I will admit to having “a moment” every so often over things I find in The NY Times that can be infuriating. (That’s the problem with Sturgeon’s Law.) Still, every once in a while the Gray Lady serves up something that makes putting up with the rest of it tolerable.
It started out with a look at “How Elba Makes a Living Wage”.
Early in Barack Obama’s recent Netflix documentary series about American jobs, viewers meet a housekeeper at the Pierre Hotel in New York named Elba. She spends her shifts cleaning hotel rooms, and she talks about the job’s challenges, including back pain and guests’ occasional misbehavior. Elba is meant to be a symbol of difficult service-industry work in today’s economy.
But when she mentioned how much money she made, I will admit that I was surprised: Elba earns about $4,000 a month, or roughly $50,000 a year. While modest, that income still allows for something approaching a middle-class lifestyle, especially when combined with the income her husband, Francisco, makes at his job in the Pierre Hotel’s cafeteria.
Leonhardt goes above and beyond to make the point about why Elba is able to do this:
How is it that they earn a living wage while so many other Americans do not? The biggest part of the answer is that Elba belongs to a labor union.
A living wage
Unions are a much smaller part of the American economy than they once were, representing only 6 percent of private-sector workers. Still, unions allow their members to earn substantially more than similar workers who are not unionized. Consider this data from the federal government:
Leonhardt then brings up several graphics to make the point clear.
He discusses how union membership is far more effective in getting workers a better share of income than relying on the semi-mythical power of market forces, and then goes on to track the rise of inequality against the decline of union membership.
It’s things like this that make MAGA-heads describe The New York Times as a socialist rag.
Leonhardt goes on to mention labor actions on the West Coast, where wages are not keeping up with housing costs, and throws in some more info:
But wait — there's even more!
ICYMI, Leonhardt picks up on a delightful story:
Using a quirk of Wisconsin law, the state’s Democratic governor raised school funding for the next 400 years.
On Wednesday, Mr. Evers, a Democratic former teacher and state superintendent, took advantage of a quirky, Wisconsin rule that has long given governors a partial veto, allowing them to amend laws with some editing trickery.
Governor Evers raised the amount that school districts could generate through property taxes by an additional $325 per student each year. In the original budget, the increase was allowed through the 2024-25 school year.
But with the slash of a hyphen and the snip of a “20,” Mr. Evers changed 2024-25 to the year 2425.
Evers also vetoed a Republican measure that would have cut taxes on the rich. (USA Today has the story without a pay wall.)
Meanwhile:
David French is one of the house conservative voices at the Times. Where he can be refreshing is that he’s not totally insane and can still at times tell a hawk from a handsaw. Which leads into: The Rage and Joy of MAGA America. French notes there’s something people tend to overlook about the MAGA movement:
...Why do none of your arguments against Trump penetrate this mind-set? The Trumpists have an easy answer: You’re horrible, and no one should listen to horrible people. Why were Trumpists so vulnerable to insane stolen-election theories? Because they know that you’re horrible and that horrible people are capable of anything, including stealing an election.
At the same time, their own joy and camaraderie insulate them against external critiques that focus on their anger and cruelty. Such charges ring hollow to Trump supporters, who can see firsthand the internal friendliness and good cheer that they experience when they get together with one another. They don’t feel angry — at least not most of the time. They are good, likable people who’ve just been provoked by a distant and alien “left” that many of them have never meaningfully encountered firsthand.
Indeed, while countless gallons of ink have been spilled analyzing the MAGA movement’s rage, far too little has been spilled discussing its joy.
emphasis added
They LIKE who they are, what they believe, and ‘Owning the Libs’. Further…
...Trump’s opponents miss the joy because they experience only the rage. I’m a member of a multiethnic church in Nashville. It’s a refuge from the MAGA Christianity that’s all too present where I live, just south of the city, in Franklin. This past Sunday, Walter Simmons, a Franklin-based Black pastor who founded the Franklin Justice and Equity Coalition, spoke to our church, and he referred to a common experience for those who dissent publicly in MAGA America. “If you ain’t ready for death threats, don’t live in Franklin,” he said.
He was referring to the experience of racial justice activists in deep-red spaces. They feel the rage of the MAGA mob. If you’re deemed to be one of those people who is trying to “destroy our country and our family,” then you don’t see joy, only fury.
Trump’s fans, by contrast, don’t understand the effects of that fury because they mainly experience the joy. For them, the MAGA community is kind and welcoming. For them, supporting Trump is fun. Moreover, the MAGA movement is heavily clustered in the South, and Southerners see themselves as the nicest people in America. It feels false to them to be called “mean” or “cruel.” Cruel? No chance. In their minds, they’re the same people they’ve always been — it’s just that they finally understand how bad you are. And by “you,” again, they often mean the caricatures of people they’ve never met.
No one who has ever been to the National Memorial for Peace and Justice can be comfortable with the idea that Southerners are the nicest people in America. French is able to build on personal experience to see and say what is happening in MAGA circles, which makes him the rare columnist, let alone conservative voice. (Unlike Ross Douthat who keeps talking about some kind of eventually-to-be-purified ‘populism’ on the Right without the racism and bigotry, or libertarian snarkmeister Bret Stephens.)
Seeing something like this in print from French, or anyone, is long overdue.
Frank Bruni also chimes in, with Ron DeSantis Is Running One Freaky Campaign.
