The Minnesota State Flag: Another Front Of The Cold Civil War

Like most sixth-graders who grew up in the Gopher State, I had a Minnesota history class back in 1989 where my classmates and I were given a detailed analysis of the Minnesota state flag originally devised in 1957.  On one hand, the class where we broke down the meaning and symbolism of the Minnesota state flag stuck with me over the years.  But on the other hand, I never really thought much about the Minnesota flag in the 35 years since I was in sixth grade.  And I'd venture to say that that's true of the overwhelming majority of Minnesotans, whose kinship with their state's flag began and ended in sixth-grade history class.  At least that was the case until 2023 when somebody decided to change it.

Specifically, a few members of the Minnesota Legislature decided it was time for a change and eventually got consensus to form a redesign commission that would accept multiple design proposals submitted by the public and vote on the configuration of a new flag and state seal.  And so was born another inevitable culture war battlefield...

It shouldn't have been surprising.  The vast majority of people instinctively hate cultural change.  Our necks tend to get even redder when said change is being made to a symbol of heritage, even if it's a symbol they haven't thought about since they were 12 years old on the elementary school field trip to the State Capitol.  I'm not sure there was ever a scenario where the adoption of a new state flag would engender anything but contempt from a majority of Minnesotans, but change advocates really poisoned the well when articulating their short list of reasons why the 1957 flag had to be replaced.

They said it was interchangeable with too many other state flags with activity centered within a circle amidst a blue back drop.  And it's true that many other states adopted cookie-cutter designs for their state flag and it's very hard to tell which one is which from a distance.  Change advocates also suggested the imagery is cluttered and clunky, with far too much going on inside that compressed circular image.  And they have a point.  Sometimes less is more, and that's probably true of the 1957 flag design.  But it's the third reason occasionally cited as an impetus for changing the state flag that generated the most chatter and the most righteous opposition.  Some critics alleged that the flag was, wait for it, racist!!!

To be fair, I don't believe any of the members of the State Emblems Redesign Commission leveled this accusation, but plenty of others did, including someone as high up the food chain as Lieutenant Governor Peggy Flanagan.  She refused to display the flag and claimed it was a visual representation of Manifest Destiny.  Even though very few people had any idea what that reference meant, the accusation of racism formally calcified that this process was gonna be divisive and culturally poisonous.

The commission moved forward with the process, narrowing down more than 2,000 design submissions to the entry that would ultimately be selected in the spring of 2024, a flag that combines a dark blue and light blue background with a north star symbol.  And how is it going over?

A local news poll gave the new flag a 23% approval rating shortly after its rollout.  Another 21% of respondents said they were fine with a new state flag in principle but didn't like the chosen design, while a full 49% wanted to keep the existing state flag. Seven Minnesota counties passed resolutions either opposing the new flag or the process by which it was chosen.

Well that didn't go so well!

But no worries.  The new flag's defenders assure us the public will come around in time.

A year has passed and I informally put that to the test during a road trip to western Minnesota this summer.  There was nothing scientific about my "windshield poll" but considering I was venturing through a vast expanse of old-school DFL territory--the kinds of places where stubborn Lutheran farmers reflexively voted Democrat every two years until the 2016 realignment--I thought it would make for an interesting visual experiment.

The result:  I saw more 1957 Minnesota state flags flown loud and proud in 2025, a year after it was repealed, than I had since my sixth-grade Minnesota class in 1989.  How many new state flags did I see flapping in the wind of the western Minnesota prairies?  One....in a courthouse lawn.  And that's despite the new flag design coming from one of their own as the selected submission was created by an artist from Luverne.

Indeed, sales of the old flag have outpaced sales of the new flag ever since May 2024.  I'm sure the imbalance isn't nearly as imbalanced in the metro area, but that's exactly the point.  The decision to adopt a new flag was inevitably poised to elicit a visually prescient ideological schism.  Even outside of election seasons, the split sides of Minnesota's ideological Mason-Dixon line would be exposed in front yards throughout the state. That would have been true no matter which design was selected and no matter what process was used for the selection, at least outside of a ballot measure where, again, virtually any design would have led to tribal fault line development and certain failure.

But to be honest, it's rather impressive that the commission did as amazing of a job as they did in unifying the state....in opposition.  I'm not sure if that 23% approval rating of the new flag measured shortly after its inception holds, but I have my doubts that it's engendered a great deal more support a year later.  I don't really care much about what the state flag looks like, but even I have to admit it comes across as pretty slight.  It certainly isn't compelling enough to justify the tangible displays of disunity and the inevitable ascent of the old Minnesota state flag as detractors' version of the Confederate battle flag.

My guess is that if I take to the highways of outstate Minnesota 10 years from now, I'll continue to see 1957 state flags flapping in the yards of people who couldn't have even identified the Minnesota state flag from a lineup in 2022.  Our cultural divisions don't seem poised to in any way diminish in the years ahead, so representations of rebellion and nonconformity will only gain in currency. 

Conservative Star Tribune columnist Andy Brehm wrote an op-ed last month suggesting that the problem is the new flag's "ugly" design and the exclusive process is what ginned up such enduring opposition, and that if we started over from scratch, we could find an agreeable middle ground. But I think he's naive.  There's no symbol of contemporary Minnesota--or America for that matter--than can unify us, and there's no governing body that most people would accept as fair arbiters.  People opposed to cultural change are gonna find some comparison to the "Somali flag" no matter what design any "commission" agrees upon, no matter how bipartisan.  They're also unlikely to accept any alternative to an existing design they believe is being discarded based on dubious accusations of white supremacy.

Defiance against the new Minnesota state flag is merely the latest pit stop of our cold civil war, consistent with my assessment before the November election that "owning the libs" is no longer just a hobby but a lifestyle, bordering on a religion.  The inverse is that finding racism under every rock became a religion of its own for those on the other side of the battle lines.  Even if one side blinks, the road to unification is nowhere in sight.  It's hard to imagine an uglier manifestation of that than living in a state where different sides of the ideological spectrum are flying different state flags in protest of the other.  But that's where we are, and Minnesota is far from being the only state where it's 1861 all over again.

 

The AI Revolution At Our Doorstep

In an episode of "Real Time with Bill Maher" last month, a panel discussion on rapidly advancing artificial intelligence technology provoked Dutch historian and author Rutger Bregman to say "we're like in February 2020 just before the pandemic hit."  This was a sobering analogy, and fitting given the degree to which basically everybody, aside from tech company executives, is whistling past graveyards about the comprehensive societal disruption that's likely to be right around the corner.

