Upstream - The Politics of COVID with Eric Levitz

Episode Date: March 9, 2021

It’s been a year since Covid hit the United States and radically altered our lives. It won’t be news to most that the Trump administration completely botched their response to the pandemic, and even under a Biden administration, the state has been slow to move on a lot of the promises that were made during the lead up to November’s election. Is this changing? In this conversation, we dove deep into the details and specifics of the United States’ political response to Covid with Eric Levitz, senior writer for New York Magazine's Intelligencer blog. Eric wrote a piece titled, “Coronavirus Creates an Opening for Progressivism — Also Barbarism,” where he explored what Covid means for the future of politics in the United States. What political cracks in fishers has Covid opened up? What divisions has it given rise to? What new forms of connection? How has it demonstrated the vulnerabilities and weaknesses in our political system, both domestically and also in how we interface with the rest of the world? Is the United States moving towards a period of more right-wing or neoliberal barbarism? Or will the Covid crisis finally be a wake up call to move towards a more just, equitable, and solidaristic form of politics? These are just some of the questions we explore in this conversation.  This episode of Upstream was made possible with support from listeners like you. Upstream is a labor of love — we couldn't keep this project going without the generosity of our listeners and fans. Please consider chipping in a one-time or recurring donation at www.upstreampodcast.org/support If your organization wants to sponsor one of our upcoming documentaries, we have a number of sponsorship packages available. Find out more at upstreampodcast.org/sponsorship For more from Upstream, visit www.upstreampodcast.org and follow us on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and Bluesky. You can also subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts.

Upstream is a labor of love. We distribute all of our content for free and couldn't keep things going without the support of our listeners and fans. Visit upstreampodcast.org forward slash support to donate. You know, on the one hand, there was this opening that the coronavirus created in a bunch of ways, you know, where intuitively you would think that this would sort of benefit the progressive understanding of how, should operate. So we have a situation that really drives home the extent to which people's economic outcomes in life are really contingent on luck, on fortune, on stuff that's really beyond their control. I think this is a pretty bedrock premise of the kind of ideology that supports the social insurance, the welfare state, the notion that when we're designing anti-poverty policy, taxes and transfer systems,

that we need to not just think about what is going to potentially subsidize the laziness of free riders, but also consider the fact that, you know, there's going to be a lot of people in a market economy who are going to end up in dire straits for reasons that they, you know, really had very little personal volition. Over. You're listening to Upstream. Upstream. Upstream.

Upstream. An interview and documentary series that invites you to unlearn everything you thought you knew about economics. I'm Della Duncan. And I'm Robert Raymond. In this conversation, we take a deep dive into the nuts and bolts of partisan politics with a capital P in the United States since the pandemic hit. Eric Levitz is a political columnist and senior writer for New York magazine's

Intelligencer. Eric wrote an article titled Coronavirus Creates an Opening for Progressivism, Also Barbarism, where he explores how the ruptures created by the coronavirus have left us with certain opportunities to improve our system, but they've also created ways in which we can fall even deeper into a chasm of barbaric right-wing policy. Hi, Eric. Welcome to Upstream. To start, I'm wondering if you could just introduce yourself for our listeners. Sure. I guess my official title is senior writer, but I'm basically a political columnist for New York Magazine's Intelligencer blog, and I've been writing about US politics on a daily basis since about, I guess, June, like 2015. My involvement in this business is sort of eerily paralleled to Donald Trump's entrance into national politics. I remember one of my first days at the MSNBC homepage was a kind of newsroom debate about whether or not to cover Trump's announcement or to ignore it as a frivolous play for media attention and publicity.

Yeah, no, that's great. Thanks for that. And so, yeah, about a year ago, you wrote a piece for The Intelligencer titled, Coronavirus Creates an Opening for Progressivism, Also Barbarism. And yeah, a lot has happened in the last year. But I'm wondering if you could outline your main points for that piece for us. Sure. Yeah, it's been a little while. But yeah, basically, I think that the argument is that at the time, this was April 2020. And, you know, on the one hand, there was this opening that the

