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No Culture War articles today? Have we achieved Culture Peace?? No one wants this!
What is there to say? Trumpism is being exposed. Beyond that, democracy itself is being exposed. Our long national nightmare of peace and prosperity is finally over.
Another way of saying this is that it's reverting to the historical mean in terms of sophistication and rhetoric.
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Trump made tariffs a cornerstone of his campaign, and he's acting on that, so there is nothing to expose. But some ppl got more than they bargained for. voter regret. ppl did not expect such bad tariffs, China to retaliate, or the reaction by stocks to be so negative. I think it's a way overreaction.
It's exposed Trump apologists. After years of his defenders insisting we should take him seriously but not literally, it turns out he's a malicious idiot and we should have taken him literally.
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What’s being exposed is our useless government. This may be worth it if it wakes up everyone to what their jobs are supposed to - I have my doubts.
Peace is still there … and unlike the other poster, I agree it’s been peaceful and prosperous for the western world and some adjacencies.
Like all good things, hubris was too high and it’s time to correct course - which this isn’t, nor will we do it after it’s over. Wow will continue.
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I would not call the state of the world today "peaceful".
For whom? Real incomes have been down for a generation for the average American worker, pretty much every other challenge the working class faces is downstream of that. Also, if you are referring to the stock market a) it is not the economy, and b) as of this minute up on the day.
I like the new term "Panicans" which very succintly describes those for whom a bit of chaos and correction is a world changing event, and contrasts nicely with the Stoics, who just want to have a pint and wait for it to all blow over.
They're not.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA672N
While I agree in that in general Americans are incredibly prosperous in absolute terms real median household income doesn't really paint the full picture here.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LES1252881900Q (real male earnings)
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LES1252882800Q (real female earnings)
The growth in real median household income is, to my understanding, driven by more women entering the full-time workforce and the growth of highly-paid white collar service work (which the median woman is more suited to and which AI has a good chance to cannibalize soon) which doesn't benefit you one bit if you're a working class male who can't attract a white-collar partner.
Really, "prosperity" to most people means access to zero-sum things such as land in desirable areas, social status and the labor of other people. Access to those things has absolutely gone down for the median American worker in a world where wealth inequality keeps increasing and where other countries have become much wealthier relative to America, and where worst of all they keep getting blasted by social media about other people having it better than them 24/7.
Pretty much nobody cares that all but the very worst off Americans can afford a flat-screen tv, the total digital sum of human knowledge online and much more food than they could ever stomach even if that would have been unimaginable a few generations ago, all of that is just eaten up by the hedonic treadmill and they're still miserable because they're at the bottom of the totem pole and see no way up.
Maybe you could tell this story before the pandemic, but the pandemic and the aftermath have boosted male median wages too.
It clearly benefits the median American household, so either the median American household has a white collar woman or it's not just white collar woman whose wages are going up.
This is just by definition wrong to some extent, right? To the extent that status is determined by wealth, it isn't affected by wealth inequality. Elon is wealthier/higher status than me and would be if he was worth merely a hundred million rather than a hundred billion. The top 1% are going to buy the 1% most desirable real estate and the median American by definition cannot. Etc.
What has changed here with respect to real estate is that the number of 1%ers has increased in pace with the population. There's 50% more people in the country than there were in 1980 and the California coastline hasn't grown a bit. That means that the median American is living in a less desirable, in absolute terms, than the median American in 1980.
As far as buying others' labor, consumer goods have never been cheaper. Automation has made big strides and there's still countries with much lower wages than the US. Where this has become a problem is with domestic service industries like education, medicine, the trades, etc. but this may be partially an unavoidable effect of the productivity growth that drove down prices in other sectors.
The hedonic treadmill cuts both ways, the things that people think were so great about the imagined past were not considered so great by those living in the actual past. Being at the bottom of the totem pole sucks no matter what year it is.
I'd be interested to see demographics of new households adjusted for population growth. Just anecdotally and based off urban demographics, younger men are more likely to stay at home (especially if lower-earning or unpartnered) whereas the median woman is more likely to have moved out to an urban metro and gotten some sort of decently paying white-collar job.
Hence household income went up but there's still plenty of disaffected men who can't / won't make it in the white-collar world and see their real wages and status falling like a rock. I do agree that it's more accurate to say "real incomes have been down for a generation for many American workers" because if you had white-collar exposure you likely did very well in absolute terms over the last generation.
The issue is that even if they're much better off absolutely and can afford a huge amount of food, technology and clothing most of the things people care about when feeling rich are relative and simply can't be accessible to everyone.
