The clash between labor and bosses used to be so violent that it sometimes resulted in deaths. Now no one wants to talk to one another. Remote workers slack off as quiet quitters, employers scheme as quiet firers and some disgruntled employees slink off to unionize while no one is watching.
In this politically polarized environment, Americans who dislike both major parties are excluded from the dialogue.
Former President Donald Trump faces legal and political jeopardy on many fronts. He is arguably guilty of treason for attempting to conspire to overthrow the government on January 6, 2021. As a real estate developer in New York, he engaged in shady tax filings. There have been allegations of fraud. He hobnobs with political extremists. Given all this, it seems strange that what we are talking about, and what the FBI and the Department of Justice are going after him about, is the relatively minor issue of documents that he took out of the White House without permission.
The most effective Republican talking point against Joe Biden’s attempt to forgive outstanding student loans is that people who didn’t go to college shouldn’t have to pay for those who did. But in a country as big as the United States, everyone inevitably has to pay for other people’s choices and politics.
President Biden delivered a primetime speech that was marketed as an appeal to protect American democracy but directly targeted President Trump and his Republican supporters as the main threat to that noble institution. Gravely undermining his antiauthoritarian message was the stagecraft of the event in Philadelphia, which featured dystopian lighting and the ominous sight of two US Marines standing at attention.
Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev died, leaving a legacy of ruin that is often overlooked by triumphalist American analysts who still gloat over our so-called victory in the Cold War.
Depending on their politics, people are praising or sending threats to employees of the National Archives in the week of the records raid at Mar-a-Lago.
Middle-class Americans don’t have a lot of government programs directed at helping them. So it’s not surprising that one criticism of student loan forgiveness by Biden two months before an election is catching on: that it feels like the government is trying to buy votes. Only in an electorate accustomed to getting nothing back from its political class would such a statement resonate as well as this one.
I spent two weeks in Russia and was greeted with nothing but friendly hospitality. But Americans refuse to accept that. Psychological projection? Or propaganda?
New York City congressional candidate Carolyn Maloney is running a gender-based campaign arguing that she will always put women first. What are male voters supposed to think about that?
