What’s needed, then, is a Trumpist political party focused squarely on “old economy”—rural, manufacturing, and blue-collar interests. Which means, in most if not all cases, a party actively opposed to the program of the ruling class. If the Republican Party can become that, all to the good. If it can’t, it should go out of business.
To me, that sounds like a party that stands for stagnation. A party with no vision for the future, only nostalgia for the past.
I will grant that the future on offer from the Democratic Party is dystopian. In my view, they want to “reform” what works (the market). They want to double down on what fails (state-run and state-subsidized education, health care, and “green” energy). And they want to cozy up to the religion that persecutes heretics.
The Republican Party that I would prefer would offer a better vision of the future. Let health care and education be reformed by market forces. Do so by reducing subsidies to demand and restrictions on supply. And protect the principles of the first amendment from the religion that persecutes heretics.
This essay by Anton is a classic example of how Trumpists use cultural issues to con blue collar voters into thinking Trump has their economic interests at heart.
Feed them the line that he will bring back the jobs of yesteryear from manufacturing to coal mining while relentlessly cutting taxes for the wealthiest (especially if they are real estate investors) no matter how much it blows up the deficit.
To read this essay you would never even know we were in the midst of a 100 year pandemic that is killing blue collar workers at a rate exponentially larger than “elites.” Not a word about the pandemic or Trump’s grotesque mismanagement of it and lying about it. Don’t worry about that. Worry instead that your daughter will lose all her track meets to biological boys before she has to change her clothes in a locker room with 50 year old men. That’s the real threat.
Blue collar manufacturing jobs haven’t come back in the last four years and they are not coming back. Farming has been devastated by a totally unnecessary trade war despite massive taxpayer bailouts of the sector.
If Trump had the interests of blue collar workers at heart (instead if his billionaire friends) he would try to insure that blue collar workers had a minimum level of government guaranteed healthcare that was up to the level of virtually all other western industrialized countries instead of trying to reduce the very limited government health benefits they get in the middle of a pandemic. A pandemic entirely unnoticed by Michael Anton.
Obama presided over a massive increase in Opioid deaths mainly affecting blue collar workers. It has also killed far more than the corona virus will (probably if corona virus is still killing this many people in a few years this won’t be true), and its larger societal effects are much more pronounced than corona viruses will be. In Trumps presidency there has been the first leveling off and potentially, still too early to tell, reduction. Also, of course, a person who dies of an opioid overdose will generally lose many more years of life than someone who dies of corona virus.
I personally believe Trump deserves about as much credit for slowing opioid deaths, as he does blame for corona virus (in both cases I think its ridiculously reductionist to describe him as a primary agent). With the caveat that opioids were/are almost uniquely American. Anyway, since this seems to be a cultural issue as well as an economic one I guess I just wonder how you think this fits into your world view. Because it is often talked about in policy terms, but of course there was nothing like the same reaction. And all of your criticisms seem to apply.
I don’t think either President was either much of a cause or much of a solution for the opioid epidemic regardless of who “presided over” what.
I think the current pandemic would have been bad no matter who was President but could hardly have been more mismanaged than it has been.
Trump has been, and continues to be, a fountain of misinformation on the virus. The President’s first responsibility on the matter is simply to tell the truth about it. He has failed miserably at that. In the early days, when it was growing exponentially and every day was crucial, he was telling everyone it was nothing to worry about. He still trivializes it daily.
His politicizing of mask wearing, social distancing, and testing is the height of idiocy. That simply hasn’t happened like this in other countries and that is on him. Masks are the simplest, fastest, cheapest, most efficient way to reduce the medical and economic cost of the pandemic. There are many other countries (most of them in fact) that have gotten better results with these simple measures.
I see, thank you, I think this sufficiently illuminates your thinking on the subject.
Sweden got good results doing nothing. Lots of countries without mask wearing are doing better.
The Coronavirus response remains one of the single worst things foisted on the American people in my lifetime.
It’s now clear that:
1) Virus transmission is relatively simple to control, it doesn’t stick on surfaces or spread through most outdoor activities.
2) Transmission happens almost exclusively in certain well known high risk contexts, not everyday life that has now been heavily regimented by authoritarians.
3) Nearly all the risk of the virus is to the very old or otherwise already sick. If they avoid the virus, the mortality rate is not a big deal.
4) Nursing homes are the key to #3.