The equivalent of an atomic bomb is about to be detonated upon our species and the only political or media figure talking about it is Bill Maher.  I guess the good news is that those who are currently saddled down with jobs are about to have a lot more time on their hands to obsess about the Epstein File!

To be fair, it's too early to know if the AI revolution lives up to the hype, and both the media and elected officials could be proven wise to hold their fire and not incite a panic.  After all, a decade ago we were told that half the vehicles on the highway would be self-driving by the mid-2020s.  As of 2025, it's still well below 1% of all traffic.  More recently, we were assured that the long-promised electric car takeover that I've been hearing about since I was in elementary school was absolutely, unequivocally, we-really-mean-it-this-time gonna happen, and happen very quickly, in the 2020s.  Several years later, electric car sales' trajectory remains at a crawl, constituting only 7% of vehicle sales in 2024, vastly below expectations from the beginning of the decade.

Is it possible the big talk about AI will fail to materialize as well?  Or at least move at a much slower pace than currently projected?

It's absolutely possible, but I wouldn't count on it.  Not with the global arms race ensuing to perfect the technology and worry about the risks later.  The only thing I can safely project is that the inevitable disruption will differ in a variety of ways than what's currently forecast.  

The early conventional wisdom that the college boys are all gonna be thrown out on their asses from their cushy desk jobs while the plumbers and HVAC technicians will be laughing all the way to the bank is too rudimentary.  The economy doesn't exist in a bubble, so if the college boys that constitute the core of the American middle class experience a deluge of unemployment, blue-collar people will be affected downstream.  After all, if office cube farms are replaced with robots, there won't be much demand for plumbers or HVAC technicians in the human-free commercial property complexes, will there?  Furthermore, it's not as if the ongoing trend of conventional automation impacting blue-collar fields will stop or slow with the advent of AI.  If anything, it will likely accelerate.

Pontificating on further hypotheticals about the magnitude of AI disruption in the job market is ultimately too speculative, at least for an amateur like myself.  All one can do when they hear that more than half of work currently done by doctors and teachers will be handled by AI in 10 years is....to hope they're as wrong as they were about electric cars dominating the highways by 2025.  

The problem is that our elected officials are likely taking the same approach as they not only give the tech barons carte blanche to move forward with this dangerous technology as they see fit, but they borrowed $3 trillion to give them a fresh round of tax cuts as they orchestrate this disruption upon us.  And if the disruption of AI is even a fraction as substantial as these very tech barons are warning, the consequences for public policy will be even more pressing than those for the employment market.

Casual commentators on AI disruption, when faced with the follow-up question of what human workers are gonna do as this revolution plays out, will often tell us the government will have to offer some form of universal basic income to offset loss of employment and income.  There are a lot of problems with that supposition, and the biggest is simple arithmetic.  Even Andrew Yang's 2020 UBI proposal--offering a mere $1,000 per month in benefits--came with a price tag of $3 trillion per year.  The government collects about $5.2 trillion per year in revenues.  

In other words, even a UBI program that backfills a mere $12,000 per year in income, which is well below the poverty line, would consume nearly 60% of the federal budget.  This is the same federal budget currently running deficits in the trillions of dollars per year just trying to keep up with Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, the military, and interest on the existing national debt, all programs whose tab will only exponentially increase during the same period of time that AI is expected to displace tens of millions of middle-class jobs.

There's always the possibility that AI will trigger a surge of economic growth so blistering that it will double federal revenues and UBI and everything else our hearts desire will suddenly become affordable.  That seems unlikely, and even if some iteration of that scenario played out, the tech oligarchs will run the country and the same guys sitting in the front row of Trump's inauguration greasing the skids for their budget-busting tax cuts in 2025 will be sure that any surge of federal revenues gets drained into their bank accounts in the form of future tax cuts.

Furthermore, whether AI generates an era of budgetary abundance or scarcity, you can be sure American politics will still operate under its long-standing zero-sum rules, spearheaded by a Republican Party that will effectively divide the working class against itself as the Republicans have done successfully since the Nixon era.  Those predicting the disruption of AI will necessitate an embrace of socialism and/or an expanded safety net are likely to be sorely disappointed.  AI will almost assuredly be rocket fuel to already scandalous levels of inequality, but the story probably won't be "winners vs. losers" so much as "major losers vs. minor losers".  And that's where the political story will get complicated.

I can already hear the Republican campaign ads targeting the "minor losers" of the AI disruption, warning them that the "lowlife, parasitic rabble and festering subhuman filth are sponging off of hardworking folk like themselves and eating Cheetos all day.  Let them get a damn job!!!"  And it will work!  Guaranteed!  Maybe an expanded safety net message will work in one election for the center-left.  Possibly even twice.  But the life cycle of safety net expansion, no matter how desperately needed, will almost assuredly run out of gas long before the economic disruption connected to AI will.  Anybody who's studied the recent history of American politics even a little should be able to see that coming a mile away.  

The bottom line is that neither our gluttonous private sector, willing to torch the country to ashes in pursuit of a strong quarterly earnings report to greet their shareholders with, nor our public sector, beholden to an easily distracted electorate licking their chops to villainize their struggling neighbor rather than the oligarchs bleeding them dry, will be the least bit prepared or capable of managing the decline in what could really live up to the typically overhyped term "existential crisis".

But maybe our new machine overlords will make it easy on us....and simply exterminate our entire species before we get a chance to wring our hands about it merely taking our jobs away.  The fact that virtually nobody in the AI development realm is prepared to debunk that possibility should alarm us that digital genocide of the human race is a very real possibility and possibly even the most likely outcome. And yet, everybody at every level overseeing the introduction and expansion of this technology is ready, willing, and able to take that risk.  

The highest-stakes gamble in human history awaits us in the immediate aftermath of a narcissistic sociopath becoming the most powerful man in the world.  Oh well.  At least we'll have high-pressure shower heads to enjoy before we go!

 

 

 

Will Manufacturing Jobs Be Coming Back To America?

It's hard to give Donald Trump credit for much of anything, but one thing he deserves some degree of credit for is rhetorical and philosophical consistency on the topics of tariffs and economic protectionism.  He has believed in these things long before he got into politics and is defying the overwhelming consensus of both economists and public opinion with his supersized tariff scheme.  So even if we assume that wielding his sovereign-sized Excalibur on the global stage is Trump's strongest motivation for the tidal wave of tariffs he's deployed--and then summarily rolled back--in the last two months, he's sincere in his belief they will lead to a more independently functioning America, and that that would be a good thing.

