My sense of social disorder is the result of open borders, the decriminalization of crime, tolerance and promotion of homelessness, racist DEI policies, mutilation of sexually confused adolescents, and the replacement of education by indoctrination, to name a few. Each one of these conditions can be directly traced to the policies and governance of radical interlopers who have co-opted the Democratic brand. They are governing so as to deconstruct and then rebuild our nation. How can I vote for a party openly hostile to my country and my family's well being?
I particularly like your comment, because it clearly called out (5) of the biggest mistakes the Dem party has made: open borders, tolerance of crime, homelessness, DEI racism, & sexual mutilation. But all five of these crimes against society are just tips of icebergs. In about four short years, the Dems managed to turned most of our social order upside down (men can get pregnant!), and did an awful lot of damage to a lot of people and institutions.
I think Ruy is one of the best liberals out there, but he needs to fess up and address your five issues (for starters) in detail. He needs to admit and discuss how people have been hurt, and how the Dems were wrong. And then he must talk about the specific things the party must do to get back onto the right track (ie. disavow the genital mutilation of children). Ruy needs to talk to you.
Ruy, you march along soundly then have to interject something like "No matter how badly Trump screws up," which kind of summarizes the problem. If you get away from hoax polling, Trump has NOT "screwed up" and is NOT "screwing up." Democrats must first and foremost understand this.
I can't say how strongly this siren song of "polling" is misleading people on both sides. If you instead look at things such as voter registration data, you'll see peoples' ACTIONS are much different than their purported WORDS TO POLLSTERS. Only until people on both sides understand Trump is a million miles from "screwing up" will anyone be able to develop strategies to, well, do whatever the hell they want.
So, again, just yesterday, we had new #s from NJ, where Rs gained another NET 4,000 or NH, an already red state where Rs gained another 49,000 SINCE NOVEMBER. In PPA, the tide keeps turning still. Now Ds have a net lead of 59,000 and are on track for PA to be a red state sometime next year. Again, these three are tiny samples of ALL 29 state movements.
A better question to ask would be, "What if Trump sees phenomenal success? What if the tariffs, as they have so far, produce $200 BILLION in new revenues, if more DOGE cuts result in say another 200,000 fed workers off the roles and fed budgets shrink, if we have three more years of peace, if the number of illegals goes down by 1 million?" These are all very, very likely outcomes. If I were a Democrat, I'd be planning strategy based on this scenario, not "when Trump screws up."
Oh, and as I keep warning, the TX/OH reality of redistricting (but Kollyfornia probably won't---way too difficult) is now likely to be joined by MO, FL, IN, and even NE, which will shift another 10 House seats to Rs so that the 2026 House elections are a lock for Rs before they start. Yes, you heard that here first.
Interesting that many in today's dwindling if radicalized ranks of a tattered Democratic Party believe that actions should bear no consequence, for them at least. Wasn't it The Great One, former President Obama, who proclaimed that "elections have consequences"?
Meanwhile, those 'No Kings' rallies are being overtaken by the Palestinian supporters. Meme: Until Palestine is free, none of us is free. Do a search on Substack on 'protests' and see for yourself. It's indicative of a lack of leadership among Democrats.
"Trump has NOT "screwed up" and is NOT "screwing up." Democrats must first and foremost understand this."
Nah. We're in "firing people for reporting unfavorable jobs numbers" territory. That's never a sign things are going well.
There's no guarantee the Dems capitalize effectively, but Trump's overinflation of expectations during his reelection campaign is clearly kneecapping him now. Prices are still rising, we're still sending weapons to Ukraine, manufacturing employment has shrunk, deficits are no more under control than under Biden, and both job growth and overall economic growth have been anemic--Trump promised swing voters that he'd solve all these problems, Superman-style, on "day one." And it's well past day one.
The Dems would be stupid not to work on their own positive messaging, certainly, but they'd be extra stupid not to squeeze as much advantage out of Trump's self-sabotage as possible, too.
To some people, Trump is "firing people for reporting unfavorable jobs numbers" to others Trump is firing someone who apparently can't find her butt without both hands. Defending massive cock-ups and insisting on guaranteed life-time employment for any government worker, no matter how incompetent, is how Democrats roll.
Anyone paying attention would note that he and the GOP were perfectly happy to accept those numbers as gospel just a few months ago.
From Truth Social in April:
"“GREAT JOB NUMBERS, FAR BETTER THAN EXPECTED. IT’S ALREADY WORKING. HANG TOUGH, WE CAN’T LOSE!!!"
From Truth Social in June:
"“GREAT JOB NUMBERS, STOCK MARKET UP BIG! AT THE SAME TIME, BILLIONS POURING IN FROM TARIFFS!!!”"
Now, in July, "THE NUMBERS ARE FAKE, I'M FIRING THE PERSON WHO REPORTS THEM!" (not an actual Trump quote, but might as well be)
It doesn't take a genius to put it together.
Anyway, anyone who ran a company this way--"Bad quarter? We're laying off all the accountants!"--would very quickly run it into bankruptcy. So spare me the shpiel about issues of merit-based employment in the government.
I agree with you, Minsky. I do think the establishment data are flawed and unreliable, but Trump's motive and manner after the most recent release fatally undercut any criticism he might have had. Half the time, the guy is a clown. The other half of the time, he's lucky?
Sheesh. That the Democrats can't really lay a glove on him ought to show them just how badly they've acted for a long time. If the Democratic Party weren't coming across as a collection from that bar in Star Wars, they'd be able to make quick work of a Donald Trump. It says a whole lot when the public thinks less of them than they think of Archie Bunker Trump, the Rodeo Clown from Queens.
Yet, here we are, and the Democrats (other than those who run this Substack, and maybe Senator Sweats from Pennsylvania lately) sit there and still act like they are better and smarter than mere human beings. If it wasn't so maddening, I'd laugh.
Yes--it has some decent potential leaders in it, but the party as a whole is a mess, and needs to get its act together, on a number of fronts. On that matter I am very much in agreement with my MAGA peers.
I am such an old school civics lesson guy. Hate me now, but I want two healthy parties, or as one of those flyover types told me 20 years ago, "The eagle needs a right wing and a left wing to fly." I know there'll be hyperbole on both sides, but I really think it's gotten way out of hand, mostly on the Democratic side on account of the "progressives" who have nothing to offer other than white-hot hatred of Donald Trump.
I don't especially appreciate Trump, by the way. I find him far too thin-skinned, combative, and all-around unpresidential, and as a result I have cast write-in votes rather than express my dissatisfaction with the Democrats by voting for him. But the longer the empty hatred from the "progressives" goes on, the louder a voice in the back of my head whispers, "Maybe the times call for a sarcastic bastard like Trump."
All the reports were bungled by this incompetent. Do you trust the previous numbers, or do you trust the new numbers? Would you pay someone to forecast P&L for your company who couldn't provide accurate numbers? Only in the government does someone unfit get defended by the tribe.
The BLS's methods have remained constant for a long time now; they predate this 'incompetent' and have been subject to the same volatility under prior leaders.
The Bureau's trying to do an estimate of developments in a massive economy, and it doesn't have a surveillance state to closely track changes in every company's payrolls, so it has to rely on projections from a sample of about 120k businesses/agencies that respond to their surveys about changes in payroll. These surveys are often incomplete by the time job numbers have to be reported for a given month; it often takes two or three more months for stragglers amongst the respondents to submit their reports. In the meantime the Bureau will 'fill in the gaps' with historical estimates. Sometimes it turns out that history wasn't a great guide to a particular month, and the actual number of jobs gained/lost ends up differing from the previous estimate of it.
There's nothing to indicate this process has been changed significantly, much less changed in a politically-motivated way. Given the records involved, in fact, this kind of rigging of the numbers would be extremely difficult.
You can argue that these methods need to renovated, and I wouldn't necessarily disagree, but if you're going to accuse the BLS of just making up the numbers or arbitrarily changing those methods then you need to provide substantive evidence--otherwise you're just spinning baseless conspiracy theories. (something it's not very healthy for a sitting president to do)
"...if you're going to accuse the BLS of just making up the numbers or arbitrarily changing those methods then you need to provide substantive evidence--otherwise you're just spinning baseless conspiracy theories..." -- where did I do that? You constantly make up statements and attribute them to me. That's dishonest.
As a reporter, I did a lot of work on federal economic statistics and their problems. Trump made a politically boneheaded play with the timing of that dismissal and the bullshit accusation of political chicanery. But the employment data from the BLS establishment survey is an unreliable joke. It's getting worse every year, and both the Biden administration and Trump's first administration ignored it. The media won't look into it because it doesn't fit their agenda.
