Americans are some miserable bastards right now. The President? We hate him. The last President? Yeah, him too. Leaders in Congress? Congress itself? We despise them. Cabinet members? Members of the judiciary? Yeah, we hate them too. Some are hated so badly (Schumer) that they’re underwater with their own party’s voters. Almost all of them are hemorrhaging a significant number of voters in their own parties, relative to how many Americans even know who they are (View Pew’s numbers here and Gallup’s numbers here).
The truth is that both political coalitions that have ruled the country essentially since Buchanan have cracked, and we’re all just prisoners in the skeletal remains of the two parties. The old Reagan/Bush Republicans are now a minority in their own party, while MAGA runs the show, with a small smattering of Libertarians somewhere in their coalition. The Obama coalition still essentially rules in the Democratic Party but about a third of the party is somewhere between European social democratic (big government) politics and flat out Marxists and Anarchists. The only unity between these groups is essentially their desire to win Presidential and other office nominations for themselves. A lot of Mamdani backers have nothing good to say about Joe Biden, and can barely be considered a member of a similar political party, let alone the same one. When you consider both political parties are fairly unpopular, and neither can really be assured of getting a majority of the popular vote at this point, it’s hard to see a national figure any time soon that reaches 50% approval for a sustained period of time. People would rather cheer for literal terrorists than a leader from the other party, and that includes some segment of your own party.
A few weeks after the 2016 Election I was drinking in DC with some friends from the Obama days, and I said we were entering a 20 year period of darkness in the politics and government of this issue. Basically I said we’d have four or five Presidencies in that period (numerically we’ve had two people serve three individual terms so far), Congress would swing regularly (we’ve had four Speakers since, and the Senate has swung twice), policy would swing wildly (kind of became obvious in 2025), and political rhetoric would get even more adversarial than it was in 2016 (I underestimated the violent element). My theory was we’d get to the end of that and either be good (so still a functioning, sane democracy) and fine, or bad (I’m pretty sure right now we’re closer to whatever the fuck this is) and fine. Maybe I should not make predictions about the future on a December weekday in a Russian bar anymore. The voodoo really woke up on this one.
I have no idea who or what would be the unifying figure to lead us out of this mess. No one will be well liked enough. As is, I don’t think you can put “the old way” back together in DC after Trump. There may not even be anyone liked enough by our population to even make us stop calling each other scumbags and Nazis on social media.
Donald Trump is the President of the United States and Zohran Mamdani is the Mayor of New York. One, a raging madman that has re-defined conservatism around his cult of personality, hatred towards those he perceives of enemies, and the destruction of both our federal government and the existing world order since World War II. The other, a self-described socialist that won’t say “the Intifada” is bad, wants to open city owned grocery stores, and ran on a platform of giving away a lot of free stuff to city residents that he will need Albany to come in and foot the bill for. If you read my blog regularly, you know that I have no use for either one. In fact, I think the election of both is a sign of a society in decline.
As is true with all things though, Mamdani’s first day was a mixed bag, even if it was almost all bad. He did decide to keep the city’s office that fights antisemitism, even if he weakened it a bit, which is a good thing. He also is showing signs that he is willing to cut through some bureaucratic red tape in the government to help build more housing fast. Other than those two things, his first day in office was a hellscape of terrible. You know it’s bad when the speeches by AOC and Bernie were as much about criticizing Democrats as the Trump Administration, but they were nothing compared to Mamdani’s. One line, in particular, has received almost all of the attention- “We will replace the frigidity of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism.” If Mao or Stalin himself had said this, we would have zero shock. The speech was literally a call to return to at least “big government liberalism,” if not an outright socialist battle cry altogether. As Putin critic and former Soviet citizen Gary Kasparov put it on Twitter, “The “warmth of collectivism” is to freeze while those with heated dachas tell you how noble your sacrifice is.” Mamdani, a man born of economic and academic privilege, is what happens when limousine liberalism gets put on steroids and hyper-charged. There is a reason China rejected Mao, the Soviet Union failed, Cuba is a failure, Venezuela is now a living hell, and no one wants to go to North Korea. This kind of rhetoric leads to failure, because the underlying system of socialism has no grounding in practical reality, it cannot be run in a functional way. Mamdani’s solution is to get the city involved in things the city probably can’t do very well, like run a grocery store. His solution to expensive transit is to make it free. His solution to some crimes is to legalize them. What he doesn’t get is that someone has to pay for it all. Politicians in Albany aren’t going to be excited to raise taxes to pay for his programs, and they probably will just refuse to do it for the most part. To the extent he’s even allowed, he may try to pin that bill on the wealthy in New York City. At least some of them will just leave. No city, not even the greatest city, can survive with no taxpayer base.