This puts him on the same side of this issue as a lot of labor unions, so it's not a big surprise that he's cleaved off such a large share of the union vote by peddling this protectionist message.  So that begs the question.  Is there any chance that he's gonna be proven right?

The easy answer is that it's a major long shot, but this is a guy who has defied unimaginable odds to prevail in two Presidential elections, so underestimate his ability to reveal yet another royal flush with his poker hand at your own risk. The experts are assured Trump is hopelessly misguided with his economic policy, and I tend to agree with them, but a little humility is in order on these things until we actually start seeing the results. 

While I may not be 100% convinced that hefty and broadly applied tariffs won't accomplish the intended goal of boosting domestic manufacturing capacity, I can predict with far more confidence that it won't play out as cleanly or as beneficially as MAGA voters expect it to.

Let's break down the biggest challenges to weaponizing tariff policy for long-term economic realignment goals.  The core conundrum here is that most people are impatient.  Asking voters to play the long game and endure hardship has been an electoral loser at least since Jimmy Carter suggested Americans should turn down the thermostat and put on a sweater if they wanted to reduce energy bills.  Trump is asking Americans, who voted for him largely because of a boomlet of inflation that occurred during his predecessor's term, to withstand thousands of dollars per household of additional inflation every year based on a hypothetical promise of a pot of gold at the end of a very, very long rainbow.  But Trump knows most people don't have that kind of patience, which is why he's been spooked into rolling back the overwhelming majority of tariffs that he's imposed since April 2, attempting to dodge the groundswell of rage he knows will be coming in the event of significant inflation or empty shelves.

Let's suppose a majority of Americans were willing to endure this bargain and stand by their man at the polls until the desired outcome materialized.  If that was the case, Trump's original behemoth tariffs may have worked--in a qualified way and with incredible short-term pain that would take years to bounce back from--in incentivizing companies to bring manufacturing back to America.  But scaling back those tariffs to the 10% baseline as he's done since is far less likely to bring about the intended goal.  Factories operating in countries with lower labor, regulatory, and administrative costs will need more of an incentive to build a new plant in Flint, Michigan, than a mere 10% tariff if they remain abroad.

With that in mind, it's hard to see any outcome of such modest tariffs than just....inflation.  Trump wants to have it both ways with tariffs that are small enough to keep Wall Street and consumers from getting "yippy" but not large enough to have much chance of shifting manufacturer behavior. 

Trump actually has a small degree of leverage with public opinion because, in the abstract, a good-sized chunk of the electorate agrees with his core philosophy and are willing to give him a long leash to corral manufacturing back to America.  That's one of the reasons his approval rating has only ticked down a bit in the last two months.  Little to no hardship has been felt yet in working-class America because of the tariffs, but even if and when it is amidst a probable near-term recession, most of Trump's voters will stand by him because they believe in the cause.  It'll be far less than a majority of the American public, but not enough to create a political earthquake and turn many red states blue in the 2026 midterms or the next Presidential election.

Then the question begs itself: what should Trump's base expect as their reward for standing by him, especially if the tariffs somehow work and we're three years away from a manufacturing renaissance?  Will the farm and factory towns left for dead return to their mid-20th century glory days?  Will a virtuous cycle of private sector investment transpire to mend all that has been broken in the last half century in rural and industrial America?  Will the valedictorians of small-town high schools be inclined to stick around after graduation to lay down roots in a way they haven't in most people's lifetimes?

Not a chance.

Voters with romanticized expectations of towering plants on the edge of town employing 1,000 or more union workers are gonna be disappointed with what they end up getting even in the best-case scenario of tariff-induced domestic reinvestment.  Most of the jobs we'd be getting would be low-value light manufacturing.  Think tennis shoes or lunch boxes or crayons.  They'd be small operations with low pay, and that's if they employed any actual humans at all.  And even if we got manufacturing plants that made generators or something with more value and higher pay, job availability wouldn't resemble anything like the plants their grandparents were used to.  In the mid-2020s, it's a matter of whether the plants will be mostly automated or fully automated.

Now let's say automation advancements fall behind expectations and the new plants need more human capital than may be expected.  Light manufacturing jobs would still offer low pay, just as the existing domestic light manufacturing jobs do that always have "Help Wanted" signs on their doors.  In other words, the depopulating rural and industrial communities hosting these new plants wouldn't be any better positioned to fully staff them than their current employers are.  In fact, as the workforce continues to shrink with the retiring Baby Boomers and the plummeting birth rate, finding workers for low-wage jobs will get harder rather than easier.

What does that mean?  Immigrants.  Any scenario where millions of new light manufacturing jobs resurface in a nation with a fast-shrinking labor force means a greatly expanded need for immigrant labor to assemble the tennis shoes and lunch boxes, or even generators, domestically.  I'm sure the number of MAGA voters who've even considered this is very close to zero, and I also bet most wouldn't be very happy about it if it came to pass.  They sure weren't in Springfield, Ohio, where this scenario has already unfolded at a localized level.

And while there's a "chicken versus egg" debate that could be had here, most major employers are gonna be reluctant to locate anyplace with a shrinking labor force and schools and hospitals that are either already closed or on the knife's edge.  Recent reports showed that fully 20% of America's hospitals are teetering on that knife's edge, a strong breeze away from inevitable closure.  But that strong breeze is about to become a tornado in the form of $723 billion in Medicaid cuts serving as the centerpiece for Trump's "big beautiful bill" currently on the cusp of passing Congress.  The inevitable closure of hundreds more hospitals brought about by these Medicaid cuts is certainly not gonna make dying farm and factory towns more attractive for would-be employers, even the ones newly incentivized to find a domestic home for their lunch box factory.

A good case can be made for manufacturing more at home.  COVID exposed that we're too dependent on the goodwill of trading partners, and it made us more vulnerable than we should have been to supply chain disruption. Of course, there's at least as much risk of being too independent of trading partners, the ensuing global isolation leading to the 1930s-style conflicts that have historically always come amidst isolated cultures.  There's no silver bullet when it comes to geopolitical equilibrium. 