And then there's the not-so-minor matter that federal employees need to decide whether they value their professionalism above their politics. They cannot have it both ways.
Patronage has its faults, for sure, and its excesses of old have been well documented. But civil service and public employee unions perform a disservice to professionalism when their agendas provide cover for undermining elected public leaders and their policy goals. Whether that happened here, as some suggest, is less clear than the fact it does happen, and one need look only at the Intelligence Community or FEMA for evidence of a seriously compromised professionalism.
There's at least a 50-year history (and longer, I am sure) of presidents trying to somehow reform the civil service. The Evil Heritage Foundation's nefarious "Mandate for Leadership," aka "Project 2025," which is mislabeled but that's their own fault, has a good discussion of it going all the way back to Jimmy Carter.
I have VERY mixed feelings about public employee unions, which end up bargaining against the taxpayers. There does need to be protections against arbitrary dismissals, but I think the unions have gone way too far to protect laziness and incompetence.
It can definitely be volatile data--depending on the metric--based as it is on business surveys, modeling, and other factors. You are trying to measure a pretty complex system, after all. But, as you say, it has been volatile for awhile, under both Democratic and Republican presidents.
Regardless, shooting the messengers who deliver you bad news is petty princeling leadership, and doesn't benefit anyone. It's the type of thing that happens in flailing authoritarian regimes--Stalin's punishing of party members who dared to inform him just how bad his command economy was doing comes to mind. A good steward of the economy, if confronted with bad numbers, would take it as a signal that there are problems afoot, and get to work trying to identify and solve them. They wouldn't just stamp their feet and look around for people to blame. (while calling them 'fake')
There is an array of conceptual problems with all of the economic data, depending on which series. The BLS establishment employment data is the worst. It's a real mess, and has been for at least a decade.
Here's the thing: If the errors occur at a constant rate, then the data are still comparable and useful. But if the methodology is getting less and less accurate over time, you have a real problem. This is the case with that establishment data. Trump wasn't wrong in a way, but in his usual ham-fisted style, he said it at the worst time in the worst way.
Here's one that I looked at a long time ago: inflation numbers. With goods, price increases are adjusted for quality. Example: If cars come with air conditioning as standard equipment, the bean counters make an adjustment, so the price increase on account of that is not scored as inflation.
But what do you do about services? There are some very sticky issues there, and genuinely hard to score. Are bank ATM machines a quality improvement in banking services? You bet they are, but how to put that into the inflation numbers? Any price increases in services are scored as inflation, even if, say, open heart surgeries are much more successful now than they once were. This has implications for inflation reports and interest rates.
Or semiconductors, on the goods side. Today, I can get an SD card that will store 10,000 times as much data for half the price as I paid 30 years ago. How do you score that? It's not as simple as it might look.
I have never seen any evidence that anyone monkeyed with the numbers for political purposes. That was Trump's most outrageous error the other day, in my book. The worst you can say is that the BLS is too slow to fix problems, and the establishment survey would be a great example. But to suggest that they had their finger on the scale for political reasons?
Unless the White House people could show the evidence, I call bullshit, and I do it from pretty deep experience from my days as an actual journalist as opposed to the airheads who dominate the media nowadays.
Yeah I think a lot of it has to do with the changing nature of employment, and the growth of the 'gig economy'--or, rather, a more decentralized labor market. A lot of the measurement strategies the BLS uses are still configured for an industrial economy where large firms employ all the labor; in that environment, if you miss changes in turnover at small or medium-sized companies--which are harder to survey--you're still getting a relatively accurate picture of job growth in the economy. When the biggest contributor to employment is small or medium-sized businesses, and many of them actually 'rent', rather than fully employ, their labor, (Uber actually employs a relatively small group of people--its gazillions of drivers are more users of Uber's software than company employees) then it's much easier to miss short-run changes in payroll size. A lot of times the true employment picture will only emerge after a few successive months of data, when trend lines between the monthly datapoints become noticeable and you can revise your estimates to account for them. I'd like to see it improve as well, but I also think you'd need the government to be more invasive to get a *really* accurate picture. The Chinese have a very accurate picture of employment in their economy--but that's because every business has a party official watching them closely. Us Westerners (and especially us Americans) won't go for that.
I don't think the gig economy matters a lot for inflation measurement. Prices charged can be sampled in the usual way. I mean, we've always had self-employment, right?
When it comes to employment, I'm pretty sure that the establishment survey's issue is centered on a "birth-death" model (not of people, but of enterprises) that just doesn't work. There are some other issues too, and they have festered for too long, even by BLS bean counter yardsticks. I really don't know how to fix it, and haven't looked closely enough in retirement. Maybe someday.
Now who's nitpicking? Look, no matter how much you like any politician, that politician will screw up. All of them do. We are human beings, not machines. On our best day, we are lucky to get it three-quarters right. I suggest dismounting that high horse and walking on two legs along with us mere commoners. And your codes ("Kollyfornia") aren't as cute as you think. Quite the opposite: To a genuinely independent reader they tend to mark you as something of a grim zealot, much like those you purportedly oppose.
I’ll only add that, as a native Californian, the state is in utter chaos under Newsom. Though I never heard of “Kollyfornia,” mocking the state is hardly out of bounds.
Nebraska is not redistricting. We've tried unsuccessfully to adopt winner take all (electoral votes) like the other 48 states, but I think most people are against disenfranchising Democrat voters altogether. This year Dems aren't even running a candidate for senate, they have endorsed the so-called Independent Dan Osborne.
Indiana years ago under GOP leadership addressed the political one-upmanship and mischief too often accompanying redistricting by legislating that redrawn lines respect existing local county, municipal and township drawn lines where possible, setting up grounds for legal challenge where these entities get sliced and diced by either parry for political gain while voters get abused and disenfranchised.
Maybe when we elect officeholders on the basis of genuine bipartisan statesmanship and service above narrower political gain we will get better officeholders.
The Blue Dot representative (Republican Don Bacon) is a member of The Problem Solvers caucus. He can't even hold a town meeting in Omaha because of the childish screaming and booing and generally repulsive behavior of the Dems. He is retiring and I don't blame him.
I have watched a few of those town halls on C-SPAN and am thoroughly repelled by the audiences. If that's the Democratic Party that I once supported, I no longer recognize it and want nothing whatsoever to do with it.
Big article in today's paper about one participant who asked how much taxpayers should have to pay to support the current fascist country. She was a younger woman, she said her instagram page jumped to over 2,000 followers overnight all praising her for her "courage." Not a single question about policy, solutions, etc. Just jeering and hooping and hollering. Sickening.
I don't blame him either, though the calculated risk of losing some of the best and brightest is viewed by the rabid Democratic Left as another victory, and therein rests one of the many seemingly unresolved schisms in our political system.
For my own part, I am delighted to be retired from what has become the rough and tumble and disrepute of so much that passes for journalism.
Yes. Democrats need to take a step away from their current negative strategy and embrace all the positive that Trump and Republicans have done in such a short time. If they don't, it may be the demise of the Democrat party. When voters go to the polls, especially in 2028, all they have to remember what Democrats did in 2020; put up Biden as a moderate and uniter, then open the borders, cause big time inflation, shove the Green New Deal down our throat, and on and on. I am an unaffiliated voter who believes I can't trust the Democrats.
I don't see the problem. If Trump works out fabulously, why do we care what the Dems do? I think this is The Liberal Patriot not the Trump fan boy page.
Spot on Ruy. May I propose the disorder didn't begin with Trump, but Biden? Those of us old enough to have kept dinosaurs as childhood pets, know Presidents come and Presidents go, generally. Then came Biden, and disorder unseen since the Carter administration. Love him or loathe him, Trump didn't start the country labeling 1/2 of all Americans ill educated, racist rubes, who should not be trusted with their own health, let alone any say in government. That began with Biden, and the Dems before him.
When discussions begin with the word "uneducated", the moment is over before it begins. Ditto for racists, homophobe, misogynists.. . . and very other insult that perpetually pours out of the Left , with never an apology. No Left leader ever mentions they are rather fond of eating on occasion, refueling their cars or the lights illuminating their homes in the evening, so Dems might want to, at least, feign a modicum of respect, for the people that render those things possible. Ditto for the person who fixes the AC when it's 100 degrees outside, the heater when it is freezing, picks up the trash every week or any of the other services or produced goods, necessary for daily life. Instead 1/2 of America was commanded to bow down to Gender Studies majors with a C average and $300K in student debt, because state universities are beneath them.
Neither was Trump responsible for 10 million new arrivals arriving without a single extra bed to shelter them , an extra MD to address their health needs or a bilingual teacher to educate those lacking any English. No one was interested in deporting Grandfathers in the US for 30 years without criminal pasts, before Dems purposefully dissolved the Southern border for 3 years.
