A thread for Democrats Only by THGRRI

REAL WORLD EVENT DISCUSSIONS

A thread for Democrats Only

POSTED BY: THGRRI
UPDATED: Sunday, June 21, 2026 06:37
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Tuesday, May 19, 2026 1:55 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
The only problem with that story is that you've had plenty of opportunity to reverse it, but it always gets worse when you guys run the show too.

Go fuck yourself, Paul.

Nobody trusts the likes of you either.

--------------------------------------------------

Be Evil. Be a dick.
6ix, you are completely fucked up in the head.

I know you are, but what am I?

Go fuck yourself, retard.

The Democratic Party is dead. Finished. You lose everything.

Move out of my country. Everybody hates you.

--------------------------------------------------

Be Nice. Don't be a dick.

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Wednesday, May 20, 2026 5:35 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
The only problem with that story is that you've had plenty of opportunity to reverse it, but it always gets worse when you guys run the show too.

Go fuck yourself, Paul.

Nobody trusts the likes of you either.

--------------------------------------------------

Be Evil. Be a dick.
6ix, you are completely fucked up in the head.

I know you are, but what am I?

Go fuck yourself, retard.

The Democratic Party is dead. Finished. You lose everything.

Move out of my country. Everybody hates you.

--------------------------------------------------

Be Evil. Be a dick.

Above is an example of 6ix's Nihilism.

Below is an example of Trump’s Nihilism.

Trump, after getting a private talking-to from Xi, now wants to know why any of this is a big deal.

Trump was asked about concerns that China was inserting code in crucial systems that control various parts of American infrastructure, such as energy, communications, and water. “You don’t know that,” he answered. “I’d like to see it, but it’s very possible that they do. And we’re doing things to them. I told them, ‘We do a lot of stuff to you that you don’t know about, and you are doing stuff to us that we probably do know about.’ We do plenty. It’s a double-edged sword.”

Instead of saying that these cyberattacks were real threats and that the country’s national-security professionals were working to stop them, the president of the United States gave an answer that just as easily could have come from a Chinese official: Secret code in your power grid? You don’t know that. We’d like to see the proof. But you Americans do plenty of things to us that we probably don’t even know about.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Wednesday, May 20, 2026 6:39 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Trump’s deportations are costing Americans jobs

May 19, 2026

https://attentiontotheunseen.com/2026/05/19/trumps-deportations-are-co
sting-americans-jobs/

The New York Times reports:

The Trump administration has long claimed that mass deportations would deliver more jobs and higher wages to American-born workers. But a new study casts doubt on that assertion, undermining a central tenet of the president’s immigration policy.

Recent surges in deportations have led to job losses for both immigrant and American-born workers, while wages have stayed flat, according to the study, published by the National Bureau of Economic Research, a nonpartisan research organization. Construction, which depends heavily on immigrant labor, was impacted more than any other industry studied, with American-born workers losing more jobs as a result of the deportations than the undocumented workers who remained. https://www.nber.org/papers/w35129?utm_campaign=ntwh&utm_medium=em
ail&utm_source=ntwg5

The study offers the first national analysis of the effects of the Trump administration’s aggressive deportation operations on the labor market, comparing communities that experienced surges in deportations between January 2025 and October 2025 with those that did not.

Analyzing federal labor data, researchers focused on four industries that rely heavily on undocumented immigrant workers: agriculture, construction, manufacturing and wholesale. Deportations had a chilling effect on each of those industries, disproportionately affecting men, who accounted for more than 90 percent of the immigration arrests. Taken together, the affected industries saw a 5 percent drop in employment for male undocumented workers and a 1.3 percent drop for male American-born workers without a college degree.

The researchers found no evidence that employers increased wages to attract American workers. Instead, work slowed.

In construction — where the researchers estimated 15 percent of the workforce is undocumented — American-born workers have paid a price for the deportations, the study found: Employment dropped by 3 percent for male American-born workers without a college degree, and 7.5 percent for undocumented workers. For each arrest, six American-born workers lost a job, and four undocumented workers lost one.

“Construction companies view it as easier to reduce production, reduce the construction of new homes and new buildings in general, rather than try to increase wages for U.S.-born workers,” said Chloe East, an author of the study and an economics professor at the University of Colorado, Boulder.

Previous research has also shown that increased immigration enforcement slows housing construction, drives up home prices and leads to job losses for American-born workers.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Wednesday, May 20, 2026 3:11 PM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Barney Frank, now in hospice care, has an urgent message for Democrats hoping to bounce back from Trump

Democrats have a chance to defeat President Donald Trump's brand of right-wing populism, but only if the party embraces core economic issues instead of polarizing culture fights.

By Anthony Brooks

May 14, 2026

https://www.wbur.org/news/2026/05/14/barney-frank-hospice-congress-dem
ocrats-trump

Brooks: Let me start with a very general question. You've been talking to CNN, Politico and other journalists, including me. What is it you want to say about this moment?

Frank: "That it is essential for the values that have driven me into politics to defeat right-wing populism, and that the major obstacle to doing that is the insistence by part of the left wing of pushing everybody to adopt politically unacceptable views. I'm not telling people I don't want them to advocate for those things — I filed a bill to legalize marijuana in 1972 and I didn't think it was going to go anywhere. My problem is that instead of treating some of these reforms as issues which are currently unpopular — for which you have to build support — they instantly make them litmus tests for everybody and therefore make it harder for us to win."

Brooks: What specific examples of litmus tests are you talking about?

Frank: "Open borders is one. Defunding the police would be another, along with insistence on political correctness and transgender participation in girls' sports. And environmental issues like the Green New Deal — they just go too far."

Brooks: Your book is entitled "The Hard Path to Unity: Why We Must Reform the Left to Rescue Democracy." [Publication date September 15, 2026] What other ways does the left have to reform itself?

Frank: "Beginning in the '80s there's a sharp divergence between economic growth and the extent to which that's shared. After the financial crisis, there's anger about inequality and I was one of those trying to get Democrats to move on this. And finally, after the emergence of Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump and people like like Marine Le Pen [in France], there was movement on the economic issue. At that point I had hoped, 'OK, now we're all for fighting inequality and we'll diminish the anger.' But the problem was that those on the left, who had been right on the economic issue, decided that they could do even more changes. They said, 'Good, let's do the economics, but let's get rid of all these cultural and social evils.' And they went way too far. Like a lot of ideologues, they convinced themselves that the public agreed with them far more than it did."

Brooks: I want to ask you about the last 10 years, which have been dominated by Donald Trump. Is the dream of furthering liberal democracy gone for good, or do you think it will come back?

Frank: "It's not gone for good but there's been a lot of harm done. That's why I have a sense of urgency and why I'm taking advantage of this situation to talk about it. If liberal Democrats, not just here in America but elsewhere, do not repudiate the extremism that drives away a lot of voters, we're going to have this kind of [right-wing] populism for the long-term. And as to Trump, I have developed my theory about him: It's not just that he's bad on all these values, but he is an idiot savant. He has just one talent: an ability to exploit anger that got him into power. But having gotten into power, he's got nothing left, and that's why now he's just floundering."

Brooks: You've said that you think he's "imploding."

Frank: "Yes. I cannot think of an issue on which he's popular. The Iran war, the fight with the Pope, the economy, even immigration, where the left was dead wrong in its excessive openness, he's managed to make himself more unpopular. His anger, his narcissism, all of the negative parts of his personality have asserted themselves, and he really doesn't have much of a positive vision of things to offset that."

More at https://www.wbur.org/news/2026/05/14/barney-frank-hospice-congress-dem
ocrats-trump

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Thursday, May 21, 2026 2:11 PM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Final Five and U.S. Competitiveness

by Jerry Cayford | Posted on Thursday, May 21, 2026 5:00AM
https://3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/author/jerrycayford

https://3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2026/05/final-five-and-u-s-compe
titiveness.html

California’s primary is in about two weeks, and it’s a mess. The panic is slightly subsiding, though, since Democrats have started polling in one of the top two spots in the race for governor. For months, Republicans were polling first and second, with eight Democrats trailing because they split the vote. The California Democratic Party chair even urged low-polling candidates to drop out so as not to be spoilers.

This can all look like an amusing soap opera. Will the Democrats shoot themselves in the foot, again? But studying it led me to literature I hadn’t found before, coming from a quarter I hadn’t expected: the Harvard Business School (HBS). An HBS study of American economic competitiveness shows that a surprisingly short path leads from an amusing soap opera to the gravest of questions: why is American society failing?

The Harvard Business School’s U.S. Competitiveness Project was a large-scale, eight-year investigation of the causes of America’s poor recovery from the Great Recession. Its final report, A Recovery Squandered: The State of U.S. Competitiveness 2019, looks at many factors that combine to determine the health of a society and its economy. https://www.hbs.edu/competitiveness/Documents/a-recovery-squandered.pd
f

The finding that connects their project to California’s primary is this: “the most important reason the United States has made so little progress during the long expansion [is]: deep dysfunction in our political system” (17).