And there's no denying that it was a catastrophic political mistake and failure of imagination to let our manufacturing sector drift away with the expectation that something--anything--would fill the void in the hollowed-out communities that remained after the factories went to China.  Still, the muscular effort by the Trump administration to restore Pax Americana manufacturing employment is probably coming two generations too late for the desired effect.  If these tariffs were imposed in 1985 or 1995, when the workforce was abundant and the communities' infrastructure had not yet dissolved, Trump's gambit may have had a puncher's chance of working.  But even then, it might have been a net negative if it stalled out dynamism in other economic sectors insurgent at the time.

By 2025, the patient has already bled too much and for too long to be saved.  Biden's infrastructure bill and unrealized Build Back Better concepts were probably the best hope rural and industrial communities had for smoothing out the edges and managing their decline.  The private sector drove the decimation of blue-collar America because it no longer had a use for them.  Unless and until the private sector decides they need blue-collar America again, it's hard to believe the same people who tore it apart will choose to put it back together, even amidst the most heavy-handed possible government intrusion like large tariffs.  If Trump proves me and his other detractors wrong once again, then hats off.  But making Midwestern steel towns and Deep South mill towns look like they did when our grandparents were alive is gonna be a much more daunting task even than getting elected President twice.

 

 

 

 

Responding To Incentives

American politics and culture in the 2020s have largely amounted to an extended reeducation on the inevitable consequences of perverse incentive structures.  So much of our current predicament is the culmination of lessons unlearned where both past precedent and a modicum of common sense should have alerted us that we were taking a destructive course.  At a macro level, this can be applied to the COVID-era consensus of flooding the zone with borrowed money and never considering that it would lead to inflation, as well as expecting that protectionist tariffs would not ultimately be paid by consumers rather than foreign governments.  

We can expect more fluidity in monetary and trade policies in a changing global economy, however, so some experimentation is not entirely unjustified when challenges arise.  In the previously cited cases, a massive vacuum of demand amidst a crippling pandemic needed an aggressive solution even if the stimulus, in retrospect, ended up overstimulating.  And as manufacturing capacity shifts away from American shores, it's reasonable to make some policy pivots to keep from being dependent on imports from economic rivals, even if broadly applied tariffs are the dumbest possible way to pursue that goal.

The enduring policy mistakes made in the first half of this decade have been centered around even more obvious cause-and-effect stimuli at the core of human nature that one or both sides has managed to get wrong.  We're already dealing with the easily predictable backlash on two of three biggest issues and are poised to with the third, even though the latter will be harder to remedy.

First is the issue of crime.  The movement was already afoot in the late 2010s to go easier on lawbreakers, whether through decriminalization or legalization of drugs, shortening sentences for criminals, doing away with cash bail, or taking away harm reduction options from police officers such as stop and frisk.  Most of these criminal justice reforms were argued with the pretext of racial fairness aspirations.  

We should always expect a push and pull on crime policy, and with good reason.  Leaning too heavily on the enforcement side leads to its own perverse incentives, such as police operating with a perception of impunity and overcrowded prisons hardening small-time offenders into worse versions of themselves.  Nonetheless, the rise in crime in the early-to-mid 2020s was a not-so-subtle reminder that the center of gravity should tilt toward the side of criminal enforcement in pursuit of social harmony given the risks of incentivizing widespread lawless behavior by those weighing the risks versus the rewards.

Worsening the situation, our would-be racial reckoning in 2020 exacerbated the narrative that enforcing crime was some combination of racist and ignorant of root causes.  As a consequence, there was a push to defund police departments, a loosening of shoplifting laws, growing acceptance of open drug use and the proliferation of homeless encampments populated mostly by addicts, and widespread elections of prosecutors in multiple jurisdictions who had no interest in prosecuting crimes.  Eliminating cash bail caught on in more and more places, allowing unprecedented numbers of offenders to reoffend in the same 24-hour period.  The result was a tangible surge in every kind of crime played out in a technological environment where all of this additional crime was captured on video for everyone to see.  And people didn't like what they saw.  Ultimately, they correctly decided that the biggest "root cause" of crime was letting criminals think they could get away with crime.

The backlash to the surge in crime has been comprehensive, crossing racial, ideological, and geographical boundaries.  Just as it was predictable that those predisposed to test legal boundaries would commit more crimes when they became incentivized to do so, it was equally predictable that the majority of the public would be motivated by survival instinct and be incentivized to once again enforce consequences for those who commit crimes.  As a result, the earnest cause of criminal justice reform was likely set back a generation.

Of course, the hole in this argument relates directly to the demographic whose crimes continue to be excused and enabled.....but I'll get to Trump and his civilian army later!

Second on the list of how public policymakers failed to calculate the response to incentives this decade was illegal immigration.  The Biden administration certainly tried to simulate the configuration of a healthy process when justifying the unprecedented mayhem at the U.S.-Mexican border for most of his term, redefining crossing the border illegally as "applying for asylum", but almost nobody was buying it.  Biden and other Democratic candidates for President campaigned on de facto open borders in 2019 and 2020 and voters believed that's exactly what they were getting in 2021, 2022, and 2023.  More importantly, millions of would-be migrants from around the world were mobilized to make the journey because they too were given the impression that de factor open borders were awaiting them.  

It still boggles the mind what the Democratic Party generally and the Biden administration specifically imagined would happen when signaling laxity of border enforcement to a world full of people awaiting a life in the United States, and who would quite obviously respond to the incentive to migrate here in unsustainable numbers.  What on Earth were they thinking?  It's really hard to understand and I can only come up with two possibilities.....  

The first is that the Biden team was genuinely more frightened of incurring the wrath of the microscopic caucus of open borders dead-enders within their party than enraging the overwhelming majority of voters who loathe disorderly borders and mass illegal immigration.  The second option is that the Biden team saw hordes of illegal border crossings as helpful toward mitigating the post-COVID labor shortage, deducing that a dysfunctional economy strained by too few workers would be a bigger detriment to his re-election than 10 million illegal border crossings over the course of his term.  If it's the latter, I'll at least credit to the Biden team for having some method to the presumed madness, but I suspect that's giving them too much credit.  Ultimately, I suspect they were operating out of fear of upsetting AOC and Julian Castro, and like most Democrats of the last 15 years, were likely under the delusion that Hispanic voters wanted as much illegal immigration as they could get based on ethnic kinship.  This mindset has cost the Democratic Party absolutely everything.