5) Everywhere outside of NYC and its surrounding area figured this out, and the death rate isn’t so bad. The single worse decision in the entire outbreak was sending COVID patients into nursing homes, a move pursued by Democract Andrew Cuomo and the other Democratic northeast politicians.
6) Life ought to go back to normal and the authoritarian overreach overturned. Untold suffering is occurring because of the lockdown unnecessarily.
7) It’s pretty obvious that Democrats like this state of affairs as it gives them untold power over the individual, and I expect them to keep it up as long as they can.
8) Leftists orchestrated a second wave by having mass riot and looting events in response to a career violent criminal overdosing on a huge dose of fenatyl/meth while resisting arrest. Then the entire managerial elite debased themselves by saying that you couldn’t visit your family but you could burn down a city if it was in the name of black lives matter.
Lastly and perhaps most importantly.
It’s also rather obvious that herd immunity thresholds are WAY lower than people originally predicted. This thing burns out whenever an area reaches a way lower threshold then the 60-70% we were constantly told.
Is there anything inconsistent between Anton’s concerns and Arnold’s? Anton’s hope is to do better by the middle and working classes in an economy and society that has neglected their interests in favor of those of the managerial/professional class and those dependent on government.
No there is nothing inconsistent between those concerns when framed that way. So what?
All sides from far left to far right to libertarian agree that we need to do better by the working and middle classes. The disagreements are entirely about which policies accomplish that.
Comparing how people did under the current and the previous administrations, and the difference in their policies, tells us which are better.
Anton sounds a lot like the Joe’s Vision web page ( https://joebiden.com/joes-vision/ ) except without all the new programs, race and sex stuff, free college, solar and wind handouts, sucking up to teachers unions, and coerced union membership. Frankly, Biden plays that tune better and no one is going to buy more votes with hand out promises than him.
I wish Anton was a little clearer about what he meant by “the program of the ruling class.” There is the tax-exempt clerisy ruling class that has a definite featherbedding agenda and then the program of ruling class click-bait trolls like George Will and National Review which seems to be “eliminate the minimum wage and flood the country with low skill migrants.” Both of these can safely be ignored.
The ruling class program that cannot be ignored, however, is the march into Argentine-style bankruptcy. The ruling class clerisy and nouveau riche want lots more federal handout spending for “research and development,” grants for connected insiders, and status boosting generally. Federal spending is already unsustainable and higher tax rates will stagnate the economy more than jaw flapping about the rust belt and manufacturing.
The Biden agenda reads a lot like the 20 tenets of Peron’s “Peronist Philosophy.” And the USA is heading to the same place Argentina did under those tenets
Trump and the Republicans’ first task, therefore should be to repudiate Peronism. Trump should apologize for his failure to control federal spending and promise to prioritize cutting federal spending if he is re-elected.
Second, he needs to apologize for not delivering on his health care reform promises. He needs to give up on trying to protect Medicare. Instead, he should propose a plan to eliminate all the federal health programs and devolve the health care safety net responsibility to the states with federal funding of 20 percent of annual federal revenue receipts.
Third, he should propose to pare back all federal education spending and regulation and to instead focus on the one thing that matters most, ensuring that children learn to read. It doesn’t need any additional major spending. Just have DeVos harping on it, measuring it, and talking up the success stories. Only 18 states ensure that elementary teachers understand the “science of reading,” according to the National Council on Teacher Quality. Unsurprisingly only 35% of 4th graders meet NAEP standards of proficiency. This is perhaps the greatest crisis and tragedy of our times and it justifies a Trump proposal to send federal education money to parents instead of schools so that parents can pay for the tutoring their children need to achieve reading proficiency.
Then and only then can Trump celebrate the first three fat years of his Administration and vow to restore them. Three years of labor force participation growth, three years of average wage increases, three years of year over year federal tax revenue increases, three years of year over year increases in international trade volume, three years of minority employment growth, and a return to increased life expectancy, no new wars, no new entitlement programs, decreased rate of increase in regulatory drag, and cheaper and more reliable sources of energy thanks to support for pipelines.
Such a program of independence, for my 2 cents, would appeal much more to the people Anton is concerned about than any patronizing and condescending Peronist program of assigning them a future. The midwesterners that I know and love are going to create their own futures in spite of the ruling class follies.
I dont mean to appear rude, but why do you care? You live in Brazil? Are you still (if you ever were) a US citizen?
I’m curious because a lot of commenters at sites I frequent don’t have much skin in the game but for some reason are pretty invested in certain outcomes here.