California’s nonpartisan top-two primary system is a reform-that-is-really-half-a-reform of American states’ usual dysfunctional system. In top-two voting, all candidates compete in a single, nonpartisan primary, and only the top two qualify for the general election. This half-reform avoids giving voters a realistic choice outside the top two parties and, as we will see in the HBS report, thereby preserves the dysfunction of our politics. The full reform needed is “nonpartisan top-five primaries and ranked choice voting in general elections” (26), in which the top five candidates advance from the nonpartisan primary, and voters then choose among them in the general election by ranked choice (aka instant runoff voting). One of the HBS report’s authors, Katherine Gehl, expands on this reform in a 2023 article, “The Case for the Five in Final Five Voting.”

The Wider Crisis

Harvard Business School comes to electoral reform inadvertently, not as a choice but as a discovery in its survey of the business community. The U.S. Competitiveness Project, co-chaired by Michael Porter and Jan Rivkin, surveyed American business leaders working in a wide range of industries, almost 6,000 HBS alumni (along with some current MBA students and a cross-section of the public). They repeated this survey six times between 2011 and 2019. You can get a quick snapshot of the Competitiveness Project—and of America—from Figure 7 in the introductory chapter of A Recovery Squandered. It shows nineteen “elements of the national business environment” graphed by how America is doing compared to other countries (X-axis) and whether America is improving or deteriorating (Y-axis). (The scale of both axes is the net percentage of respondent positive/negative views.) Notice the dot in the lower left corner: “Political System” ranks worst for on-going deterioration, and only “Health Care” ranks worse compared to other countries.

Three points from the report’s big picture deserve mention before we focus on the political system. First is the report’s thesis statement on our recovery from the Great Recession: “despite a decade of steady economic growth, the United States has done remarkably little to address underlying structural weaknesses in our economy and our society. The nation has squandered the recovery” (3). Second, the report points out that Figure 7 clarifies our enormous inequality and “lack of shared prosperity”: America’s strengths (in the upper right) almost exclusively pertain to and benefit large companies. “Middle- and working-class Americans, in contrast, cannot escape the ramifications of a weak educational system, political paralysis, crumbling roads and bridges, and costly, inaccessible health care” (9). Third, this level of dysfunction is by no means common or normal: “The United States was one of only four countries [out of 146] whose Social Progress Index declined in absolute terms between 2014 and 2019. The others were Brazil, Nicaragua, and South Sudan” (14). America is failing, and there is nothing slight or subtle about it.

The Politics Industry

The HBS report’s Executive Summary succinctly assembles the themes of its chapter on political dysfunction:

Chapter 2 zeroes in on a central reason America has made so little progress: our political system has been optimized by the two major political parties to advance their partisan interests rather than the public interest. (1)

Americans do not fully grasp the structural nature of our political system problem. Many believe that we have simply elected the wrong people. (1)

Survey respondents [show]…stronger support for widely publicized changes, such as campaign finance reform and efforts to counter gerrymandering, than for reforms that we believe are more powerful, such as nonpartisan primaries and ranked choice voting. (1)

I will discuss each of these themes in turn: the system optimizes partisan interests; most people don’t even know the electoral system is the cause of their problems; when they do recognize the need for electoral reforms, they see the popular ones instead of the important ones.

“Partisan Interests”

A profound and original analysis lies behind the idea that our political system has been optimized for partisan advantage by the two major parties (an analysis elaborated in a 2017 interim report by Gehl and Porter and summarized in Appendix A of Squandered). Its view that politics is an industry like any other yields this key insight:

At the center of the politics industry are two private rivals who can only be described as a textbook duopoly: the Democratic Party and the Republican Party. Around this duopoly has arisen a large array of actors and organizations, including special interest groups, lobbyists, big-money donors, Super PACs, think tanks, consultants, and the media that bridges Washington, D.C., to the rest of the country. Together they comprise what Gehl and Porter call the “political industrial complex.” (56)

What Gehl and Porter present is a very different picture of American politics: “Most people think of our American political system as a public institution derived from the Constitution. Not so….[Rather], our political system has become a self-serving, self-perpetuating industry comprising gain-seeking actors who write their own rules” (56). If a “politics industry” seems like just a manner of speaking, a sensible market approach to healthy political competition, the important point in Gehl and Porter’s analysis is that it is an unhealthy industry practicing unhealthy competition. Their characterization suggests we can apply to politics the tools of analysis we normally apply to industry, and particularly the analysis of unhealthy competition due to monopolies.

To digress for a moment, this framework implies the possibility of a useful partnership between two activist movements: electoral reform and anti-monopoly. Monopoly and its ills is a topic in the midst of an explosion of attention and influence with the rise of the anti-monopoly movement, developing and evolving quickly since the Great Recession. In comments on the anti-monopoly movement’s main blog, Matt Stoller’s Substack BIG, I have argued that political power is a product, manufactured and sold in a monopolized market. Harvard Business School brings to that thesis a depth of research and analysis that I could not.

Let’s now take this industry framework back to California’s messed up primary and its new rules. “The engines of unhealthy competition in the politics industry are the overlooked but all-powerful rules, structures, norms, and practices of politics” (56). In 2010, California adopted a top-two open primary. This reform raised voter turnout, made more races competitive, encouraged bipartisan cooperation, etc. Yet these improvements are all superficial (seen through an industry lens) and they do nothing to touch the real problem Gehl and Porter identify: “The politics industry is perfectly designed to serve the private interests of the actors in this industrial complex: to grow their power and revenues and to protect against threats to their hegemony. It’s not designed to serve citizens” (19). California’s top-two rule does not threaten the politics industry’s power because it preserves the all-important “spoiler effect.” The spoiler effect is what we are watching in the current crowded primary: voters having to sacrifice their real preferences in order to get to choose between the top two candidates. The spoiler effect protects the duopoly by disciplining voters to choose only what the two parties offer. It is why ranked choice voting (RCV) is essential for healthy competition: “RCV eliminates the powerful ‘spoiler effect’” (57).

“The Wrong People”

A well-known obstacle to fixing any problem is confusion about where the problem even lies. Of the obstacles listed in the Executive Summary quotations above, the one that most simply guarantees continued dysfunction is that most people don’t see a system problem but instead imagine we are just electing the wrong people. I will digress again to present a recent example of this dynamic.

In Paul Krugman’s May 12 post, “What Happens When Americans Realize How Miserable We Are?” his subject is roughly the same as HBS’s. He looks at a number of measures of America’s failure to perform as well as other developed countries: life expectancy (the graph at the top of this article); traffic deaths; infant mortality rate. We used to be equal or better on these measures and are now worse. Our traffic deaths are three times France’s; infant mortality is worse even than China’s. Our homicide rate is four to ten or more times as bad as basically everyone’s. Beyond deaths, Krugman considers quality factors—work-life balance, paid leave, healthcare, walkable cities, public transportation—and notes, “my guess is that relatively few Americans realize how much we are falling behind other nations on basic aspects of a civilized life.”

In case you thought Squandered was just a snapshot of a few bad years, Krugman in 2026 confirms its portrait of American decline. But then he says this:

Why are American lives so often nastier, more brutish, and shorter than those of citizens of other advanced nations? That’s a complicated story, but much of it comes down to the fact that US politics has for decades been dominated by a party that is fiercely opposed to any concept of shared responsibility, of caring for our fellow citizens, and that foments a deep level of distrust that makes it ever harder to operate as a society.

Where Squandered has a genuinely complicated story to tell of dysfunction’s sources, Krugman says it comes down to our electing the wrong people: Republicans. And if “dominated by” seems to leave a systemic interpretation open, he doubles down in his next post, “The Apotheosis of Willful Ignorance” (May 13): “The rejection of science, like so much of the U.S. political landscape, has a lot to do with the influence of the fossil fuel industry,” as well as “the growing extremism of the Republican Party” and its “rejection of expertise.” But explanations like these are too small even to account for the U.S. political landscape, let alone the failure of American society. As Squandered shows us, “America is stuck because we have a structural political system problem” (18).

In “The Case for the Five in Final Five Voting” (2023), Katherine Gehl tries to turn our thinking from people to systems. All the minor improvements introduced by California’s nonpartisan top-two primary, for example, help voters select “the best winner,” which is the traditional goal of election theorizing. But finding the best winner, like finding who is to blame, is too small to solve our structural problem. It will not change the political industrial complex. Instead, she proposes “a new, more holistic, and results-oriented inquiry: ‘Which voting system best incentivizes elected officials to act in the public interest?’” This is the right question, based on Gehl’s work with HBS. As long as elected officials are operating within and constrained by a politics industry “perfectly designed to serve the private interests” of the system, it hardly matters whether those officials ideally reflect the values of their constituents. Before the “best winner” can matter, we must fundamentally shift power within the politics industry, or rather away from it.

Gehl’s question brings us back to the spoiler effect. As long as only the top two candidates have a viable chance of winning, most of the public will limit itself to choosing between them, enabling the duopoly to act in its own interests without fear of losing elections. Ranked choice voting—Gehl uses “instant runoff voting”—is the mechanism that enables voters to safely choose candidates outside the duopoly. Forcing the two parties to compete with outside candidates would break the duopoly control of our politics. Serving the public interest would become a viable career path, and the American political system could return to being a public institution, rather than a self-serving industry. The answer to Gehl’s holistic inquiry is Final Five Voting: to incentivize officials to the public interest, adopt nonpartisan top-five primaries and ranked choice voting in general elections.

