Do not lose sight of how stupid and unfair all of this is.

(This post is available for everyone to read for free today.)

As I was reflecting the other day, as I often do, on the grim state of affairs that is U.S. politics, it suddenly really hit me just how fucking stupid and exhausting and stupid everything is. I don't mean that in a hopeless, despairing way—I think things can get better. I just mean it might be healthy, for us as Americans, to step back and look at the whole picture and fully take in how much bullshit we are dealing with.

I'm barely even talking about how Donald Trump is going to be president again, even after he tried to overturn the last election. Why would we be surprised by that? There's been a lot of shouting about what a threat to democracy he is, and Democrats certainly raised a lot of money shouting right along. And I don't think they're wrong. But they did fuck all about it. Democrats had control of the White House and Congress when Joe Biden's term began in 2021, and proceeded to do next to nothing to deal with Trump. There were multiple prosecutions of the guy, which started too late and took too long, and now he will suffer no penalty at all. The Democrats didn't even pass voting rights legislation! Did you think they had? There was the John Lewis Act and the Freedom to Vote Act, and neither became law. No, but John Roberts's Republican-controlled Supreme Court did weaken the Voting Rights Act of 1965 for the second time in 2021. (The first time was in 2013.)

You might want to interrupt me to say that Democrats tried to do these things, and just couldn't, because of the Senate filibuster, and because they couldn't count on support from rogue Democratic senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, and because John Roberts's Republican-controlled Supreme Court would simply block or overturn everything anyway. First: You can't interrupt me. This is a newsletter. Second: Are you kidding me? You think Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema were being obstructive because they're too principled? You think they are the two politicians in Washington whose price simply can't be met, who couldn't find their way to a yes vote with the proper incentives? Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema? Maybe, maybe, someone else had given them insurmountable reasons not to support voting rights legislation or eliminating the filibuster—like promising to bestow upon them the powers of Superman, or threatening to blow up their houseboat. Maybe. But maybe there are other Democrats who also don't actually support those things—especially eliminating the filibuster—and so the party isn't going to push that hard, because it's convenient to pin it on a guy who's about to retire and a woman who got to the Senate because of her progressive record and abruptly turned conservative.

I don't want to hear about the Supreme Court either. The conservative Federalist Society has handpicked the last three Republican justices—and I'm calling them Republican on purpose—one of whom stole a Democratic appointment's place. It has been clear to literally millions of people for a long time now that Dems need to rein in the court, probably by packing it, because the branches of federal government were supposedly designed to serve as checks and balances against each other. Americans gripe about how too many voters have forgotten their high school civics classes, but the people running the government seem to have forgotten their high school civics classes, so can you really blame some folks for not taking civics more seriously? Do the Democrats think that the court is just gonna get better on its own? The court that won't impose rules that prevent its justices from taking vacations with the billionaires whose cases they rule on? Or are the Democrats just hoping for a streak where enough Republican justices die or retire and then Dems can appoint a new court majority without interference? Is it just about waiting until we get lucky? Is that how politics works? Is that how it worked when William Rehnquist's Republican-controlled Supreme Court gave the presidential election to George Bush in 2000? Was it just a happy accident?

I know all this stuff is much easier said than done. I understand that politics and life are complicated. Again: I am just trying to pause and reflect here, on the larger situation, because I think in our valid concerns about how complicated politics and life are, we can lose sight of how straightforward some of it is too.

The United States is the only first-world country without a national healthcare system. We spend so much more on healthcare than people in our peer countries, and we see fewer doctors and get kicked out of the hospital sooner than they do—and not because we get better faster. Most Americans have to get insurance through their employers, and both the insurers and the employers can just change what's covered if they want to. We spend hundreds of dollars a month on our premiums, and insurers still fight with us about what they'll pay for, and force people to jump through hoops at the lowest points of their lives. I know everything can't be free, but are you going to tell me you think health insurers are just strapped for cash? That their CEOs and executive management teams are tooling around in 2004 Honda Accords because they don't want to deny any more claims than they absolutely have to? No.

I know that as a citizen and resident of the United States, I enjoy greater material wealth and comfort than most people have experienced throughout all human history. I know I enjoy greater material wealth and comfort than most people have experienced this year. That doesn't change the fact our healthcare is materially worse than healthcare in other countries like this one. And that doesn't mean, either, that I should have to fucking move to get better healthcare. (Have some dignity, for Christ's sake, if that's what you were about to say. Have some pride in your country.) No matter how good Americans have it in some ways—and we do not have it as well as we're told we do—health insurers are constantly defrauding us, and doing everything they can to keep us from implementing a new system. We know this. None of it is a secret. Even people who voted for Donald "President Crimes" Trump will readily agree that big corporations have been scamming us for years, and that the politicians who aren't Donald Trump have done a terrible job of making that clear.

Everything is like this. Everything has gotten more and more expensive. I know inflation was the result of covid relief and recovery, and that it happened all over the world, but I also know that everything was getting more expensive before that, too, and that very little of the added revenue from higher prices is going to child care workers, or teachers, or the folks in retail and food service. We know where it's going: to people who already had more money than the rest of us. And do you think they're earning that?

Are you kidding? Maybe you've noticed that Google is worse than it used to be, that you seem to get fewer search results and they're not as useful as they were a few years ago. Maybe you thought you were imagining it. You are absolutely not imagining it. Google made its search engine worse because users were finding what they wanted too quickly, and that meant they were seeing fewer ads. That's what we're dealing with here in 21st-century America: The people who control the tools that millions of us use every day will make them worse at the drop of a hat if it means they can…what? Buy another boat?

I've already written 1,500 words, and I could easily keep going for at least that many more. More and more of our kids die in school shootings, and we apparently can't do anything about it, because of folks shrieking about their guns being taken away. (And yet gun control in the U.S. has only gotten less strict in my lifetime.) We're still having a "debate" about climate change, despite a virtual consensus among experts that it's caused by humans, and despite having known for years now that the fossil fuel industry has spent billions on propaganda denying its reality. (Do you think they did that—and then lied about doing it—because they just want to product us from evil scientific evidence?) Americans with ADHD have struggled to get their meds because the federal government has limited how much of those meds can be produced, and failed to raise production limits to match an uptick in diagnoses. (And it's not weird that ADHD diagnoses have increased, as the internet has informed more and more people about how ADHD presents.) The med shortages have been going on for a couple of years now, and apparently there is no end in sight. Why the hell not?

I don't know how to fix any of this, short of someone bestowing upon me the powers of Superman. I know there are people who might read this and choose to nitpick one or more of the points I've made, and to do so would be to miss the larger point entirely. I don't expect the world to be perfect; indeed, I would be suspicious if it were. I would like the world to get much better than it is, because it's bad right now mostly for terrible, stupid reasons. The people running the show are not doing a bang-up job. And yet they rarely seem to suffer because of it. That shouldn't surprise any of us—like half of the Old Testament is complaints about how the wicked prosper.

But we shouldn't forget that so much stupidity today is the fault of people who are supposed to be our leaders, in government and in business. We cannot let ourselves fall into the trap of believing that we deserve a broken society while the rich get richer because we're somehow falling down on the job. We do have to do more, but only because the American ruling class is not going to grow a conscience any time soon. It's not because we're not doing enough, though. It's because they are taking too much.

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