Sunday, February 15, 2026

Doom Report (Week 56: The Pendulum, and the Pit of Accountability)


This week I had a long talk with my children about the economy.  Now, my children (that still live with me) are almost-20 and almost-14, so you might think that the economy would be a very boring topic for them.  But here’s the thing: they have to consider whether they’re ever going to be able to move out; whether they’re ever going to be able to afford to buy their own house.  And, I gotta tell you: they don’t think they will.  And I can’t really argue with them either.

This week on the Weekly Show, Jon Stewart interviews conservative economist Oren Cass.  And he gives lots of interesting historical perspective: for instance, he thinks the New Deal swung too far in one direction.  And I don’t necessarily agree with that—of course: I’m a pretty hard progressive—but it’s easy to see the point.  First there was the Industrial Revolution, and all the rich people made all the poor people go work in the factories—men, women, and children—and then all the poor people kept dying or getting mangled in those factories, so there was no one to buy all the products being produced by the factories, so then we introduced labor laws, instituted the weekend and got the kids out of the coal mines, and then the rich people got really rich, and we had the Gilded Age and the robber barons, which of course led inevitably to Black Tuesday and the Great Depression, so then FDR comes in with the New Deal and jobs programs and the Glass-Steagall Act and the Securities Exchange Act and appointing trustbuster Thurman Arnold.  Now, Cass’s point is that the regulations fixed things, but the Democrats took from that the wrong lesson: they thought that, if some regulations were good, more regulations must be better, right?  So they overregulated.  Then along comes Reagan and starts deregulating.  And, again, the Republicans took the wrong lesson: if some deregulation is good, then more must be better, right?  And now here we are in the 21st century, with the 2008 financial crisis and wealth inequality that puts the Gilded Age to shame.  The crux of Cass’s argument is that the pendulum had swung too far, so it swung back; now it’s swung too far in the other direction, and must, inevitably, swing back towards equality.  So, maybe, by the time my children are ready to move out, that swing will be in progress.

This is what passes for hope in our house these days.

Last week I tried to articulate why I think it’s important to include videos from Adam Kinzinger alongside those from Mehdi Hasan and the Some More News crew.  With further time to reflect, I think it may be best summed up by Kinzinger himself, who is fond of saying that, if we guesstimate that people don’t start paying to politics until they’re around 15 or so, that means that every single person in America today under the age of 25 doesn’t know politics without Trump.  They don’t understand what it means to say, yeah, this person is on the “other” side, but they still make some good points.  They don’t realize that this—what we’re living through today—is not normal.  And that makes me sad.  It just occurred to me this week that my children have grown up thinking that I sure must like the news a lot, because I listen to so much of it.  And I hate the news.  I successfully avoided watching nearly all of it until 9/11 happened, and then I (like many of us) went crazy for a while, and then I scaled back for my own sanity and refused to watch any news that didn’t have a humourous angle, and then ... Trump.  And, while I still desperately try to focus on news that can make us laugh while we learn, even when we’re learning about the horrors, there’s just too much.  I dream of a time when watching The Daily Show will be sufficient again.  I dream of my children saying, “hey Dad, how come you don’t watch the news all the time any more?”

So I think that’s why I love it when I can point you to Adam Kinzinger, or Tim Miller, or, this week, to Oren Cass, who is absolutely a conservative, and you (if your political viewpoint is more or less aligned with my own, and I assume it is if you’ve lasted this far into these reports) will absolutely yell at your screen at least once or twice when listening to him describe something.  But here’s Jon Stewart, every bit as progressive as I, also disagreeing with Cass, and yet ... there is so much they do agree on.  I want us to get back to that place.  That place where the Democrats and the Republicans, the conservatives and the progressives, can all talk to each other, and maybe they fight a little, but, at the end of the day, they still shake hands and smile at each other.  Because this bullshit demonization of the “other side” is completely manufactured: it was wholly invented by rich fucking assholes who want to make damn sure we don’t pay attention to how much money they’re siphoning off us, because last time that happened, they ended up with tax rates over 90%.  And I want my children (as well as my readers) to embrace that.  The “other” side is fine.  We can talk to them.  They, like us, believe in democracy, and the rule of law, and basic human dignity and equality.  And the people who don’t believe in those things are not a different side—they’re a whole different species.  And one we should probably not be looking to preserve.