My guess is Mamdani will mostly fail to deliver, and that’s my hope. If he succeeds, it will have long lasting impacts on the city, and a few will be good, but the net will be bad. How do you get to Mamdani though? You get there through electing a Trump. How do you get a Trump? You get there by a government that the public doesn’t think meets it’s needs. A world where more people live out of debt, work more hours, and get ahead less. In short, it is a collective failure that gets you to Mamdani. Oh, the irony.
This past year, in Northampton County’s vast ruby red Northern Tier there was an election to be the Magisterial Judge in the Wind Gap/Plainfield area. There were two respectable, good people running to be the new judge. One won the Republican nomination, and eventually the seat, and the other won the Democratic nomination. In the Democratic Primary, there were 1,522 votes cast. Over 10% of them (195) went to a third candidate in the race- the candidate was at the January 6th rally in 2021 that ended up ransacking the capitol (no idea if he went inside or not). This same candidate was also at the center of a legal case involving the Northampton County GOP showing home made pornography at their general membership meeting (to be clear here, as the victim). He also was reportedly saying in his campaign that he did not believe PFA’s were constitutional, and he wouldn’t enforce them (I have nowhere to link to here because the campaign is over). Even with all of that, this individual received nearly 200 Democratic primary votes. Is it possible some of them just didn’t know what they were doing? Sure. Over 10% of them? No. Some people knowingly and willingly voted for this guy.
One of the unpleasant, but absolutely true things to know about our democracy and the people participating in it is that the people don’t really trust politicians or experts anymore. It’s more pronounced on one side, but it’s not limited to that side. Politics have become almost entirely tribal, completely culturally, and more or less, emotional. Nearly every institution from the White House to the Army, to the Catholic Church, to banks, to college football powers, have been engaged in a scandal in the last 50 years that have wrecked public trust with them. No one likes banks. Organized religion has been in a decline with the public for years. No President has been willing to get into a protracted war after Iraq. Faith in institutions is gone. People tend to believe the institutions aren’t for them. Experts work for them, not for us, or something.
Whether you believe Barack Obama was born in Kenya, 9/11 was an inside job, or Trump had Epstein killed, an increasing number of people on your side agree with you. This has not been true in the past. People basically don’t believe anything their told, as long as it does fit their world view, as you can see in the polling above.
This is, in and of itself, the main reason that Barack Obama and Joe Biden ultimately gave way to Donald Trump. They ran a political party based on “managing” society right. There’s a lack of audience for that. An increasing share of the American left are also chiefly concerned with “getting stuff” from the government. If they don’t, they’re not super interested. They also aren’t interested with a government run by “experts” if it isn’t doing what they want. People don’t believe the experts. They don’t believe the institutions. They believe nutty videos on YouTube and TikTok though. You know they’d never lie to you or manipulate you, right?
You live in the most advanced time in human history. If you’re an American, you live in the wealthiest and militarily strongest country in the world. There are now apps that can look up virtually any fact on the face of the Earth and feed it to you in seconds, all you have to do is interpret them (thanks AI!). There are stoves that can connect to Wifi. Your car will yell at you if don’t buckle up. You can put money into an investment account every month and that money will make you money over the long haul. We can fight wars with drones instead of people. We have cars that run on electric. Solar energy can power your house. We have planes that can fly you around the world safely, and faster than ever before. I mean, we have the internet.
But God dammit, MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN.
Sure, we’ve sacrificed a lot to achieve the greatness of modernity. Income inequality is higher than at any point in modern history. We pile debt onto you to buy houses, cars, pay for your education, even get married. Your labor is less secure than it was when more of America was in a labor union. Globalizing the market made a shit ton of money for most people, comparable to times when we were more domestic, but it also gutted out “low skill” work and devalued it. Basically we got more comfort and amenities, we made life easier in most ways, but we also traded away any sense of security and protection from ruin. It’s scary. It’s uncomfortable.
However, it is better.
The past really wasn’t that good. Any analytic can tell you that, provided that we even measured these things then. People watched black and white televisions in the 1950’s. Households might have had one car. The internet, personal computer, laptop, Wifi, and social media were completely unheard of, not to mention they didn’t exist. People were poor compared to today:
There probably is some benefit to recognizing that lots of middle-class Americans managed to have good lives and happy childhoods despite growing up with material living standards that would be typical of poverty in the contemporary United States.
That said, nothing is stopping you from dropping out of the workforce to be a full-time domestic worker, eliminating your family’s child care expenses while cooking more economical meals at home. Yes, even with those savings, you would have less money than the average married couple, but you could also choose to live in a smaller-than-average house like the one in the picture. The problem is that you probably don’t want to do that, and your spouse probably doesn’t want you to, either. It’s fine to make the case that the norms around this today are bad and wrong as a matter of values — the Amish show that people certainly can choose to live materially poorer lives if they really want to. But factually speaking, living standards have risen dramatically since the era of that photo, and people who lived like that would be poor today.