Did Dems expect Americans to yawn when their ERs and schools were overwhelmed , migrants committed horrendous violent crime and scarce affordable housing disappeared?
Dems lit the country on fire with their insults, a Covid debacle, historic inflation spurred by trillions wasted and mass immigration. The latter has failed so spectacularly across the globe, the prim and proper Brits now seriously worry a Civil War is unavoidable. Instead of admitting their mistakes and suggesting a reset to 2019, Dems foist blame on Trump and his supporters and promised additional states, a packed SCOTUS and future open borders when they regain power. Dems brought this upon us, and they are the only group who can right the ship. I suggest they begin with perpetual and blanket apologies.
" we live in a country where 78 percent of voters think change is more important than preserving America’s institutions"
Depends on how you define preserving America's institutions. If Humpty Dumpty has been falling for the last decades that that the Dems have been in charge, there were no American institutions as we have see for hundreds of years. Preserve is the wrong word. More like restore. It always has been about the systems. Individuals and their actions were not an indicator of anything or trend. It is how the systems dealt with them. and the systems are being dismantled mainly by the Dems. What is ironic for those who understand, the most existential threat to this country is the left. The ones who scream hysterically the most about it. I believe they are sincere. They just have their own definition of democracy. Just like the definition of the concepts of woman, gender, justice and so many others. And once you have the perceived power to define the world as you see fit, it would the only response is to destroy such a threat. Even the level Dems like LP can not save the party. As your radical side believes, resist, even violent resistance is needed.
Yesterday the DNC chair stated the Texas Dems who ran were preserving democracy. Really? Pritkzer defending them was a clown show. Even if you had a Trump heading the right direction, it will take a long time to prove the Dem party can be trusted. And every time the Dems get in charge will only prove what a catastrophic vote that is.
I really hope Mamdami wins. Better to sacrifice another liberal strong hold as a failure to save the country.
I hear you about Mamdani, but I don't think it's a good idea to hope that the opposition goes nuts. You never know what might happen.
Weirdly enough, I really think this is what happened to the Democrats in '16 in its own way. I think their worthies looked at the Republican field in '15 and decided to have their media types talk up Trump because, in their eyes, he was a total clown and easy to beat. I think they regarded Trump as a gift. Remember how Scarborough and Mika had him on Morning Joe all the time in the spring of '16, building him up like crazy? I do, because back then, Morning Joe was my insomnia show, and one that I respected.
I will never prove it, but I think that was part of a plan. Almost worked, too. Hillary won the popular vote by 2.1% that year, but ran it up in CA, NY, and IL, and overlooked what was happening in PA, MI, and WI. Her aides didn't, but she was arrogant. She thought she had it sewn up, and went to AZ in the end, thinking she'd twist the knife.
Oops. So they got the whackjob. My point: Beware the whackjob you think will be easy to beat, or who you think will crash and burn if he does get in. Really, you never know.
Yes, but you must remember this: Not only do people beat the odds and win the Powerball jackpot, but in politics there is a great deal of uncertainty. Shit happens, and happens pretty often.
I keep re-learning the reality that sarcasm is lost on the internet, but I cannot bring myself to use that /s device. My point was that long shots do happen, and more often in politics.
As a lifelong Independent, I continue to see both major parties as oriented primarily for their own welfare rather than the interests of the American electorate. Hispanics, African Americans and the young increasingly sense the hubris and condescension in the current Democratic Party leadership. With Ruy’s incisive observations, it’s amazing he’s still a Democrat. I suspect he remembers with fondness a party that no longer exists. I can’t help wondering, if Ruy came down from Mars today, knowing what he knows, how would he register?
He's trying to reform them. I'm not sure they can be reformed, but I do respect him for trying. It's what Americans do at our best. We see problems, call them out, and try to fix them. Nothing at all wrong with that; other way around. And if the Democrats don't fix their problems, Mr. Teixeira's chronicles will serve as a guidepost for what comes afterwards. At the very least, none of them can say they were surprised.
Ha! I'm not so sure. Millions of ineligible voters have been removed from voter rolls in many states. I'm sure some of them voted. So Ruy wouldn't be breaking new ground.
AI is going to do to the PMC what automation and cheap overseas labor did to blue collar workers. The bottom two rungs on the professional ladder have just been removed and there is no putting that genie back in the bottle.
IMO this is going to rip up the social order more than anything and I don't think anyone in DC is focused on it. At a minimum, the Democrats need to pay attention, because it will be largely their voters who are impacted.
There are going to be a lot of lawyers with hundreds of thousands of student loan debt that cannot get an associate position anywhere. Same with accountants, finance, IT, programmers, the list goes on and on.
Not to mention older knowledge workers who are too young to retire but cannot get employed.
Maybe so, but maybe not. Will A.I. really be Amazon and Microsoft rolled into one, or will it be the Segway, hyped to the sky only to vanish? Or maybe voicemail and automated answering devices, press 1 or 2 or 3 ...
FWIW, I could see copyright infringement being the Lilliputians which tie down Gulliver. AI gets away with stealing other people's content, and that probably isn't a sustainable model.
Thus far, I haven't seen A.I. invent anything original. If it scares the hell out of every Ph.D. candidate banking on getting a doctorate for restating what came before, is that such a tragedy?
Sadly, those still willing to publicly admit to being Democrats seem to take a rather demented pride in the status, apparently equating being part of minority party status to a kind of exclusivity, a martyrdom if you will, an elitism uncontaminated by what they dismiss as the "unwashed masses."
This is the very foundation, if early stages, of an authoritarianism destined to meet with growing rejection and an irreversible slide in the polls.
In The Liberal Patriot, and notably its contributors like Ruy Teixeira, the Democratic Party has been handed a light in the darkness, an invitation and opportunity to comprehend the true history and clear virtues of liberalism -- properly understood rather than politically defined and maligned -- and its vital role in advancing freedom, individual worth, and self government.
So where are the leaders within the party who will dare turn on that light and let it shine?
In other words, where is the voice of reason? Sadly, there is no market for reasonable views at this time. Go to the David Brooks article Ruy links above and read the comments. They uniformly call him an idiot. That's the Democratic rank and file talking. I'm not sure who occupies the space corresponding to Brooks and Ruy on the right, but I have read some rational-right articles that were attacked in the same way. What's the answer? I wish I knew.
How do you build an older order when currents generations have no idea of what the old order is and when told just tell you that it is passe’? My observation of 88 years thinks that the breakdown started when women had to go to work to help sustain living standards. Women used to be the fabric that held everything together. They visited and volunteered and ‘raised’ the kids on one paycheck. A present day example of the lack of social interacting is two of our young neighbors living next door to each other each having one child. One became pregnant again and had another boy. The other neighbor asked my wife if the next door neighbor had a a baby. She had no idea, even living next door, that the neighbor was even pregnant. In older days we used to talk to our neighbors. If one was outside we would go out and interact. Don’t see that anymore. Being a woodworker my garage door is open a lot and people walk by, wave and walk on. They never come up and ask what I’m doing or talk. Guess you call that ‘nosey’ today. So how do we build an interacting social order again?
It is quite simple : The "Social Order" that the Democrat Party is and has been totally based on Identity Politics and DEI ! This ''Social Order " is based on a principle something like this : Success of a certain segment of society is based on holding back other segments of society and this is done through the flawed theory of Intersectionality of the so called "opressed" ! The American people are in the midst of rejecting this and this rejection will continue ! Trump is simply the only thing the democrats can villify no matter what he does and Americans are rejecting this approach also ! The mid terms will increase the republican majorities ( albeit by a small amount ) in both the house and senate and I predict a huge republican presidential victory in 2028 -- JD or Marco -- ! Who do the democrats have : Kamala - Pritzker - Newsome - Klobachar -- all jokes -- Shapiro ? Nope - b/c the dems will never nominate him -- Booker? LMAO -- Schiff? he could be in prison by then
I should add one more thing. It's 6 mo in and even the NYSlimes is calling Trump the most influential and pathbreaking president since FDR. (I'd say, by the time he's done, Trump will make FDR look like James Buchanan). The question NONE of his enemies/opponents even ask is, "What if he is totally successful in everything he does for 3.5 more years?" What if the fed budget shrinks by 1/3, the national debt starts falling, energy production drives gas prices down to under $2 as happened in his first term, Big Tech is thrilled with him for supporting AI not just with money but with ENERGY, if over 2 million illegals are removed, and if take-home pay rises about 30%?" This is the question everyone should be considering. Meanwhile, I will address the "social order" question in my own Larry Schweikart substack later today. Enjoy!
