Post-it Pessimism

Back in August, NPR asked the under-40 set some questions:

If you're under 40, how have concerns about affordability shaped your life? Have they changed how you typically vote? Delayed a big life decision?

The whole exercise seemed calculated to bring out the gloom in people, and judging from the responses, it did.

The answers are short; they're presented as if typed onto Post-it Notes, and all of the responses printed in the story fit on to one or two of them. And because it was simply an open call for responses, they are, as NPR points out, not a representative sample.

But what readers shared helps highlight a steep challenge facing Democrats and Republicans alike as they work to win over these voters, who are collectively expected to make up more than half the electorate in 2028.

I'm not so sure about that. Mainly because while it's clear that the respondents aren't a representative sample of the American public, it's also likely true that they aren't a representative sample of NPRs under-40 audience. Remember the questions were asking about how financial concerns were shaping people's lives and politics. Audience members whose response was "I've got this," or "I think I'm managing," wouldn't have written in... there would have been no reason to.

Not that there's nothing there. American economic policy has been something of a train wreck for some time now. But that's because, as I remember George Will putting it once, American society doesn't really take steps to avoid problems; it allows them to happen, and then cleans up the mess. And there are plenty of recent examples of that tendency. It's also worth noting that the American political system apparently thrives on pessimism, stoking it at every turn to raise the stakes of elections. Once the message from any given candidate is that a win by the other will be the end of the world as we know it, it is any wonder that people's views of the current state of the world are more easily predicted by their partisan identities than the actual fundamentals?

And the media isn't blameless here, either. We all know that "if it bleeds, it leads" is a common journalistic outlook, but there's also the habit of talking about issues in terms of "how worried people should be" in order to convey a sense of seriousness to the audience. It might be good for that, but it also conveys the sense that anxiety is, in and of itself, as appropriate response to the broader world, even though there's nothing about change that requires anxiety. In fact, anxiety tends to push back against the idea that change is possible.

It's this passivity that eventually becomes the problem. The collective we, as in American society as a whole, and I count myself in that number, have made a myriad of individual and group (if not collective) choices that have brought us to this place. And to the degree our choices have brought us here, they can take us somewhere else. It's going to be slow, and it's likely going to be expensive and/or painful. And I think that's what's really in play here... the "young" people who responded to NPR's call for input are seeing that the pain that other people are working to avoid is going to be visited upon them later. And they're understandably pessimistic about that. But I'm not sure of the utility of constantly reminding people of that, or of presenting it as the outlook of entire age cohorts, rather than just a self-selected sampling.

Dreamed Up

The state Republican Party in California has apparently given up on attempting to support Red states in their efforts maintain/expand their majority in the House of Representatives, and are walking away from their opposition to Proposition 50, which would suspend the bipartisan commission in charge of drawing the state's Congressional districts.

California is a Blue state, a Republican message that effectively comes down to, "Yes, hold on your ideals while our compatriots in the rest of the nation use them against you," was doomed from the start. Why anyone bothered with opposing Proposition 50 in the first place is beyond me; it was clearly going to win, especially given that President Trump has been going from one Red state to another, demanding that legislatures alter their district boundaries to shore up Republican chances of retaining control of the House of Representatives. And Republicans as a whole are no better than anyone else about holding onto ideals once they become even slightly expensive; see how their commitments to state's rights have evaporated. What message they were going to use to appear to the political middle was never clear.

The problem of gerrymandering, however, isn't one that lies with politicians; it's one that lies with the public, and it always has. The term "gerrymander," after all, dates back to 1812. Which means for nearly the entire history of the United States, politicians have realized that there were people whose votes they could count on, and who wouldn't protest the efforts that they would undertake to make those votes more important than others. As long as there's no wrong way to get to the right outcome, this is going to be what happens.

And it's worth pointing out that there's little that anyone could have done to prevent this current race to the bottom. Even if Congress had, at some point in the past, passed anti-Gerrymandering legislation at the Federal level, it's unlikely that the the current Republican-controlled Congress would have resisted calls from the President to repeal, or at least suspend it. There's no viable way to protect legislation from legislators, and there never will be.