But idiotic border policy cost more than just the Democratic Party.  The country is going to need more immigrants as we approach a demographic cliff with a rapidly depleting workforce aging to its sunset, but thanks to a Biden-era border policy that incentivized lawlessness for four years, we're not gonna get it.  Just as criminal justice reform was likely set back a generation because of the mindless zeal of its hard-line activists, immigration reform has likely been set back a generation as well, and it will cost us dearly.

And in the overcorrective national backlash to the left's failed understanding of human nature related to behavioral incentives, we've managed to create a new monster vastly more menacing than the original sins.  That monster, of course, is an autocratic President operating without regard to any laws he doesn't like and facing little to no consequence from those whose constitutional duty is to rein him in.

Once again, it all boils down to bad actors responding to an enabling incentive structure.  If you're Donald Trump, it makes complete sense to continue operating with impunity in a system that has allowed him to operate as a criminal his entire adult life, and particularly since entering politics.  Not only was he allowed to dodge an expansion-pack resume of felony indictments on matters as serious as inciting insurrection and refusing to surrender confidential files, the Supreme Court went so far as to give him an open-ended get-out-jail-free card for the crimes he commits in his second term.  Meanwhile, the legislative branch, controlled by Trump's party, continues to shrug off the crimes inevitably being committed in Trump's second term, ranging from suspension of habeas corpus for deported immigrants to accepting a $400 million luxury jet as a bribe from a foreign government in league with terrorists.  Add in a freshly emboldened crime syndicate working on his behalf after he was permitted to pardon thousands of felonious insurrectionist loyalists and you have the makings of a slow-moving coup that isn't moving so slowly anymore.

And this is just the tip of the spear.  With his "memecoin" cryptocurrency hustle, Trump has set himself up for an unlimited pipeline of under-the-table bribes from the world's worst despots.  If Vladimir Putin slips Trump a billion-dollar memecoin "gift" in exchange for favorable policy treatment, not only will nobody be in a position to stop him, nobody outside of the Trump family is even gonna know about it.  By letting a single man who happens to be a clinical sociopath operate outside of the law, 77 million American voters and every would-be institution intended as a guardrail have incentivized the most lucrative criminal enterprise in the history of our species.

While there was a clear and entirely predictable public backlash to those who incentivized street crime and illegal immigration in the first half of the 2020s, it's not as obvious that the country will be as easily able to course correct on the government we chose on November 5, 2024.  A sociopath has been granted effectively unlimited power.  He's already proven he's not inclined to give up that power without breaking as many things as possible on his way out, and that was at a time where he was still theoretically within the reach of the law.  He no longer is.  And if he doesn't like the verdict that voters render in 2026 or 2028, why on Earth would he feel obliged to abide by it?  He's been given every opportunity and every incentive possible to bulldoze his challengers with a literal and figurative tank, so why should we expect that he won't?

But even if we assume, despite every indication otherwise, that Trump won't seize the long list of incentives he's been given to maintain his grip on power beyond January 20, 2029, I maintain my prediction from November that the future is autocracy, and that autocracy will transcend party affiliation moving forward.  We're not gonna flip a switch in November 2028 and go back to the regular order we lived by in the nation's first 248 years of existence.  Now that the delicious toothpaste of authoritarianism has been released from the tube, it's not gonna go back in.  The incentive structure that Americans allowed to be put into place to enable Donald Trump will outlast the 78-year-old man who inspired it, and no matter the prevailing ideology of the time, I fully expect the America of 2055 to more closely resemble the autocratic America of 2025 than the institution-driven republic we lived in back in those long-ago days of 2023.

The history books will look back upon the 2020s as the decade that an arrogant America decided that the incentive structures that enabled counterproductive or destructive behavior in the past no longer applied.  At this point, the best we can hope for is that the empire avoids complete collapse as a consequence of that hubris.

 

Risk Versus Security: The Real Fault Line Of American Politics

It's been more than 20 years since Thomas Frank's groundbreaking tome entitled "What's the Matter with Kansas?" that took a deep dive into the American working class's ongoing trend from the Democratic Party to the Republican Party.  It was a head-scratcher for those on the left and center-left, myself included, trying to decipher why the demographic that had long been the core constituency of the Democratic Party kept warming up to Republicans more with each cycle.  Democrats spent the years ahead trying to modify their messaging to win some of these working-class voters back, but even at the peak of the Democratic insurgency at the sunset of the Bush years, they continued to lose large swaths of the white working class, particularly in Appalachia, the South, and the lower Midwest.

And then, of course, came the Donald Trump realignment of 2016 that consolidated the white working-class as a bedrock constituency of the Republican Party, growing their dominance with each cycle to the point that the Democratic Party of their ancestors was scarcely a consideration anywhere on the ballot for a decisive majority of the current working-class generation.  And the Republican Party's reach has officially crossed racial and ethnic lines with a rising tide of GOP support among working-class voters of color.  The thesis of "What's the Matter with Kansas?" could now apply to "What's the Matter with Paterson, New Jersey?" or "What's the Matter with the Rio Grande Valley?" as nonwhite, working-class voters in those jurisdictions are voting similarly to the residents of rural Kansas in 2004 when Frank's book came out.

There was never any question that cultural concerns led the way for so many working-class voters' divorce from the Democratic Party, a quarter century ago and still today, but I suspect another part of that disconnect that gets less analysis is that voters see the Democratic Party as having less leverage than it used to when it comes to generating better outcomes in working-class lives.  Obviously, the legacy of NAFTA and other questionable trade deals accelerated this perception, but even taking specific trade policy off the table, the overall shift of the economy in the last quarter of the 20th century all but ensured diminished strength for the farm and factory towns where the Democrats used to get most of their support.  With each shuttered factory, with each new year where the high school students graduating with honors left town with no intention of returning, and with each new Census report showing downwardly adjusted population signs, it became harder for residents of these communities to see how the Democratic Party's vision for the country would be able to deliver for them.

And as the Democrats' promise of economic security seemed increasingly dissonant from the situation on the ground, this demographic became more and more likely to base their voting habits on cultural issues.  Most people are pretty conservative, and people of working-class pedigrees tend to be even more conservative than the population at large.  They crave security in their lives, both in their culture and in their finances.  When the situation on the ground reduced the Democrats' leverage in offering them security, their votes were up for grabs.  

