The Problem with S1 E2

The Problem with Jon Stewart: I watch because it's Jon Stewart. I watched episode two a second time to take some notes. Second time, I noticed how good that episode is. The guests are great.

Not sure who said it. One of the guests:

"There is a slow erosion of the principles of democracy"

Not slow enough. And you won't agree, but the reason for the erosion, specifically, is that the economy is so bad. People can live with many things, but they can't live with unlivable living conditions. So when a guy comes along with Trump's skillset, they jump on his bandwagon. We think things get worse. They know things have been getting worse for a long time and they are anxious, some of them desperate, for a solution. Trump provides a clear alternative to the status quo. Thus the attraction. 

If you want to beat Trump, you also must provide an alternative to the status quo. The same old policy is not an alternative. Nor is more of the same. Not even if you add the comedic twist.

The voters who supported Trump (and even those who didn't) lived through the covid recession, most of them; not ten years before that, we had the financial crisis and that whole economic disaster from which we never recovered; farther back in time, there was the inflation of the 1970s -- and general economic deterioration since that time.

If you have money for cigarettes, you cannot understand the situation of a co-worker who doesn't have money for cigarettes. He's not likely to sit down and explain it to you, either. But there is a limit to how much he can take. Your best option is to be sympathetic, because you may be the next one to find yourself without cigarette money. Ours is a continuing economic decline. Nomadland.

Jon Stewart: "Everybody wants to ban shit that they don't agree with. And how do you square that?"

You square it, Jon, by fixing the economy. People will think you're going off-topic. But the economy is the root of the problem. Everything else is consequences. Fix the economy so that the government can recede, "a distant ship, smoke on the horizon". 

When people can afford their own medical insurance, the government doesn't have to make arrangements. Isn't that what people really want? When living standards are rising, the "socialist" social spending becomes less and less necessary. That spending can recede. As it recedes, it becomes less objectionable to those who object to it. That is how you bring polarized people together: by fixing the economy.

We have to solve the problem, not the consequences. To wait until we're starting to have insurrections, and then say insurrections are the problem, no Jon, that's not right. Not even close.

31 minutes into the episode, Bassem Youssef says

"The death of democracy in America could only be summarized in one word: money."

That's what I said, except I called it the economy.

Maria Ressa jumps in after Bassem and expands the thought:

"Look, it is about power and money, all across the board. Power and money. So think of -- the pieces are this, right:

• Someone seeds a meta-narrative that is kind of half true.
  
• It becomes a virus of lies and infects real people.
• Then those real people spread it. 

That is a diseased system. And that is what we are living in."

You picked up on that, Jon, and brought it back to money:

"It's like we're fighting two pandemics, two viral things. And it's interesting. I originally said oh this is like the fable of the three bears. It's really scarface. It's: first you get the money, then you get the power."

"First you get the money, then you get the power." There's a word for that, Jon: financialization. Economist Thomas Palley writes:

In effect, there is a politics of financialization that goes hand-in-hand with the economics.

It's all tied together. 

When we fix the economy, we change the flows of money and power. We just have to be sure we fix it right. Neither Democrats nor Republicans have the right plan.