I have a home in Brazil that I hope to permanently settle in eventually. I still have real estate in two USA states. My wife is in her two year waiting period to get her green card made permanent. She would prefer spending half her time here and half there. I have two children who are USA citizens. But mostly I care about the USA because it was anti-communist for several decades. Plus, a strong and thriving USA would be good for countries friendly to it such as Brazil. The USA – Brazil relationship has nearly unlimited potential to promote human flourishing.
Thanks for the reply. It was illuminating.
Like it or not, the US is not an ordinary country and what happens in American cultural life has an out-sized impact on the rest of the world, mostly in terms of influencing perceptions of which ideas are high status in a global infosphere and economy. When the American media wants to turn the spotlight on something, it is like when a comet swings by and is temporarily the brightest star in the sky, commanding the attention of the whole human population.
What happens here ripples out everywhere else almost immediately. Which is why within days of the recent incident in Minneapolis, people in Scotland can’t help but feel like they are somehow part of the same big event and are moved by a subconscious compulsion to participate in the signalling of affiliation and sanctimony and start vandalizing a statue of Robert the Bruce, who lived … 700 years ago.
This never, ever happens the other way around. You can draw many circles on Earth of the equivalent population and ask even a highly informed American to name something interesting which happened there in the last 5 years and they will come up totally blank. When has an American vandalized anything here in “””solidarity””” with anything that has happened abroad?
This is the ‘cultural influence’ version of “When America Sneezes, the World Catches Cold.”
What you see going on in some countries – mostly China and Russia – are countries in which top decision makers and very aware of this issue and problem and which are trying to do something about it, namely, to culturally quarantine so they can have ‘spiritual sovereignty’.
Yes, in a globalized world, when the briefly-hegemonic imperial state starts going insane, even whole nuclear powers start working on Benedict Options. There is no easy and gentle way to go about doing that, so only the most serious, determined, and non-squeamish regimes are going to even try. China may well succeed.
But as for everybody else, they are like besieged Melos, America’s influential lunatics do what they can, the rest of us suffer what we must.
How much coverage has the huge Chinese floods been getting in the USA? Millions have been evacuated – see NPR 9 Aug:
https://www.npr.org/2020/08/09/899784094/roads-become-rivers-nearly-4-million-chinese-evacuated-or-displaced-from-flooding
The Ministry of Emergency Management estimates that nearly 55 million people from 27 provinces have suffered from record-setting floods. More than 40,000 houses collapsed; at least 158 people are dead or missing.
Not to mention the continuing threat to the Worlds Largest Dam – Three Gorges. Whose collapse would put at risk some 400 million people – more than America.
Little coverage. But a far more likely disaster than melting ice caps or other Global Warming.
America remains the World’s Best Hope for a better world.
He could do both by rolling back regulations and reining in the Fed, but neither are likely.
Well, what have now is big pharma creating drug additions, agribusiness selling toxic foods, an obese population, low fertility rates, tons of film remakes, tech startups building apps to feed off informational addiction, empty office jobs, false academic research spreading misinformation and etc. This seems like it was fueled by the market, and I don’t want more of this.
I do want an actual vision of a better future, but I don’t want more of what we have now and a greater reliance on the market (at least one globalized) can’t solve this. In fact, it will only make it worse.
“false academic research spreading misinformation” “was fueled by the market”?
Seriously?
Look at the academics producing research that wasn’t replicable just to get jobs in academia and for companies. So much of that information was used by companies, NGOs and governments to make harmful decisions.
Look at the big pharma and food company sponsored “studies” published in medical journals, all produced to get doctors to justify selling harmful or addictive drugs to patients.
I agree with most of what you just said. Academics often do bad studies to build up a resume to get a tenure track job, and then continue to do bad studies to get grants and/or get a better job. Organizations with money fund researchers who they think will “find” results that the organization approves of.
However … Your argument would seem to say that any time there is choice, there is a market. Who should be hired? Who should be funded? But that means that markets are everywhere and in fact there is nothing but markets. When EPA funds a study, it decides who to fund on the basis of who it thinks will give an acceptable result–and indeed that is a common right-wing criticism of government-funded research. Everyone wants money; everyone wants status. And that doesn’t change if they work in a for-profit or a not-for-profit or the biggest not-for-profit of all, the government.
I agree with that, but markets can’t be allowed to go wild. They drives a chase to the bottom in our humanity.
Human nature can’t handle the freedom of the markets.
