The Partisan Divide on Issues

[pbrower2a]

(05-12-2021, 03:13 PM)Einzige Wrote: What Regeneracy?

Biden's popularity is down roughly seven points from where it was after the inaugural, in the low-mid 50s.

Predictable. That usually happens.

Quote:There is an inflation crisis,

Price stability as we have known in the neoliberal era depends upon large numbers of people being overworked and underpaid. Such is the definitive expression of supply-side economics from Reagan to Trump with ephemeral breaks under Clinton and Obama before the Master Class starts buying the political process: employers crack the whip, and employees cannot buy anything except in an auction-like setting for such things as property rents, mass low culture (such as cable TV), and medical care whose raw demand cannot really rise but whose prices can. 

Quote:a computer chip shortage,

probably because people cooped up during the COVID-19 plague have been spending such disposable income as they have on electronic goodies 

Quote:an oil pipelines payment system was just hacked for ransom (The Administrationblamed the Russians like a pack of retards until it came out that the hackers just wanted cash), etc.

Muggers and bank robbers just want cash, too. Ransomware operators have the same motivation but don't need to threaten anyone's life. 

Quote:The Biden Administration has also partnered with the Republicans in a direct assault on those receiving unemployment benefits, threatening to cancel  them entirely and trying to force the workers back to work.

Such has been the norm. Part of the idea behind unemployment insurance is that people make do while work similar to what they have been doing reappears instead of competing with people doing lesser-skilled work. Maybe an accountant might do some bookkeeping for a while, but if he takes a job as a convenience-store clerk he is solving his own problem badly by putting someone else out of work. That solves nothing. 

It's not as if people unemployed must move across country to take temporary work -- let us say going from Pittsburgh to Dallas for two months and ending up unemployed in Dallas after two months and having to start anew.  

Quote: Biden's first six months have been as stupid and chaotic as the first six months of the Clinton or Obama Administration ls before him,

For real chaos look at the second term of Dubya, let alone the catastrophe that is Donald Trump as President.  President Obama has a war to win... against a plague to which Donald Trump gave a mangled response. As for Obama... if most people see the possibility of a replay of the economic downturn leading into the Great Depression (early 2009 was analogous to early 1931, when the downturn was still a recession and not the full-blown depression that it would be in a year and a half), maybe backing thebanks comes before trying to reshape the economic order. 

Chaos is never easy to put to an end.  

Quote: 
and will likely cost them at least the House. He's certainly no Grey Champion. He's another muddling neolib Democrat, and the Democratic Party is the enemy of the working class.

The Democrats have a bare majority in the House. Except that 

(1) the Republicans took the low-hanging fruit in 2020, so that is different from 2010

(2) Republicans still have the onus of Donald Trump. Unlike the case of Dubya, his antics are still toxic to the GOP, and I would expect them to still be in late 2022. Donald Trump is still toxic in the extreme, and he casts a shadow far larger and deeper than Dubya ever did. 

(3) generational change now favors Democrats as it did not favor them in 2010 or 2014. Every year about 1.6% of the electorate dies off, and that is almost exclusively people over 55. That now largely means middle-to-late-wave Silent, Boomers, and now early-wave X. On the whole these three groups seem to be about 5% more R than D. Meanwhile the Millennial and Homeland generations (at this stage of the generational cycle an Artist/Adaptive generation behaves much like a Hero/Civic generation in politics) is about 20% more D than R. This is as the Millennial generation gets deeper into the age groups in which a generation starts winning large numbers of high offices. Only because people have been living longer and staying active have elderly politicians stayed around longer than usual. But that too comes to an end. 

(4) the capital Putsch is going to still look very bad through 2022 at the least. Pols who can't see anything wrong with nullifying a presidential election -- all of them Republicans -- will be statistically more vulnerable than usual if incumbents.

(5) there is no evidence of any fresh right-wing trend in religious life. What exists is increasingly becoming a fossil (which is ironic because the Religious Right often denies the literal fossil record of science for pushing creationism along with other aspects of Biblical literalism).   

(6) Evidence suggests that the Skowronek cycle is in operation to the detriment of the GOP -- both the supply-side 'classicist' wing that prevailed from the time of Reagan and to the right-wing populists around Trump. The response to COVID-19 has been in part to improve some of the sweatshop-like working conditions. An economic recovery does not have the 'principles' of supply-side economics behind it. The Hard Right is strongly committed to Reagan-Bush-Trump supply-side practices that  may no longerr be sustainable.

I'm not calling for Democratic gains in the House in 2022, or even a general hold of the House majority -- yet. The fat-cat pigs know how to fund right-wing pols willing to win Congressional seats and follow the orders of those who supply the Koch-aine (get it?) of American politics.  That might not be so successful for a while. Most people no longer see being overworked and underpaid or being fleeced by monopolists as a solution to any of their problems. 

The six-year itch still applies in American politics -- but 2022 is also six years after the election of Donald Trump.