A generation ago, when Thomas Frank's book came out, the Democrats had yet to fully collapse among the working class largely because the Republicans were still peddling more economic risk than security.  The Bush-era GOP was at the forefront of lobbying for even more trade agreements, getting us involved in questionable foreign policy entanglements, and wanted to cut Medicare and privatize Social Security.  Enough working-class voters stuck with the Democratic Party, and thus kept it from fully melting down, because the risk versus security tug of war still came out in favor of the Democrats on economic policy over the Republican Party on cultural policy.

Enter Donald Trump in 2015.  In one fell swoop, he stole the Democrats' advantage on the three issues that were working best for them among working-class voters.  He was more aggressive than Democrats in opposing international trade policy.  He was more aggressive than Democrats in his opposition to American foreign policy intervention.  And he stated from the outset that he didn't plan to touch Social Security or Medicare, which was definitely not the Republican Party position up to that point.  At the same time, he embraced the same cultural conservatism embraced by a strong majority of working-class Americans.  Donald Trump was selling an agenda of both cultural security and economic security for the kinds of voters who wanted both, and it was no longer difficult for these voters to choose.  They shifted by double-digits to Trump in 2016 and have continued to grow these margins in subsequent cycles.

How did the Democratic Party, or at least the remaining Democratic party constituencies, respond to Trump consolidating "security voters"?  By embracing muscular and exponentially expanded cultural risk and foisting it upon the kinds of voters who were already abandoning them by the millions because they wanted more security and not more risk.  The left's backlash to Trump's first term centered around a cultural transformation that put security-minded voters on defense in the most aggressive possible ways.

Security-minded voters wanted tighter control of our borders and reduced prevalence of illegal immigration, and the left responded by calling for abolishing ICE and decriminalizing border crossings.

Security-minded voters wanted to de-emphasize racial and ethnic differences, and the left responded by demanding a "racial reckoning" that dwelled even more deeply on racial grievance.

Security-minded voters wanted opportunities for better lives for their sons and daughters, and the left responded by scolding them that their grandchildren's grandchildren should still be held responsible for the actions of their grandparents' grandparents.

Security-minded voters wanted grace for past mistakes in their own personal lives and for their families, and the left responded by deciding that people's entire lives should be judged based on a politically incorrect Halloween costume they wore in the 80s or having smacked a woman in the ass at a bar in the 90s, with their lifetime cancellations from polite society and losing their ability to be employed being the only acceptable responses.

Security-minded voters wanted as much continuity as possible in relations between men and women, and the left responded by insisting that gender falls on a spectrum and that biological men should be playing on their daughters' soccer teams. 

And security-minded voters were definitely not duped when unpopular solutions that imposed cultural risk on the majority in the past got repackaged with different language.  "Illegal border crossings" didn't gain support when they were rebranded as "asylum claims".  "Affirmative action" didn't win over converts when they started calling it "diversity, equity, and inclusion".  And soft-on-crime policies of the 70s were just as unpopular when justified on the grounds of "criminal justice reform" or "prosecutorial discretion" in the 2020s.

Obviously, people who crave cultural security are often on the wrong side of history and I'm not making excuses for bigotry and obtuseness, but when it comes to democratically decided elections, candidates for office have to recognize that most people do not welcome cultural change.  When voters do demand change, the majority of them are really seeking a "change" in the direction of more security for themselves, their families, and their communities.  It's a minority of voters whose pleas for "change" include an expanded degree of risk, either cultural or economic.

This puts the progressive party of any nation in a precarious position because cultural risk is required to expand rights and to evolve with the times.  So when someone bursts onto the scene peddling a security-minded agenda on both cultural and economic matters, as Trump did in 2016 and again in 2024, it's gonna be very hard for the progressive party to keep their troops from switching armies.  Democrats recognized this as 2024 progressed and attempted to modify their message, but the damage had been done and the cake was baked. 

With a combination of media fragmentation and astonishing levels of disengagement by swaths of the security-minded electorate, Donald Trump was able to obscure an agenda rife with an unprecedented degree of risk and sell it as security last year.  Security-minded voters allowed themselves to be convinced that the Democratic Party was a riskier bet than the guy who vowed to slash the federal government and impose supersized and wildly disruptive tariffs.  Trump made no secret that he intended to govern as an autocrat, but like so many other societies who handed the keys to their kingdoms to autocrats in the past, voters determined they were okay with authoritarianism in the interest of cultural and economic security.

Clearly, now that Trump has managed, in less than 100 days, to single-handedly induce a recession, endanger the retirement savings of millions, and put Medicaid and potentially other senior entitlements on the chopping block despite his promise not to, the voters who chose him on the grounds of security are poised for serious buyer's remorse, whether they're willing to admit it yet or not.  By default, the Democrats stand poised to poach voters motivated by security in subsequent cycles.  That's not to say they're going to for a number of reasons.

Primary among these reasons is that we're at the precipice of both the AI revolution and the last of the Baby Boomers retiring.  Voters picked the worst possible time for enabling Trump to take us over the cliff with a self-induced global economic crisis.  If Democrats had limited capacity to shape the economy in security voters' favor in the recent past, they're gonna have a vastly harder time in an era of scarcity and oligarchy.  As a result, the politics of culture is likely to continue to be salient on most security voters' radar, especially now that Trump has exposed just how severely cultural grievance can be leveraged and, likewise, how Biden has inadvertently exposed how little impact old-school initiatives directed toward winning over security-minded voters have in contemporary politics.

This feeds into the key question that fragmented Democrats are trying to figure out in the aftermath of their November 2024 annihilation.  Do they move to the center or to the left?  Certainly based on a conventional reading of American politics, or a conventional reading specific to the 2024 election for that matter, it would seem obvious that Democrats need to move to the center.  But the political center is not a space that satisfies the electoral majority's insatiable appetite for security.  With this in mind, I don't think it's at all clear which direction would best serve the Democrats' electoral interest, particularly in 2028.  It'll depend on how bad the Trump economy gets, how disruptive the AI revolution gets, and how far along our institutions' ongoing meltdown gets to its completion.  How many hundreds of additional rural and small-city hospitals will close their doors in response to our broken health care system?  How many people will be denied full homeowners' insurance coverage as climate change renders the risk pool model unsustainable?