Other things you need to know this week:

  • I suppose the big news of the week was the Epstein Files (again) and the MAGA meltdown over Bad Bunny’s superbowl performance.  For a capsule view of both topics, try Kimmel’s monologue from Tuesday.
  • How does deep red Kentucky wind up with a Democratic governor?  On Monday’s Daily Show, Jon Stewart interviews governor Andy Bashear to find out.  Note Bashear’s emphasis on making working people’s lives better: every time Jon asks “how did you get Republicans to vote for you?” this is the answer: if you make their lives better, they don’t care which letter is next to your name.  Other Democratic candidates damned well better be taking notes.
  • Adam Kinzinger’s week in review is perhaps not quite as indispensable this time around, but still good.

So my talk with my children about the economy sort of devolved into a history lesson.  And my kids are homeschooled (for non-religious reasons), so we’ll take any excuse at all to be educational.  And for me, a person who see connections in everything, it’s hard not to get overwhelmed by how much all this stuff fits together, and how much of what’s happening today is inextricably entangled with what went on 20 years ago, 50 years ago, a hundred years ago ... notice how Oren Cass’s pendulum swings took us backward all the way to the Industrial Revolution, and that was about 250 years ago.  But another thing we had to talk about was accountability.  Because, if the Democrats can successfully take back the government at some point—and, if they don’t quickly wake up to the plans to cheat and start preparing better than Jamie Raskin, they might not—but, presuming they can, they’re going to have to hold some people accountable.  And that’s going to be tough, because, historically, it just isn’t done.  And some people point to Obama’s refusal to prosecute anyone in the Bush administration for their blatant lies about Iraq—and, you know: all the torturing—but what I pointed out to my children was this goes back way farther than that: after Watergate, Ford pardoned Nixon.  And whether your excuse is that we need to be looking forward instead of back, or that we need to maintain the dignity of the office, or whatever else bullshit you can come up with, the truth is, if we never hold anyone accountable, then they’re just going to keep on doing it, over and over again, forever.  And, while we were talking about that, we touched on impeachment: Nixon wasn’t actually impeached, of course, but he’s one of the five cases where the Articles of Impeachment were drafted and approved ... he just resigned before they could be voted on.  In the other four cases—Johnson, Clinton, Trump, and Trump—the votes all passed.  But, while I was explaining all this, it occurred to me: does the lack of accountability go back even further than Nixon?  Because Johnson (who, by the way, came within a single vote of being convicted of the crimes for which he was impeached: the closest any President has ever come) is a study in this as well: he pardoned 7,000 former Confederates and allowed them to regain political power.  Is this cycle of refusal to hold the political class—or, to adopt Jon Ossoff’s clever coinage, the Epstein Class—accountable that we’re currently locked in really 160 years old? or more?

If an 18 year boy shoots someone, we lock them in prison for life, because we want to make sure people know they can’t do that sort of thing again.  But if a 78 year old banker steals billions, we give them a slap on the wrist (or, if Trump happens to be in office, a full pardon) ... why?  Do we not want to let other people know not to do that again?  Or do we just not care?  And, if a 78 year old billionaire—who may not have been a billionaire before but damned sure is now—grifts the entire country, and indeed the entire world, out of billions of ill-gotten gains, do we want to let other poeple know that that’s not okay? or just encourage more people to try?  Accountability is going to need to be a major plank in any next candidate’s platform, or else I fear my granchildren will be writing Doom Reports about how they can trace their own current horrors back 50 years to some guy named Trump ...









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