In 1950, most homes in Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, North Dakota, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, and West Virginia didn’t have complete plumbing. By 1960, the numbers in some of those states were still chillingly high by contemporary standards, but they’d fallen a lot and every state had full plumbing in the majority of homes. To the extent that nostalgia for that era makes sense, it’s that people who lived through it got to experience extremely rapid improvements in living conditions. More recently, things have continued to get better, but they’ve gotten better more slowly.
Yes, life was simple and good back then, because you didn’t know better. You didn’t know better, and life improved. Today you live in remarkably better conditions. It’s just that ten years from now your life will not naturally be so dramatically better than it is today. You’ll have better technology, more access to data and information, and better services available to you- but we’re not going to make poor people billionaires without inflation, or solve how to beat death, or end everything wrong in our world. We’re just going to keep marginally improving, with an occasional breakthrough that accelerates improvements and alleviates pain. I think it’s perfectly fine to point out how our society’s growth over the last 70 years has had flaws- the loss of union jobs, the rise of climate change, the rise of divorcees and co-parenting, mental health issues and mass shootings rising, and on and on. Those things aren’t great, and yes, both the government and the market need to help fix them. But they are.
The best way I can explain this is straight forward- I had a grandfather who died from a brain tumor in 1972 that today probably would have been completely treatable. He was about the same age I was when I almost died last year. If you reverse our chronological order, I would have been the one dead at 41. So in many ways, my grandfather may have lived a more fulfilling, simpler, and happier life than I do. I almost certainly am living better, and in fact, in a better time.
None of the nostalgia on both the left and right is about technology, housing, or economics though, as much as we would like it to be. If that were the case, we would have broad national and international consensus about reversing course on income distribution and labor protections. We’d build more affordable housing and allow for easier migration, at least within national borders. No one other than the most over-privileged brat young conservatives would actually argue that those in the service economy, or gig economy, or any low skilled job deserves to make crap wages, not receive access to quality health care, and shouldn’t be able to afford housing in their community. We are not pre-disposed to hate our neighbors like that. Especially not on the behalf of some rich person.
So let’s be honest, none of this is about economic nostalgia, it’s about demographic changes and identity.
So since both the tweet above and the writer who wrote about it pinpoint the 1950’s, I think it’s worth noting that this was exactly the right place to start our conversation. Yes, it has been 109 years since the last Presidential Election in the United States where only men could vote, and yes, some conservatives actually outright say they think we should go back to some approximation of that (either just men voting, or one vote per household). In the 1950’s, the lion’s share of women were either not voting, or voting how their husbands told them. We were still a solid decade from meaningful Civil Rights legislation that gave even Black men a right to vote. We had an electorate that was overwhelmingly male, and overwhelmingly white. As late as 1988, close to 9 in 10 voters were white. Women couldn’t have their own checking accounts without permission, Black children went to segregated schools, most of our immigration was from Europe yet, Roe v. Wade and no fault divorce were abstract concepts at best, red lining was a thing, and hell, we were still fighting into the 1950’s about desegregating the military. Boy, what changed since the 1950’s, I wonder? The sexual revolution? The Civil Rights Movement? An increase of visas for educational and work purposes for people from non-European countries? The rise of global power nations that aren’t white, such as India, China, Brazil, and Saudi Arabia? Suddenly you lived in a world where women had their own bank accounts and could get a no-fault divorce, so they didn’t have to stay in bad (and often unreported abusive) marriages. Suddenly both parties could enjoy sex for non-child birthing reasons. Suddenly Black people had a vote and could raise their own issues and concerns. Suddenly gay people were just out as gay. Your doctor was less likely to be a White man, or even born in America. We have street signs, instructions, and messages in languages besides English. Hell, we’ve had a Black President now.
The world is dramatically different in most democratized, Western societies, whether we mean the United States, France, England, Italy, or wherever. You can be whatever you want to be in the West, and that’s not really what I think bothers most people bothered by that, it’s that you can be that wherever you want to be it. Yes, we’re going to send jobs to India and China, and then we’re going to take their children in for educational and work purposes, and they’re going to compete with your children. That’s unpleasant. Your son may not want to find a wife and have kids, but if he does, women might be more picky now and demand more from a guy they pick, so your son may not find one. Not only is the world changing, and rather rapidly, but there’s really no good way to be shielded from it. There are no carve outs for you to live in a past world where you didn’t have to interact with people, cultures, and behaviors that you frankly don’t like or want to interact with. If you want the old traditional Christian family structure it will cost you somewhere. Middle, Upper-Middle, and wealthy life styles today are just more expensive than they were for my grandparents. My grandparents bought their home in Pohatcong, NJ for $25,000 cash, some of which they borrowed from family members. When my grandmother died in 2023, I had more than $25,000 cash to myself, and didn’t even think of buying it. It’s on the market now again, and listed at over $400,000.