“More Powerful Reforms”

Our dysfunctional political system is “a central reason America has made so little progress.” And as we’ve seen, that phrase “so little progress” labels a vast and ominously growing sea of economic weakness and societal failure. The stakes in reforming our politics, then, could not be higher. Harvard Business School’s U.S. Competitiveness Project takes the problem seriously.

In seeking solutions, its researchers proceed from democratic principles to corresponding political reforms, and they examine seven major reforms aimed at fostering those principles. But effectiveness is also important, and they focus on “innovations found at the intersection of what’s powerful and what’s achievable” (22). Three of the seven reforms land most clearly at that intersection. Yet those three are not well known to the public. Media attention has brought popularity to “a laundry list of reforms…[that] will either not address root causes of system failure, or they aren’t viable—or both” (26). Appendix C lists the “40 most commonly proposed reforms” from among 800 or so suggestions by survey respondents. (Multimember districts and proportional representation, which are popular in parts of the reform community, do not appear anywhere in HBS’s report and are apparently not on business leaders’ radar.)

Political effectiveness and public awareness are not much correlated. “Of these seven reforms, four have been widely discussed in the public discourse and by political commentators: (1) eliminating gerrymandering; (2) campaign finance reform; (3) congressional term limits; and (4) lobbying bans for former elected officials” (22). The report acknowledges that eliminating gerrymandering and campaign finance reform “can be beneficial,” but finds that term limits and lobbying bans make little difference. And even those beneficial first two reforms receive attention disproportionate to their impact, possibly at the expense of stronger measures:

The most powerful reforms are in three other areas not known to most individuals, but far more powerful because they will change the nature of political competition, reduce partisanship, and raise the ability of our legislators to pass and implement real solutions to our pressing economic and social challenges.

Nonpartisan Top-Five primaries…
Ranked-choice voting (RCV)…
Legislative rules reform. (22-23)

Elsewhere, Squandered refers to the first two of these as “two constituent parts” of the “Final Five Voting System” to be implemented “in tandem” (57); I treat them as a single reform.

Since I have recently been advocating an end to gerrymandering (via mathematical algorithm), I should note here that I agree with HBS that RCV/Final Five Voting is much more important. I have also argued that ending gerrymandering is a step toward Final Five Voting, a step suddenly made possible by today’s redistricting wars. Though less powerful than RCV, the reform that HBS found “resonated most strongly across all groups [was]…eliminating gerrymandering” (24), which garnered both the highest level of support and the fastest growing support over time (25, Figure 8). And this was years before the intense attention now trained on redistricting. There is a solid case for opportunism here: just as the Great Recession seared “Too big to fail” into the public’s consciousness, sending a flood of attention, money, and power into the anti-monopoly movement, so I believe the current gerrymander wars could be the galvanizing event for major electoral reform.

Be that as it may, Final Five Voting emerges as the single most powerful way to address political dysfunction, “the root cause of the decades-long inability of our government to make progress on America’s most pressing economic and social problems” (18). (Better legislative rules take a strong but secondary position.) Harvard Business School’s large-scale, multi-year project has given us, then—along with valuable information, analysis, and insight—a thesis vitally relevant to our public conversation about electoral reform: the stakes of that conversation are immeasurably higher than we usually recognize. To make this point, HBS not only documented the magnitude of America’s decline and crisis, but also spotlighted electoral reform as the very top priority in reversing our long slide. Not just easing polarization, gridlock, and other narrowly “political” problems. Not just making California’s elections sensible. Breaking the politics industry’s self-serving duopoly is how we address everything else as well.

Do you want to repair crumbling roads and bridges, lower infant mortality rate, or fix K-12 education? The single most effective remedy is “nonpartisan top-five primaries and ranked choice voting in general elections.” Are you trying to improve health care, life expectancy, or public transportation? Your method is “Final Five Voting.” The powerful message of HBS’s U.S. Competitiveness Project is that electoral reform is our main tool to end dysfunctional politics, strengthen U.S. competitiveness, and stop America’s decline. Want paid leave and walkable cities? Or—updating from 2019 to today—do you seek to compete with China on anything at all, unwind predatory monopolies, or develop more useful, less dangerous artificial intelligence? All of it. The basic aspects of a civilized life. The answer is the same. Put your effort into nonpartisan top-five primaries and ranked choice voting in general elections, aka Final Five Voting.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Wednesday, May 27, 2026 3:09 PM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Are you tired of the Trump era yet?
Every few weeks there's a new disaster that would have sunk any other president.
By Noah Smith
May 25, 2026

https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/are-you-tired-of-the-trump-era-yet

I get a lot of flak from progressives for being a “both sides” kind of commentator. I spend a fair amount of time criticizing leftist ideology and expounding on the very real failures of progressive governance, both of which have gotten much worse over the last decade. Yes, I support the Democrats, but that support is contingent — if their ideology and competence deteriorate to the point where the Republicans are less bad, I’ll switch to supporting the GOP. So it’s worth it to fight to halt and reverse the deterioration; in the long term, the cost of ignoring extremists and policy failures in order to have “no enemies on the left” is very high.

And yet right now, despite all of the negative trends on the left, the choice of which party Americans should support has never been clearer. The second Trump administration has unleashed a dizzying array of measures seemingly tailor-made to weaken the United States of America — sometimes at the behest of rightist extremists, sometimes due to Trump’s own mercurial whims, and sometimes in order to enrich Trump and his clique.

Sometimes it’s hard to keep track of everything Trump is doing to tear down the America I grew up in. In his first term, it was often said that he avoided criticism using a “DDOS” strategy — rhetorically attacking so many opponents at such blinding speed that they couldn’t focus on any one outrage for long. In his second term, the DDOS is actual policy; Trump inflicts real damage on such a broad array of U.S. institutions, with such incredible speed, that the news can’t keep track of them all.

To illustrate this, I decided to write a post about three mostly unrelated pieces of Trumpian insanity:

• The assault on international tech industry employees and founders

• The disastrous Iran War

• Trump’s unprecedented corruption

Either the second or the third of these would have been a presidency-ending disaster for Barack Obama, George W. Bush, or Bill Clinton, while the first would have alienated broad swaths of the business community. But for Trump, it’s just business as usual. The stories crowd each other out of the headlines, and everyone just sort of gets overloaded and starts tuning out the news. Trump’s approval ratings drift slowly downward, but nothing else really happens. Hardcore MAGA supporters just keep screaming that everyone has “TDS”, while Trump’s wavering allies eventually manage to convince themselves that Democrats would be even worse.

But anyway, if you were paying attention, here’s the latest round of Trumpian disasters.

Much more at https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/are-you-tired-of-the-trump-era-yet

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Sunday, May 31, 2026 6:48 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

There’s One Thing All Democrats Must Agree On, or They’re Dead in 2028

The DNC’s 2024 autopsy is a waste of your time. The answer to the party’s woes lies deep in a New York Times poll released the same day.

Michael Tomasky / May 22, 2026 / 10:26 a.m. ET

https://newrepublic.com/post/210843/democrats-autopsy-2024-electoral-s
trategy-2028

I started reading the Democratic autopsy of their 2024 loss that was belatedly released Thursday, but I stopped on page eight, when I got to this sentence: “In 1989, after losing three straight presidential campaigns, our party refocused the conversation around policy and purpose to reclaim the vital center of American discourse.” The second I saw that indefensible sentence, I clicked away.

Why? I’ve written this a few times, but I’ll write it again: There is no comparison whatsoever to be made between the Democrats’ situation after the 1988 election and their situation now, post-2024. In 1989, the Democrats had been absolutely pasted in three elections in a row. In 1980, Jimmy Carter lost to Ronald Reagan by nearly 10 points and 440 electoral votes; in 1984, Walter Mondale lost to Reagan by 18 points and 512 electoral votes; in 1988, Michael Dukakis lost to George H.W. Bush by 8 points and 315 electoral votes.

Meanwhile, the last three presidential elections have been decided by razor-thin margins. Hillary Clinton lost narrowly, though she won the popular vote by a fairly substantial margin (2.8 million); Joe Biden won; and Kamala Harris lost by a combined 230,000 votes in three states. There is no parallel to 1989.

So why would someone write this? I can think of only two reasons. The first is a combination of historical ignorance and allowing emotion to push aside facts. Democrats were so crushed by 2024 that it kinda felt like 1988. But feeling that without looking at the actual numbers is either dumb or lazy.

The second reason someone might write that sentence is ideological. That is, they are firmly committed to the view that the Democratic Party needs to “move to the center” or even “to the right,” and so they invoke the anemic ghost of 1988 to help them make their case. And if they did happen to stop and look at the numbers from the 1980s and wrote the sentence anyway, well, that would make the writing of it a deeply cynical exercise as well, because the writer would know there’s no truth to the analogy.

That “someone,” by the way, was Democratic consultant Paul Rivera. The Democratic National Committee hired him on a pro bono, part-time basis to conduct the autopsy even though he hadn’t worked on a presidential campaign in more than two decades. Apparently, he never finished the job, as the document released on Thursday was shockingly incomplete. “For full transparency, I am releasing the report as we received it, in its entirety, unedited and unabridged,” DNC chair Ken Martin said. “It does not meet my standards, and it won’t meet your standards, but I am doing this because people need to be able to trust the Democratic Party and trust our word.”