...The Florida governor is running one freaky and unsettling presidential campaign. He’s more focused on putting certain Americans in their places than on lifting others to new heights. He’s defined by the scores he pledges to settle instead of the victories he promises to achieve. He casts himself as someone to fear rather than revere. That video actually flashes an image of Christian Bale in “American Psycho” as a flattering DeSantis analogue.
Vote DeSantis: He’s a monster, but he’s your monster.
How does someone with that pitch possibly bring together and lead an entire diverse country, if he gets that chance, and what does it say about the United States today that he has come this far? Have we put tolerance, grand ideals and optimism so fully to rest? I remember “morning in America.” I guess it’s now midnight.
To read deeply and widely about DeSantis is to learn that his cruel politics match a cold personality. He seems to trust almost no one other than his wife, who’s his twin in unalloyed ambition. He’s a collector of slights. He gets an A+ in grudge holding and an F in humility, and he’s taking etiquette pass/fail. He has resting disdain face.
It’s a bit of a change from the days when De Santis was being celebrated by the press because his Covid policies refused to push lock-downs and distancing and were supposedly successful. (No matter that the death and infection numbers were being cooked by the State, or that De Santis has installed a vaccine CT believer as head of the Florida state health programs.) There also seemed to be enthusiasm by the press for De Santis simply on the grounds that he might take the nomination away from Trump — but less so since that seems increasingly unlikely. (There goes the horse-race narrative.)
Bruni seems to have noticed something about De Santis.
When I find pictures of him laughing, his expression is a bad stage actor’s — it’s a labored and spurious guffaw — as if a campaign aide intent on warming him up had just pulled hard on some string embedded in DeSantis’s back. Only his rants have a genuine air. He looked perfectly comfortable on Fox News recently saying that anyone who cut through a border wall between Mexico and the United States to traffic fentanyl would “end up stone cold dead.” He’s out to out-Trump Trump, who reportedly wondered aloud about a water-filled border trench stocked with snakes and alligators. I’m counting the minutes until DeSantis’s proposal for a moat stocked with great white sharks.
As French has noted, De Santis may be faring poorly because:
...Ron DeSantis, for example, channels all the rage of Trumpism and none of the joy. With relentless, grim determination he fights the left with every tool of government at his disposal. But can he lead stadiums full of people in an awkward dance to “Y.M.C.A.” by the Village People? Will he be the subject of countless over-the-top memes and posters celebrating him as some kind of godlike, muscular superhero?
French closes with an important question:
During the Trump years, I’ve received countless email messages from distraught readers that echo a similar theme: My father (or mother or uncle or cousin) is lost to MAGA. They can seem normal, but they’re not, at least not any longer. It’s hard for me to know what to say in response, but one thing is clear: You can’t replace something with nothing. And until we fully understand what that “something” is — and that it includes not only passionate anger but also very real joy and a deep sense of belonging — then our efforts to persuade are doomed to fail.
And speaking of Inconvenient truths…
Paul Krugman devoted some space to a proposition that needs more consideration:
The Rich Are Crazier Than You and Me
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is a crank. His views are a mishmash of right-wing fantasies mixed with remnants of the progressive he once was: Bitcoin boosterism, anti-vaccine conspiracy theories, assertions that Prozac causes mass shootings, opposition to U.S. support for Ukraine, but also favorable mention for single-payer health care. But for his last name, nobody would be paying him any attention — and despite that last name, he has zero chance of winning the Democratic presidential nomination.
Yet now that Ron DeSantis’s campaign (slogan: “woke woke immigrants woke woke”) seems to be on the skids, Kennedy is suddenly getting support from some of the biggest names in Silicon Valley. Jack Dorsey, who founded Twitter, has endorsed him, while some other prominent tech figures have been holding fund-raisers on his behalf. Elon Musk, who is in the process of destroying what Dorsey built, hosted him for a Twitter spaces event.
So what does all this tell us about the role of technology billionaires in modern American political life? The other day I wrote about how a number of tech bros have become recession and inflation truthers, insisting that the improving economic news is fake. (I neglected to mention Dorsey’s 2021 declaration that hyperinflation was “happening.” How’s that going?) What the Silicon Valley Kennedy boomlet shows is that this is actually part of a broader phenomenon.
Wait for it.
...Tech bros appear to be especially susceptible to brain-rotting contrarianism. As I wrote in my newsletter, their financial success all too often convinces them that they’re uniquely brilliant, able to instantly master any subject, without any need to consult people who’ve actually worked hard to understand the issues. And in many cases they became wealthy by defying conventional wisdom, which predisposes them to believe that such defiance is justified across the board.
Add to this the fact that great wealth makes it all too easy to surround yourself with people who tell you what you want to hear, validating your belief in your own brilliance — a sort of intellectual version of the emperor’s new clothes.
And
...There’s historical precedent here. Watching Elon Musk’s descent, I know that I’m not alone in thinking of Henry Ford, who remains in many ways the ultimate example of a famous, influential entrepreneur, and who also became a rabid, conspiracy-theorizing anti-Semite. He even paid for a reprinting of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a forgery that was probably promoted by the Russian secret police. (Time is a flat circle.)
In any case, what we’re seeing now is something remarkable. Arguably, the craziest faction in U.S. politics right now isn’t red-hatted blue-collar guys in diners, it’s technology billionaires living in huge mansions and flying around on private jets. At one level it’s quite funny. Unfortunately, however, these people have enough money to do serious damage.
There are moments when The NY Times comes close to beating Sturgeon’s Law. YMMV and I’m sure there will be further journalistic atrocities, but we live in an imperfect world…
Take what you can get, never give up, never surrender. Forward momentum!