- Top Features:
- War Room
- Glenn Greenwald
- Broadsheet
- Joan Walsh
- Camille Paglia
- Since You Asked
- Follow Salon:
Letters posted here are associated with the following Salon Premium Member:
Published Letters: 109
Editor's Choice: 13
The basic problem of American democracy can be told in two sentences. When gas hit $4, you could not give away a big SUV. As soon as gas prices dropped, SUVs started selling again. (OK, there has been some shift toward better fuel economy.)
What this shows is that most car buyers (and by generalization, voters) cannot keep track of history or read trend lines. We will see $4 gas again, maybe higher, and people will again be stuck with gas guzzling behemoths.
That is the problem the Democrats presently face. Beginning with the election of Reagan in 1980, Republicans ran the country into the ground by cutting taxes for rich people and not regulating the financial industry (the same thing they did in the 1920s). People will forget who got us into the mess we are in now, and few will understand how close we were to another depression. They will blame Democrats for not fixing things in two years. (It took a decade and WWII to get us out of the Great Depression.)
With party unity and without a Republican vote, Democrats could make real progress on turning things around by spending more on job creation (and fixing the medical disaster, and limiting carbon emissions, etc.), but Democrats from the border states and more conservative districts are running scared.
Robert Reich has pointed out the obvious: they are the ones who will be replaced by Republicans if we don't make some visible progress by next Fall. Somebody needs to tell these dummies.
