He’s not wrong.
We’re still a bunch of greedy monkeys, and no amount of education or “proper parenting” can fully override the base biology all the time for every person.
As much as it would be great to be better, we aren’t even close.
Yeah, he raises a good point.
The question then becomes: how do we make the people who feel excluded (and hence want to burn everything down) feel included?
By stopping austerity. Tax the wealthy and reinstate everything that’s been torn down since the new deal. Shift taxes from taxing labour to taxing assets.
I thought facts didn’t care about their feelings.
How about helping the people who are genuinely being excluded?
Wasn’t it better in the 90’s already, and it got worse in the last 20 years?
I’m not at all convinced, because the poor aren’t the ones who elected Trump. Both the rich and the poor voted for Harris. Here’s the data:
Ordinary people don’t keep track of billionaires. Almost no one even knows how many billionaires there are, or how many billions they have. I don’t know and I bet that even most people who blame billionaires for everything don’t know. If there are twice as many now as there were before and each one has twice as much money, the public won’t even notice.
IMO Trump support is due to envy and resentment, but it’s not the resentment of the rich by the poor. It’s the resentment of the middle class by the working class. Look at the results by college education:
(Note that while income and education are correlated, my first plot shows that the people without a college education who are voting for Trump aren’t voting for him simply because they’re poor.)
It used to be the case that mass media was controlled largely by people with middle class values. The people who opposed vaccination and supported renaming the Gulf of Mexico were called crackpots and they wouldn’t appear in most mainstream newspapers or TV news. Neither the Democrat nor the Republican candidate for President would agree with them.
Now, thanks to the internet, these people have been able to organize into a mass movement and they want to smash the institutions built by the middle class that looks down on them. They voted for Trump because he’s culturally one of them, despite the fact that he’s a college-educated billionaire.
Do experts say Trump is a fascist? Do experts say vaccination is essential for public health? Do experts say tariffs will wreck the economy? Now Trump will make those experts cry delicious liberal tears…
brutal, blunt and true.
Fucking depressing, and totally accurate
Humans just aren’t actually good. We’re capable of amazing things, and also great cruelty
We’re right in the middle. The scales tip in whatever direction circumstances dictate. It’s quite something, especially because we all want to b the the “good guy”. We’re just not wired that way