coronavirus created in a bunch of ways, you know, where intuitively you would think that this would sort of benefit the kind of progressive worldview or progressive understanding of how, you know, government should operate. So we have this situation that really drives home the extent to which people's economic outcomes in life are really, you know, contingent on luck, on fortune, on stuff that's really beyond their control. You know, I think this is a pretty bedrock premise of the kind of ideology that supports the social insurance, the welfare state, and a kind of a humane, or at least, you know, the notion that when we're designing anti-poverty policy, taxes and transfer systems that we need to not just, you know, think about,

well, what is going to potentially subsidize the laziness of free riders, but also consider the fact that, you know, there's going to be a lot of people in a market economy who are going to end up in dire straits for reasons that they, you know, really had very little personal volition over. So the COVID-19 crisis, really, I think all of these small businesses were forced to shutter their operations and that, you know, potentially didn't have the cash reserves on hand to withstand a lockdown. It's not their fault that a novel coronavirus emerged from Wuhan, China and spread across the globe. The workers that were laid off because of the sudden collapse in consumer demand for a variety of in-person services and tourism and whatnot, obviously these workers did not bring this on themselves. And so

there's a sense in which this could help illustrate kind of a broader point about, you know, sort of the nature of people's vulnerability under market capitalism. And then also already in April, the response to the crisis was already kind of making the invisible hand a bit more visible in terms of at that point, we already had major central bank interventions, major interventions by the Federal Reserve in order to shore up credit markets and help promote a recovery in the stock market. And, you know, so I think that, you know, a lot of conservative, popular conservative ideology kind of depends on aligning to the degree to which the market economy is itself a government program that is fundamentally reliant on, you know, a series of laws and public laws and institutions that structure markets and that do a great deal to determine who prospers from market exchange and

how the productivity gains that a capitalist market economy produces, how those are distributed between workers and investors. So the Federal Reserve, for example, you know, directly sets the price of money, this is basically a public institution. And depending on how it sets interest rates, you know, that has an impact, not just, you know, on the level of the money supply, or whatever the availability of credit, but also it has a distributional impact. If interest rates are high, then creditors, people with money to lend, are going to get more passive income, and borrowers are going to have to give a higher share of their income to people who already have money, etc. There's a lot of

different dynamics that work there. But the basic point being that under normal conditions, the free market doesn't exist in kind of the way that it's represented in conservative kind of sort of folk wisdom or propaganda, and that the coronavirus crisis, like all sort of financial crises, kind of makes this a little bit harder to ignore. You know, the other aspect of it, right, is that the pandemic was, I think, you know, a pretty good harbinger of what's in store for us in the Anthropocene from climate change as the world gets warmer over the coming decades. We've had pandemics, obviously, throughout human history long before the Industrial Revolution, but the emergence of

novel diseases and the crossing the barrier from animals to humans and then spreading this has become a lot more common in in recent decades than it was you know a half century a century ago basically a bunch of different developments within our global economic system have unintentionally conspired to create this kind of pandemic producing machine. So we have unprecedented concentrations of human beings in these enormous cities, right? We have urbanization as a phenomenon that's been going on for centuries, but it's really gone global and picked up in just the last few decades, especially in China and India, where we have these really dense concentrations of human beings. The cities are ringed by factory farms that bring

unprecedentedly dense concentrations of pigs and chickens into contact with each other. And then on top of that, we have this system of wet markets that puts all manner of wildlife together in China. Combine that with a globally integrated economy in which before the pandemic, people were circulating from one continent to another at a pretty extraordinary clip for human history, right? We have business people flying back and forth across continents on a regular basis,

so very easily circulating viruses. So take these together, you have a situation where a lot of interspecies contact and very close contact sort of dirty unsanitary conditions lends itself to the spread of viruses, gives viruses opportunities to mutate, recombine viruses from one species to another, and then also a lot of opportunities with the density of people to spread among humans and to spread across the world. So because of these conditions we've had in just this century, right, the SARS scare, the MERS scare, you know, avian flu scares, we have a lot of emerging viruses and pandemic threats. And these are related to the stress

that we're putting sort of on the natural sort of ecological circumstances as a result of the way we've organized our economy. So it's a threat that's very parallel in many respects to the threat of climate change. And like climate change, to effectively combat it requires a significant amount of global cooperation, because as with climate, it sort of reinforces human interdependence, right? Like, it's very easy for people in the United States to conceive of the interests of people in other countries, especially less powerful countries, as being fundamentally irrelevant to our well-being, if not actually, you know, in sort of a Trumpian zero-sum nationalist framework, antithetical to our