No wonder I couldn’t read it any further. Lazy and inapt historical analogies, and indeed carrying on a detailed argument about why Harris lost, is irrelevant to what’s needed most in this moment: a discussion of how the Democrats can win in 2028. But before doing that, let me quickly offer three broad reasons why Harris lost:

1. Joe Biden didn’t exit the race in time.

2. Harris didn’t do an adequate job of reminding voters of Trump’s incompetence on a range of fronts in his first term (this is a point the autopsy apparently does make, in fairness).

3. Harris didn’t make a compelling or aggressive enough economic case.

Always in presidential campaigns, there are dozens of factors, but I would hope about 97 percent of us can agree that if Biden had exited in the spring and the Harris campaign had done a better job of 2 and 3, she’d likely have won those 230,000 votes in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, and more. OK? And that’s all the autopsy that’s really needed. (There are separate questions of the ground game and spending and things like that, but those topics are for insiders only.)

The same day the autopsy was released, The New York Times published a poll looking at Democrats’ beliefs and attitudes right now. The poll does say that in some ways, Democrats and “potential Democratic supporters” want the party to move to the center; 52 percent said the party should nominate a centrist in 2028, and 25 percent said it should nominate a more progressive candidate. Respondents thought Democrats should moderate their positions on immigration (specifically the border) and crime. And I think it’s clear to most people, for example, that the 2028 Democratic standard bearer does have to take a pretty stern line on border security. It’s the one promise Donald Trump made that he’s actually delivered on, and the only issue on which he’s above water in polls (this does not include, mind you, wanton deportations by ICE thugs—just the actual border).

So there were things, surprise surprise, that Democrats disagree on. But there was one thing they seemed to agree on: “Still, the economic populism pushed by a growing number of Democratic midterm candidates has found a receptive audience. More than 80 percent of the party’s backers thought the political and economic system should be torn down entirely or needed major changes, and nearly 90 percent called the economic system unfair.”

That’s the secret sauce, right there. That’s the answer. There was one question in the poll that to me was more important than all the others. It was wordy, so bear with me: “Now I’m going to describe two hypothetical Democrats. Tell me which of the two you would be more likely to support in the next Democratic primary for president. A candidate who promises to lower prices by going after corporate monopolies and price gouging. [Or] a candidate who promises to lower prices by making it easier to build housing and expand energy production.”

I’m not quite sure why housing and energy were considered the opposite of monopoly power and price gouging, but hey, I didn’t write it. Anyway: Going after monopolies and price gougers won 67 to 30 percent. It won massive majorities from every category in the cross-tabs. Young people, 75 percent; old people, 68 percent. Men, 65 percent; women, 69 percent. Whites, 70 percent; nonwhites, 65 percent.

Oh. And among which subcategory was the result most lopsided? White noncollege, by 76 to 22 percent. In other words, those magic white working-class voters the Democrats have hemorrhaged, and the media can never stop talking and writing about. The result among nonwhite noncollege respondents was not as extreme as that, but was still a whopping 64 to 34 percent.

The lesson here is obvious. Democrats have to make it crystal clear, unmissably clear, that they are on the side of working people struggling to get by and getting nickel-and-dimed by shifty corporations every day of their lives. That means taking certain policy positions, but it means much more.

“Positions” are close to worthless in campaigns today. What’s needed today is to create emotionally gripping narratives and make them go viral. On this issue, that means calling out the bad actors by name. It means naming villains. It means educating the American public about why they’re paying higher prices for prescription drugs and other forms of medical care, and who’s responsible. Watch this five-minute clip of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez just ever so deftly ripping the eyeballs out of David Joyner, the CEO of CVS Health, earlier this year. Much more of that, please, Democrats.

In the superficial lexicon the political media uses, I suppose this means “moving to the left” on economics. Fine. So be it. But I’d argue it isn’t even “to the left.” It’s moving to where the people are. The people are furious about getting ripped off by corporate actors whom a rigged system will never hold to account. If virtually every demographic in that poll prefers a nominee who goes after monopolists and price gougers by 30-plus points, well, polling doesn’t ever get any clearer than that.

There’s this endless and often boring debate about whether to energize the base or reach out to moderates. As the above poll numbers show, a populist economics that targets bad actors can energize both. It’s only elite moderates who are against this, because they accept money from those sources for their campaigns or their organizations. They don’t actually represent anybody, or they represent a share of the electorate that is shrinking at a lightning pace. They, too, need to get with the program. This is where the people are.

So autopsy, schmautopsy. Stop arguing about 2024, Democrats. Talk about the future. And talk about the bad guys who are making working people’s lives harder. That’s where today’s “vital center” is—they’re sick and tired of getting screwed—and that way lies victory.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Saturday, June 6, 2026 7:29 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

How many lynchings ended with a trial of the murderers followed by a conviction for something, anything, not just murder?

AI Overview
There is no exact total number for how many lynchings ended in a trial and conviction. However, historians and civil rights archives estimate it was exceedingly rare.

Because a lynching is defined as an extralegal, mob-driven execution without due process, the vast majority of perpetrators were never held legally accountable.

Why Convictions Were Rare:

• Complicity and Scale: Dozens or hundreds of individuals often took part in a lynching, and local law enforcement frequently turned a blind eye or actively participated.

• Acquittals: When mob members were actually arrested and put on trial, all-white juries in the Jim Crow-era South almost universally refused to convict anyone for the murder of an African American.

• Lesser Charges: If a trial did result in a conviction, it was almost exclusively for a minor, peripheral offense like rioting or arson rather than murder.

The Equal Justice Initiative and the NAACP both maintain extensive documentation regarding the thousands of documented racial terror lynchings that occurred in the U.S. during the 19th and 20th centuries. The Equal Justice Initiative (EJI) has documented nearly 6,500 racial terror lynchings of Black Americans in the United States between 1865 and 1950.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Wednesday, June 10, 2026 6:27 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

The Four Ideas That Explain America’s Democratic Crisis

By Brynn Tannehill | Jun 9, 2026

https://www.damemagazine.com/2026/06/09/four-ideas-explain-americas-de
mocratic-crisis/

Now that I’m an American living in Canada, something I hear all the time is some variation of, “What the hell is going on in the United States?” spoken with a tone of mixed bemusement and horror. The people I work with come from all over the world, and it’s the same message from everyone. The very short answer is “fascism”. However, people outside the U.S. can’t square the circle when it comes to understanding how the Americans they meet are generally friendly and helpful yet elected a government that revels in cruelty. The answer to why America is the way it is today lies in four central concepts: the “Chesterton’s fence” thought experiment, the Dunning-Krueger effect, Bonhoeffer’s theory of stupidity, and social dominance orientation (SDO).

The U.S. is diving deeper and deeper into a constitutional, political, economic, and military crisis, and it’s too much for most people to absorb. Understanding the root of these problems is critical to responding to them and the current regime, and hopefully, to finding a path toward future repair.

Chesterton’s Fence

This rule states that one should not remove any established system until you understand the purpose it serves. In 1929 novelist G.K. Chesterton wrote the following on politics and reform:

“In the matter of reforming things, as distinct from deforming them, there is one plain and simple principle; a principle which will probably be called a paradox. There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, “I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away.” To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: “If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.”

By understanding the “why” behind the “what,” we avoid situations where removing something leads to unexpected problems or negative outcomes. This is crucial for avoiding unintended consequences when making changes. Even if a system appears inefficient or outdated, there might be a hidden purpose or benefit that is not immediately obvious.

The modern MAGA and Trumpist movement refuse to do this. They make their decisions from the “gut” or on the fly, guided by common sense or Christian religious beliefs. If they don’t understand something, it needs to be eliminated; no further thought is required so long as the person regards themselves as intelligent or Christian.

For example, Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) claimed massive fraud at the Social Security Administration (SSA). This belief was caused by their misunderstanding of the system’s data. They assumed that the system was wrong, never considering it was their comprehension that was flawed. It never occurred to them to dig deeper to understand why they were seeing what they were seeing. Instead, they chose to kick down Chesterton’s metaphorical fence.

Musk and Trump believe that their great wealth is a sign of their intelligence and infallibility, despite all evidence to the contrary. This belief in their superiority leads them to assume that their decisions to kick down fences are, naturally, correct because no one could possibly be smarter than them or better at deciding what needs to be destroyed. In reality, it is more reflective of their sociopathy and amoral ability to exploit the system for personal gain.

Which leads us to the next fundamental concept for understanding American fascism:

More at https://www.damemagazine.com/2026/06/09/four-ideas-explain-americas-de
mocratic-crisis/

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Wednesday, June 10, 2026 7:30 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
So autopsy, schmautopsy. Stop arguing about 2024, Democrats. Talk about the future. And talk about the bad guys who are making working people’s lives harder. That’s where today’s “vital center” is—they’re sick and tired of getting screwed—and that way lies victory.

SPOILER ALERT: You ARE the bad guys.

--------------------------------------------------

Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.

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Monday, June 15, 2026 5:58 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

SPOILER ALERT: You ARE the bad guys.