This nails it on the head imo. Even for the median household that has done well in absolute terms they likely live in a smaller or less desirable location compared to their parents and their real wages, while they have gone up, have likely gone up less relative to the cost of domestic services and hence they feel poor because they've gone down the totem pole.
This is very true though. The issue is that nobody thinks they'll be the poor peasant who struggles to feed themselves and they all think they'd be in a higher class where property and domestic service was much cheaper in relative terms.
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Even if it is true, then USA is still hilariously prosperous, also for average American workers. It could be better, but denying prosperity is not honest
and down 7% over last 5 days, 11% over last month, 13% over last year. If you take since Trump inauguration it gets worse.
Yes and that is the point of this excercise. Making things better for the average American.
I think the average American is being quite honest when they say rising costs for everything combined with stagnant wages does not leave them feeling very prosperous. This recent canard of insisting that the working class disbelieve their lying eyes and consider themselves lucky is very strange to me, especially since it usually comes from those who claim to be advocates for the everyman.
And theres approximately 10,000% more media hysterics now than in say, 2022 when it was down roughly 20%. This is not whatsboutism, but rather praise for the recognition then that markets get overheated and correct, and number does not always go up. I remain unmoved, and will contiue to DCA as always.
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People getting way poorer from stocks crashing than from tariffs, which aren't even going to be that bad in terms of projected increase in inflation (2-3% overall). Whole thing feels like a huge overreaction. Stock valuations are based on multiples, so a small loss of profits can mean a large decrease in share price.
I'm genuinely curious about a projected 2-3% inflation when imports are all increased in cost by >10%, and that includes a lot of input costs for domestic goods. It doesn't pass the sniff test. I'm open to being educated about it though.
Not all goods are imported, raw goods are only a fraction of the cost of a good. So it evens out to much less than 10%. A large percentage is advertising . For a $5 cup of coffee Starbucks, only a tiny percentage of the price is the raw goods.
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I have this idea I call 'Mistake Theory' which posits that the only official acts that benefit the public are mistakes. US Politics exist solely as a way to screw the ninety-percenters and the POTUS is the perpetual enemy of the people. So a wildly chaotic moron is better than an effective genius because there's the teensy-tiniest chance something good might happen.
As far as I'm concerned, the collapse is well underway. The only thing Trump did was rip down the curtain. The 'national nightmare of prosperity' ended on 9-11-01 with every political and economic act afterward serving merely as a way of jamming the door open for looters. Better now than 5 years from now when we'd have even further to fall. Democracy has been nakedly exposed since...Obama? Bush v. Gore? earlier? The only question that remains in American politics is which flavor of authoritarianism is going to win--unless...someone makes a huge mistake!
America: I hate to see you go, but I love to watch you leave.
the market was at close to record highs just 4 weeks ago, and the crash came right as Trump unveiled the tariffs. Your analysis seems to get the causality wrong.
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Give it some time, the jury's still out...
This one is true.
The sentiment I'm seeing from both leftists and "centrists" is "surely this won't be allowed to go on, the business class will step in and save us, the 'powers that be' don't like losing money"... if these "powers that be" do indeed have that much political power (because you presumably don't mean Congress), then aren't you admitting that we already don't live in a democracy? If you want the democratically elected president to be overruled by unelected elite interests, then aren't you admitting that you don't think democracy is actually a good thing? Sure, maybe ~30k swing voters in Pennsylvania actually shouldn't have the power to unilaterally dismantle the world economy. That's a perfectly reasonable position to hold. But don't keep calling it democracy.
Combined with the actions taken against Le Pen and Georgescu, we can conclude that there are actually very few principled supporters of democracy, but plenty of people who are willing to use the rhetoric of "democracy" as long as their side is winning.
I guess if 'democracy = one elected man can do anything he likes', then no, very few people believe in democracy, and rightly so. Democracy requires the all branches of government, media, public discourse and checks and balances to be operating as a healthy whole. Or at least a lot better than they are now. Hoping that unelected elites will intervene is just knowing that democracy is no longer working properly and, given that, it's all that might save us.
No, "democracy" is the idea that power vests in the expressed will the people, and frankly the only politics that most people know anything about is presidential politics. With apologies to Madison, the house is not the body closest to the needs and desires of the people, because most people can't name their representative and few people vote in those elections when there isn't a presidential race to goose interest and drag lower offices along on its coattails.
The Demos, whether for cultural, material, techological, or irrational reasons has decided to place its trust in an elected hetmanate occupying the office of the President, imbuing the occupant with totemistic responsibility for just about everything, regardless of his formal ability to cause or prevent the events in question. This has been done with the connivance and acquiescence of the legislative branches, who voluntarily have surrendered most of their actual power to the executive, and have contented themselves with insider trading and playing wannabe-cable-news pundit on CSPAN.
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