Since 1949, job growth under Democratic presidencies has been more than twice as large as that during Republican administrations (2.47% to 1.07%). Excluding public sector jobs, the advantage is even greater (2.55% to 0.97%). Other key averages reveal a similar distinction during this period: Real business investment growth advanced 6.58% under Democratic presidents and 2.98% under their Republican counterparts; real personal income — excluding government transfers — increased 2.66% and real economic growth per capita (net domestic product) advanced 2.6% under Democratic chief executives, but only by 1.41% and 1.28%, respectively, under Republican leaders. Inflation has also been much more modest under Democratic presidents (2.91% compared to 3.28% under their Republican counterparts), with an even more decided advantage when volatile energy and food markets are excluded (2.87% compared to 3.59%).

Of the 11 U.S. recessions we’ve endured over the past 75 years, 10 began in Republican presidential administrations; only Jimmy Carter — embracing Republican-style fiscal, monetary and regulatory policy much more completely than any other recent Democratic president — presided over a “Democratic” recession. The two “double-dip” recessions of 1980 and 1981-82, straddling the late Carter and early Reagan administrations, are almost indistinguishable in their policy origins.

We are reminded consistently by pundits, journalists and scholars that tax cuts represent what may be our most readily available and useful tool for economic stimulus. Flat, or flatter, taxes, we are told, are the only means to the achievement of tax simplicity and tax compliance.

Even on the question of who tends to favor lower or higher taxes, it is easy to be deceived. When income taxes are reduced (at the federal and state level) and the entire tax code is rendered less progressive as a result, two things happen almost automatically: other much more regressive taxes rise to fill the vacuum created by universally demanded (if not readily acknowledged) public services and consumer demand falters as higher taxes begin to fall on those compelled to spend all that they earn. Overall economic activity and prospective revenue growth, in turn, begin to stagnate, triggering a vicious cycle of tax rate increases (among the untouched regressive tax vehicles), just to maintain public services and economic activity.

Republican politicians have stumbled upon a remarkably effective political strategy: preach tax cuts as the be-all and end-all of successful economic policy; ignore the ways in which federal income tax cuts often lead to increased tolls, fees and property, sales, and excise tax increases; relinquish all but rhetorical opposition to the federal deficits created by federal tax cuts; and cap it off by hinting repeatedly that more could be done — allegedly to great effect — by reducing government spending directed at “undeserving” and “unambitious” poor people of color.

Republican political leaders have their cake and eat it too, riding a diffuse anti-tax sentiment to political victory. Actual results in this game don’t often matter, at least as long as their Democratic opponents succeed in staving off the most precipitous decline with safety nets and the preservation of some progressive fiscal policy elements.

Begun quietly with what Republican activist and Wall Street Journal editor Jude Wanniski called the “Two Santa Claus Theory” — under which Republicans could counter the Democratic social spending Santa Claus with their own tax-cutting Kris Kringle — this approach promised political “success” even amid policy failure, for opponents could be pinned with the deficits and damage it produced.

Exploiting normal psychological tendencies to imagine that “more money in my pocket” and “less money in theirs” simply must be good policy, the widespread ignorance of actual public spending and significant intergovernmental fiscal policies (where federal change forces state and local change, or vice versa), and the compelling notion that personal economic opportunity or success must be derived from personal talent and initiative (rather than significant public policy reform), the “Two Santa Claus” strategy has buoyed a Republican Party that has consistently delivered sub-par results.

Here’s a warning and an admonition written in January 2019 by author and organizer Jonathan Smucker: “If the Dem Party establishment succeeds in beating down the fresh leadership and bold vision that's stepping up, it will effectively enable the continued rise of authoritarianism. But they will not wake up and suddenly grasp this. It's on us to outmaneuver them and win.”

There are a million surface-level reasons for Kamala Harris’s loss and systematic underperformance in pretty much every county and among nearly every demographic group. She is part of a deeply unpopular administration. Voters believe the economy is bad and that the country is on the wrong track. She is a woman and we still have some work to do as a nation to overcome long-held biases.  But the real problems for the Democrats go much deeper and require a dramatic course correction of a sort that, I suspect, Democrats are unlikely to embark upon. The bottom line is this: Democrats are still trying to run a neoliberal campaign in a post-neoliberal era. In other words, 2016 Bernie was right.