Politics in much of the Western world today has very little to do with class issues, and there’s no real way to put the genie back in the bottle here. For many people, social welfare and social safety net are just round about ways to say you’re going to give our money to people who aren’t from here, didn’t earn our national wealth, don’t speak our language, aren’t members of our churches, and aren’t a part of our culture. They don’t want the changes our society has undergone, and they have no way of avoiding them. So they’d rather burn it to the ground than help them. Some go so far as to say they are white nationalists, white supremacists, Neo-Nazis, and skinheads. Others say “fuck the poor, cut my taxes.” Running some supposed left-populist political candidates that are white, blue collar men across the nation is not going to meaningfully move any significant portion of these voters, and probably will alienate (at least) an equal number of voters who are currently voting left-of-center. It’s futile, it misses the point all together, and frankly it’s just embracing bad, outdated, poorly thought out policy goals that won’t work. These people are almost cartoon characters. Running away from the main divide in American (or any other pluralistic Western democracy for that matter), how people feel about a less traditional, more pluralistic, changing post-60’s society, is not going to work. They are not going to look away from the culture war issues that motivate them, anymore than a 35 year old single woman in graduate school today that doesn’t want to get married or have kids wants to hear how much you’re going to sell her out. Could it work for one election? Sure, I guess, anything can happen for a short period. It takes a longer term trend line to really change anything though.
I would be remiss if I didn’t scold my brand of liberals for exasperating these issues more than a little bit. We have folks who think the more female/non-white/LGBTQ/Atheist/immigrant you are, the more they want to elect you. This sort of adversarial push has forced a lot of voters who are not very comfortable with Nazis or Hamas to make a very stark choice, and Trump is the living proof that this forced choice doesn’t really work well for us. I mean, it’s worth noting that the only time this guy lost, it was to a 78 year old white man that was viewed as the “moderate” in the Democratic primaries. Even a lot of immigrants, the very group of people that Trumpism rails against the most, are really uncomfortable with what the face of the Democratic Party is to them, and an increasing number of immigrants and non-white people voted for Trump in each of his three elections. Saying “absolutely fuck all of your traditionalism” and pushing them to accept social minority policies and far left economics scares the living shit out of these people. That’s frankly to be expected.
People long for a world where they feel they can do well. That is still the defining question most voters ask, and that is not at all, let alone entirely, an economic question in our modern society. If reading all of this has made you feel dark and gloomy, don’t. There are examples of social progressive movements succeeding even in our modern American society, after the 1950’s. The Civil Rights Movement and the battle for Gay Marriage were won by progressives, even against long odds and an American society that is still overwhelmingly neither Black nor Gay. Both movements achieved success focusing on two things. First, optics. There was a reason that MLK Jr.’s marches were attended by people wearing their Sunday’s best, or that Rosa Parks was the woman that sparked the Montgomery Bus Boycott. The movement for Gay Marriage had won less than a decade after George W. Bush largely ran his 2004 campaign targeting gay marriage bans across the country, and that was because every day, very average to successful American LGBTQ people became the face of the movement. The second thing both movements did was focus on the discussion of rights. You’re not going to convince a White, straight majority that the alternative to them are better than them, but you can convince them that they should be treated as human beings that deserve decency and dignity. Putting forward leaders that are credible with the majority and making the case for simple fairness can give agency to many voters that are even a bit uncomfortable with social change to walk away from their side when they have gone too far.
Last week I wrote about Charlie Kirk at length. My message was simple- this was a horrible tragedy, this is not a right-left political violence problem, and we’re being over force-fed “us vs. them” info. I went on to talk about how Kirk’s death and the hyper-partisan reactions were playing out locally, and how Jimmy Kimmel’s comments about Kirk fit into the larger war on liberal comedy. For those of you who read me regularly, you know this is a lot of typing for me about Charlie Kirk, who had never once been mentioned on my blog before his death. I don’t talk about really any of the MAGA podcast/influencer folks- not Laura Loomer, Nick Fuentes, not even Tucker Carlson. It’s not so much that they are insignificant to me, I acknowledge they have large audiences and a good deal of influence with MAGA leaders all the way up to Donald Trump. I think talking about them is complicated and takes a lot of nuance that you can’t really have in every post. They are not elected officials or government officials who have direct powers to help or hurt us as a society or individuals. I don’t listen to or read any of them, other than when I come across their tweets and other posts, most of which I don’t agree with (occasionally I do, but even a broken clock is right twice a day). On the other hand, and definitely in part because they are not empowered government officials, I absolutely support their first amendment right to speak whatever they wish, free from any government censorship. On the other hand, if they lie or defame people, they should have to deal with their employers, funders, and civil lawsuits from individuals for their actions. I just kind of think their world is largely none of my business, I’m not one of their consumers.