If those things were to happen, it would indeed be stunning. I bought a Powerball ticket yesterday afternoon, and haven't checked the numbers yet. The jackpot is worth $450 million or so, and if I win I will let everyone know.
UPDATE: Just checked. Not even a single number matched. Same deal with Hit 5. Dang.
With regard to Trump’s slightly dipped poll numbers, sure his bellicose rhetoric and often ham-fisted implementation is turning some voters off, this doesn’t mean they don’t continue to see him as the lesser evil when compared to Democrats. Additionally, restricting illegal immigration, tariffs, and onshoring manufacturing were once core planks in the Democratic Party’s platform. Nothing shows how much they have abandoned blue collar American workers quite as starkly as their full throated opposition to Trump on these issues.
I follow the Real Clear Politics numbers closely. I adjust for outliers and partisan pollsters. Last year, I called Trump's margin pretty much on the nose three weeks in advance, and his victory when the June unemployment numbers were released in early July. The reason for the mid-summer call was that if the headline "U-3" unemployment number (household series, much more accurate than the establishment series) does anything but decline in the second quarter of a presidential election year, the incumbent party's candidate loses the popular vote. That one has worked in every presidential election since World War II except for 1956 and 2012, the latter because of a seasonal adjustment quirk.
Anyhow, if you toss the outliers in the latest Trump approval rating, Trump is down by about 3%, about half of what the unadjusted number shows. Do the same with the generic number for Congress, and the Rs are down by about 2.5%, which is really about half of what the Democrats need to retake the House. Thus, I think the '26 mid-terms are going to be a real nail-biter for the Democrats. Their chances of retaking the Senate round down to zero, and if they fail to retake the House then at least some of them are going to be forced to realize that Hating the Evil Trump is not a way to return to power.
Dems are still in there, just fumbling a little bit of late. The longer they stumble about looking for some sort of solid ground to stand on the more likely they are to ditch the crazy and objectionable. Trump who is a very imperfect candidate managed to do it for the Republicans, and he still catches tons of grief from the Cato and Chamber of Commerce types. Democrats have less distance to go maybe, being as we are supposed to be the party of the little guy. Best not wait too long though, easier to retain voters than to win them back.
I saw an interview with the Teamsters President yesterday. He was saying it used to be people joined the union, had a steady job with decent pay and benefits, and after so many years retirement with a pension and health care. People say factory work sucks. Well maybe it does, but there's something to be said for supporting your family with a dependable job. Hard to uphold social order when you've lost your job and might lose your house and dignity.
I might comment that in the period the Teamsters' president was talking about, the Teamsters Union was run by thugs, backed up by the mob. Truckers got unjustifiably high pay, but they had to pay unjustifiably high union dues, and God help you if you tried to welsh on them.
The Democrat politicians and activists all seem hell-bent on turning the US into a nation ruled by one party with an all-powerful and intrusive central government enforcing controls on speech, assembly, flow of information, and numerous other activities that are allowed to flourish in a free society. Some Democratic politicians try to portray themselves as “moderate”, but they invariably go along with far left policies like open borders, DEI, allowing homeless encampments on city streets and in city parks, drug legalization, no cash bail, down-grading felonies to misdemeanors, men competing in women’s sports, and a host of other lunatic social experiments that have turned multiple Democrat-run cities into dystopian garbage dumps.
Democrats insist that we speak in a new language emphasizing bizarre attention to race and gender with punishment for those who resist these efforts. Democrats routinely claim that “speech is violence” and that alternative political views are evidence of “Nazi” or “fascist” leanings. Democrats insist on a daily basis that what we can see with our own eyes is false, from claiming that Biden was mentally “sharp” to maintaining that the Southern border was “secure” to stating that men taking female hormones have become “women”. The scariest part of the whole situation is that there are large numbers of apparently gullible Americans who embrace the Democrat’s lies and fight hard to oppose those with more grounded and reasonable views. At this point, I cannot conceive of circumstances where I would ever vote for a Democrat at any level of government.
I've been wondering if the last 30-40 years have been the opening decades of the long slow decline of the West. We clawed our way out of the dogma of the Middle Ages into a period of that gave us revolutions in astronomy and cosmology, medicine, physics, literature, engineering, music, equality...the list goes on.
And now, millions of people all over the West claim that a man is a woman just because he says so. Millions argue that their brand of racism is virtuous. Politicians in the UK are clamping down on free speech and the courts there may even be bringing back blasphemy laws. This list goes on, too.
These ideas are insane, and they go against everything that's been achieved, at great cost, since the beginning of the Renaissance and through the Enlightenment. And as the author says, they tear the social order to pieces. If you question any of it, you're transphobic/a racist/stupid/a hater.
Welcome to the new Distributed Inquisition: unlike old inquisitions, this one is run all over the world by courts and HR departments who can keep up with the latest heresies at the click of a mouse. But as always, inquisitors are chosen for zealous ideological purity that's immune being swayed by evidence.
Is this how Islam's golden age ended? Through the acceptance of one insane idea at a time? Will the West regain social cohesion only imposition of conformity by woke tyrants? I hope not.
One major destroyer of our social order was school busing. Destroyed neighborhood schools, which was a foundation of our neighborhoods when boomers were growing up. Now, with school vouchers that institution is really in ruin.
The institution of public education doesn’t need to be in ruins. It needs to produce a product worthy of the country’s needs and the massive amount of money it receives, a considerable amount of which goes to elect Democratic candidates. Charters and Choice will force the needed reforms that the unions were unwilling to implement.
Ronda: again, thanks for a nice discussion. I realized that I wanted to add something else to this discussion.
For 30 years, starting in 1977, I taught at Illinois State University. I was in the psychology department. We were also the ed psych department for the department of education.
So I taught teachers for decades.
I wouldn't want to overgeneralize, but here was my "typical" student: a first generation college student who worked in high school for college money, worked during the summers for college money, and worked during the school years for college money.
Sometimes when people have talked about Harvard or Yale being "elite," I tell them that it was I who taught at an elite school.
Those students showed up on time every class, worked HARD, I worked them HARD, and they loved it. Getting through my class with a C was a point of pride. I used to tell them that if they got a C in my class and the next fall I showed up in my children's classroom and they were the teacher that I could just go home and relax knowing they would be taught well.
Many of them went into teaching because they had been inspired by their teachers.
Maybe teachers are different now, as I'm sure all of my students are retired. But I can tell you, all of my thousands of students would not just sit on their butts and let their children pass without doing the learning that was required. They weren't raised that way, their personalities weren't that way, and they sure as HELL weren't taught that way!!!
Those data, of which we are familiar, are very distressing.
However, we don't believe that we know the cause of them. For example, our education was done as much by our parents as it was by our teachers. We were read to, we went to the library each week, my father would give me math exercises when we were together. We also learned to respect our teachers......we were never allowed, for example, to criticize a teacher. My father went to my school one day each year (during the 50s), just to emphasize to me how important it was.
Do parents still do that?
One other dimension to this problem is the EXPLOSION in the number of children who don't have fathers in the home. They don't stand a chance to be educated by their "parents" as a joint parent-teacher endeavor.
Now with devices it is much worse. Parents don't read books, children don't read books during the summers, etc.
I don't see the school voucher program as making things any better for the average student. Not opposed to it, but just see that the problems are much more cultural than they are school-related.
God bless teachers! How does one hold the parents accountable? I wish I knew how to do that. The parents are a huge part of the equation in the success of the student. And yes I’m 58 and we did not question the authority of the teacher nor show disrespect. Culturally that has changed. There are a fair number of parents who dont think it’s their job to help their kids with school work. Teachers get the blame but there is only so much they can do. I would definitely be for forgiving student loans for teachers … our society needs them and they put up with a lot.
My sense of social disorder is the result of open borders, the decriminalization of crime, tolerance and promotion of homelessness, racist DEI policies, mutilation of sexually confused adolescents, and the replacement of education by indoctrination, to name a few. Each one of these conditions can be directly traced to the policies and governance of radical interlopers who have co-opted the Democratic brand. They are governing so as to deconstruct and then rebuild our nation. How can I vote for a party openly hostile to my country and my family's well being?
I particularly like your comment, because it clearly called out (5) of the biggest mistakes the Dem party has made: open borders, tolerance of crime, homelessness, DEI racism, & sexual mutilation. But all five of these crimes against society are just tips of icebergs. In about four short years, the Dems managed to turned most of our social order upside down (men can get pregnant!), and did an awful lot of damage to a lot of people and institutions.