The lie that fueled the Iraq war destroyed confidence in the institutions that were the bedrock of this neoliberal order and in the idea that the U.S. could or should remake the world in our image. Even more devastating, the financial crisis left home owners destitute while banks were bailed out, revealing that there was something deeply unjust in a system that placed capital over people.

These events sparked social movements on both the right and the left. The Tea Party churned out populist-sounding politicians like Sarah Palin and birtherist conspiracies about Barack Obama, paving the way for the rise of Donald Trump. The Tea Party and Trumpism are not identical, of course, but they share a cast of villains: The corrupt bureaucrats or deep state. The immigrants supposedly changing your community. The cultural elites telling you your beliefs are toxic. Trump’s version of this program is also explicitly authoritarian. This authoritarianism is a feature not a bug for some portion of the Trump coalition which has been persuaded that democracy left to its own devices could pose an existential threat to their way of life.

On the left, the organic response to the financial crisis was Occupy Wall Street, which directly fueled the Bernie Sanders movement. Here, too, the villains were clear. In the language of Occupy it was the 1% or as Bernie put it the millionaires and billionaires. It was the economic elite and unfettered capitalism that had made it so hard to get by. Turning homes into assets of financial speculation. Wildly profiteering off of every element of our healthcare system. Busting unions so that working people had no collective power. This movement was, in contrast to the right, was explicitly pro-democracy, with a foundational view that in a contest between the 99% and the 1%, the 99% would prevail. And that a win would lead to universal programs like Medicare for All, free college, workplace democracy, and a significant hike in the minimum wage.

On the Republican side, Donald Trump emerged as a political juggernaut at a time when the party was devastated and rudderless, having lost to Obama twice in a row. This weakened state—and the fact that the Trump alternatives were uncharismatic drips like Jeb Bush—created a path for Trump to successfully execute a hostile takeover of the party.

Plus, right-wing populism embraces capital, and so it posed no real threat to the monied interests that are so influential within the party structures.

The Republican donor class was not thrilled with Trump’s chaos and lack of decorum but they did not view him as an existential threat to their class interests

The difference was that Bernie’s party takeover did pose an existential threat—both to party elites who he openly antagonized and to the party’s big money backers. The bottom line of the Wall Street financiers and corporate titans was explicitly threatened. His rise would simply not be allowed. Not in 2016 and not in 2020.

What’s more, Hillary Clinton and her allies launched a propaganda campaign to posture as if they were actually to the left of Bernie by labeling him and his supporters sexist and racist for centering class politics over identity politics. This in turn spawned a hell cycle of woke word-policing and demographic slicing and dicing and antagonism towards working class whites that only made the Democratic party more repugnant to basically everyone.

The path not taken in 2016 looms larger than ever. Bernie’s coalition was filled with the exact type of voters who are now flocking to Donald Trump: Working class voters of all races, young people, and, critically, the much-derided bros. The top contributors to Bernie’s campaign often held jobs at places like Amazon and Walmart. The unions loved him. And—never forget—he earned the coveted Joe Rogan endorsement that Trump also received the day before the election this year. It turns out, the Bernie-to-Trump pipeline is real! While that has always been used as an epithet to smear Bernie and his movement, with the implication that social democracy is just a cover for or gateway drug to right wing authoritarianism, the truth is that this pipeline speaks to the power and appeal of Bernie’s vision as an effective antidote to Trumpism. When these voters had a choice between Trump and Bernie, they chose Bernie. For many of them now that the choice is between Trump and the dried out husk of neoliberalism, they’re going Trump.

Maybe I will be just as wrong as I was about the election but it is my sense that with this Trump victory, authoritarian right politics have won the ideological battle for what will replace the neoliberal order in America. And yes, I think it will be ugly, mean, and harmful—because it already is.