Trumptards are Confederates. They don't want Lincoln telling them that slavery is wrong, and they know that slaves deserve to work for free so that Confederates don't have to.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Monday, June 15, 2026 5:58 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

The Voters Who Believe That Trump Defends Their Values

Why Calls to ‘Save Democracy’ Don’t Work

Katy Osborn, Scott Warren | June 13, 2026

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/06/democracy-government-trump-m
aga/687535/

Given President Trump’s disregard for long-standing political norms and his efforts to overturn the 2020 election, many Americans fear that he is hostile to democracy. According to this view, the 49.8 percent of voters who supported him in 2024 must simply be unaware of the existential threat he poses to our republic. The logic, to Trump’s critics, is therefore simple: Once voters fully grasp that democracy is under threat from creeping authoritarianism, then surely they will turn against Trump.

Yet this strategy has largely fallen flat. Why? The consulting and pro-democracy organizations where we work have spent the past few months with conservative Trump voters across three counties in Wyoming, Michigan, and South Carolina. We learned that many do indeed revere America’s founding design, including the Constitution, free and fair elections, the Electoral College, and the rule of law. But these voters feel that government institutions have drifted from their founding values and priorities, which they classify as faith, or the belief that moral authority precedes political authority; family, the primary unit of social life and obligation; freedom, mainly from government overreach; and place, or the importance of local community over national abstraction. The people we spoke with explained that by forsaking these values, the country’s political institutions have lost touch with the moral ethos that they believe should guide public life, and that these institutions were designed to protect.

Our research involved conducting in-depth interviews with and observing the daily lives of dozens of people along with their friends, families, and neighbors to better understand how they think about American democracy right now. Our goal was not to persuade or judge, but to figure out why public trust in national institutions has plummeted to historic lows and what might be done to build it back up.

We learned that the central question for the conservatives we met is not “Should America be a democracy?” Instead it is: “Has American democracy remained faithful to what makes it legitimate?” Democratic institutions are legitimate, in the view of conservatives, when they honor and protect the faith, freedom, families, and communities of their constituents. When institutions and the politicians who inhabit them fail to appreciate the centrality of these core values, they become illegitimate.

One participant, Sarah, a 30-something mother of three in rural Wyoming, grew up poor, the daughter of a single teen mom. From the time she was 10, her local church fed her family, cared for her when her mother couldn’t be around, and surrounded her with people who treated her with dignity. In 2008, at age 18, she strongly considered voting for Barack Obama for president. She appreciated his care for struggling Americans and believed his promises of change. The parents of her boyfriend at the time didn’t argue with her. Instead, her future in-laws listened and then asked: Who brought you out of poverty? The answer, Sarah realized, was not the federal government, but her church community—a view that she believed put her closer to the priorities and policies of conservatives rather than Democrats.

Nearly 20 years later, Sarah told us that virtually every major institution she has encountered in her life, including public schools, hospitals, and various federal agencies, has squandered her trust and fallen short of what her church gave her. Having witnessed the shortcomings of the public-school system firsthand as a teacher, Sarah now home-schools her children. When neurologists dismissed her young son's recurring seizures, she turned to networks of mothers online to crowdsource a diagnosis and treatment plan, which largely entailed avoiding certain government-sanctioned products and chemicals. (When we met her, her son hadn’t had a seizure for more than a year.) During the coronavirus pandemic, Sarah watched policies that seemed designed for urbanites arrive in her rural town without the consent of residents or evidence of their local efficacy. She threw herself into local activism, showing up to county meetings, local boards, and precinct caucuses. She now aligns herself with a chapter of the right-wing Freedom Caucus.

Across Wyoming, Michigan, and South Carolina, we heard stories like Sarah’s: Conventional institutions had failed participants, and faith and values-aligned organizations filled the gap. This is why calls to restore power to government institutions ring hollow, and why the Democratic Party’s faith in institutions can appear naive and godless. As Thomas, a rural South Carolinian who comes from a family with a long history of military service and civic engagement, told us: “Democrats see government as their god, while conservatives see their god as God, and government as sort of secondary.”

Disappointment and distrust in much of government—owing to the ways these institutions have seemingly abandoned the priorities that made them just and meaningful—have hardened into a worldview, one that dismisses democratic rules and norms as expendable if they don’t reinforce what’s morally essential. As Sam, a small-business owner in Michigan, put it: “Political norms are just like culture, right? Norms just mean how we have always done things. So I think that’s fine to disrupt.”

Which brings us to Trump. How can people with such a strong attachment to faith and family vote for someone who criticizes religious leaders and defies so many ethical standards? We learned that these voters evaluate Trump not as a model of their values, but as a defender of them. “I don’t like him as a person,” Cindy, a 50-something nurse in South Carolina, told us. “But I like him as a president.”

A number of respondents expressed gratitude for the way Trump has worked to protect their communities and livelihoods, particularly in coal country. Sarah told us, for example, that when Trump returned to office, her husband, a land surveyor in Wyoming, was nearly unemployed and the family was worried about making ends meet. But thanks to the president’s reversal of Biden-era restrictions on coal mining, her husband is now overwhelmed with work. Such moves have made Trump a hero in parts of the country where Americans have been unwilling or unable to pivot away from coal.

This view of Trump as a protector of the country’s core values and interests also helps explain how participants reconcile the president’s interventionist policies and growing executive power with their stated preferences for small, local governance. Many of the people with whom we spoke justified Trump’s aggressive use of federal power as a necessary response to hostile institutions that have violated their constitutional mandate. When the FBI investigates Trump, when government agencies mandate vaccines, and when the Department of Education influences local curricula, voters say these institutions have exceeded their legitimate authority. In cracking down on these institutional breaches, Trump is not breaking the rules but defending the foundation the rules were meant to protect. “Do I think Trump’s all the time, great? No. But I do think he’s fighting for everyone right now,” Kyle, a 20-something delivery driver in rural Wyoming, told us.

Our research suggests that activists seeking to protect American democracy from authoritarian influences are pursuing a failing strategy. They are defending largely abstract democratic processes, such as norms and rules, on the assumption that everyone agrees that they are legitimate and worth saving. But such arguments are unlikely to resonate with voters who have come to believe that many of these norms and processes have abandoned the country’s bedrock values. Calls to defend democracy promise to alienate anyone who feels that democratic institutions have somehow failed them. Few care to preserve a system they feel stopped serving its purpose long ago.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Monday, June 15, 2026 2:23 PM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Boomers actually do hold most of the wealth and power. So why do they call it ‘whiny’ to point that out?

By Nick Lichtenberg

June 14, 2026, 7:00 AM ET

https://fortune.com/2026/06/14/why-are-boomers-millennials-angry-at-ea
ch-other-wealth-inequality-psychology/

Over 2,000 years ago, Aristotle had some bars about the kids these days: “Young men have strong passions, and tend to gratify them indiscriminately,” the great philosopher wrote in Rhetoric. “They are changeable and fickle in their desires, which are violent while they last, but quickly over… They have exalted notions, because they have not yet been humbled by life or learnt its necessary limitations.”

Later in the same chapter, he had some words for their elders: “They are small-minded, because they have been humbled by life: their desires are set upon nothing more exalted or unusual than what will help them to keep alive.”

He could have been reading my email.

A striking number of my readers—older, almost uniformly—skipped past the data entirely and went straight to character: younger generations complain too much. They spend recklessly. They don’t sacrifice. They whine.

What was notable wasn’t the anger. It was the precision of the deflection. No one challenged the Federal Reserve data showing that Baby Boomers control roughly 52% of U.S. household wealth while representing about 20% of the population. No one argued that Millennials are, in fact, thriving. The response to a structural argument about wealth and power was, almost invariably, a moral argument about character.

That pattern has a name in psychology. And understanding it—alongside what actually makes Boomers different from every dominant class that preceded them—tells you more about where America is stuck than any balance sheet. Is it whiny to try to understand this psychology, or is it a form of self-knowledge?

Two kinds of threats—and why they’re not symmetrical

In 2023, researchers Stéphane Francioli, Felix Danbold, and Michael North published a peer-reviewed study in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin examining precisely what makes Boomers and Millennials hostile toward each other. The findings map almost perfectly onto the reader mail in this reporter’s inbox. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11490062/

Both generations express genuine animosity toward the other. But the nature of that animosity is fundamentally different, and the difference is not incidental.

Millennials’ hostility toward Boomers is driven primarily by what intergroup threat theorists call realistic threat—specifically, the fear that Boomers’ delayed transmission of power hampers their life prospects. The Federal Reserve data on housing, wealth, and debt give that fear its material texture. Millennials aren’t upset about Boomer values. They’re upset about Boomer advantages, and the structural conditions that have made those advantages self-perpetuating.

Boomers’ hostility toward Millennials runs in the opposite direction. Their animosity is driven primarily by symbolic threat—perceived conflict over culture, values, and worldview. Not economics or data. The feeling that a generation coming up behind them is challenging something essential about what America is, what hard work means, what success is supposed to look like.

This asymmetry is a predictable feature of dominant-group psychology, older even than Aristotle. When you hold the material advantages, you don’t feel materially threatened — because you aren’t. What you feel threatened by is the narrative that your advantages might not be entirely earned. That is a different kind of threat that produces a different kind of defense.

