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Yahoo
8 hours ago
- Politics
- Yahoo
American Politics Only Pretends to Work
There is a pervasive feeling—rising up from the precarious working poor, through the illusory middle class, and now even brushing the edges of the elite—that something in America is broken. The carefully curated illusions of American life, which held just enough weight to seem real for much of my millennial lifetime, are beginning to collapse. These illusions were constructed in the shadow of post-Reagan neoliberalism, just as the rot began to eat away at the gains of the postwar economy. Poverty and racism have always made liberty and justice feel like empty promises for many, but for protected classes, the illusion could endure. So much so that by the time I reached college—coinciding with the first term of Barack Obama—it was fashionable to declare that we had entered a post-racial America. Now those delusions lie bloodied in the street. We have seen law-abiding citizens snatched off the street, a billionaire oligarch turned loose to deconstruct the civil service. Meanwhile, that chasm between those with more than enough and those with nothing keeps widening. If there was an 'Obama legacy,' then it's mostly vanished. The optics of progress have failed to mask its absence. On May 16, Maryland Governor Wes Moore—a Democrat, a Rhodes scholar, and the only Black governor in the country—sent a letter to the president of the Maryland State Senate, vetoing a bill passed by the state legislature that would have created a reparations commission to study the economic and social case for compensating Black Marylanders for the enduring harms of slavery and its legacy. The headlines suggested betrayal. 'Maryland Governor Vetoes Reparations Bill,' read The New York Times' headline. 'Gov. Moore vetoes bill creating a state commission to study reparations,' wrote The Baltimore Banner. But the governor's letter tells a more nuanced story. 'I strongly believe now is not the time for another study,' Moore wrote. 'Now is the time for continued action that delivers results for the people we serve.' The sentiment that a substantial body of research exists bears out. The evidence is already there. The impacts of slavery, redlining, racial violence, and economic exclusion have been documented in study after study by universities, think tanks, and government agencies alike. The racial wealth gap in America—which is a topic that does not want for robust news coverage or analysis—remains staggering: The average white family holds nearly 10 times the wealth of the average Black family. In cities like Baltimore and all across the country, formerly redlined neighborhoods remain poorer, sicker, and less resourced than their white counterparts. Economist Sandy Darity, the Brookings Institution, and the Federal Reserve have all produced rigorous economic models showing the effects of slavery and other racist programs on Black wealth and showing how reparative programs could substantially narrow these disparities—even lengthening the lives of Black Americans. Echoing these findings, The California Reparations Report proposed direct cash payments and broad institutional reforms—ranging from guaranteed access to health care and housing to tax-exempt status for reparations payments—as essential components of a comprehensive state-level strategy to repair the enduring economic and social harms of slavery and its afterlives. But here's the rub: The bill that Moore spiked was never actually about discovering new facts to lay alongside the vast mountain of already-obtained knowledge. Rather, it's a quintessentially American ritual. A performance of forward motion that, in reality, preserves the status quo: activity masquerading as achievement. We are not waiting for more data. We are waiting for the willpower of political elites to catch up to the facts we have already gathered about the state of the world. We are hoping that we might create a force strong enough to dissolve the lucrative web of mutual dependence that exists between politicians, their funders, and their funding recipients—an arrangement that allows the few to profit from the entrenched policies that impoverish the many. For much of my lifetime, the nation, like our tech devices, has operated like a machine engineered for planned obsolescence: appearing functional on the surface but designed to slowly degrade beneath the hood. Our dissatisfaction is tempered by the allure of a shiny new upgrade that promises new features each campaign cycle. Like our top-grossing movies, election cycles are reboots and franchises. That includes our politics. Our institutions don't just fail; they are built to delay, to degrade, to defer. We pretend they work, and when they don't, we hold another hearing, commission another report, launch another study, believe another is hardly the first to challenge these neglectful impulses. More than a decade ago, The Atlantic published Ta-Nehisi Coates's landmark essay 'The Case for Reparations.' It was not merely a manifesto but a meticulous historical excavation—from redlining in Chicago to the GI Bill's racist exclusions—that laid out in irrefutable detail how government policy, not just private prejudice, created Black disadvantage. It forced a national conversation. But again, the response was mostly talk. On June 1, however, Tulsa Mayor Monroe Nichols—who once opposed reparations—announced a historic local plan for survivors and descendants of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre. The city would fund direct payments and long-term support programs. It is a rare instance where moral clarity translated into material commitment. But Tulsa is the exception, not the rule. This policy of forever kicking the can down the road in the name of respecting some phantasmal process is not unique to reparations. The same pattern plays out across the political spectrum: Universal basic income pilots have consistently shown that giving people money reduces poverty, homelessness, and even mental illness—yet most federal assistance remains conditional and insufficient. Restorative justice programs show lower recidivism than punitive sentences—particularly for youth—yet U.S. incarceration rates have remained the highest in the world since 2002. The information is known. The solutions exist. They are simply not acted upon. The political class often blames this inertia on partisan gridlock. But that too is an illusion—one as fragile as it is convenient. The apparent opposition between parties masks a deeper consensus: Both benefit from a system that rewards performative conflict over substantive change, ensuring that donor interests and institutional power remain undisturbed regardless of which party holds office. What has not changed since the 1990s is the sheer number of Americans who do not vote at all. In 1992, Joan Didion wrote in The New York Review that political apathy was a misdiagnosis: the real condition was disenchantment, a loss of faith that the system could deliver anything meaningful. And while raw turnout numbers have rebounded