I think Ruy is one of the best liberals out there, but he needs to fess up and address your five issues (for starters) in detail. He needs to admit and discuss how people have been hurt, and how the Dems were wrong. And then he must talk about the specific things the party must do to get back onto the right track (ie. disavow the genital mutilation of children). Ruy needs to talk to you.
Ruy, you march along soundly then have to interject something like "No matter how badly Trump screws up," which kind of summarizes the problem. If you get away from hoax polling, Trump has NOT "screwed up" and is NOT "screwing up." Democrats must first and foremost understand this.
I can't say how strongly this siren song of "polling" is misleading people on both sides. If you instead look at things such as voter registration data, you'll see peoples' ACTIONS are much different than their purported WORDS TO POLLSTERS. Only until people on both sides understand Trump is a million miles from "screwing up" will anyone be able to develop strategies to, well, do whatever the hell they want.
So, again, just yesterday, we had new #s from NJ, where Rs gained another NET 4,000 or NH, an already red state where Rs gained another 49,000 SINCE NOVEMBER. In PPA, the tide keeps turning still. Now Ds have a net lead of 59,000 and are on track for PA to be a red state sometime next year. Again, these three are tiny samples of ALL 29 state movements.
A better question to ask would be, "What if Trump sees phenomenal success? What if the tariffs, as they have so far, produce $200 BILLION in new revenues, if more DOGE cuts result in say another 200,000 fed workers off the roles and fed budgets shrink, if we have three more years of peace, if the number of illegals goes down by 1 million?" These are all very, very likely outcomes. If I were a Democrat, I'd be planning strategy based on this scenario, not "when Trump screws up."
Oh, and as I keep warning, the TX/OH reality of redistricting (but Kollyfornia probably won't---way too difficult) is now likely to be joined by MO, FL, IN, and even NE, which will shift another 10 House seats to Rs so that the 2026 House elections are a lock for Rs before they start. Yes, you heard that here first.
Interesting that many in today's dwindling if radicalized ranks of a tattered Democratic Party believe that actions should bear no consequence, for them at least. Wasn't it The Great One, former President Obama, who proclaimed that "elections have consequences"?
Meanwhile, those 'No Kings' rallies are being overtaken by the Palestinian supporters. Meme: Until Palestine is free, none of us is free. Do a search on Substack on 'protests' and see for yourself. It's indicative of a lack of leadership among Democrats.
"Trump has NOT "screwed up" and is NOT "screwing up." Democrats must first and foremost understand this."
Nah. We're in "firing people for reporting unfavorable jobs numbers" territory. That's never a sign things are going well.
There's no guarantee the Dems capitalize effectively, but Trump's overinflation of expectations during his reelection campaign is clearly kneecapping him now. Prices are still rising, we're still sending weapons to Ukraine, manufacturing employment has shrunk, deficits are no more under control than under Biden, and both job growth and overall economic growth have been anemic--Trump promised swing voters that he'd solve all these problems, Superman-style, on "day one." And it's well past day one.
The Dems would be stupid not to work on their own positive messaging, certainly, but they'd be extra stupid not to squeeze as much advantage out of Trump's self-sabotage as possible, too.
To some people, Trump is "firing people for reporting unfavorable jobs numbers" to others Trump is firing someone who apparently can't find her butt without both hands. Defending massive cock-ups and insisting on guaranteed life-time employment for any government worker, no matter how incompetent, is how Democrats roll.
Anyone paying attention would note that he and the GOP were perfectly happy to accept those numbers as gospel just a few months ago.
From Truth Social in April:
"“GREAT JOB NUMBERS, FAR BETTER THAN EXPECTED. IT’S ALREADY WORKING. HANG TOUGH, WE CAN’T LOSE!!!"
From Truth Social in June:
"“GREAT JOB NUMBERS, STOCK MARKET UP BIG! AT THE SAME TIME, BILLIONS POURING IN FROM TARIFFS!!!”"
Now, in July, "THE NUMBERS ARE FAKE, I'M FIRING THE PERSON WHO REPORTS THEM!" (not an actual Trump quote, but might as well be)
It doesn't take a genius to put it together.
Anyway, anyone who ran a company this way--"Bad quarter? We're laying off all the accountants!"--would very quickly run it into bankruptcy. So spare me the shpiel about issues of merit-based employment in the government.
I agree with you, Minsky. I do think the establishment data are flawed and unreliable, but Trump's motive and manner after the most recent release fatally undercut any criticism he might have had. Half the time, the guy is a clown. The other half of the time, he's lucky?
Sheesh. That the Democrats can't really lay a glove on him ought to show them just how badly they've acted for a long time. If the Democratic Party weren't coming across as a collection from that bar in Star Wars, they'd be able to make quick work of a Donald Trump. It says a whole lot when the public thinks less of them than they think of Archie Bunker Trump, the Rodeo Clown from Queens.
Yet, here we are, and the Democrats (other than those who run this Substack, and maybe Senator Sweats from Pennsylvania lately) sit there and still act like they are better and smarter than mere human beings. If it wasn't so maddening, I'd laugh.
"If it wasn't so maddening, I'd laugh."
Yes--it has some decent potential leaders in it, but the party as a whole is a mess, and needs to get its act together, on a number of fronts. On that matter I am very much in agreement with my MAGA peers.
I am such an old school civics lesson guy. Hate me now, but I want two healthy parties, or as one of those flyover types told me 20 years ago, "The eagle needs a right wing and a left wing to fly." I know there'll be hyperbole on both sides, but I really think it's gotten way out of hand, mostly on the Democratic side on account of the "progressives" who have nothing to offer other than white-hot hatred of Donald Trump.
I don't especially appreciate Trump, by the way. I find him far too thin-skinned, combative, and all-around unpresidential, and as a result I have cast write-in votes rather than express my dissatisfaction with the Democrats by voting for him. But the longer the empty hatred from the "progressives" goes on, the louder a voice in the back of my head whispers, "Maybe the times call for a sarcastic bastard like Trump."
All the reports were bungled by this incompetent. Do you trust the previous numbers, or do you trust the new numbers? Would you pay someone to forecast P&L for your company who couldn't provide accurate numbers? Only in the government does someone unfit get defended by the tribe.
The BLS's methods have remained constant for a long time now; they predate this 'incompetent' and have been subject to the same volatility under prior leaders.
The Bureau's trying to do an estimate of developments in a massive economy, and it doesn't have a surveillance state to closely track changes in every company's payrolls, so it has to rely on projections from a sample of about 120k businesses/agencies that respond to their surveys about changes in payroll. These surveys are often incomplete by the time job numbers have to be reported for a given month; it often takes two or three more months for stragglers amongst the respondents to submit their reports. In the meantime the Bureau will 'fill in the gaps' with historical estimates. Sometimes it turns out that history wasn't a great guide to a particular month, and the actual number of jobs gained/lost ends up differing from the previous estimate of it.
There's nothing to indicate this process has been changed significantly, much less changed in a politically-motivated way. Given the records involved, in fact, this kind of rigging of the numbers would be extremely difficult.
You can argue that these methods need to renovated, and I wouldn't necessarily disagree, but if you're going to accuse the BLS of just making up the numbers or arbitrarily changing those methods then you need to provide substantive evidence--otherwise you're just spinning baseless conspiracy theories. (something it's not very healthy for a sitting president to do)
"...if you're going to accuse the BLS of just making up the numbers or arbitrarily changing those methods then you need to provide substantive evidence--otherwise you're just spinning baseless conspiracy theories..." -- where did I do that? You constantly make up statements and attribute them to me. That's dishonest.
As a reporter, I did a lot of work on federal economic statistics and their problems. Trump made a politically boneheaded play with the timing of that dismissal and the bullshit accusation of political chicanery. But the employment data from the BLS establishment survey is an unreliable joke. It's getting worse every year, and both the Biden administration and Trump's first administration ignored it. The media won't look into it because it doesn't fit their agenda.
And then there's the not-so-minor matter that federal employees need to decide whether they value their professionalism above their politics. They cannot have it both ways.
Patronage has its faults, for sure, and its excesses of old have been well documented. But civil service and public employee unions perform a disservice to professionalism when their agendas provide cover for undermining elected public leaders and their policy goals. Whether that happened here, as some suggest, is less clear than the fact it does happen, and one need look only at the Intelligence Community or FEMA for evidence of a seriously compromised professionalism.
There's at least a 50-year history (and longer, I am sure) of presidents trying to somehow reform the civil service. The Evil Heritage Foundation's nefarious "Mandate for Leadership," aka "Project 2025," which is mislabeled but that's their own fault, has a good discussion of it going all the way back to Jimmy Carter.
I have VERY mixed feelings about public employee unions, which end up bargaining against the taxpayers. There does need to be protections against arbitrary dismissals, but I think the unions have gone way too far to protect laziness and incompetence.