interests. For us to prosper, we need them to be kept in their place. But with climate change, how India and China choose to develop has very significant implications. If they pursue industrial development in a carbon-intensive way, that's going to have pretty massive implications for our quality of life in the next century. And similarly, if there are large parts of the globe that have very poor public health infrastructure, that becomes a problem for everyone in the context of a pandemic. So these factors together, I think were sort of core to my case for how it sort of creates an opportunity to just kind of push a progressive worldview that emphasizes the need for social insurance,

that emphasizes that the market economy is always, in part, a public creation. And so there's nothing unnatural about intervening in it to make it produce outcomes that are more positive for the majority of the public, and also emphasizes this, you know, fundamental human interdependence that requires a spirit of global cooperation, rather than belligerence in order to address these really fundamental problems that humanity faces in the 21st century. So that was the opening that it presents. On the other hand, you know, as far as the barbarism point in the initial response to the pandemic, and, you know, to some extent still, what we saw was a real reversion to nationalism, like in this period of acute crisis, and in this context of what, you know, initially

seemed like and was scarcity, right, where there's only enough ventilators, there's only enough medical equipment for so many of us, we didn't see an opening out into a more interdependent, non-zero-sum orientation towards international relations, but the opposite, where we had many countries within the European Union, this body that is supposed to be, to a certain extent, overcoming national divisions to collectivize sort of the security and well-being of Europe as a whole. We saw actually national divisions reasserting themselves as many EU nations declined to meet Italy's requests for personal protective equipment when that country was getting really hammered to a degree that other EU member states were not. And so we saw that in this kind of context, I mean, it was also

obviously and perhaps, you know, more appropriately causing nations to seal their borders. And so really sort of emphasizing, again, also reinforcing kind of a nationalist ethos. And then within Donald Trump's United States, we actually had a sort of every state for itself dynamic prevailing due to the absence of a really coordinated federal system for dispensing medical equipment and testing and what have you. So, well, then the other thing also, I guess, was that we also saw the total abandonment of the most disempowered people, both in the country and in the world. But this was particularly salient to me within the United States, where we had people in jails often just locked into these completely unsanitary hotbeds

of COVID infection, with little sort of in the immediate term being done to protect them from serious illness. And then you also had, you know, the undocumented population that was disproportionately employed in the industries that really got hammered, you know, hotels that were shutting down in the restaurant, the food service industry, a lot of the workers in those industries are not documented immigrants. And the initial relief packages, you know, Donald Trump was not going to dispense much aid to those people. So yeah, so we saw, you know, the potential for crisis to promote a progressive response, as well as the potential for it to, you know, impose a sense of scarcity that makes everybody circumscribe and contract their lines of social solidarity. So, yeah, just to sort of add to that, I want to quote from your

piece in The Intelligent Sir. You wrote that, quote, the coronavirus crisis provides a vivid reminder that the state is perfectly capable of sheltering its constituents from the market's mercilessness. The question has only ever been whose risks it wishes to socialize. And yeah, so it's been a year and I'm wondering maybe if you could sort of outline how the U.S. government has responded in terms of how some other countries have responded and sort of compare and contrast and maybe some of the countries that have responded in a little bit more responsible, caring way. So to be honest, as awful as the U.S. response was in many respects, in part because of the unique resources that we were starting out with

as, you know, the most powerful country in the world, the holder, the printer of the world's reserve currency. And, you know, before the crisis, we were widely considered to have like, perhaps the best national public health apparatus in the world. Our healthcare system is terrible. But in terms of like the CDC had like a pretty great reputation, and it had, you know, significant resources. So these things together, if you look like at this particular moment, at the US versus the European Union, for example, right now, we appear to, you know, compare fairly favorably. Our vaccine rollout is going better than the EU's a more generous social safety net than we do before this crisis kicked in. So they had much longer lasting and higher paying unemployment insurance systems in almost every OECD country than we have here. And they also have, you know, child allowance payments in place.

