Dissonance - Cognitive and Otherwise

I want to contrast the day to day life I lead - too much time sitting in front of the computer, wisecracking with friends and family during the occasional Zoom call, complaining about the various aches and pains mostly which are due to arthritis, on a daily basis doing some short form writing while much less less frequently writing something long form such as this post, worrying about what we should have for dinner, tracking how the Yankees are doing now that it's baseball season, and a host of other behaviors that I would describe as normal, even if they are not completely routine.  Our downstairs furnace/AC has not been functioning and today the guy from Lanz is here to do repairs and the semi-annual maintenance.  It turns out that the thermostat had gone bad (no idea why) and was just replaced.  So the unit is functioning now.  Hurray!!  Day to day existence does provide its little victories now and then.  And it provides its little pleasures too.  Yesterday to celebrate Mother's day we went to Sun Singer for happy hour.  We had a glass of wine (better quality than the normal fare we have at home) and a margherita flatbread which was very tasty.   We sat outside for that.  If the weather remains mild, we'll be doing that more frequently.  I wear a mask when going shopping, which now seems to be the new normal, but I don't wear one at home, even when the repairman is here to visit.  Not perfectly consistent, I will admit.  But it seems normal to me.

There is a non-normal part of my day that I will describe below.  But first I want to contrast my usual home life with what seems to be our disastrous national politics.  Here I will list and give brief descriptions about what bugs me that I'm not seeing discussed much at all. 

• The decline in manufacturing, which probably goes back to the 1980s but manifest for real in 1990s, coupled with the decline in unions (remember that Reagan busted PATCO, which was the start of the whole thing), was a complete disaster for White male blue collar types.  They couldn't or wouldn't adjust to service sector employment (at lower wages than they had been earning previously).  This is the fundamental source of anger among Trump's base. 
• The second war in Iraq, the one that followed U.S. involvement in Afghanistan after 9/11, was another complete disaster.  There weren't any WMDs.  The Iraqi people didn't want Americans there.  Many vets after returning home committed suicide.  Since the military is all volunteer, one wonders how many of these people enlisted in the first place because of poor economic prospects at home.  If that was typical, the Iraq war was rubbing salt into the wound.
• People who are not healthy from an economic perspective often become unhealthy in a way where they need to see a medical doctor.  The opioid epidemic was largely concentrated in these blue collar types and, in a downward spiral, made them unemployable thereafter.  Life became hopeless for them. 
• If the regular labor market wasn't going to solve this issue, then perhaps government spending in the form of massive infrastructure investment would provide a sufficient number of decent blue collar jobs.  Further, America's infrastructure has been declining at least since Reagan, so this would be killing two birds with one stone. This piece by Felix Rohatyn and Everett Ehrlich to establish a national infrastructure bank came out prior to the 2008 election.  That never got done.  You might argue that if the Democrats had fought off the Tea Party challenge in 2010 and retained control of the House, it would have gotten done then.  Alternatively, you might argue that this should have preceded the fight for Obamacare, since the case for doing something big about infrastructure should have had cross-party appeal and there would have been a better chance for the Democrats to maintain control of the House that way.

In sum, we don't connect our present social ailments to our history in a very good way.  This has let Trump own the MAGA types by feeding them red meat - xenophobia and racism - without doing anything of note to help them economically.  We know from history that movements toward fascism are prefaced by economic dislocation of the masses.  This gives a strong reason to connect to our history.  Nonetheless, we don't seem to do it.

Let me turn to the next set of issues which can be summed up with two points:

• Democrats are too reactive.  We knew that the Supreme Court was going to overturn Roe ever since Amy Coney Barrett was appointed an Associate Justice.  Why else was there a rush to get that appointment in while Trump was still President?  How come it takes Alito's leaked draft to elicit such a strong response?  Why wasn't a well planned strong response contemplated and articulated much earlier?
• Democrats put too much faith in the system and that it will correct itself.  There is ample evidence that the system has been manipulated by the Republicans in a way that is horrible for democracy.  Why should anyone trust the system now?  And if that's the right way to consider things, why not work through outside-the-system approaches that can be effective?  

Then there is the flip side of this.  In a recent opinion piece by Jamelle Bouie called Why Republicans Are So Angry About the Supreme Court Leak, he argues that:

When McConnell led the Senate Republican caucus in a blockade of President Barack Obama’s nominee for the Supreme Court in 2016 and then killed what remained of the judicial filibuster the next year to place Neil Gorsuch in the seat instead, they diminished the legitimacy of the court. When those same Republicans looked past a credible accusation of sexual assault to confirm Brett Kavanaugh in 2018, they again diminished the legitimacy of the court. And when, with weeks left before the 2020 presidential election, Republicans ignored their own rule from four years earlier — that an election-year vacancy “should not be filled until we have a new president” — to place Amy Coney Barrett on the bench in a rushed, slapdash process, they once more diminished the legitimacy of the court.

I would add to this McConnell's blockade of Obama's nomination of Merrick Garland had a significant influence on the 2016 election as it strongly encouraged those who wanted to get rid of Roe to vote, with that having an immediate impact given the open seat on the Court.  Further, the Senate's perfunctory dismissal of the charges in the two impeachment trials let a criminal President off the hook.  The outcome of the first trial allowed Trump to nominate Amy Coney Barrett, even though she must have been well aware of his criminal acts. This followed William Barr's perfunctory dismissal of the Mueller Report. In our country's move toward fascism, there have been many steps taken.  The enablers are first McConnell, then Barr, and then other Republicans in Congress.  Their lack of spine in dealing with these dismal realities offers another reason to work outside the system to stop this descent into societal madness. 

We seem headed for Civil War.  How much of that will be violence versus information warfare of some kind or still some other form of warfare I cannot say.  But there doesn't seem to me to be a path that gets everyone back to a normally functioning society without such a civil war happening first.  I can't be the only one who thinks and feels this way.  

Now let me try to bring this back to me personally and how it impacts my day to day existence.  At home, my wife and I often do separate things.  She will watch TV - often gardening shows, or shows about house fixer uppers, some light comedy too, but then a good dose of MSNBC.  I'm sitting at my computer, which is in a different room, but when I don't use earbuds I can hear the TV.  And once in a while it sparks a rage in me.  Sometimes it's reading something online that sparks the rage. I don't do anything about it, but I do think about it.  I know from when I was working full time that anger is not a good emotion for me.  I lose my rationality when I'm angry and I get even more single-minded than I usually am.  I'm okay with getting angry when the ref makes a bad call in a basketball game I'm watching.  But that's about the only situation where I think my anger is okay.  Otherwise, I'm afraid that my anger will take me down a bad path.

I have thought for a while that high-level Democrats should model voters like me after the Walter White character in Breaking Bad.  In addition to the anger, there is substantial intelligence coupled with a demoralizing sense of impotence.  And some of this anger is directed at Democrats because they seem not to get this - they are still trusting the process implicitly.  

I hope they'll figure it out before it's too late.