But there has to be alternatives, and we can find them if we were more imaginative.
So far I think localism, where local communities have a say of direct say politically and economically on what comes in from the outside and can leave if they so choose, is a good alternative. Nassim Taleb has a lecture on it on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=un9i-5pwOUA&t=3211s
It may be true that “Human nature can’t handle the freedom of the markets” but one can just as well say “human nature can’t handle power.” It is humans who will restrict markets, and they are subject to all the problems of human nature.
No doubt Coase would say that governments should have power up to the point where marginal benefit just exceeds marginal cost, and markets should be free up to the point where marginal benefit just exceeds marginal cost. Of course, knowing what those points are (and how and by whom they should be determined) is rather a problem.
Tonight I happened to watch, “Once Upon a Honeymoon”, a 1942 Hollywood movie. One of the bad Nazis says something like, “People can’t handle freedom; we’ll do their thinking for them.” This is supposed to make the audience see how awful the Nazis are.
[Don’t engage in personal attacks here–ed.]
“toxic foods”? What on earth are you talking about?
There are plenty, and they are in a lot of our foods, such as soy, but a major one is vegetable oil:
https://carnivoreaurelius.com/why-is-vegetable-oil-bad-for-you/
It’s been polluting our foods.
Saying vegetable oil is bad for you is rather different from saying it is toxic (i.e., poisonous). And it doesn’t seem reasonable to me to blame “agribusiness” for growing what people want to eat. Especially since that’s what nutrition scientists and government guidelines recommended for several decades. Furthermore, I have eaten plenty of vegetable oil in my life and expect to eat plenty more before I die…
This is getting really off-topic, so I apologize. In my view the questions of the health impact of products made from soybeans is an open controversy. Soy contains several trypsin inhibitors which are not easy to get rid of, which is why early attempts at soy milk for infants born with a rare sensitivity to breast milk caused a lot of babies to get pancreatic cancer. It takes a lot of of heat or fermentation and time to neutralize those inhibitors. More worrying – though still controversial – is an extremely high amounts of isoflavone and phytoestrogen, which effects the endocrine and sex hormone systems. With it’s not clear whether this adversely affects humans, we do know these plant chemicals reduce the fertility of grazing animals, which is probably their adaptive purpose. The trouble is that they are very, very hard to get rid of, much harder than the trypsin inhibitors, and even in purified oil. Soy sauce is ok, miso paste mostly ok, but other products, like any soy-based protein shakes, are full of the stuff. These chemicals also end up in the muscle tissue of the animals who gets lots of soy in feed lots, and that’s on top of the hormone implant sticks and pellets that put into a large number of animals.
In general, plants which create extremely dense bundles of calories and protein make very attractive snacks, and in the evolutionary arms race often have to go to extreme lengths to defend their nutritious seeds from being chewed up before sprouting new plants, and filling the seeds up with toxins like bitter cyanide or endocrine disruptors or making the seeds indigestible are just some of the tactics out there.
Soy is so important because nothing makes as much protein per acre in as wide a variety of terrain and climate under modern intensive agricultural practices. A turn away from soy because of potential health impacts could easily cause a major drop in the affordability of proteins in general.
They are harmful. Humans shouldn’t be consuming them. I got rid of them and my physical and mental health upgraded to the next level.
The satisfaction of human desire, which is insatiable, doesn’t seem like a good compass for society, and most societies until modernity didn’t use it.
We all know that chasing satisfaction for all desires in our personal lives is bad, but we need to apply that on a societal level.
Buddhism is wisely focused on the conquest of desire for a reason.
it’s like toxic masculinity but for food
It is not a binary world, but if the GOP has to represent the multinationalist-globalist-interventionists or the employee class, then it should choose the workers.
Better a party represents workers, than social welfare recipients.
You’re too kind Arnold: it’s not a vision of stagnation, it’s a vision of retrogression. Aspiring to have an “old economy” based on nostalgic agrarianism and manufacturing amounts to aspiring to be what today would qualify as a third world country. This guy seems to have a similar goal to AOC: set the economy back two or three generations.
Not sure about this.
People are going to want manufactured goods and farm output in perpetuity, I predict.
How is being the best at manufacturing and farming “retrogressive”?
As for “comparative advantage”–that is hollow in today’s world. Cars are made everywhere. Why? It is in government that “comparative advantages” largely reside today, not geography.
Read up on Singapore’s Jurong Island and the petro-plants there. BTW, Singapore’s government is deeply involved and financially backing multi-story vegetable factories, to supplant imports of greens.