It can definitely be volatile data--depending on the metric--based as it is on business surveys, modeling, and other factors. You are trying to measure a pretty complex system, after all. But, as you say, it has been volatile for awhile, under both Democratic and Republican presidents.
Regardless, shooting the messengers who deliver you bad news is petty princeling leadership, and doesn't benefit anyone. It's the type of thing that happens in flailing authoritarian regimes--Stalin's punishing of party members who dared to inform him just how bad his command economy was doing comes to mind. A good steward of the economy, if confronted with bad numbers, would take it as a signal that there are problems afoot, and get to work trying to identify and solve them. They wouldn't just stamp their feet and look around for people to blame. (while calling them 'fake')
There is an array of conceptual problems with all of the economic data, depending on which series. The BLS establishment employment data is the worst. It's a real mess, and has been for at least a decade.
Here's the thing: If the errors occur at a constant rate, then the data are still comparable and useful. But if the methodology is getting less and less accurate over time, you have a real problem. This is the case with that establishment data. Trump wasn't wrong in a way, but in his usual ham-fisted style, he said it at the worst time in the worst way.
Here's one that I looked at a long time ago: inflation numbers. With goods, price increases are adjusted for quality. Example: If cars come with air conditioning as standard equipment, the bean counters make an adjustment, so the price increase on account of that is not scored as inflation.
But what do you do about services? There are some very sticky issues there, and genuinely hard to score. Are bank ATM machines a quality improvement in banking services? You bet they are, but how to put that into the inflation numbers? Any price increases in services are scored as inflation, even if, say, open heart surgeries are much more successful now than they once were. This has implications for inflation reports and interest rates.
Or semiconductors, on the goods side. Today, I can get an SD card that will store 10,000 times as much data for half the price as I paid 30 years ago. How do you score that? It's not as simple as it might look.
I have never seen any evidence that anyone monkeyed with the numbers for political purposes. That was Trump's most outrageous error the other day, in my book. The worst you can say is that the BLS is too slow to fix problems, and the establishment survey would be a great example. But to suggest that they had their finger on the scale for political reasons?
Unless the White House people could show the evidence, I call bullshit, and I do it from pretty deep experience from my days as an actual journalist as opposed to the airheads who dominate the media nowadays.
Yeah I think a lot of it has to do with the changing nature of employment, and the growth of the 'gig economy'--or, rather, a more decentralized labor market. A lot of the measurement strategies the BLS uses are still configured for an industrial economy where large firms employ all the labor; in that environment, if you miss changes in turnover at small or medium-sized companies--which are harder to survey--you're still getting a relatively accurate picture of job growth in the economy. When the biggest contributor to employment is small or medium-sized businesses, and many of them actually 'rent', rather than fully employ, their labor, (Uber actually employs a relatively small group of people--its gazillions of drivers are more users of Uber's software than company employees) then it's much easier to miss short-run changes in payroll size. A lot of times the true employment picture will only emerge after a few successive months of data, when trend lines between the monthly datapoints become noticeable and you can revise your estimates to account for them. I'd like to see it improve as well, but I also think you'd need the government to be more invasive to get a *really* accurate picture. The Chinese have a very accurate picture of employment in their economy--but that's because every business has a party official watching them closely. Us Westerners (and especially us Americans) won't go for that.
I don't think the gig economy matters a lot for inflation measurement. Prices charged can be sampled in the usual way. I mean, we've always had self-employment, right?
When it comes to employment, I'm pretty sure that the establishment survey's issue is centered on a "birth-death" model (not of people, but of enterprises) that just doesn't work. There are some other issues too, and they have festered for too long, even by BLS bean counter yardsticks. I really don't know how to fix it, and haven't looked closely enough in retirement. Maybe someday.
Now who's nitpicking? Look, no matter how much you like any politician, that politician will screw up. All of them do. We are human beings, not machines. On our best day, we are lucky to get it three-quarters right. I suggest dismounting that high horse and walking on two legs along with us mere commoners. And your codes ("Kollyfornia") aren't as cute as you think. Quite the opposite: To a genuinely independent reader they tend to mark you as something of a grim zealot, much like those you purportedly oppose.
I’ll only add that, as a native Californian, the state is in utter chaos under Newsom. Though I never heard of “Kollyfornia,” mocking the state is hardly out of bounds.
All in context. I mock it too, but there's a level of zealotry with Larry that stands out to me.
Nebraska is not redistricting. We've tried unsuccessfully to adopt winner take all (electoral votes) like the other 48 states, but I think most people are against disenfranchising Democrat voters altogether. This year Dems aren't even running a candidate for senate, they have endorsed the so-called Independent Dan Osborne.
Indiana years ago under GOP leadership addressed the political one-upmanship and mischief too often accompanying redistricting by legislating that redrawn lines respect existing local county, municipal and township drawn lines where possible, setting up grounds for legal challenge where these entities get sliced and diced by either parry for political gain while voters get abused and disenfranchised.
Maybe when we elect officeholders on the basis of genuine bipartisan statesmanship and service above narrower political gain we will get better officeholders.
The Blue Dot representative (Republican Don Bacon) is a member of The Problem Solvers caucus. He can't even hold a town meeting in Omaha because of the childish screaming and booing and generally repulsive behavior of the Dems. He is retiring and I don't blame him.
I have watched a few of those town halls on C-SPAN and am thoroughly repelled by the audiences. If that's the Democratic Party that I once supported, I no longer recognize it and want nothing whatsoever to do with it.
Big article in today's paper about one participant who asked how much taxpayers should have to pay to support the current fascist country. She was a younger woman, she said her instagram page jumped to over 2,000 followers overnight all praising her for her "courage." Not a single question about policy, solutions, etc. Just jeering and hooping and hollering. Sickening.
Got a link? I would love to read it, and maybe pass it to a friend who was recently up close and personal with the IRS.
I don't blame him either, though the calculated risk of losing some of the best and brightest is viewed by the rabid Democratic Left as another victory, and therein rests one of the many seemingly unresolved schisms in our political system.
For my own part, I am delighted to be retired from what has become the rough and tumble and disrepute of so much that passes for journalism.
Yes. Democrats need to take a step away from their current negative strategy and embrace all the positive that Trump and Republicans have done in such a short time. If they don't, it may be the demise of the Democrat party. When voters go to the polls, especially in 2028, all they have to remember what Democrats did in 2020; put up Biden as a moderate and uniter, then open the borders, cause big time inflation, shove the Green New Deal down our throat, and on and on. I am an unaffiliated voter who believes I can't trust the Democrats.
I don't see the problem. If Trump works out fabulously, why do we care what the Dems do? I think this is The Liberal Patriot not the Trump fan boy page.
Spot on Ruy. May I propose the disorder didn't begin with Trump, but Biden? Those of us old enough to have kept dinosaurs as childhood pets, know Presidents come and Presidents go, generally. Then came Biden, and disorder unseen since the Carter administration. Love him or loathe him, Trump didn't start the country labeling 1/2 of all Americans ill educated, racist rubes, who should not be trusted with their own health, let alone any say in government. That began with Biden, and the Dems before him.
When discussions begin with the word "uneducated", the moment is over before it begins. Ditto for racists, homophobe, misogynists.. . . and very other insult that perpetually pours out of the Left , with never an apology. No Left leader ever mentions they are rather fond of eating on occasion, refueling their cars or the lights illuminating their homes in the evening, so Dems might want to, at least, feign a modicum of respect, for the people that render those things possible. Ditto for the person who fixes the AC when it's 100 degrees outside, the heater when it is freezing, picks up the trash every week or any of the other services or produced goods, necessary for daily life. Instead 1/2 of America was commanded to bow down to Gender Studies majors with a C average and $300K in student debt, because state universities are beneath them.
Neither was Trump responsible for 10 million new arrivals arriving without a single extra bed to shelter them , an extra MD to address their health needs or a bilingual teacher to educate those lacking any English. No one was interested in deporting Grandfathers in the US for 30 years without criminal pasts, before Dems purposefully dissolved the Southern border for 3 years.
Did Dems expect Americans to yawn when their ERs and schools were overwhelmed , migrants committed horrendous violent crime and scarce affordable housing disappeared?
Dems lit the country on fire with their insults, a Covid debacle, historic inflation spurred by trillions wasted and mass immigration. The latter has failed so spectacularly across the globe, the prim and proper Brits now seriously worry a Civil War is unavoidable. Instead of admitting their mistakes and suggesting a reset to 2019, Dems foist blame on Trump and his supporters and promised additional states, a packed SCOTUS and future open borders when they regain power. Dems brought this upon us, and they are the only group who can right the ship. I suggest they begin with perpetual and blanket apologies.