The meritocracy is the message

One word I used in a previous headline was particularly triggering: “hoarding,” as in, hoarding wealth, hoarding real estate, hoarding political power and opportunity. Seen through the lens of psychology, this verb begs the question of what Boomers are actually being asked to defend.

It isn’t just wealth. It’s the story they’ve told about wealth—that it arrived through discipline, sacrifice and superior decision-making. And many vivid stories I’ve been told show that story isn’t entirely wrong. Many Boomers did work hard. Many did save diligently. But the story has a significant omission: they also came of age during the single most favorable economic environment in American history. Postwar manufacturing at its apex. Housing that cost 2x or 3x annual income, not 10x. Defined-benefit pensions, subsidized public universities, and a tax structure that rewarded wages as much as assets are all features of history, not current economic life.

Researchers who study system justification theory—the psychological tendency to defend existing social arrangements as fair and legitimate, even when they aren’t—have found that this impulse is strongest among people who have benefited most from the system. The more you’ve gained from an arrangement, the more motivated you are to believe the arrangement is just. Not because you’re dishonest, but because the alternative — accepting that luck and timing played a decisive role in your success — is genuinely destabilizing to the self.

A fair objection deserves airing here: a framework in which both agreement and angry disagreement confirm the thesis risks explaining everything and therefore nothing. If every defensive email is just “system justification in action,” the argument becomes unfalsifiable. That’s why the asymmetry documented by Francioli and his colleagues matters. The claim isn’t that Boomers got angry—anyone might. It’s that the anger ran almost exclusively through one channel (character and values) while leaving the other (the data) untouched, exactly as intergroup threat theory predicts for a materially dominant group. Had readers attacked the numbers and ignored the character question, the theory would have been wrong. But they didn’t do that.

Not just any privileged class

Here is where the Boomer defensiveness becomes harder to dismiss—and, strangely, easier to understand.

Every dominant group in history has reached for the same psychological toolkit. Roman senators, English landowners and mid-century American corporate aristocracies — all told versions of the same story: we have what we have because we earned it. System justification is ancient. Generational condescension goes back to the Greeks.

But Boomers are not simply the latest iteration of a recurring historical pattern. The specific configuration of advantages they accumulated — and the mechanisms by which they accumulated them—has no real precedent. This matters, because it means the defensiveness isn’t just psychologically understandable. It’s also, in a structural sense, more consequential than prior versions of the same reflex.

Start with the scale. Boomers hold an estimated $85 trillion in wealth—not merely more than prior American generations at the same life stage, but more than any cohort in recorded economic history by a vast multiple. Many of them would seemingly like to think they earned this simply by working harder than anyone who came before, but they entered the housing and equity markets just before both began 40-year appreciation cycles, and they were the largest generation in American history to do so. They didn’t just accumulate wealth—they sat on top of two of the most powerful asset-appreciation engines in modern economic history during their prime earning years.

Then there’s the democratic dimension, which gets almost no attention. Previous dominant classes held power through class, race or institutional control—not raw democratic headcount. Boomers were the largest voting bloc [by eligibility or participation?] in American history for nearly four consecutive decades, from roughly 1978 until the mid-2010s. That means the policies that shaped housing markets, the tax treatment of capital gains, the defunding of public universities and the dismantling of defined-benefit pensions were debated and passed during a period when Boomers were the decisive electoral constituency. They didn’t just benefit from the system. They voted for it repeatedly at the precise moment when their demographic weight and financial self-interest were in perfect alignment. No prior privileged class had that combination of democratic legitimacy and self-interested policymaking available simultaneously at this scale.

Finally, consider what the gap actually looks like on the other side. In most prior periods of wealth concentration, the non-wealthy simply had less. What’s structurally novel now is that younger generations don’t just have less wealth—they carry the majority of the debt. Federal Reserve data shows Millennial and Gen X mortgage debt is nearly double that of Boomers in absolute terms. More than a third of all student loan borrowers are Millennials, and the St. Louis Fed explicitly documents a generational “clear increase in debt holdings” for younger generations. “Specifically, both Gen Xers and millennials held more debt than Baby Boomers.” Student debt—which exploded during the very decades of Boomer political dominance—has no real historical parallel in prior generational transitions. The floor has been actively lowered, not just the ceiling raised.

The lattés and avocado toast

There’s another concept in social psychology called motivated invisibility — the tendency of dominant groups to render their advantages structurally invisible, not through explicit denial but through reframing.

The most durable reframe in Boomer wealth discourse is the pivot to younger-generation spending behavior: avocado toast, streaming subscriptions, the failure to delay gratification. One reader deployed this argument almost reflexively—a near-word-for-word echo of criticisms that have circulated for a decade. “Wealth is NOT a fixed amount,” they wrote to me. “Want some wealth? Go earn it and save it and accumulate it, rather than always upgrading to the latest iPhone and swilling lattés and avocado toast.” The kicker on the email brought it back to that other epithet: “you’re a whiny turd who figured out who to string some sentences together and vie for cliques.”

But the spending-habits argument is durable precisely because it accomplishes what the data cannot: it relocates the problem from structure to individual. If the gap is about choices, then no one needs to feel uncomfortable about conditions. The system is fine. The kids just need to cut back on lattés.

This is system justification in action, and it is not unique to Boomers, or to this moment. Research consistently shows that members of dominant groups across race, class, and—now, generation—reach for the same mechanism when their advantages are named.

The honest caveat

Serious coverage of this topic requires the acknowledgment that Boomers are not monolithic. Per a Pew Research Center analysis, Boomer households collectively held $77 trillion in 2022—and the top 10% of those households held 71% of it. A white-collar Boomer who bought a San Francisco home in 1985 and maxed a 401(k) is in a categorically different position from a working-class Boomer who rented their whole life and watched their pension disappear.

The structural argument is real—but the villain of this story, to the extent there is one, is not a generation. It is a cohort within a generation: college-educated, propertied, politically engaged, and concentrated in expensive coastal metros. They shaped the policy environment in their own interest during the decades when their demographic weight gave them the power to do so. And they are, not coincidentally, the people most likely to be reading Fortune—and writing back.

The scolding reflex, it turns out, doesn’t even stop at the generational boundary. It operates within the generation, too. One Boomer reader described protesting the Vietnam War at 18 and feeling “angst about selling out”—”then I grew up,” he wrote. He told me he isn’t rich, but he “worked my way up to making enough to make sure my kids weren’t hungry.” His verdict on his peers was harsher than anything Millennials sent me: “I am not rich, but I am not complaining. And I can’t believe that so many in my generation of Flower Children are such losers.” The character argument, in other words, is not really about age. It is a portable script, and it gets deployed downward—at whoever has less—regardless of birth year.

Another reader put it more cleanly than most: “The bigger issue is not old versus young. It is a broken American system that has made housing unaffordable, healthcare unaffordable, retirement insecure, and work feel unstable for nearly everyone.” That framing is neither wrong nor incompatible with the structural argument about how we ended up in a place where everyone feels stuck, and like everyone else is whining about it.

That is a harder emotional position than defensiveness. It requires disaggregating two things that Boomer identity has long held together: the real effort and the real tailwind. It requires acknowledging that you can deserve what you earned and still have been given conditions that made earning easier — conditions that were then, through the very political power that prosperity enabled, systematically withdrawn from the people who came after.

Jon from the Channel Islands sees an even larger force gathering behind the generational one. The Boomer/Millennial wealth debate, he argued, is being overtaken by a capitalism-and-AI-driven concentration that will make the current gap look modest—wealth flowing not from young to old but from nearly everyone to the owners of the machines. The combatants in the generational war, in his telling, are arguing over a shoreline that is about to be redrawn entirely: “It is like they are scratching their heads wondering why the water has suddenly drained out of the bay,” he wrote, “oblivious to the tsunami that is coming in shortly, to swallow them up.”

Only a few readers asked the question that none of the angry emails even approached. My favorite: “How do we build a country where younger people can rise without older people being discarded?” That is a political question, not a generational one. The answer isn’t unknowable, but the people with the most power to shape it have spent the better part of a decade arguing about whether the question is fair.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Monday, June 15, 2026 2:50 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

SPOILER ALERT: You ARE the bad guys.
Trumptards are Confederates. They don't want Lincoln telling them that slavery is wrong, and they know that slaves deserve to work for free so that Confederates don't have to.

Confederates were Democrats.

And it's the Democrats today that want to let in millions every year to work for slave wages and keep the quality of life down for everyone who isn't rich.

YOU are the bad guys. You were always the bad guys.

--------------------------------------------------

Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.

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Tuesday, June 16, 2026 6:16 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

SPOILER ALERT: You ARE the bad guys.
Trumptards are Confederates. They don't want Lincoln telling them that slavery is wrong, and they know that slaves deserve to work for free so that Confederates don't have to.

Confederates were Democrats.

And it's the Democrats today that want to let in millions every year to work for slave wages and keep the quality of life down for everyone who isn't rich.

YOU are the bad guys. You were always the bad guys.

--------------------------------------------------

Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.

So, the Democrats of today's USA are the Democrats of the Confederacy in 1860? Then the Democrats of North Korea must be the Democrats of today's USA, too. The same name must mean they are the same.