year. And they also have, you know, child allowance payments in place, you know, most European countries, you get a monthly payment from the government for each child that you have to help compensate you for the cost of doing the really socially necessary labor of raising children. So there's a lot of stuff that like Europe already had, and that we didn't. And so in some ways, I thought of our response as kind of a a pop-up welfare state. Like we established extremely generous unemployment insurance benefits. We're on the cusp now with Biden of establishing a child allowance that will phase out after a year. But if you look at just in terms of like spending just on this crisis, just in response to this crisis, we've done more than any other country, in part because those countries had a bunch of things to cushion the blow already in place. But in other respects, you know, we have really utilized our ability to inject demand into the economy by printing dollars, which was a power that we had in 2009, and really did not use to nearly the extent that was justified. Now we actually, in response, I think, to

a decade of internal criticism and self-scrutiny among center-left economists, we're actually ended up mounting a reasonable fiscal response to the crisis, which has been a major positive and has, in fact, we have been able to capitalize on some of the progressive potential here. The child allowance that I just described, it's technically a tax credit, but Democrats are trying to structure it such that it will take the form of a, if not monthly, then quarterly payment to parents. a year for every child under six and $3,000 for every child above six, up to $17 per kid. This will majorly reduce child poverty. And while it is set to expire after a year, my understanding is the intention is to revive it after that, that the calculus is that once Americans get a taste of a child allowance, it's going to be very difficult for Congress to allow it to suddenly go away. And so it's possible that we get really durable reforms to the American

social safety net out of this crisis. So that's all positive. Of course, the way that we handled the outbreak to begin with was a disaster. We had, you know, a president who was, you know, as he openly said, wanted to limit testing, because he viewed fundamentally, a, you know, mass death event, a public health crisis without parallel for a century, as fundamentally a PR problem, and that his concern was reducing the number of cases that he saw reported on cable news, not the number of cases actually existing within the country. So, you know, if you look at the response that was mounted in South Korea, to a lesser extent in Japan, New Zealand, you know, had the benefit of being an island nation, it makes it a little bit easier to be a small island nation to contain this thing. But it did, you know, really nations which

were able to summon the level of social solidarity and trust in the state to implement really comprehensive lockdowns upon the first sign of spread, community spread, and suffocate the virus before it could really establish itself. Those are countries that really experienced a completely different 2020 than what we've dealt with. And I don't know, I'm not an expert on how widespread sort of anti-mask identity politics is throughout the European continent. I know that it is a non-existence and that there has been in countries that were unable to stifle it to begin with and were faced with the immensely difficult challenge of trying to suppress the spread of this virus

over a you know year-long horizon I think there's been you know just massive difficulty in in sustaining the measures necessary for containing spread due to the implications that those measures have for small business owners in a variety of interest groups within the society. And the ability to execute these things is further undermined by a pre-existing trend towards eroding social trust, which is a major phenomenon, I believe, in Europe, but also especially in the United States, where we've become kind of a low trust society. You know, pollsters have these measures of social trust in which you ask people things like, you know, can you generally whatever trust your neighbors, or can you never be too careful around people? And then also, you know, we have asked them about trust in institutions as well. But what we have even before the pandemic was a systematic decline in Americans' trust in each other, in their neighbors, in just strangers generally, and in their government.

And this makes it a lot more difficult to have the public, you know, at great potentially personal cost to themselves, either in terms of their lifestyles or in terms of their financial well-being, adhere to what experts say they need to do for the collective good. But we obviously had a major problem with that and had and have a major problem with that in this country, where, you know, this incredibly low cost intervention of simply wearing a mask when you're in an indoor public place has been turned into this culture war totem where we had Republican members of Congress, right, on the day of the Capitol Hill insurrection, refusing to wear masks when they were crowded in hiding with their Democratic colleagues, you know, some of whom were, you know, in their 70s, and who had requested that they

really would like them to wear a mask to protect them, because they have comorbidities. And this was, you know, too much to ask. And we see that replicated at larger scale in regions throughout the country. So, so yeah, so I guess to summarize, obviously, we had major problems in terms of both the diligence and, you know, just intentions of the people who happen to be in charge of our federal apparatus. When the crisis hit, we had problems from just fundamentally negative place that we were in as a society, socially, culturally, in terms of promoting solidarity and trust in established experts. But we also happened to be able to, I mean, we got very fortunate as far as if you imagine a 2020 in which Hillary Clinton is president, the Republicans control the Senate,