So all the writing about Kirk does kind of prove a right-wing talking point- Kirk is larger in death than he ever was in life. I didn’t give a shit about him a month ago. Now I’m writing about him. But are my writing about the actual person Charlie Kirk, or whitewashed character that has only marginal ties to the actual person? David A. Graham of the Atlantic writes about this, and concludes that this is literally an affront to the actual person Charlie Kirk was. He writes beautifully about the irony in this mythological version of Charlie Kirk:
Kirk’s commitment to debate was inextricable from his political views; he wasn’t a value-neutral advocate for free speech. Kirk arose as a countercultural figure and deployed the First Amendment as a crucial tool for spreading his ideas: In an environment where they were not welcome, he pointed out that they were protected. Now that Kirk’s political allies hold power, however, many appear eager to suppress ideas they dislike. The Trump administration is vowing to use Kirk’s death as an excuse to crack down on dissent even as it lionizes him for defending it.
Kirk began his career planting Turning Point USA chapters on college campuses. As many conservatives were writing off academia, Kirk was evangelizing, creating a beachhead for right-wing views in traditionally liberal environments. Free speech was an important shield for him, because some of his ideas were bigoted, or articulated abrasively.
Some people now praising Kirk are conflating a commitment to argument with a devotion to civility. Kirk succeeded, in part, by eschewing civility in favor of conflict. He said, for example, that “Joe Biden is a bumbling, dementia-filled—Alzheimer’s—corrupt tyrant who should honestly be put in prison and/or given the death penalty for his crimes against America.” (In the same radio show, he questioned whether Kamala Harris is Black.) He bused supporters to Washington on January 6, 2021; invoked the Fifth Amendment rather than answer questions about the insurrection; and campaigned for pardons for the perpetrators.
Kirk railed against transgender and gay rights. He called George Floyd a “scumbag,” declared the Civil Rights Act of 1964 a “mistake,” and claimed that many influential Black figures were in their roles only because of affirmative action. “If I see a Black pilot, I’m going to be like, ‘Boy, I hope he’s qualified,’” he said. He said that if Donald Trump lost in 2024, hundreds of thousands of Haitian migrants would be brought to Alabama, where they would “become your masters.” Comparisons to King are especially ironic because King, Kirk said, was “awful. He’s not a good person.”
I hold some inconvenient beliefs sometimes, but central to them is authenticity. Charlie Kirk said exactly what he said, and simply replaying or reprinting his words is not an attack on him, it is an honest rendering. I don’t agree with virtually any of Kirk’s beliefs about civil rights, Joe Biden, women voting, LGBTQIA rights, “DEI,” George Floyd, January 6th, Donald Trump, the 2020 Election, or really anything I can think of, besides his belief that he had a right to say it. I don’t think that people I deem as bad should be shot, ever. I don’t believe the government should try to cancel a television show, ever. Hell, I’ll just be honest and say I don’t think employers should have any absolute right to view your social media, or censor it, even as I acknowledge that isn’t covered by the First Amendment. I think people should have the ability to be their authentic selves, and in fact I think morally it is an imperative. Yes, if you are out in public (I at least on some level don’t consider social media public, particularly if you are protecting your posts from the entire public), saying something really crazy can get you fired. I typically do not think it should.
The truth of the matter is that even dangerously stupid and ignorant speech should be policed through the court of public opinion, and if your response is that this is failing in our current society, my response to that is this is who we actually, truly are. Trying to censor who we are because this “Trump era” makes you uncomfortable, or because you thought these kinds of opinions were supposed to be gone by 2025, is UnAmerican and morally reprehensible. If it bothers you that Charlie Kirk was amassing followers saying the Civil Rights Act was a mistake, or that he hated Barack Obama and Joe Biden, or that he thinks Kamala Harris is a moron, or that Martin Luther King Jr. was a bad man, or that women didn’t vote, or whatever it is you think- just understand that the people listening and agreeing with Kirk also agreed with what he was saying before he had a job saying it. These opinions and thoughts, they always existed in the world, and it’s not society’s formal job to silence people for saying them. You silence these opinions by not listening and not buying from the advertisers. Charlie Kirk should be able to speak to the audience that believes these things, just as Jimmy Kimmel should be allowed to do the same. There is a market of millions of people who agree with them. As long as that exists, they should exist, and we should make authentic judgments about how we feel about them. It’s pretty simple.
Of course, there is only one logical conclusion to this though- I didn’t like Charlie Kirk. I did not listen to him when he was alive, and I wouldn’t now. He told us how he feels about the role of women in our society, how he feels about Civil Rights in our society, that he thinks most Black Americans in the work place are of lower quality and that they are there because of DEI, that he thinks Donald Trump is a good man and Joe Biden is not, that LGBTQIA people are predators, and lots of other things. Charlie Kirk lived authentically and told us who he is. I did not approve of it. While I would not describe myself as a “Jasmine Crockett Stan,” but I think she’s right to question why any Democrats were voting to honor Kirk in the Congress. Do these Democrats agree with him on his beliefs? Did they agree when he was live? Or are they being inauthentic and cowardly, in hopes that this conversation will go away?