Singapore’s GDP PPP per capita is about 70% higher than that of the US.
When theories are sacralized, they become theologies.
50% higher
Thx for better accuracy!
Which makes sense, because for the working class the economy was much better two or three generations ago (although the technology was worse). To the working class, “free markets” translates to “compete with hundreds of millions of Chinese laborers who are willing to work 72 hour weeks for a less than a third of your pay”; it’s not an attractive proposition. The 40 hour a week, unionized jobs of the 1970s look very good by comparison.
I don’t know how much any government could hope to bring that back, or what the consequences would be for trying. But I’m hardly surprised that they want it back, or that politicians can win votes by promising it.
For *some* members of the working class, the economy was better two or three generations ago. But most working people did *not* belong to the United Auto Workers or United Steel Workers or a similar union. They did not have terribly high wages and they had to pay the prices for cars and steel-using appliances. Even many of the union members yo-yoed between getting laid off and getting called back as product demand decreased and increased.
The idea that the 1950s was much better for workers is as silly as the idea that ’50s teens were all happily going to sock hops and hanging out at the malt shop.
I read Anton’s article differently. It seems to me to have several Straussian signals in it.
On the one hand, it seems to an invite to a “Don’t hate the player, hate the game” analysis. That is, “What is the better winning alternative?” It is consistent to be against what it takes to win elections, if one is also against elections. If one is going to work with the system as we have it, then the question is what political approach is the least bad option among those that have a good chance of winning.
What Anton’s article demonstrates is that it’s still pretty bad, but more to the point, completely impossible. I suspect the subtitle of his book gives the game away: we are already past the point of no return to save the republic, so, “What now?”
A neo-GOP would need a lot of non-whites that are currently vote banks for the Democrats. “That’s just math”, says Anton, also everybody. Five years ago I said, “Trump is what minority outreach looks like.” Anton put is this way:
In other words, even after Trump, it can’t be some “Hollywood casting American President” like Mitt Romney, it’s got to be another ‘Trump’-style one-in-a-million billionaire celebrity huckster, because that’s what the proles, white and non-white alike, like. Does that seem likely?
Wait, it gets better. Just just one other Trump, but Trumps ad infinitum. Anton says an ‘army of Trumpists’ at every political level and a deep bench for high office. Lol, he’s joking. No, really, he’s actually joking.
Oh, but better than that, they would have to be Trumps that can talk the Trump talk on the campaign trail and in public on Twitter or whatever, but in secret be administrative and leadership geniuses, like that old SNL skit, “President Reagan, Mastermind”. The clients across all ethnicities will have to be bought by reshoring all those real-man jobs somehow, and they will have to stay bought, even as the demographic tide continues to flood in, year after year.
Well, the more one looks at it, the more it gives itself away. “Regime Change or Die”.
Given that Anton identifies as a West Coast Straussian, I would think that a Straussian reading is pretty much mandatory.
> Well, the more one looks at it, the more it gives itself away. “Regime Change or Die”.
Flight 93 Election all over again.
“And protect the principles of the first amendment from the religion that persecutes heretics.”
Hear, hear! But how do you want the Republican Party to do that? On the one hand, what would you like to see them do, and on the other hand, what would be going too far?
Immediately defund Fed support for all colleges who forced any professors to resign based on speech. Also end all Fed loans to students there.
Explicitly write that, for all legal purposes, “diversity” includes diverse political parties and support, and explicitly support for opposing Presidential candidates with some level of 80% of the prior 3 election average.
Virtually no colleges have professors who have publicly supported Trump – so none are “diverse”, so any who advertise themselves as diverse are subject to false advertising charges. The DOE & DOJ should be funding students suing their “diversity” colleges for false advertising.
Sorry, Arnold. This is not the time for searching for a Party offering a better vision of the future. There is no future if the new coalition of barbarians is not stopped. Whatever Trump’s 2016 intentions were, so far his main achivement has been to slow down the barbarians (the slow-down has forced the barbarians to change tactics repeatedly, and now they are pursuing a two-prong strategy to win or steal the election –we can discuss it but it’d take too much space). Right now, the barbarians are focused on destroying him. The choice is simple: either you help Trump to stop the barbarians or you are with the barbarians (by omission or commission). This is politics, that is, about grabbing and expanding government power, not about lost or possible paradises.
You or any of your readers may like to frame what is going on in some alternative way. Please let us discuss both.