such that it is not only in their ideological interest to oppose government intervention in the economy, but also in their crass political interest to tank the economy to undermine the incumbent president, we could have ended up in a very dark place. Fortunately, we had a democratic house that could advance its substantive aims by pursuing relief measures. And we had a Republican president who could advance his crass political interest by pursuing those measures. And so we a Republican president who could advance his crass political interest by pursuing those measures. And so we were able to get a really robust response despite divided government in 2020. And by a knife's edge, we ended up with a unified democratic government now,

which is going to give us another round of relief. And so things are going to be a lot better than they might have been. We'll be right back with Eric Levitz, writer of the Intelligencer article, Coronavirus Creates an Opening for Progressivism, Also Barbarism. අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි Thank you. That was a cover of John Hartford's Gentle on My Mind, composed by Robert. Now back to our conversation with Eric Levitz. Robert. Now back to our conversation with Eric Levitz. What you were saying earlier in terms of this feeling of solidarity and divide, and it sort of seems to me like both things are happening simultaneously. And it reminded me of, I'm not sure if you're familiar with Rebecca Solnit and her book, A Paradise Built in Hell, sort of describes this idea of disaster collectivism. And I just pulled up a quote real

quick. She writes, the sense of immersion in the moment in solidarity with others caused by the rupture in everyday life, an emotion greater than happiness, but deeply positive. And then she goes on to say, we don't have a language for this emotion in which the wonderful comes wrapped in the terrible joy and sorrow, courage and fear. We cannot welcome disaster, but we can value the responses, both practical and psychological. And for me, it's just really interesting because I see all these amazing mutual aid efforts and all these organizations and groups around the country that are just, you know, stepping in to fill in a lot of the gaps that are left by the government. And yeah, I guess I'm just curious what your thoughts are on that. And maybe what do progressives and those on the left need to do in order to make sure that we don't slip further into barbarism

and further into division, but instead move towards a more just, equitable and ecologically sound future? Yeah, you know, I'm not an expert on political organizing or mutual aid efforts. I mean, and I guess I will say that, you know, the mutual aid is beautiful and important and trying to push against the forces that are driving us towards atomization and really hyper-individualist forms of existence. You know, one of the things that we've seen accompanying this decline in social trust is a decline in sort of civil society organizations, you know, declining church attendance. Obviously, trade unions have been decimated. Social organizations that bring people together

around shared interests, that's been kind of declining while more and more people are getting their political information and sort of having their civic lives really carried out within algorithmically bespoke social media feeds. And this is very much true of myself, you know, because when politics becomes primarily experienced as a form of spectation and media consumption on platforms that are designed to maximize engagement, that's going to drive you towards a politics that is intensely polarized and fragmented and in terms of really emphasizing abstract ideological cultural differences, because, you know, outrage is going to be what engages you. And if you are interfacing

with national media, you're going to be focused on issues that are at some distance from your immediate daily experience, at least in many cases, in which you're thus more likely to kind of process through the prism of group identity, rather than maybe, you know, more through kind of an immediate concrete material interest that one might have if you were debating a policy that was going to, you know, directly influence your monthly rent or directly influence whether your kid is going to, you know, have a whatever, I don't know, a baseball field, like within a reasonable drive, you know, things that are really like going to be processed through, do I want this to happen or not, rather than through, you know, who am I, I am a white conservative Christian American, ergo, my position on this issue is X, or a way to express, you know, who I am is to take this position on X. I don't think that the way that this has evolved

is very healthy for our political culture. And so I think to the extent that people can, through building up organizations that bring people together in their communities around political issues, you know, I think to a certain extent, this is the aim of an organization like DSA, the Democratic Socialists of America, but also Indivisible. These are positive things to try to cultivate. You know, at the same time, I think it's really important for those on the left not to lose sight of the fact that the state just has capacities that ordinary people don't. And the best mutual aid effort in the world is not going to be a substitute for what the CARES Act