Voters have shown us twice in the last decade that they're willing to take a bazooka to constitutional order if they believe it will deliver them greater security.  With it looking increasingly doubtful that Trump is gonna be able to deliver on that security, don't rule out the possibility that they'll swing radically the other direction just as quickly and just as comprehensively as they embraced right-wing authoritarianism.  I predicted in November that the future is autocracy, and I'm doubling down on that.  Don't expect an electorate that chose a bomb thrower who promised them security last time to suddenly decide upon a calculated centrist beholden to institutions as their salvation next time....expect them to throw their support toward a different kind of autocrat who promises security at any cost, with the caveat that that security has to come in the economic and cultural form.

The 2016 version of Bernie Sanders is a close approximation of what I think security voters will be most likely to respond to, one who either resists talking about cultural matters or actively takes the side of the risk-averse, while promising to do whatever it takes to stanch the considerable economic bleeding that has befallen working-class communities.  But whoever this figure ends up being can be expected to be much more sharp-elbowed in his or her approach than 2016 Bernie was, a new reality awakened by Trump's autocratic tendencies and voters' willingness to put up with it so long as the trains run on time.  

For all of the ink spilled and the bandwidth occupied litigating left versus right in American politics, it's the wrong calculus and the wrong spectrum.  The real fault line is risk versus security.  It always has been to some degree.  The appetite for security swung this country's otherwise right-leaning voters decisively to the left in 1932, and it will absolutely happen again when conditions are right.  With each passing week, it becomes easier to imagine that happening in the next Presidential cycle, but it will require the Democratic Party to settle on a platform that maximizes economic security and minimizes cultural risk, neither of which will be an easy task to even articulate let alone execute.

But even in the best-case scenario for Democrats, where voters respond to the upheaval of Trumpism 2.0 by handing Democrats huge victories in both 2026 and 2028, expect the Republicans to come roaring back with a vengeance in 2030.  Obviously, this is the conventional pattern of American politics anyway, but even the most astonishing degree of self-imposed wreckage by one of our political parties will be quickly forgiven by an electoral majority desperately craving an increasingly elusive measure of security in their lives.  A beleaguered population with an irrational expectation of security is going to be smacked in the forehead with a world offering them a rising tide of risk, and our political system is not gonna be equipped to handle it.  They will demand cultural and economic security and will get neither.

Grow Up About Moving The Clock Forward

On the list of serious problems facing the country in March 2025 and on the list of wrongheaded policy pursuits of the Trump administration, the growing push to abolish daylight savings time wouldn't even rank in the top 100.  But given that it was that time again this weekend and we moved our clock ahead one hour amidst the usual chorus of boo-hooing, it's time to get real about this issue.  Moving the clock back an hour in the fall and ahead in the spring is unequivocally the most efficient and least disruptive option to the flow of everyday life, particularly for those of us living in the northern states.  Whatever trivial sacrifice is required in short-term sleep pattern disruption is more than worth it compared to the alternatives.

 The U.S. learned this lesson in 1974 during the oil embargo and the push to conserve energy.  It was decided that the country would pivot to year-round daylight savings time, effective January 6, 1974.  It was popular in concept but fell out of favor about five minutes after enactment.  In three months time, favorability for the transition dropped from 79% to 42%.  It turns out when it's dark until after 9 a.m., it's harder to see schoolkids going to the bus stop.  Eight of them were killed in traffic accidents en route to school.  The construction industry wasn't thrilled either that work couldn't begin until the morning was half over.  The pivot to year-round daylight savings time was repealed later in 1974.  

How soon we forget.  

A half century later, the momentum keeps growing for giving this foolishness a second try.  That momentum may have reached its apex now that the richest and most evil man in the world has recommended doing away with daylight savings time, declaring it "inefficient", whatever that means.  Considering Elon Musk tends to get whatever he wants, this could really happen this time.  And I'm sure it would start out just as popular as it was at this time in 1973 by people with short memories or lackluster critical thinking skills, which is the vast majority of the population.

The majority of the people who would support this would have a near-instant reality check when they learned that Musk's version of "efficiency" doesn't mean year-round daylight savings time, but year-round regular time.  In other words, no more extra daylight in the summer.  What do you get instead?  The sun rising at 4:30 a.m. in June and July and being awakened by chirping birds two hours before the alarm goes off rather than one hour before.  Then people grumbling about moving the clock twice a year would really have something to whine about regarding their "altered sleep pattern".  The buyer's remorse would kick in pretty quickly once people realized that.  

But Arizona doesn't follow daylight savings time and they seem to do okay!!!!

It's true.  Arizona chose to snub the federal daylight savings time policy in 1968.  But as I hinted at earlier, screwing around with daylight savings time has a vastly more significant impact on those in northern latitudes.  The further one lives from the equator, the more daylight they gain in the summer or lose in the winter.  Minnesota has an hour less daylight than Arizona in December and an hour more daylight each day in June.  Failing to adjust the clock seasonally would be less disruptive in Arizona than it would in Minnesota.

Given that this is the case, I suppose I'd be okay with leaving daylight savings time laws to the states, but it would be even more problematic for national cohesion if a third of the states chose to be on permanent regular time, another third chose to be on year-round daylight savings time, and the other third stuck with moving their clocks back and forth twice a year.  Would we really want to go down this road?

Ultimately, there just isn't a good argument for change here.  Changing the clock twice a year helps alleviate the daylight fluctuations between the seasons in a way that accommodates the schedules that most people follow.  The idea that it will be more "efficient" or less disruptive to sleep to either wake up to 4:30 a.m. sunrises in the summer or to be up and about three hours before 9 a.m. sunrises in the winter is laughable.  Elon Musk is already causing enough figurative headaches for Americans with everything else he's doing.  Let's not allow him to cause literal headaches for Americans by scrapping daylight savings time.

America Sets Itself On Fire Just As Voters Asked Us To Do

Over the past generation, a politics of rage has consumed the American people, provoked by the tribalism of our fragmented media landscape and the monetization of bitter division, all coupled with the predictable postindustrial decline in American communities where the middle class had always been the most fragile.  It's been a toxic brew and the electorate has been flirting with self-immolation a little more with each passing election cycle.  It's increasingly clear that on November 5, 2024, a near majority of American voters in states worth 312 electoral voters pulled the trigger, convinced that burning the country to ashes to "own the libs" was a winning proposition.  Smaller numbers of voters had been flirting with the politics of self-immolation for some time, but last fall, a critical mass decided that the most dangerous people the country has ever witnessed aspire to power should be given that power, completely unchecked.  They promised it would be fun to set the country on fire and then stand back and watch it burn, and the people decided that burning to death didn't sound so bad as long as liberals were the first ones doused in gasoline.