Charlie Kirk’s death has been weaponized to do things that some conservatives wanted to do anyway, like cancel Jimmy Kimmel. The conservatives doing it are being as dishonest as the Democrats in Congress voting to honor Kirk. This is all mythology. It’s creating a martyr of a person who was just a person. It’s gross and antithetical to being a health nation with a vibrant First Amendment. It’s creating a false narrative about who we actually are and who we actually want to be as a society.
In the time since my own near death experience, I have to admit some survivor’s guilt. Once you realize it can all be over in the matter of a moment or a part of the day, you wonder why you got to survive and someone else didn’t. That’s even more true when you pay your respects to someone younger than you. It’s even more true when you know their family and know they’re good people.
On Tuesday night I stood in line for two hours and fifty minutes at the viewing of a young, fallen Easton fire fighter. I arrive there at 7:30pm, after putting my dog down (more on that later), and figured I’d be able to get right through. Instead, it was the longest continual stand I have done in over a year. It was worth it. One thing about Easton, about first responders, and about our local Lehigh Valley wrestling community (his dad was a long time official), we come out for our own. People stood calmly in the line as the 8pm end of the viewing passed and just marched along to the family procession and casket. Cops, fire fighters, EMT’s, blue collar Lehigh Valley people. The honor guard was an incredible touch.
Tyler Weidner was a good friend to my cousin. His father refereed many of my matches. Their family lives up the street. It breaks my heart that they had to endure this sudden tragedy. This young father was way, way too young to die. It’s unfair. As I said, I don’t understand life anymore. Going to things like this, I probably never will again.
If you walk into a convenience store right now, there are kids buying cigarettes, or college kids in bars buying booze, who were not alive on 9/11/2001. There are kids serving in the United States military in foreign countries right now who were not alive on 9/11. I can state this kind of unequivocally now- 9/11 is a long time ago, it is now just a moment in history. There’s a fairly good argument that those moments on that Tuesday morning 24 years ago changed the course of history more than any other point in this century, and yet, it’s not really a part of the political conversation now. We are no longer in Afghanistan, the war that was a direct response to the attacks on America that day. The moment of national unity that 9/11 ignited is most certainly dead and in the ground.
Imagine having a President with 90% approval today, albeit only because society rallied around him. George W. Bush basically exhausted all of that good will and probably is not a President we should emulate today. With that said, imagine any figure in American life taking a bullhorn and telling the assembled first responders at Ground Zero “I can hear you. The rest of the world hears you. And the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon.” The unity in that moment in time was remarkable. It’s something we have never felt since. It’s something we probably will never hear again. Not long after this, it was all gone amidst fights over Iraq, Katrina, Abu Ghraib, and all the other political wars of that moment. But at least for a moment, we had it.
I remember everything about that day. I remember driving to school and remarking that gas was under a dollar. I remember that the sky was a perfect blue, almost completely cloudless here, roughly 75 miles from Manhattan. I remember that we were supposed to have a cross-country meet that day at home. I remember being in Latin I (I had spots to kill as a senior) and saying to a friend named Tarin that this was “definitely al-Qaeda,” (I read a lot of news back then) when we honestly really didn’t know yet. I remember being sent back to homeroom after that period. I remember sitting in senior lunch (privileges to go out to lunch hadn’t started yet) with my friends and talking to our principal about what was happening. I can almost recite the whole day from memory. I remember the weeks after too. I remember going to New York City, to Shanksville, and to Washington, D.C., all somewhat by chance, and seeing the destruction. I remember the terror of the unknown that followed. I was in the Anthrax scare in the U.S. Senate office buildings (I went to meet Rick Santorum. Yes, really.) and remember being quarantined for a night after a girl with me got sick. I remember the military members with machine guns at the Eagles-Giants game in October, the first Monday Night game in New York after the attacks. I think the enduring image though, for me and for everyone else, was still watching the first responders run into the Trade Centers, and not come out until we saw them dug out by their own colleagues in the weeks that came after. It was sick. It was disgusting. They were the best of humanity. The terrorists truly did represent all that encompasses the worst of humanity.
I’m going to be honest- before 9/11, I really didn’t like New York City. I grew up going there, even as a kid. It was big. There really wasn’t that much for me to do as a kid. There was traffic. My family liked going there for stuff that I really didn’t love at the time. I hate all of their sports teams. If I’m even more honest, I found a distaste for Washington, D.C. as a young adult that took me until years later to get over. Today they are two of my favorite places to go. One of the things that 9/11 made me realize though is that to billions of people around the globe, New York and Washington are quite literally the most recognizable symbols of the United States, and possibly the Western World. I am incredibly lucky to live within a driving distance of either. Part of the reason that cowardly bastards who join petty terrorist organizations wanted to harm them is because they represent the best of us in many, many ways.
