Tuesday, July 23, 2019

Losing basketball games to dogs, or why "This Is Going to Get Worse."


Burmila's thoughts are angry, gloomy, dark and largely accurate -- and the melancholy isn't confined to Trumpism.

This is Going to Get Worse, by Ed Burmila (The Baffler)

“Send her back” is what Trumpism has been all along

WATCHING A VIRTUALLY ALL-WHITE CROWD of viciously angry, red-faced people chanting “Send her back!” at the mention of Representative Ilhan Omar during the President’s latest herrenvolk rally was horrifying. But the real horror is that this, sixteen months out from the election, is just the tip of an iceberg. This is bad and it will get worse. Much worse.

The Democratic Party has little to offer in terms of solace, merely a promise to fail in the same way as before.

It will get worse because the Democratic Party still believes that the mushy center is the place to campaign against Trump, that white votes are the only votes worth winning, that people of color or young people will never vote so why bother giving them a reason to, and that, in the brilliant words of Chuck Schumer, “for every blue-collar Democrat we lose in western Pennsylvania, we will pick up two moderate Republicans in the suburbs in Philadelphia.”

The following passage cuts closest to the bone. I may have arrived at the tail end of the Boomers, but in the final analysis, their narcissism wins out.

It will get worse because an entire generation of people under forty has already been written off to a life of lowered expectations and debt peonage—a generation that might get more riled up by the politics of Social Security and Medicare had they not already resigned themselves to the reality that neither will exist when, if, they reach old age. None of the relevant social, political, or economic institutions are undergoing an intergenerational transition of power; instead, Boomers have decided simply to stay at the helm until death comes, and since nobody except them has ever mattered it’s no big deal if everything burns down on their way out.

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