• People's Democratic Republic of Algeria
• Democratic Republic of the Congo
• Democratic Republic of Timor-Leste
• Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia
• Lao People's Democratic Republic
• Democratic People's Republic of Korea
• Federal Democratic Republic of Nepal
• Democratic Socialist Republic of Sri Lanka

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Tuesday, June 16, 2026 6:17 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

The End of Neoliberalism

The virtues it extolled—cosmopolitanism and competition—led to its demise.

June 15, 2026, 12:13 AM

By Branko Milanovic, a research professor at the CUNY Graduate Center.

https://foreignpolicy.com/2026/06/15/neoliberalism-globalization-compe
tition-cosmopolitanism-economics-reagan-thatcher/

If one were to define neoliberal globalization during the 40-year period from the early 1980s to around 2020, one could say it was driven by two ideas: cosmopolitanism and competition. One could also say these same features have now led to neoliberalism’s undoing.

Cosmopolitanism was an essential neoliberal idea going back to the meetings of the Walter Lippmann Colloquium in 1930s Paris and the early Mont Pèlerin Society. Cosmopolitanism meant that every individual in the world was to be thought of as equally important and equally capable of economic improvement if they faced optimal economic conditions—which implied security of private property, free trade, low taxes, and a “tolerable administration of justice.” Very little else, in the words of economist Adam Smith, was needed to fulfill the universal desire of all persons to “better their own condition” and for the world to attain unimagined levels of prosperity.

Cosmopolitanism was also the political idea underpinning a neoliberal world where national government as such would be out of sight and would leave individuals free to pursue their self-interest. This was, ideally, a world of small or almost invisible government. In the language of early advocates of neoliberalism, “imperium”—that is, flags, anthems, languages, and other paraphernalia of nationhood—would be left to politicians (and to voters, if citizens insisted on voting), and the more consequential world of “dominium” would consist of the movement of goods, capital, technology, and people.

For cosmopolitanism to create global wealth and prosperity, the world also had to be competitive. Not only would people be allowed to compete with (or against) one another regardless of national borders, but they also needed to be stimulated to compete by the display of all the goods that could be theirs and by the societal approval they would command if they won in that competition.

Competition produced global growth: Between 1980 and 2020-21, the average world GDP per capita more than doubled, jumping from $7,700 (in 2005 international dollars, adjusted for purchasing power parity) to almost $17,000. This makes the worldwide yearly average growth rate 2.1 percent per capita, an extraordinarily high rate for a period of 40 years. (And this despite the increase of the world population from 4.4 billion in 1980 to 8.3 billion now.) The more than doubling of per capita income combined with an almost doubling of the world population means that the total amount of goods and services produced in the world quadrupled during the era of neoliberal globalization.

But this “anonymous” growth rate, realized principally thanks to the high growth rates of Asian countries and notably China, did not help neoliberals’ case in rich countries. What was politically salient was not the 2.1 percent global rate but the fact that in the United States and in most rich Western countries, much of the population registered real (adjusted for inflation) growth rates of approximately 1 percent per year, while incomes of the rich grew two to three times faster.

Moreover, the neoliberal period (dated from Ronald Reagan’s presidency onward) was not only pro-rich, in the sense that incomes of the rich increased faster than those of the middle class and the poor. It also represented a slowdown in across-the-board growth compared with the preceding period. In fact, at every point of U.S. income distribution—except at the very top—growth was slower during the neoliberal era than during the previous decade and a half.

The world, at least for a while, seemed to become uniform, divided not by borders of nation-states, race, or gender but by differences in people’s abilities, skills, and effort. It was approaching the neoliberal ideal of a borderless world full of intensively competitive individuals whose competitive juices were additionally stimulated by the ability to communicate with any part of the globe and to learn what potential competitors may do—and then to try to outdo them.

But cosmopolitanism and competition, however attractive in themselves, were an unstable combination.

Cosmopolitanism crashed against national political borders. Excessive competition created a world of greed, amorality, and commercialization of all activities, even those that used to be the most private ones. Fundamentally, it threatened to make family superfluous.

The winners of neoliberal globalization in rich countries—inspired precisely by their cosmopolitanism, which they regarded as a moral virtue (being free of poisonous nationalism)—were quick not only to treat their less fortunate compatriots’ welfare as of no greater importance as the welfare of a foreigner or a stranger but also to believe that their compatriots’ failure in such an open competition was indicative of some moral flaw. Economic success meant being virtuous, or as Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping, whose rise to power coincided almost perfectly with those of Reagan and Margaret Thatcher in the United Kingdom, did not deny: “To be rich is glorious.”

The political system however is organized within nation-states. The less fortunate compatriots felt forgotten and ignored, and they were resentful of the way in which they were treated. They saw the readiness, even eagerness, of the rich to invest in faraway places as callousness toward domestic workers. Promises of new jobs that would replace those lost due to cheaper imports or online work elsewhere were hard to materialize.

The resulting discontent created political turbulence in the richest democracies. The 2007-08 global financial crisis made obvious what had previously only been implicit. The rich did not care for those left behind, and when the costs of the crisis had to be paid, they made sure that the bill was not sent to them.

The malcontents who in previous times would equally replenish extreme left-wing and extreme right-wing parties, as they did during the Great Depression in the 1930s, had now much less choice. The left-wing parties were either discredited by the failure of the “real-existing socialism” or, through their accommodative third-way policies, seen as accomplices of the center-right parties in promoting the type of neoliberal globalization that so disenchanted Western working and middle classes. Indeed, the peak of neoliberal globalization was achieved under the notionally left-wing governments of Bill Clinton in the United States, Tony Blair in the U.K., and François Mitterrand in France.

So the disappointed masses turned toward the right-wing parties that promoted national solidarity, an end to the (economically) equal treatment of the domestic population and foreigners, and even a return of industrial jobs. In the international arena, neoliberal globalization thus became increasingly replaced by neomercantilism, which used economic coercion, the seizure of foreign assets, import bans, and extravagant tariff policies to cut, or at least control, the free flow of goods and services. Free flow of labor was even easier to cut because its political popularity, even at the peak of neoliberal globalization, was small.

The second part of the neoliberal equation—competition within society and across borders and time zones—created, with the assistance of technical advances, a world where the upkeep of one’s homes and cars and even domestic chores, from cooking to elder- and childcare, were shifted precisely to the people who no longer had steady jobs and were part of the class of malcontents. The moral norms that previously held societies and families together and would have forestalled such outsourcing had become effaced by a desire to be “glorious”—that is, to be rich. That perceived amorality also helped the rise of anti-systemic right-wing parties. They grew on the promise of a restoration not only of lost jobs but of self-respect among malcontents and a return to allegedly traditional values for society as a whole.

In short, neoliberalism has succumbed to its own substitution by a combination of protective barriers for foreign goods and foreign people and vain attempts to return to a more traditional world at home. As in a Greek tragedy, the very features that ensured neoliberal globalization’s success for decades produced its inevitable demise.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Wednesday, June 17, 2026 6:39 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Wall Street Journal BOOKSHELF | By Barton Swaim | June 15, 2026 4:05 pm ET

‘Communion’ Review: The Veep’s Progress

JD Vance recounts his conversion to Catholicism and explains what he calls a ‘Christian approach to economics.’

Harper, 304 pages, $35

https://www.wsj.com/arts-culture/books/communion-review-the-veeps-prog
ress-358f0ac2

JD Vance’s intellectual evolution continues apace. In “Hillbilly Elegy” (2016) he lamented the social pathologies he witnessed as a child in small-town Kentucky and Ohio—drug addiction, domestic violence, idleness and dependency—but concluded that “these problems were not created by governments or corporations or anyone else. We created them, and only we can fix them.” As a political figure, first as U.S. senator and currently as vice president, Mr. Vance now holds that governments and corporations did create them, namely by free trade and offshoring. As for the state’s role in welfare dependency, Mr. Vance no longer has much to say about it.

These changes of mind more or less tracked his altered views on Donald Trump, which went from scathing in 2016, when Mr. Vance had a book to sell, to laudatory in 2022, when he needed the former president’s endorsement in the Ohio Senate race.

Mr. Vance’s second memoir, “Communion,” chronicles the evolution of his religious views: from the Evangelical-Pentecostal faith of his early years, through the halfhearted atheism of his 20s, to his conversion to Roman Catholicism in 2019 at age 35. The book is part religious memoir, part campaign book. Roughly the latter half articulates Mr. Vance’s updated thoughts on foreign policy and economics, with Christianity making appearances at opportune moments; readers familiar with books by ambitious politicians will assume the author of this one has an eye on 2028.

Mr. Vance has no ill words for the unlearned fundamentalism in which his grandmother raised him. He credits the small-town nondenominational congregants of his early years with living out the kind of communitarian values the rest of the world professes to value but mostly doesn’t. You soon get the feeling, however, that the Bible-carrying countryfolk of Mr. Vance’s early years serve mainly as a foil for the educated elites he so detests. “From the professional pipeline I encountered in law school to the social media mob of the 2016 election,” he writes, “the intensity of social control was far greater among our elites than anything I’d seen in a Pentecostal or Southern Baptist church back home.”