That’s the other point that I think needs to be made here. Literally only people from these places could have endured these attacks and dusted themselves off and moved forward. They are resilient people. They’re fighters. For all of the mud that gets thrown at some of our biggest cities, I think it’s important that we remember, these people are tough. Real tough. And proud. And after 9/11, they the victims were the example for the rest of us on how to move forward. If you grew up or lived in the area that I lived in, you remarked for years how every town along I-78 from the city out here to Eastern Pennsylvania had flags on the overpasses and memorials to remember their residents who died in the attacks. It was literally every single one.
I think it’s important to also give Shanksville their props too. The tiny Somerset County town and it’s surrounding areas were not ready for Flight 93 to crash there that day. No one was. They rebuilt though, and built a beautiful memorial to the victims. Their Western Pennsylvania grit got put on full display.
As I said, this is all just history now. George W. Bush is a private citizen living in the Dallas area, and the “Bush dynasty” in politics is over. Osama Bin Laden is dead, and I have to say that celebrating his death outside of the White House was enjoyable and well deserved. There are millions of voting aged Americans who have no recollection of 9/11 or were not alive. It is simply a part of the history books now.
It’s up to us to tell that story now. For the sake of history, we all should. We are all the primary sources of how we experienced that day, and the days that followed. I hope we never forget that.
Later on today, Republicans will take control of both houses of Congress, setting up for a unified control of government when Donald Trump is sworn in as the 47th President, later this month. Regardless of what you want the Democratic Party to be, they will essentially be irrelevant in governing America soon. Parties that win elections get to govern. Parties that lose get to complain.
I’ve largely stayed out of the debate over why exactly the Democratic Party lost in the 2024 Election. The reasons for that are fairly simple. First, I think there’s ample evidence that the election should have been much worse for Democrats, based on how they did down ballot from the Presidential race (they did better), so I think I’d be wrong to sit here and tell you how awful everyone did. Second, while I think there were serious problems with the Vice-President’s candidacy, I think it’s unfair to dunk on her after the loss when she didn’t cause most of the problems. Third, while I think Joe Biden does deserve some of the blame for the state he leaves the party in, I basically reject the media’s narrative that he lost the campaign for the party, or even that pushing him out was some stroke of strategic brilliance. My general read on what happened to the Democratic Party is that the root cause of their defeat was a death by a thousand cuts, that many different factors played into their defeat. My big picture opinion is that the problems with the Democratic Party were bigger than Biden, Harris, or even campaign tactics on the trail. Democrats have a mostly systemic problem that would be painful for a lot of people involved if they fixed it.
We make campaigns really complicated and scientific, and really at the end of the day they are more marketing than data science. Whether you’re trying to grow the electorate, shrink the electorate, or whatever, your goal is to convince more people that they want to make the effort to vote, and to vote for your candidate. Most voters don’t have some long checklist of issues they care about, they’ll look at the personal qualities they want and maybe one to three issues they care about. In other words, you want to be talking to the broadest audience possible about things they agree with you on, with the most likable/least offensive messenger possible. If you’re spending a lot of time as a party on stuff that excites 45% of the population, you’re probably going to lose, no matter how well you target voters. Bill Clinton and Barack Obama were both generally likable people, who seemed to like things that normal guys liked, and ran competent governments on the day-to-day. There were a lot of people who didn’t consider themselves progressives or activists, many people who didn’t ever donate a dime, who felt fine casting their vote for them. The same could be said for Joe Biden in 2020.
The Democratic Party largely misread exactly why Barack Obama won two terms, and it has plagued them in almost every election after. It was less about changing social norms and demographic tidal waves changing the country, and more about President Obama providing cool, competent leadership coming out of a turbulent time. He wasn’t winning record numbers of Black, Latino, and young voters because those groups somehow are naturally more liberal than the rest of the population. He won them because they liked him, and he offered ideas that they liked when they heard him. I think that the misread of why Obama won has done serious damage to the party’s brand, and maybe gave a false sense of security that lead Democrats to take positions that were never going to sell. Democrats found themselves arguing the virtues of progressive social policy against conservatives, rather than going back to the faithful argument that all Americans deserve rights and security afforded to them simply as human beings. Democrats found themselves defending an open border, rather than a competent, orderly, and fair immigration process that has the resources to keep people safe. We got cornered into virtue signaling arguments about slogans like “Defund the Police” and “Green New Deal,” rather than fairness in the justice system and a clean, safe environment. Because a lot of donors, activists, and operatives in the Democratic Party wanted Obama’s mandate and legacy to be a demographic tsunami that was leading us to a rejection of white, traditionalist, Evangelical male values, we took his impressive electoral strength as confirmation that he won for the reasons we wanted him to. He didn’t. The belief that he did though lead a lot of the Democratic Party being very comfortable in a perpetual culture war that a combined majority of America either didn’t agree with us on, or just didn’t give a damn about. We spent a lot of time telling America what a bad guy Donald Trump and his supporters were. We probably would have done a lot better the last eight years talking about lowering Medicare’s eligibility age, funding public schools, and building more affordable housing. The Democratic Party lacked anything that could make a majority of America feel excited. We didn’t put forward a big idea that most people felt would improve their lives.