from the dismal 1990s, it remains the case that disaffection is a constant presence. I saw it firsthand while teaching an introductory sociology class in Washington, D.C., in the autumn of 2024. As expected in a presidential election year, every discussion of social issues circled back to politics. My students, who represented the population of their majority-Black, working-class university, were thoughtful and interested but wary. One student offered the familiar argument: that nonvoters had only themselves to blame; they are uninformed and unengaged. But an older Black woman in the class cut in. She worked with unhoused Washingtonians who, she said, don't see much difference between life under either party. And how could they? Their material circumstances have not changed. In 2024, the Democratic Party—once the party of labor—ran its campaign flanked by billionaires and Bush-era Republicans. While Donald Trump performed populism in a McDonald's, Kamala Harris held fundraisers with Mark Cuban and the Cheneys. Campaigns are fought on vibes and not policy. While Kamala Harris had a 'Brat Summer,' Trump, a Manhattan-made real estate developer, played to rural crowds. Their policy disagreements and, especially, their pro-war consensus on foreign policy and neoliberal economics are rarely discussed. One party cosplays populism, and the other cosplays credibility. All that has shifted since the '90s is which party plays which role. What has changed since the Clinton era is not political substance but political spectacle. Social media has democratized access to information and sharpened our ability to see the rupture between what is promised and what is real. There is now a generation fluent in disillusionment. The Democratic National Committee itself has become a case study in illusion maintenance: from undermining Bernie Sanders as the leading candidate in 2020 to burying debates, to pretending Joe Biden's cognitive decline is a fabrication rather than a crisis of leadership. When David Hogg—a Parkland school shooting survivor and one of five DNC vice chairs—challenged the party's refusal to reckon with younger, more progressive voters and threatened to primary incumbents, he wasn't breaking ranks; he was breaking the fourth wall. And now his sentence may be ousting. My generation has watched the lives promised to us slip away based on a political consensus we were not alive to agree upon, conceived by a club we've not been invited to join. While a cycle of progress and backlash has emerged on some social issues, such as same-sex marriage and abortion, neoliberal financial policies embraced by both major parties have left millennials unable to buy houses, afford kids, or even buy groceries without financing them through buy-now-pay-later apps like Klarna—which is now facing losses and pausing its IPO in part because we can't pay them back. Meanwhile, policies supporting deregulation of financial markets, tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy, and austerity measures have persisted throughout our lifetimes. These are the policies that political elites keep recycling as 'solutions' to our problems; meanwhile, these strategies only further widen income inequality and economic insecurity. Banking deregulation under the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act of 1999 paved the way for risky financial practices that led to the 2008 financial crisis. Similarly, trade agreements like NAFTA, which went into effect in 1994, prioritized corporate interests over labor protections, resulting in job losses and stagnant wages for American workers. Just a few weeks ago, the Senate, by bipartisan acclamation, passed an industry-friendly crypto deregulation bill, the direct fruits of crypto donors drowning Washington in slush money. This is a deeply entrenched way of doing business, one that reflects a larger failure to adapt to changing economic realities and contribute to ongoing challenges faced by younger generations. We should think of Governor Moore's veto like this: He didn't reject reparations; he rejected this whole charade. And the culture is catching up. Even our consumer habits reflect the growing revolt against disposability. Across the country, citizens are fighting for 'right to repair' laws, demanding that tech companies let people fix their own devices rather than forcing them to buy replacements. Behind that demand is a deeper yearning—for durability, for agency, for something built to last. We should want the same from our politics. But our civic infrastructure is designed more for optics than policy action. Commissioned research is a dress rehearsal for a play that will never debut. A 25-hour 'filibuster' that blocked no bill is marketing for Senator Cory Booker's new book. Every moral breakthrough is deferred until the next election cycle. We have outsourced moral courage to process. Governor Moore's veto was a rare political moment that acknowledged what so many Americans now suspect: We are not in need of more evidence or rhetoric—we are in need of political will and action. We know how to fix what's broken. The question is whether we still have the courage to stop pretending and pick up the tools to repair it.
New York Times
05-04-2025
- Politics
- New York Times
Cures for What Ails the Democratic Party
To the Editor: Re 'The Democrats Are in Denial About 2024' (editorial, March 30): Donald Trump rose to the presidency on fear and false promises: safety, lower costs, a better life. He lied, but those needs are real. People want health care, housing and a livable future. These aren't radical demands; they're basic expectations that neither party is addressing adequately. A progressive agenda — universal health care, fair wages, climate action — isn't fringe. It's practical, popular and necessary. Leaders like Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez are showing the way, and they are popular. They're not waiting, and neither should we. We don't have years to wait. This is not normal politics. And we cannot afford a business-as-usual response. The usual checks — elections, courts, oversight — are being bypassed. President Trump and his allies are laying the groundwork for authoritarianism now. History is clear: Once fascism takes root, it doesn't leave willingly. Trumpism isn't the disease. It's the symptom of a broken system. The cure is solidarity, justice and building something together that's worth believing in. This is a real opportunity if we choose to meet it. Rebecca Jones Whately, Mass. To the Editor: This editorial leaves out the main reason for the Democrats' 2024 defeats: their abandonment of the working and middle class in the post-Reagan era. Instead of offering a cleareyed look at how this rightward shift culminated in the party's disastrous 2024 performance, the editorial signs on to the center-right talking point that the Democrats have 'moved too far left on social issues.' Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times. Thank you for your patience while we verify access. Already a subscriber? Log in. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