" we live in a country where 78 percent of voters think change is more important than preserving America’s institutions"
Depends on how you define preserving America's institutions. If Humpty Dumpty has been falling for the last decades that that the Dems have been in charge, there were no American institutions as we have see for hundreds of years. Preserve is the wrong word. More like restore. It always has been about the systems. Individuals and their actions were not an indicator of anything or trend. It is how the systems dealt with them. and the systems are being dismantled mainly by the Dems. What is ironic for those who understand, the most existential threat to this country is the left. The ones who scream hysterically the most about it. I believe they are sincere. They just have their own definition of democracy. Just like the definition of the concepts of woman, gender, justice and so many others. And once you have the perceived power to define the world as you see fit, it would the only response is to destroy such a threat. Even the level Dems like LP can not save the party. As your radical side believes, resist, even violent resistance is needed.
Yesterday the DNC chair stated the Texas Dems who ran were preserving democracy. Really? Pritkzer defending them was a clown show. Even if you had a Trump heading the right direction, it will take a long time to prove the Dem party can be trusted. And every time the Dems get in charge will only prove what a catastrophic vote that is.
I really hope Mamdami wins. Better to sacrifice another liberal strong hold as a failure to save the country.
I hear you about Mamdani, but I don't think it's a good idea to hope that the opposition goes nuts. You never know what might happen.
Weirdly enough, I really think this is what happened to the Democrats in '16 in its own way. I think their worthies looked at the Republican field in '15 and decided to have their media types talk up Trump because, in their eyes, he was a total clown and easy to beat. I think they regarded Trump as a gift. Remember how Scarborough and Mika had him on Morning Joe all the time in the spring of '16, building him up like crazy? I do, because back then, Morning Joe was my insomnia show, and one that I respected.
I will never prove it, but I think that was part of a plan. Almost worked, too. Hillary won the popular vote by 2.1% that year, but ran it up in CA, NY, and IL, and overlooked what was happening in PA, MI, and WI. Her aides didn't, but she was arrogant. She thought she had it sewn up, and went to AZ in the end, thinking she'd twist the knife.
Oops. So they got the whackjob. My point: Beware the whackjob you think will be easy to beat, or who you think will crash and burn if he does get in. Really, you never know.
It’s all about probabilities. He is the most probable candidate into tank NY. Maybe he won’t. But the odds are he is the guy.
Yes, but you must remember this: Not only do people beat the odds and win the Powerball jackpot, but in politics there is a great deal of uncertainty. Shit happens, and happens pretty often.
Some one always wins the lottery. It is set up that way. Not so for governing ideology.
I keep re-learning the reality that sarcasm is lost on the internet, but I cannot bring myself to use that /s device. My point was that long shots do happen, and more often in politics.
Got it.
As a lifelong Independent, I continue to see both major parties as oriented primarily for their own welfare rather than the interests of the American electorate. Hispanics, African Americans and the young increasingly sense the hubris and condescension in the current Democratic Party leadership. With Ruy’s incisive observations, it’s amazing he’s still a Democrat. I suspect he remembers with fondness a party that no longer exists. I can’t help wondering, if Ruy came down from Mars today, knowing what he knows, how would he register?
He's trying to reform them. I'm not sure they can be reformed, but I do respect him for trying. It's what Americans do at our best. We see problems, call them out, and try to fix them. Nothing at all wrong with that; other way around. And if the Democrats don't fix their problems, Mr. Teixeira's chronicles will serve as a guidepost for what comes afterwards. At the very least, none of them can say they were surprised.
He is indeed. As you say, gotta give him props for trying.
Aliens can't vote. Had to stick that in.
Ha! I'm not so sure. Millions of ineligible voters have been removed from voter rolls in many states. I'm sure some of them voted. So Ruy wouldn't be breaking new ground.
AI is going to do to the PMC what automation and cheap overseas labor did to blue collar workers. The bottom two rungs on the professional ladder have just been removed and there is no putting that genie back in the bottle.
IMO this is going to rip up the social order more than anything and I don't think anyone in DC is focused on it. At a minimum, the Democrats need to pay attention, because it will be largely their voters who are impacted.
There are going to be a lot of lawyers with hundreds of thousands of student loan debt that cannot get an associate position anywhere. Same with accountants, finance, IT, programmers, the list goes on and on.
Not to mention older knowledge workers who are too young to retire but cannot get employed.
Maybe so, but maybe not. Will A.I. really be Amazon and Microsoft rolled into one, or will it be the Segway, hyped to the sky only to vanish? Or maybe voicemail and automated answering devices, press 1 or 2 or 3 ...
FWIW, I could see copyright infringement being the Lilliputians which tie down Gulliver. AI gets away with stealing other people's content, and that probably isn't a sustainable model.
That said, I am worried.
Thus far, I haven't seen A.I. invent anything original. If it scares the hell out of every Ph.D. candidate banking on getting a doctorate for restating what came before, is that such a tragedy?
AI isn't inventing anything original. It doesn't have to invent anything to wreak havoc on people's livelihoods.
I hope to hell it ends up being benign, but God knows what happens when a bunch of educated knowledge workers revolt.
I hesitate to make predictions about A.I., and only suggest some circumspection. Where is that flying car that the Jetsons promised, anyway?
Oh no doubt. But I don't think this is on the radar of the D party at all. It should be.
Sadly, those still willing to publicly admit to being Democrats seem to take a rather demented pride in the status, apparently equating being part of minority party status to a kind of exclusivity, a martyrdom if you will, an elitism uncontaminated by what they dismiss as the "unwashed masses."
This is the very foundation, if early stages, of an authoritarianism destined to meet with growing rejection and an irreversible slide in the polls.
In The Liberal Patriot, and notably its contributors like Ruy Teixeira, the Democratic Party has been handed a light in the darkness, an invitation and opportunity to comprehend the true history and clear virtues of liberalism -- properly understood rather than politically defined and maligned -- and its vital role in advancing freedom, individual worth, and self government.
So where are the leaders within the party who will dare turn on that light and let it shine?
In other words, where is the voice of reason? Sadly, there is no market for reasonable views at this time. Go to the David Brooks article Ruy links above and read the comments. They uniformly call him an idiot. That's the Democratic rank and file talking. I'm not sure who occupies the space corresponding to Brooks and Ruy on the right, but I have read some rational-right articles that were attacked in the same way. What's the answer? I wish I knew.
How do you build an older order when currents generations have no idea of what the old order is and when told just tell you that it is passe’? My observation of 88 years thinks that the breakdown started when women had to go to work to help sustain living standards. Women used to be the fabric that held everything together. They visited and volunteered and ‘raised’ the kids on one paycheck. A present day example of the lack of social interacting is two of our young neighbors living next door to each other each having one child. One became pregnant again and had another boy. The other neighbor asked my wife if the next door neighbor had a a baby. She had no idea, even living next door, that the neighbor was even pregnant. In older days we used to talk to our neighbors. If one was outside we would go out and interact. Don’t see that anymore. Being a woodworker my garage door is open a lot and people walk by, wave and walk on. They never come up and ask what I’m doing or talk. Guess you call that ‘nosey’ today. So how do we build an interacting social order again?
It is quite simple : The "Social Order" that the Democrat Party is and has been totally based on Identity Politics and DEI ! This ''Social Order " is based on a principle something like this : Success of a certain segment of society is based on holding back other segments of society and this is done through the flawed theory of Intersectionality of the so called "opressed" ! The American people are in the midst of rejecting this and this rejection will continue ! Trump is simply the only thing the democrats can villify no matter what he does and Americans are rejecting this approach also ! The mid terms will increase the republican majorities ( albeit by a small amount ) in both the house and senate and I predict a huge republican presidential victory in 2028 -- JD or Marco -- ! Who do the democrats have : Kamala - Pritzker - Newsome - Klobachar -- all jokes -- Shapiro ? Nope - b/c the dems will never nominate him -- Booker? LMAO -- Schiff? he could be in prison by then
I should add one more thing. It's 6 mo in and even the NYSlimes is calling Trump the most influential and pathbreaking president since FDR. (I'd say, by the time he's done, Trump will make FDR look like James Buchanan). The question NONE of his enemies/opponents even ask is, "What if he is totally successful in everything he does for 3.5 more years?" What if the fed budget shrinks by 1/3, the national debt starts falling, energy production drives gas prices down to under $2 as happened in his first term, Big Tech is thrilled with him for supporting AI not just with money but with ENERGY, if over 2 million illegals are removed, and if take-home pay rises about 30%?" This is the question everyone should be considering. Meanwhile, I will address the "social order" question in my own Larry Schweikart substack later today. Enjoy!