For sure there are other problems with the party. Our campaigns are overly bloated and inefficient, our messaging is too narrow, perhaps our candidates are too cautious. We waste our power on Capitol Hill when we win worrying about process arguments and norms. We view digital and online campaigning as largely a fundraising tool, rather than the battleground. I could go on. None of that on its own is what does us in though. If you don’t know what people like about you, it’s really hard to sell those attributes.
To the extent Joe Biden deserves blame, perhaps the timing was just bad. An 82 year old man just isn’t going to look and act like a 62 year old man. That’s not his fault, nor does it necessarily mean he was incapable of actually doing the job. Perhaps he should have run in 2016. Perhaps, given how close Kamala Harris lost, he should have never (been forced to) dropped out at all. Unfortunately, I think Joe Biden’s biggest political miscalculation in 2020 was trying to appease the numerous but small factions of people in the Democratic Party with his candidacy. Some people were never going to be happy and enthusiastic with Joe, because his brand really was different than the rest of the party. There’s a reason he looked like the most moderate guy on the debate stages in 2020- he knew better than to chase slogan politics. The unique brand that got him nominated and elected in 2020 should have been something he defiantly defended. Doing so would have given him much more space to address inflation, to address global issues, and to deal with a Congress that was increasingly dysfunctional for the latter half of his career in Washington. Governing as a fairly standard ideological Democrat boxed him in with a large chunk of America.
When Kamala Harris de facto took over the Biden campaign in the Summer, I privately told family at the time that she had no chance. Here she was, with terrible approval ratings, serving under a President with bad approval ratings, jumping into the race late, swimming uphill against the demographic history of our country (we elect white guys), and frankly her last Presidential run didn’t go great. She far exceeded my expectations of her. She was a disciplined and focused candidate, she raised money, she motivated people, and most of all, she didn’t make big mistakes. She picked a Vice-Presidential candidate who did the least harm even, a move that is almost always smart. She damn near won despite everything. About the only thing I can say bad about her was that previous Presidential campaign. Her instincts coming out of the 2018 midterms were to chase the lefty activists who seemed to have momentum in the party. Most of America was never there. Trump’s campaign effectively used her words against her. She just couldn’t quite get clear of being viewed as the average Democrat. She just couldn’t quite out run the past. Most of the reasons why (bigotry, the nature of her current job, poor media coverage, etc.) weren’t her fault. That doesn’t change the sense in hindsight that this was baked in from the jump.
The evidence suggests Democrats should have gotten blasted worse in this election. Basically every other governing party in the developed West has either lost or lost seats since the Covid-19 pandemic has faded from public view. Senators Rosen, Gallego, Baldwin, and Slotkin won swing states that Vice-President Harris lost, as did Governor Stein, while outgoing Senator Bob Casey out performed Harris in PA. House Democrats basically held the status quo. All this happened while Donald Trump won the election and the popular vote. If the Republican Party had matched his performance across the country, they would hold a sizable majority in both houses of Congress, comparable to now. This could have been way worse for Democrats. That they avoided it is worth some congratulations.
If you want people to buy your product, you have to sell them something they want. Republicans are always going to try and define the Democratic message as something terrible. The Democratic Party didn’t really push back against those perceptions. Most Americans view Democrats right now negatively. Allowing the GOP to define the Democrats as a “globalist” (such a gross term) status quo, Beltway insider, ideological, “DEI” (I know, horse shit), nerd party isn’t going to work. Marching out a collective of the same old faces and leaders, a surrogate list that still looks like 2009, and messaging points that are approved by every partner in the coalition isn’t breaking that mold.
In short, I think it’s time for some of our leading voices to take a break. Too many of our leaders listen too much to activists and donors in our party, and their views of the world just don’t jive right now with most of the people. Elections are won out where the people are, and the next generation of Democratic leaders should take the timeout we’re in to get out and meet them. Learn what the product is that they want from us, and run with it. Most people aren’t looking for a Bolshevik Revolution in America, but they do want something to be excited and hopeful for. Twenty years from now, the world will remember Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, Barack Obama, Bill and Hillary Clinton, and Nancy Pelosi fondly for the actually good governance they gave us over these past couple decades. We boxed them in though, and it’s time for Democrats to get outside of the box.
Apocalypse Vibes 