A year ago the secprogs were praying, after their manner, for a recession that would get Trump voted out of office in 2020. It does happen in such a circumstance; look at Carter and George H.W. Bush and Herbert Hoover.
But they can't seem to stick to one script, and in the era of social media, it's a lot harder to talk out of both sides of your mouth without the same audience hearing opposing stories from the same person. When there was a little less information and a lot more control, a lot of people will hear one bad story, and a lot of other people will hear another bad story, and most of the rest will hear both but only in small enough parts that it will seem less like a contradiction and more like a complex mass of bad news. The few who grok both prongs of the conspiracy for what they really are, were few enough not have much electoral impact.
Not anymore. Now most of us have the whole story at our fingertips. There's still more information and disinformation than we as a society are savvy enough to see all the way through yet, but the genie is out of the bottle.
So now when false rape accusations get made against high profile political appointees, we still have people picking sides based on inadequate evidence, but everybody can see how embarrassing the process of sausage making is. Faith in the old institutions is eroded, but not just in the targets that those who stooped to low tactics hoped to disparage.
And when a potential crisis arises in Hubei, the Dems poo-poo Trump for overreacting and don't let him do anything but cut off trade with China, and say "go to the Chinese New Year parade or you're racist." When that turns out to be inadequate, they poo-poo him for not having done enough, and cite as evidence a bunch of watery out of context quotes that were intended to give people some hope and instill peace, and stay mum about having discouraged social distancing at a critical time because it may have been too early to know but racist signaling in retrospect is really not a fair counterpoint to a public health concern. When the damage that was done continues to blossom, they poo-poo him for his optimistic naïveté and start doing their Chicken Little impressions.
So now we're basically in a recession. If this all ended tomorrow, maybe it wouldn't qualify as a real recession; it's not so much that people are fiscally battening down the hatches to weather out a storm of low confidence, but everybody just putting their business on hold. The demand is pent up, not gone, and the big companies that operate a lot on LTAs are stuck between trying to get out of them and just trying to manage them in the new situation. But after a while people run out of the capacity to keep waiting, and businesses do board up, and workers do try to find alternative sources of income, and after a while longer the chances of the band getting back together start pointing at zero.
But even now this isn't really a recession. The stock market's behavior is just a symptom. What this is, is a crisis. And a crisis is like a war: the leaders who demonstrate the willingness and intent, in word and deed, to help America survive and thrive, are the ones who will keep or gain the reins of power until normality returns.
But the Dems have been telling us for over a decade now that, either by name or by effect, America needs to end, and we either ought to be subsumed in either some kind of global identity or anonymized under a swarm of immigrants and intersected identities that still think the brass ring known as the American dream is still here to be grasped.
Whatever the world as a whole is going through, these considerations are a luxury that Americans are decreasingly willing to indulge in. We finally have a real taste of toilet paper shortages and bread lines, and "well, at least the billionaires can't hoard any more than the rest of us" no longer sounds so comforting.
In the end, who is more likely to keep the power? The known quantity, or the challenger who has no relevant experience (remember when that was a meaningful criticism)? In the end, who is more likely to win the election? The guy who stumbles along the way but at least tries to remind us that this isn't the end of the world and is actually trying to do something, or the guy who still thinks pronouns and replacing convicts in prison with socially distant paddle boarders are more pressing concerns than toilet paper and access to food?
But they can't seem to stick to one script, and in the era of social media, it's a lot harder to talk out of both sides of your mouth without the same audience hearing opposing stories from the same person. When there was a little less information and a lot more control, a lot of people will hear one bad story, and a lot of other people will hear another bad story, and most of the rest will hear both but only in small enough parts that it will seem less like a contradiction and more like a complex mass of bad news. The few who grok both prongs of the conspiracy for what they really are, were few enough not have much electoral impact.
Not anymore. Now most of us have the whole story at our fingertips. There's still more information and disinformation than we as a society are savvy enough to see all the way through yet, but the genie is out of the bottle.
So now when false rape accusations get made against high profile political appointees, we still have people picking sides based on inadequate evidence, but everybody can see how embarrassing the process of sausage making is. Faith in the old institutions is eroded, but not just in the targets that those who stooped to low tactics hoped to disparage.
And when a potential crisis arises in Hubei, the Dems poo-poo Trump for overreacting and don't let him do anything but cut off trade with China, and say "go to the Chinese New Year parade or you're racist." When that turns out to be inadequate, they poo-poo him for not having done enough, and cite as evidence a bunch of watery out of context quotes that were intended to give people some hope and instill peace, and stay mum about having discouraged social distancing at a critical time because it may have been too early to know but racist signaling in retrospect is really not a fair counterpoint to a public health concern. When the damage that was done continues to blossom, they poo-poo him for his optimistic naïveté and start doing their Chicken Little impressions.
So now we're basically in a recession. If this all ended tomorrow, maybe it wouldn't qualify as a real recession; it's not so much that people are fiscally battening down the hatches to weather out a storm of low confidence, but everybody just putting their business on hold. The demand is pent up, not gone, and the big companies that operate a lot on LTAs are stuck between trying to get out of them and just trying to manage them in the new situation. But after a while people run out of the capacity to keep waiting, and businesses do board up, and workers do try to find alternative sources of income, and after a while longer the chances of the band getting back together start pointing at zero.
But even now this isn't really a recession. The stock market's behavior is just a symptom. What this is, is a crisis. And a crisis is like a war: the leaders who demonstrate the willingness and intent, in word and deed, to help America survive and thrive, are the ones who will keep or gain the reins of power until normality returns.
But the Dems have been telling us for over a decade now that, either by name or by effect, America needs to end, and we either ought to be subsumed in either some kind of global identity or anonymized under a swarm of immigrants and intersected identities that still think the brass ring known as the American dream is still here to be grasped.
Whatever the world as a whole is going through, these considerations are a luxury that Americans are decreasingly willing to indulge in. We finally have a real taste of toilet paper shortages and bread lines, and "well, at least the billionaires can't hoard any more than the rest of us" no longer sounds so comforting.
In the end, who is more likely to keep the power? The known quantity, or the challenger who has no relevant experience (remember when that was a meaningful criticism)? In the end, who is more likely to win the election? The guy who stumbles along the way but at least tries to remind us that this isn't the end of the world and is actually trying to do something, or the guy who still thinks pronouns and replacing convicts in prison with socially distant paddle boarders are more pressing concerns than toilet paper and access to food?
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