More than once Mr. Vance scorns elite “strivers” and purports to feel shame that he once tried hard to gain admittance to their circles. “I wanted to win the race because other people wanted to win the race,” he recalls of his feverish attempt to attend an elite law school. “In a sense, I won that race and was admitted to Yale Law School.” But it all came at a price. “Without realizing it, I had become addicted to winning the competitions other people set for me.” On the next page, Mr. Vance uses the term “humblebrag,” but about other people, not himself.

You might have thought the esteem in which he holds working folk, together with his disdain for elites who presume to know what other people need, would have led Mr. Vance to appreciate laissez-faire economics, presuming as it does that ordinary people generally know how to use their own resources more wisely than faraway eggheads. And maybe he almost did plump for free markets at one time. Early in the book, in a passage I’m tempted to think he forgot to cut, he makes the point that religious questions often involve hidden complexities. Mr. Vance draws a comparison with minimum-wage laws, which, he notes, seem like a great idea but “could do more harm than good” by dissuading employers from hiring more workers. His lesson: “The complexity counsels some humility in the face of difficult questions.”

That bit appears in Chapter 2. By Chapter 11, “A Dismal Science,” Mr. Vance has cast humility aside. Straw men populate the book’s later chapters, particularly on economic questions. He equates the free-market outlook with amoral indifference to anything apart from abstract economic-growth numbers. Reciting stories of people trampling one another to buy new tech products on Black Friday, Mr. Vance observes that “from the view of classical economics, they’re doing something far more ‘productive’ than reading a book or spending time with their children.”

Having several years ago read Leo XIII’s 1891 encyclical “Rerum novarum,” in which the pope sought to enunciate an economic outlook that avoided both socialism and capitalism, Mr. Vance attempts to express his own “Christian approach to economics,” which amounts to little more than the prescription that economic actors should exercise kindness, mercy and generosity. Employers, Mr. Vance accordingly thinks, should pay workers a fair or living wage. He doesn’t say who would define “fair” and “living”—Labor Department bureaucrats?

In one passage of egregious sloppiness, Mr. Vance quotes a paper by Vanessa Brown Calder, formerly of the Cato Institute, in which she explains the perverse effects of mandatory parental-leave benefits. “A review of states and countries with government-mandated paid leave programs indicates they harm young women,” Ms. Calder writes. “This is because parental leave policies are associated with an increase in leave-taking and childbearing, which leads to lost labor or increased health care costs for companies.” Mr. Vance fulminates: “Never have I read a purer distillation of our worship at the altar of commerce.” If he had read the paper more carefully, or even the next sentence, he would have noticed Ms. Calder’s argument: that mandated parental-leave laws discourage companies from hiring women at all, and that a host of other reforms would give them the freedom to start families without encouraging firms to penalize them.

Whether Mr. Vance’s error arose from laziness or dishonesty or something else, I don’t know, but alas it typifies the low regard he has for people who profess views he dislikes. If he wins the presidency, one hopes he can take his own counsel to practice humility in the face of difficult questions. But by then, he may have a different set of views.

Mr. Swaim writes the Journal's Unruly Republic column.

Download JD Vance’s books for free from https://annas-archive.gl/search?q=Vance,%20J.D. or https://z-lib.sk/book/45vmxEveqa/communion-finding-my-way-back-to-fait
h.html for this particular book.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Sunday, June 21, 2026 6:37 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Why Wages Fall

Paul Krugman | Jun 20, 2026

https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/arindrajit-dube-on-wages

. . . So the entire shareholder primacy revolution that happens in the ‘70s and ‘80s, turns out had a real impact on how wages were set. Research by Daron Acemoglu from M.I.T. and coauthors find a really interesting fact. Most businesses are not run by people with a business school degree. I actually didn’t know that. Even today, that’s actually the case. But the share that actually have a CEO with a business school degree has been rising quite, quite steadily. So what happened, for example, in the ‘80s or the ‘90s, when a company moved for the first time to a CEO with an MBA? Sometimes it’s because maybe someone retired or even died, you know? It sounds kind of grim, but actually it makes for a good natural experiment where, almost random, you introduce a CEO with an MBA for the first time. And what’s really interesting is that it leads to a very clear reduction in pay: about a 6% reduction in pay for workers overall, and about a 9% reduction for blue-collar workers. So the labor share falls by about five percentage points. That’s the amount of money going to workers versus owners. And of course, CEO pay rises. Now you may say, well, maybe that happens, and that’s just like the cost of running the business better, right? MBAs probably raise productivity. Wrong. It has no effect on productivity compared to comparable businesses. So it’s purely a rent transfer, as we say. Meaning, you’re taking money from one group and giving it to the other. In this case, the money is going towards owners of capital and high-income managers, and away from the workers, especially blue-collar workers.

Krugman: Wow. I always thought that the Harvard Business School was evil, but I didn’t realize it was quite that evil. So that’s pretty impressive. That’s really a significant impact on sort of the nature of our society that comes from almost an academic doctrine.

Dube: Absolutely. This is sort of like ideology. It’s ideology, not skills that is explaining this important change here. And, in fact, this turns out to have played a non-trivial role in the fall in the labor share in the United States, for example.

Krugman: That’s a really funny thing for me. Economists are supposed to be hard-headed, but in fact, if you really look at the data, and really do economic science, it says that ideology matters a lot.

The Wage Standard: What’s Wrong in the Labor Market and How to Fix It [2026]
Download the book from https://z-lib.sk/s/?q=The+Wage+Standard+What+Wrong+in+the+Labor+Market
+and+How+to+Fix+It

A sample from the book:

Quote:
If you’re like most working Americans, I have some good news: You probably deserve a raise!

Now, you very well may share this sentiment—after all, most of us believe we’re doing a decent job. But here’s the kicker: In this case, chances are, you’re right. You might wonder how I could possibly know that, since we’ve likely never met. I’ve never been to your workplace, and we’ve never shared a meal or even a coffee. So how can I be so sure?

Well, it has everything to do with my job. I study how people get paid, and why they earn what they earn. My work involves poring over mountains of data, analyzing how companies set wages, and examining the ripple effects of those decisions on employees, customers, and companies themselves. I’ve researched what happens when businesses compete to attract talent and what unfolds when governments step in to establish pay standards. A few years ago, I even advised the United Kingdom’s government on setting its minimum wage policy. These experiences have given me a unique perspective on how companies—your employer included—figure out what to pay.

Here’s the truth: Over the past half century, many working- and middle-class Americans have received paychecks smaller than they should be, even as our society has grown more prosperous. In this book, I aim to show you why—and, more importantly, how—we can change the labor market to work better for us all.

The Wage Standard tells the story of how we got here, the choices that led to this situation, and the steps we can take to give America a raise. Let’s start with a thought experiment. Imagine we were time-traveling anthropologists transported back to 1980 to study the American economy. What would seem familiar? What would feel completely different?

Life in 1980 was, in many ways, a world apart from our own. If you wanted to buy a TV, you might head to a department store like Sears, where a 19-inch color RCA television would cost the equivalent of $1,700 today (as in 2023 dollars, after adjusting for inflation).[1] These TVs were clunky and expensive, and they required manual adjustments for a decent picture. On your way home, you might drive to a supermarket called Alpha Beta—yes, that was a real chain—in a car without keyless ignition, built-in navigation, or even airbags, likely getting around sixteen miles per gallon. Inside the store, you’d find few pre-prepared meals, no exotic fruits out of season, and hardly any imported food products.

Fast-forward to today, and the differences are staggering, but the most notable is economic: America has become a far wealthier society than we were forty-five years ago. One way to measure this progress is by looking at how much American workers produce in an hour of work. After accounting for inflation in a manner consistent with how pay is measured, and subtracting the portion of output needed to replenish machinery, buildings, and so on, American workers’ overall hourly productivity rose by 73 percent between 1980 and 2019.[2] That statistic alone shows how much wealthier our society has become: We can produce over 1.7x as many goods and services in an hour as we did forty years ago. To put this in perspective, a 73 percent gap in current overall income is roughly the difference between America and countries like Estonia or Poland.[3]

But how have wages grown since 1980? If everyone’s wages had risen in step with overall productivity—and if the shares of income going to labor and capital had stayed the same—then real (inflation-adjusted) wages could have grown by as much as 73 percent between 1980 and 2019.[4] But is that what actually happened? Or did wages evolve in a way that diverted much of the productivity gains to top earners and business owners rather than to most workers?

During our hypothetical trip back in time, imagine asking the employees at Alpha Beta how much they were making. To find out what their wages looked like—and how they’ve changed—we can turn to the Current Population Survey (CPS), a monthly federal survey based on household interviews. According to the CPS, the average hourly wage for retail workers in 1980 was about $14.60 in today’s dollars. Fast-forward four decades: If we repeated the survey in 2019, just before the pandemic, we’d find that their average pay had risen to only about $17.40, a 19 percent increase in the real (or inflation-adjusted) wage.[5]

In other words, while the broader economy has changed in dramatic, fundamental ways—becoming much richer overall—wages for many workers have remained much more suppressed. Even as economy-wide productivity climbed by 73 percent, the purchasing power of frontline retail workers grew much less, only by around 19 percent. That’s a striking—and sobering—gap, reminding us that economic growth alone doesn’t guarantee broad-based prosperity.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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