was able to do. We had last, I believe, April or May, after the CARES Act took full effect, we saw in the middle of a pandemic, in the middle of a mass unemployment event in which tens of millions, I believe, had lost their jobs, we had poverty actually decline from where it was in 2019. Overall, U.S. poverty declined because the $1,200 checks, the $600 federal unemployment benefit left many, many people, millions of people better off than they were before they'd lost their jobs. That's what the government can do. When you have the spending power on that scale, that's what can be accomplished. And because of the stimulus efforts, because of the CARES Act and the subsequent stimulus, there's been a minority of Americans who, because they allowed, Congress allowed CARES to expire, have really been financially devastated by this crisis. But

actually, like a majority of US households, because of the aid from the government and the real contraction and temptation to spend, you know, because so many things that people like to spend money on, were suddenly rendered unsafe. As of the beginning of this year, US household finances were better than they'd been in decades, if ever. So many people, because of the government response, were able to pay down credit card debts that they had accumulated. People have more savings, are better off financially than ever before. And no amount of community organizing around mutual aid is going to be able to give you that kind of scale of change. Community organizing around building the political organization to contest for state power

and influence state policy, though, is absolutely vital and certainly worth pursuing. I'm not sure if that circles around your question at all. No, yeah, that's super helpful. And that's really interesting to hear those stats that you shared about household financial situation being as good as it is. I go through this a lot where I do spend a lot of time writing about and researching mutual aid. And I think one of the things that I really appreciate about it is that these mutual aid efforts are mostly targeted towards the most vulnerable populations and those that are sort of shut out from the more, you know, official governmental side of relief. I do tend to agree that it's sort of a both and question, like we need both. And yeah, just sort of, I guess, on a more personal note, it's sort of difficult to look at the current situation, global pandemic, recession, climate

change. And you do talk a lot about optimism and pessimism in your piece. And I'm wondering how do you feel? Do you feel optimistic, pessimistic, some blend of the two? I guess a blend. So one of the things that I write about a lot that is fundamentally the source of my pessimism, it's kind of its own sort of topic, but is the political trends within the United States, the realignment of the two party coalitions, such that Republicans have in the last decade really consolidated the support of non-college educated white voters and voters in rural areas. This has interacted with the design of our constitutional framework, which structurally over-represents people in rural areas at every level of government. So partially because 19th century Republicans wanted to gerrymander the Senate, we have all these really low population states in the middle west of the country, the mountain states, the Great Plains, where you have predominantly white gerrymandering, which there is in most places, because more states, for the reason I just stated, there are more Republican states than Democratic states in the country. And since state legislatures draw the districts that House elections are held on, since Republicans control the districting process in more places, the House

map is biased towards Republicans by about, right now, about three points. When they do the next round of redistricting, it will likely be more. But even if you didn't have the gerrymandering, because Democrats now have so much of their support concentrated in geographic space, in terms of running up huge margins in cities, if you draw contiguous districts, you're going to end up having Democrats waste a bunch of votes in a couple districts and not spread them out in an efficient way for representation. Anyhow, what this means together with when you combine this with the fact that the electoral college, a lot of the states that are kind of 50-50 are trending right because they have high, large populations of non-college educated white voters. right because they have high, large populations of non-college educated white voters. These things have combined to create the situation where, you know, Joe Biden came very close to losing in November while winning the two-party vote by four percentage points. If you take out the third-party

candidates, he won by 4.3%. If he had done 0.3 or 0.4% worse than based on the difference between the national margin and the margin in Wisconsin, which was the tipping point state, Trump probably wins the electoral college. You had even with a landslide, you know, by modern standards, Democratic victory in November, you saw the Democratic House majority shrink, and they barely got a Senate majority. So what you're looking at when you project these trends forward is that barring a truly radical realignment in voters' partisan preferences, or Democrats passing legislation that addresses these structural problems with the government, so for example, adding DC as a state, granting statehood to any US territory that would like it. Since these US territories are disproportionately non-white,

it would do something to rebalance the under-representation of minorities, racial minorities within the Senate, as well as banning partisan redistricting. If these measures aren't taken, which it looks like they will not be, at least at this moment, the overwhelming likelihood is Republicans taking back power by 2024, probably over both Congress and the presidency, because you're going to be in a position where you need to win by four points to retain the presidency. The Senate has a, like a six point bias towards Republicans and the House, a three-point. So you're in a situation that looks pretty bleak. And given that the GOP could use its federal authority to support ongoing efforts at the state level to try to suppress