I definitely agree with Kling on this.
This virus has demonstrated that most higher education can work well online. There is giant opportunity for reform there. High quality education should be available to anyone who wants it and is willing to pay a reasonable cost.
The existing higher ed system artificially concentrates many career pathways and economic prosperity into a small number of expensive boom cities. Libertarian reforms would absolutely spread out economic propsperity and opportunity geographically. And reforms would weaken the undesirable caste-system nature of the current system.
I’m disappointed to read Anton advocating an “old economy” focus. We should want manufacturing, but new-economy innovative high-tech manufacturing, not old-economy manufacturing. I’d choose Peter Thiel as a better thought leader of a forward thinking political right.
This virus has demonstrated that most higher education can work well online.
No, that has not been demonstrated at all. We know that most colleges finished last semester with online instruction. But we don’t know s**t about how much students learned.
Of course, we don’t have much better knowledge of how much students learned from in-person instruction.
It’s not just Spring, Summer semester as well which just ended; many universities held all classes online. Fall is going to be a more complicated hybrid model. It depends on the class, I think, so many a chemistry lab might be in person, but strictly textbook classes will be online.
Not everyone is convinced that online instruction works. How much do we normally know about how much students learn?
I personally took an advanced math class at a prestigious university last Spring: it was a normal on-campus in person class until spring break when it was forced to go online. I felt that the class worked *better* in the online format. Even when the class was on-campus in-person, the classroom lectures weren’t useful. The learning happened when it’s just me studying the textbook and working on problems and preparing for tests; and that part worked identically whether the class was in-person or online. In theory, I could just learn everything from the textbook myself without a college, but I feel having a human coach, human classmates, and getting course credit is all very important. The online experience gave me those things, without the hassle of commuting to campus. And until 2020, this type of online class really wasn’t an option.
I’m glad it worked out for you. I’m now going to be uncharitable and say that a major reason it worked out for you is that you wanted to learn the subject matter. You were not taking the course because you wanted to get a passing grade. You were not taking the course because you needed the credit. For most students most of the time, those are the motivations (coupled with “maybe this will be interesting; I’ll take a chance”).
But with such motivation, student’s major concern is “will it be on the test?” Then, the material that will be “on the test” is crammed into short- and medium-term memory without much understanding, is not used after the test, and gradually decays to nothing plus epsilon.
Just about nobody is interested in finding out how big that epsilon is. So we don’t know what it is.
It sounds to me like that class hit your sweet spot. Enough time-structure and human interaction–and course credit :)–to keep you on task, but not any useless extras.
You are an interested student and a thoughtful internet commenter, a double minority 🙂
“Let health care and education be reformed by market forces. Do so by reducing subsidies to demand and restrictions on supply”
Did you mean college education? Because you can’t use the market on k-12. One key choice parents don’t have is right to refuse to educate their children. Moreover, unless schools are allowed to utterly reject students–I mean all schools, for any reason–then schools can’t be market driven either. And even at the college level, you’re going to have trouble with the rejection issue, as the racial imbalance will be catastrophic.
I suspect health care will have the same limitations, although that’s not my field.
There are other ways for the GOP to develop without doubling down on the same stupid policies theyve pushed for the past 30 years.
There is tons of potential for K-12 market-oriented reforms. The K-12 school choice initiatives have already demonstrated positive results. To take one example, KIPP schools perform measurably better than traditional schools on test scores.
And laws can be changed to relax compulsory education laws. Many parents are already allowed to homeschool their kids, and that is quite flexible.
Arnold: A party with no vision for the future, only nostalgia for the past.
The past had one HUGE thing not mentioned explicitly by Anton or commenters.
Most workers thought that their kids would have better lives.
The Republicans should be focused on married voters with kids, and how to best help them achieve better lives.
“Going to college” used to be it. But now too much college is mere indoctrination, tho too many jobs still require it.
I’m convinced that “Hyper Asset Inflation” is the key reason that huge US budget deficits aren’t causing big inflation – and won’t in the next 10-20 years. Tho house prices & stock prices will absorb the printed money and continue rising. Call them stimulus checks, or helicopter money, or socialism – but Trump sending out cash to everybody increases the absolute material well-being of the bottom.
Tho it doesn’t upset the status-ranking of prestige and domination. Republicans should keep doing it until all who want to work are in some kind of jobs.
US jobs, and increasing the wages of those jobs thru market forces, should be the key Rep priority.