President Trump's political instincts demand that he always insert himself into conflicts, and as Blue and Red America become more hostile to one another, the President is just as much beholden to that conflict as he's an instigator of it. Whether it was due to his own temperament or the wishes of his voter base, President Trump seems to have gone out of his way to implement policies that would divide the nation into "for" and "against" camps. It's possible that he feels a need to implement the Heritage Foundation's Project 2025 in the most divisive way possible. It's clear that he understands that it's alienating people; otherwise, there would be no need for this gerrymandering project in the first place. The California GOP pretending that the state's Democratic voters are unaware that the President plans to use a Congressional majority to punish them was never going to work.

Over Muddied Waters

Last week, former Trump adviser Steve Bannon - who remains a vocal supporter - claimed there was a "plan" to secure a third term for Trump.

"Trump is going to be president in '28, and people ought to just get accommodated with that," Bannon told The Economist. "At the appropriate time, we'll lay out what the plan is."
Trump does not rule out seeking third term - but says he will not use VP loophole

Part of the problem with the Democrats still not having their act together in terms of advancing strong contenders for the Presidency in 2028 is that it leaves room for garbage like this. While it's possible that the "plan" could simply be whining to the Supreme Court that President Trump is entitled to a do-over of some sort, and hoping that the Republican-appointed justices are partisan enough to pretend whatever arguments put forth should matter to anyone, the most likely way that Donald Trump remains President is that the administration declares some sort of bogus "emergency," Congressional Republicans still feel beholden enough to him to go along with it, and they count on the fact that the Judiciary has no way of enforcing whatever adverse rulings it hands down.

But Joe Biden made his disingenuous "bridge President" statements years ago, and the Democratic Party still doesn't seem to have started the work of coming up with who their next candidate is going to be. California Governor Gavin Newsom seems to be looking at the job, but that's really about it. And sure, this upcoming Presidential election cycle wouldn't be the first one where someone previously unknown jumps out of the field to run away with the primary election, but there isn't a field at this point. Absolutely no one seems interested in getting the first mover advantage here. So I'm curious what everyone is waiting for. (It's possible that people are still convinced that if they simply stay out of the way, the Republicans will self-destruct, but one would think that this tactic has been demonstrated to be a bad one by this point.)

The thing is, this doesn't strike me as the sort of situation in which anyone who puts their head above the parapet risks being sniped. Sure, the Trump Administration is going to go after anyone they think might be gaining some level of name recognition, but in an environment as partisan as the current one, that seems more like an advantage than a problem.

It's possible the issue is that the Centrist vs. Progressive divide is hard at work, and some number of people are waiting (hoping) for the midterms to choose a (temporary) victor in that conflict before they make a move. It makes an amount of sense to me, but I'm not a political scientist... when I found out that there were going to be five papers due in the first semester of PolySci 101, I promptly changed majors. So I suspect that my guess isn't any better than the bottom 15th percentile. But it's clear that something's going on. I think that the Democrats need resolve it prior to Steve Bannon telling a media outlet that, at the appropriate time, they'll lay out their plan to have Donald Trump anointed the messiah. Even if only to see who he can get a rise out of.

P.S.: By the way, I don't buy for a moment that President Trump would be above running for Vice President, with the expectation being that whomever was supposedly running to be President resigning as soon as the election results are in. If he actually thinks it will work (a.k.a., that SCOTUS would play along), it's absolutely on the table. 

Clean Living

Even before the final bankruptcy of Rite-Aid, which resulted in the closure of all of the Rite-Aid and Bartell's Drugs locations that weren't converted into CVS pharmacies, there were neighborhoods in the Seattle area where drugstores were thin on the ground.

Like here, for instance.

The Northwest Kidney Centers is in a former Rite Aid location that shut down some years ago. After that, a Walgreens moved into the now-empty store seen the right, just beyond the Taco Bell. (That side of the intersection is Seattle proper.) The Walgreens was there for a few years before it too closed, perhaps a year or two ago. Where people in this area go for their prescriptions now, I don't know. There had been a Fred Meyer store a few blocks further south into Seattle that people could have used, but it's also closed. I think that there is a shopping center with a supermarket, and perhaps a pharmacy to the west of this location, but it's a mile or two down the road.

There are still a few independent drugstores here and there, but CVS and Walgreens have most of the local market that isn't served by supermarket pharmacies. CVS didn't keep all of the Rite-Aid and Bartell's locations open, and, as seen here, Walgreens has also had some contraction in the local area. We'll see if the new acquisition stabilizes things, and people who need medications continue to have nearby places to get them. 

Decorated

A Halloween skull decoration, tucked into a bush.