And now, nearly four months later, here we are.  We elected a bull in a china shop and, just as promised, the china is us.

Go back to last fall and read some of my past columns.  I predicted it would be very, very bad when an emboldened autocratic aspirant took the reins of power under dramatically different conditions than was seen in January 2017.  But honestly, even I wasn't mentally prepared for it to be as bad as it has in just five nightmarish weeks as literally nobody has inclination to stand in the way of this madman.  The Democrats are as terrible at politics as they've always been and can't even seem to find their way out of the La-Z-Boy let alone articulate a cogent counteroffensive.  People that know better in the Republican Party are scared to death about their own careers and quietly pretend to agree with positions taken by the new administration that run counter to everything they've ever feigned caring about in the past.  Rome is burning and hundreds of Congressional Neros are content to fiddle away.

Rather than going through a laundry list of everything Trump and his team are breaking, it's more useful for me to sniff out what's likely to come on the other side of all of this scorched-earth wreckage.....and that's a geopolitical climate where every other country on the globe decides it's in their best interest to work around the United States rather than with us.  Trump and his disciples are convinced the U.S. economic might is so overpowering that we can behave like a gangster on absolutely everything and the world will fall in line.  But does the rest of the world really need us the way Trump and his voters think?  Particularly if we raise the cost of business with supersized tariffs while cutting off their foreign aid and letting it be known that we'll thuggishly steal their mineral rights just for the privilege of having us in the room?

The question certainly becomes what the U.S. has to offer that's worth enduring the expense and humiliation that Trump insists upon, particularly as we make it clear that our military might is no longer gonna be accessible or available to the former allies and would-be trading partners being forced to eat the shit sandwiches.  What's in it for them?  And what do we have that they can't live without?  Are the legacy brands that we're coasting on (General Motors, McDonald's, Walmart) really that irreplaceable? Is our tech sector really at the cutting edge of innovation as it was a quarter century ago, or are the Chinese poised to show us up at every stage of the tech development of the future?  And as we've allowed our economy to be centered around financial industry three-card monte with increased regularity, will we continue to lead the rest of the world by the nose with Wall Street's gimmicks and Ponzi schemes when everybody else has an active interest in working around us if they're gonna be treated like enemies? 

For those keeping score, here's where things stand in America in March 2025.....

At the very time when the advancement of artificial intelligence is poised to allow the tech billionaires to erase trillions of dollars of human capital from the economy, these same tech billionaires have a literal front-row seat to secure the sweetest deal possible for themselves at the behest of the narcissistic puppet they bought and paid for.  Not only will these tech barons be purging millions of American workers from the ranks of the employed, they'll be raiding the public coffers for trillions of dollars in debt-financed tax cuts to pay for it.

The promised budget cuts will percolate through the American economy and dramatically increase the risk of a recession even before the AI revolution is fully rolling.  The Medicaid cuts alone run the risk of manufacturing crushing deficits for the states, and their balanced budget requirements threaten a domino effect of further cuts that will almost certainly be enough to instigate a recession.

And perhaps most ominously for the interest of national security, Trump and Musk have created an environment so toxic where nobody will find a career in national service attractive.  Who in their right mind would look at what's happened since January 20 and believe that a career in any capacity with the federal government would be worth the risk of instantaneous discharge and financial ruin at the hands of megalomaniacs?  Federal jobs are at the forefront of national security protection and, in just six weeks, we've created an environment where zero people would ever consider doing them moving forward.  America's smartest people who've done this work up until now are guaranteed to seek alternative options.  And this is happening at the same time as we're creating enemies out of everybody else on the planet.  It won't be long at all before the national security implications of these impulsive choices will reveal themselves in the form of tangibly diminished national safety.

And given that Trump has already gotten his license for four years of unchecked power and the promise of unlimited lawlessness to come, the possibility of buyer's remorse isn't particularly relevant, but as a  student of public opinion, I'm still curious how many people ultimately abandon him.  Ultimately, I just don't see Trump declining to the depths of his public opinion nadir as seen in late 2017 and 2018.  Too many people have gone down a rabbit hole of radicalization since then, and to be fair, the Democrats' pandemic-era consensus on immigration, crime, and race served up no shortage of kindling to accelerate that radicalization. 

Furthermore, cruelty to "those people" is popular in American politics.  This is nothing new either.  I came of the age in the Reagan era, and while contemporary MAGA Republicans are much different in so many ways compared to the Reagan-era GOP,  the clearest connecting tissue is the elation they get from watching other people's lives be destroyed.  As meatpackers, steelworkers, autoworkers, and small family farmers were chewed up and spit out during the Reagan years, the Gipper's base got a visceral masturbatory thrill observing the ensuing wreckage of the people who they didn't believe deserved their one-time middle-class lives.  Fast forward 40 years and, ironically, it's the steelworkers, autoworkers, and farmers at the front lines of the MAGA base, getting their own visceral masturbatory thrill watching a wrecking ball delivered upon the lives of the college boys (and former military people....wave that flag!!!) on the payroll of the federal government or of those receiving Medicaid.  In 1985 and again in 2025, no matter who makes up the coalition, enjoying the suffering of others has been the essence of Republicanism, and the voters who ascribe to it will have to go through a lot personally to offset the euphoria they feel from hurting people they perceive as their rivals.  And Trump and Musk have plenty of hurt to deliver upon to gratify these voters' basest urges to "own" these people.

In other words, I wouldn't believe the polls showing Trump's popularity increasingly underwater or the Congressional townhalls full of enraged constituents representing a mass backlash to the status quo.  If it was real, you'd be seeing lethargic Democratic lawmakers rising from their slumbers and Republican lawmakers more likely to distance themselves from Trump's most controversial positions, neither of which is happening.  If you go to a diner in Kenosha, as CBS News did earlier this week, you can expect to see tables full of former blue-collar Democrats who can't find anything to oppose in all that Trump and Musk are doing.  While I have no doubt that suffering will befall these people as a consequence of Trump's choices, until that suffering is impossible to ignore, the overwhelming majority of the 77 million people who voted for Trump, along with a nonzero number of the 78 million people who didn't vote for Trump, are gonna be content to enjoy watching the fire they started consume the country.  Arsonists like to stand back and watch what they've destroyed right until the point that it burns their own home, and America's MAGA arsonists can be counted upon to do the same.