FDR is the most overrated president in U.S. history.
If those things were to happen, it would indeed be stunning. I bought a Powerball ticket yesterday afternoon, and haven't checked the numbers yet. The jackpot is worth $450 million or so, and if I win I will let everyone know.
UPDATE: Just checked. Not even a single number matched. Same deal with Hit 5. Dang.
It will ruin you as a person. So, we'll send you our address so you can dump some of the poison on us, and we'll be glad to help you that way.
No need to thank us.
I'm afraid no ranch and corporate jet for me. Better luck next time. LOL
This is simply an outgrowth of https://www.liberalpatriot.com/p/the-democrats-governance-problem
With regard to Trump’s slightly dipped poll numbers, sure his bellicose rhetoric and often ham-fisted implementation is turning some voters off, this doesn’t mean they don’t continue to see him as the lesser evil when compared to Democrats. Additionally, restricting illegal immigration, tariffs, and onshoring manufacturing were once core planks in the Democratic Party’s platform. Nothing shows how much they have abandoned blue collar American workers quite as starkly as their full throated opposition to Trump on these issues.
I follow the Real Clear Politics numbers closely. I adjust for outliers and partisan pollsters. Last year, I called Trump's margin pretty much on the nose three weeks in advance, and his victory when the June unemployment numbers were released in early July. The reason for the mid-summer call was that if the headline "U-3" unemployment number (household series, much more accurate than the establishment series) does anything but decline in the second quarter of a presidential election year, the incumbent party's candidate loses the popular vote. That one has worked in every presidential election since World War II except for 1956 and 2012, the latter because of a seasonal adjustment quirk.
Anyhow, if you toss the outliers in the latest Trump approval rating, Trump is down by about 3%, about half of what the unadjusted number shows. Do the same with the generic number for Congress, and the Rs are down by about 2.5%, which is really about half of what the Democrats need to retake the House. Thus, I think the '26 mid-terms are going to be a real nail-biter for the Democrats. Their chances of retaking the Senate round down to zero, and if they fail to retake the House then at least some of them are going to be forced to realize that Hating the Evil Trump is not a way to return to power.
We shall see.
Dems are still in there, just fumbling a little bit of late. The longer they stumble about looking for some sort of solid ground to stand on the more likely they are to ditch the crazy and objectionable. Trump who is a very imperfect candidate managed to do it for the Republicans, and he still catches tons of grief from the Cato and Chamber of Commerce types. Democrats have less distance to go maybe, being as we are supposed to be the party of the little guy. Best not wait too long though, easier to retain voters than to win them back.
I saw an interview with the Teamsters President yesterday. He was saying it used to be people joined the union, had a steady job with decent pay and benefits, and after so many years retirement with a pension and health care. People say factory work sucks. Well maybe it does, but there's something to be said for supporting your family with a dependable job. Hard to uphold social order when you've lost your job and might lose your house and dignity.
I might comment that in the period the Teamsters' president was talking about, the Teamsters Union was run by thugs, backed up by the mob. Truckers got unjustifiably high pay, but they had to pay unjustifiably high union dues, and God help you if you tried to welsh on them.
The Democrat politicians and activists all seem hell-bent on turning the US into a nation ruled by one party with an all-powerful and intrusive central government enforcing controls on speech, assembly, flow of information, and numerous other activities that are allowed to flourish in a free society. Some Democratic politicians try to portray themselves as “moderate”, but they invariably go along with far left policies like open borders, DEI, allowing homeless encampments on city streets and in city parks, drug legalization, no cash bail, down-grading felonies to misdemeanors, men competing in women’s sports, and a host of other lunatic social experiments that have turned multiple Democrat-run cities into dystopian garbage dumps.
Democrats insist that we speak in a new language emphasizing bizarre attention to race and gender with punishment for those who resist these efforts. Democrats routinely claim that “speech is violence” and that alternative political views are evidence of “Nazi” or “fascist” leanings. Democrats insist on a daily basis that what we can see with our own eyes is false, from claiming that Biden was mentally “sharp” to maintaining that the Southern border was “secure” to stating that men taking female hormones have become “women”. The scariest part of the whole situation is that there are large numbers of apparently gullible Americans who embrace the Democrat’s lies and fight hard to oppose those with more grounded and reasonable views. At this point, I cannot conceive of circumstances where I would ever vote for a Democrat at any level of government.
I've been wondering if the last 30-40 years have been the opening decades of the long slow decline of the West. We clawed our way out of the dogma of the Middle Ages into a period of that gave us revolutions in astronomy and cosmology, medicine, physics, literature, engineering, music, equality...the list goes on.
And now, millions of people all over the West claim that a man is a woman just because he says so. Millions argue that their brand of racism is virtuous. Politicians in the UK are clamping down on free speech and the courts there may even be bringing back blasphemy laws. This list goes on, too.
These ideas are insane, and they go against everything that's been achieved, at great cost, since the beginning of the Renaissance and through the Enlightenment. And as the author says, they tear the social order to pieces. If you question any of it, you're transphobic/a racist/stupid/a hater.
Welcome to the new Distributed Inquisition: unlike old inquisitions, this one is run all over the world by courts and HR departments who can keep up with the latest heresies at the click of a mouse. But as always, inquisitors are chosen for zealous ideological purity that's immune being swayed by evidence.
Is this how Islam's golden age ended? Through the acceptance of one insane idea at a time? Will the West regain social cohesion only imposition of conformity by woke tyrants? I hope not.
One major destroyer of our social order was school busing. Destroyed neighborhood schools, which was a foundation of our neighborhoods when boomers were growing up. Now, with school vouchers that institution is really in ruin.
The institution of public education doesn’t need to be in ruins. It needs to produce a product worthy of the country’s needs and the massive amount of money it receives, a considerable amount of which goes to elect Democratic candidates. Charters and Choice will force the needed reforms that the unions were unwilling to implement.
To go along with your point, the NEA recently had a huge fight over making gender identity a major focus of elementary education.
If I was a parent, I'd get my kid out of public schools.
I hope you're right. Good comment.
2/3rds of US 8th graders cannot read at grade level, 4 years after they must read to learn other subjects.
School choice is no the cause of mass education failure. It is our only hope back to mass literacy.
Ronda: again, thanks for a nice discussion. I realized that I wanted to add something else to this discussion.
For 30 years, starting in 1977, I taught at Illinois State University. I was in the psychology department. We were also the ed psych department for the department of education.
So I taught teachers for decades.
I wouldn't want to overgeneralize, but here was my "typical" student: a first generation college student who worked in high school for college money, worked during the summers for college money, and worked during the school years for college money.
Sometimes when people have talked about Harvard or Yale being "elite," I tell them that it was I who taught at an elite school.
Those students showed up on time every class, worked HARD, I worked them HARD, and they loved it. Getting through my class with a C was a point of pride. I used to tell them that if they got a C in my class and the next fall I showed up in my children's classroom and they were the teacher that I could just go home and relax knowing they would be taught well.
Many of them went into teaching because they had been inspired by their teachers.
Maybe teachers are different now, as I'm sure all of my students are retired. But I can tell you, all of my thousands of students would not just sit on their butts and let their children pass without doing the learning that was required. They weren't raised that way, their personalities weren't that way, and they sure as HELL weren't taught that way!!!
Thanks.
Those data, of which we are familiar, are very distressing.
However, we don't believe that we know the cause of them. For example, our education was done as much by our parents as it was by our teachers. We were read to, we went to the library each week, my father would give me math exercises when we were together. We also learned to respect our teachers......we were never allowed, for example, to criticize a teacher. My father went to my school one day each year (during the 50s), just to emphasize to me how important it was.
Do parents still do that?
One other dimension to this problem is the EXPLOSION in the number of children who don't have fathers in the home. They don't stand a chance to be educated by their "parents" as a joint parent-teacher endeavor.
Now with devices it is much worse. Parents don't read books, children don't read books during the summers, etc.
I don't see the school voucher program as making things any better for the average student. Not opposed to it, but just see that the problems are much more cultural than they are school-related.
Best. Thanks for the good comment.
God bless teachers! How does one hold the parents accountable? I wish I knew how to do that. The parents are a huge part of the equation in the success of the student. And yes I’m 58 and we did not question the authority of the teacher nor show disrespect. Culturally that has changed. There are a fair number of parents who dont think it’s their job to help their kids with school work. Teachers get the blame but there is only so much they can do. I would definitely be for forgiving student loans for teachers … our society needs them and they put up with a lot.
BRAVO!!!! We must stop rearranging the deck chairs and deal with the sinking ship.