forget that only a few years ago, if you wanted to argue with, or talk shit to another person you had to do it in person…
Today a lot of people spend hours of their day saying terrible things to people on the other side of the political isle… things they’d never, ever say to another human being in person…
At least they never would have before today’s charged environment - because we’re starting to see the online hate spill over into day to day real life…
An average Joe or Jane in a small town somewhere in America, can have her day ruined because she gets a message from a stranger on twitter calling her a nazi - or a libtard … the stranger could be anyone --- it could be a 13 year kid in Eastern Europe, or a college kid drinking with his buddies in Nebrasja… or maybe even a Senator or the President of the United States.
but that doesn’t matter… her day’s been ruined by some Trump supporting a hole or a Commie loving Libtard. She goes to work and listens to right wing talk radio, or left wing podcasts… scrolls through her facebook page that’s taylor made to fire her up even more…
talks to friend in the cubicle next to her who feels the same way about the other side… and then she goes home and listens to fox news or msnbc for 3 hours - talks to her husband about the horrible message she got on twitter that morning… and she does this for 4 years…. It’s not a surprise that she starts viewing anyone from the other side of the aisle as an enemy
We all have t work to change the tone that’s been set by Trump’s outrageous use of social media.
These platforms are both amplifying and covering up our deep national scars, traumas and injustices… including racism - sexism and grossly unfair economic policies…
The glass half full side of me thinks that Trump speeding this process up maybe this was a good thing. You know, rip the veil off - let everyone see what’s happening - and maybe we’ll all start working on repairing the damage…
I don’t think we can legislate ourselves out out of this mess completely but new laws could play a role. Social media companies are monetizing our private information and making a fortune doing it. Most Americans have no understanding that facebook exists to collect data about you… your friends, your kids, what you buy and who you hate… they don’t exist so that you can share pictures… they exist to make money off of your data...
Legislation that demands transparency and requires Social Media Companies to let people opt out of - or even pay a premium to opt out of having their personal data collected could bring some positive change.
I’d love to see a setting on twitter and facebook that allows the user to have a non-political feed whenever they want. The 24 hour online hate cycle that many americans are in isn’t healthy. Giving people an easy way to step outside of it would be a start...
We have our work cut out for us if we’re going to change the direction the United States is heading…
But do we really have a choice? I argue no… the direction we’re heading is unsustainable and dangerous. You can’t have 2 opposing sides standing nose to nose screaming obscenities at each other for an indefinite amount of time. Because eventually Something has to give.
Especially right now… the history buff in me looks at our current situation and sees all the ingredients for disaster. A Global pandemic… joblessness, an economy that could fall apart at any moment and political instability…
We need to get our house in order so that we can deal with what could be coming.
I’m hoping the Biden Administration is ready to step up to these incredible challenges.
Thanks for listening…