He predicted these events in 1936.
But, as Michael Brenes argues, this pendulum is broken. The Democrats didn’t mount a full-scale pendulum swing leftward after Reagan. Clinton was elected, sure, but his policies were closer to Nixon’s than to FDR’s. Obama created some strong social policy, including, but not limited to the ACA. But when push came to shove, Democratic presidencies have begun to look more and more like traditional Republican presidencies.
Or, at minimum, the lines have been blurred.
Of course, Trump has taken the broken pendulum and run with it, destroying the administrative state, razing our global standing, and brazenly funneling wealth from the bottom to the top. He’s also creating a de facto private domestic military and openly exchanging favors for bribes.
The constant barrage of horrors in our flaming hot news cycle, pushed out through social media’s algo, has the effect of making us all forget that this very moment — the present — was constructed by the past. And the future will be constructed by our actions today.
Trump is breaking the world in the present. In the future, either we’ll fix it … or we won’t.
In this conversation, Michael Brenes talks about how we got here and where we’re going. There’s more hope here than you might imagine, but it’s gonna take work, and America will clearly never be the same.
We wanted to talk about his new book, The Rivalry Peril: How Great-Power Competition Threatens Peace and Weakens Democracy, but we didn’t get to it.
But good news! We’re doing this again at the same time next week: Monday, July 28 at 12 p.m. ET,
will be speaking again with Michael Brenes about how our obsession with battling China is a distraction that will leave us poorer, sicker, and less safe. You don’t want to miss it.THANK YOU FOR MAKING US ONE OF THE FASTEST-RISING SUBSTACKS! CLAIM YOUR SPECIAL SUBSCRIPTION OFFER TODAY!
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