Democratic voting, you're in a situation where it is very plausible scenario, where Democrats are out of power, in terms of at least not being able to have full control of the federal government, and the ability to pass laws on a party line basis, you know, for a decade or more. So this is kind of the political crisis that I'm kind of obsessed with. And, you know, to be clear that this scenario is contingent on a bunch of assumptions that are debatable. But it's one that I know that a lot of Democratic Party operatives, pollsters and experts are deeply concerned about. And it just seems very possible that we are on the cusp of falling into sustained right wing minority rule, that's going to make it very difficult to take significant

action on climate change, on inequality, and, you know, could potentially push our foreign policy into an even more belligerent direction as China rises, creating, you know, significant risk of instability and in Cold War. So that's what I think about when I think about what makes me pessimistic about the future. You know, at the same time, there are some sources for optimism, like I suggested earlier, we are going to come out of this pandemic. I think that the short term economic outlook is pretty strong. It's pretty good. For the reasons I stated, Americans even before this 1.9 trillion goes out, most Americans are better off financially than they've ever been. I think we're going to,

we have this new realignment in fiscal and monetary policy orthodoxy so that a decade ago, elite policymakers, economists, wonks really had this very kind of austerity mindset, this real fear of deficits and fear of inflation. So we've had a lot of positive shifts in the policy consensus over the past 12 months. And we've also seen, you know, our country is bad at a lot of things, but we are still good at research and product development. I mean, the vaccines are truly extraordinary. And the mRNA technology seems to have a bunch of really exciting potential applications. This could be a real biomedical breakthrough that advances treatments for a bunch of diseases that have been causing immense human suffering. And we're going to probably, if all goes well, we're going to get

major investments in renewable technology out of the Biden administration that could, you know, if we get lucky, really help keep the climate situation manageable. And we've got also, you know, for now, we still have this unified democratic government that has the power to make our federal institutions more representative and to mitigate this threat of reactionary minority rule. And we have time to act to pressure them to do what is in their own partisan self-interest and really pass these democracy reforms. You know, so those are all causes for optimism. Well, yeah, let's maybe

we'll end on the optimistic note instead of the pessimistic one. So yeah, I really appreciate your time and thank you so much. This was great. Yeah, thanks for having me. Upstream is a labor of love. We distribute all of our content for free and couldn't keep things going without the support of our listeners and fans. Visit upstreampodcast.org forward slash support to donate. And because we're fiscally sponsored by the nonprofit Independent Arts and Media, any donations you make to Upstream are tax exempt. If you haven't checked it out already, make sure to listen to our new documentary,

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Feminism for the 99%. If you're part of an organization that would like to sponsor this upcoming episode, please reach out to us. You can learn more about our sponsorship packages at upstreampodcast.org forward slash sponsorship. Thank you. The The I'm going to go ahead and do that. Thank you. Sinti, Sinti, Sinti, Sinti, Sinti, Sinti, Sinti, Sinti, Sinti, Sinti, Sinti, Sinti, Sinti, Sinti, Sinti, Sinti, Sinti, Sinti, Sinti, Sinti, Sinti, Sinti, Sinti, Sinti, Sinti, Sinti, Sinti, Sinti, Sinti, Sinti, Sinti, Sinti, Sinti, Sinti, Sinti, Sinti, Sinti, Sinti, Sinti, Sinti, Sinti, Sinti, Sinti, Sinti, Sinti, Sinti, Sinti, Sinti, Sinti, Sinti, Sinti, Sinti, Sinti, Sinti, Sinti, Sinti, Sinti, Sinti, Sinti, Sinti, Sinti, Sinti, Sinti, Sinti, Sinti, Sinti, Sinti, Sinti, Sinti, Sinti, Sinti, Sinti, Sinti, Sinti, Sinti, Sinti, Sinti, Sinti, Sinti, Sinti, Sinti, Sinti, Sinti, Sinti, Sinti, Sinti, Sinti, Sinti, Sinti, Sinti, Sinti, Sinti, Sinti, Sinti, Sinti, Sinti, Sinti, Sinti, Sinti, Sinti, Sinti, Sinti, Sinti, Sinti, Sinti, Sinti, Sinti, Sinti, Sinti, Sinti, Sinti, O Oh