These days hate has roughly the same role in popular culture that original sin has in traditional Christian theology. If you want to slap the worst imaginable label on an organization, you call it a hate group. If you want to push a category of discourse straight into the realm of the utterly unacceptable, you call it hate speech. If you’re speaking in public and you want to be sure that everyone in the crowd will beam approval at you, all you have to do is denounce hate.

At the far end of this sort of rhetoric, you get the meretricious slogan used by Hillary Clinton’s unsuccessful presidential campaign last year: LOVE TRUMPS HATE. I hope that none of my readers are under the illusion that Clinton’s partisans were primarily motivated by love, except in the sense of Clinton’s love for power and the Democrats’ love for the privileges and payouts they could expect from four more years of control of the White House; and of course Trump and the Republicans were head over heels in love with the same things. The fact that Clinton’s marketing flacks and focus groups thought that the slogan just quoted would have an impact on the election, though, shows just how pervasive the assumption I’m discussing has become in our culture.

what happens when people decide that some common human emotion is evil and harmful and wrong, and decide that the way to make a better world is to get rid of it?

The example I have in mind is the attitude, prevalent in the English-speaking world from the middle of the nineteenth century to the middle of the twentieth, that sex was the root of all evil.

I know that comparing current attitudes toward hate with Victorian attitudes toward sex will inspire instant pushback from a good many of my readers. After all, sexual desire is natural and normal and healthy, while hate is evil and harmful and wrong, right? Here again, it’s easy to lose track of the fact that people a century and a quarter ago—most likely including your ancestors, dear reader, if they happened to live in the English-speaking world—saw things the other way around. To them, hate was an ordinary emotion that most people had under certain circumstances, but sexual desire was beyond the pale: beastly, horrid, filthy, and so on through an impressive litany of unpleasant adjectives.

Make something forbidden and you make it desirable. Take a normal human emotional state, one that everyone experiences, and make it forbidden, and you guarantee that the desire to violate the taboo will take on overwhelming power. That’s why, after spending their days subject to the pervasive tone policing of contemporary life, in which every utterance gets scrutinized for the least trace of anything that anyone anywhere could conceivably interpret as hateful, so many people in today’s world don internet aliases and go to online forums where they can blurt out absolutely anything

The opposite of one bad idea, after all, is usually another bad idea; the fact that dying of thirst is bad for you doesn’t make drowning good for you; whether we’re talking about sex or anything else, there’s a space somewhere between “not enough” and “too much,” between pathological repression and equally pathological expression, that’s considerably healthier than either of the extremes. I’m going to risk causing my more sensitive readers to clutch their smelling salts and faint on the nearest sofa, in true Victorian style, by suggesting that the same thing’s true of hate.

Hate is like sex; there are certain times, places, and contexts where it’s appropriate, but there are many, many others where it’s not. You can recognize its place in life without having to act it out on every occasion—and in fact, the more conscious you are of its place in life, the more completely you acknowledge it and give it its due, the less likely you are to get blindsided by it. That’s true of sex, and it’s true of hate: what you refuse to acknowledge controls you; what you acknowledge, you can learn to control.

the blind faith that goodness requires amputation is so unquestioned in our time.

Human beings are never going to be perfect, not if perfection means the amputation of some part of human experience, whether the limb that’s being hacked off is our sexual instincts, our aggressive instincts, or any other part of who and what we are.

We can accept our sexuality, whatever that happens to be, and weave it into the pattern of our individual lives and our relationships with other people in ways that uphold the values we cherish and yield as much joy and as little unnecessary pain for as many people as possible. That doesn’t mean always acting out our desires—in some cases, it can mean never acting them out at all

As much as I wish circumstances were different, the stress and expense of this fight – coupled with the existing stress and expense of operating Omegle, and fighting its misuse – are simply too much. Operating Omegle is no longer sustainable, financially nor psychologically. Frankly, I don’t want to have a heart attack in my 30s. The battle for Omegle has been lost, but the war against the Internet rages on. Virtually every online communication service has been subject to the same kinds of attack as Omegle; and while some of them are much larger companies with much greater resources, they all have their breaking point somewhere. I worry that, unless the tide turns soon, the Internet I fell in love with may cease to exist, and in its place, we will have something closer to a souped-up version of TV – focused largely on passive consumption, with much less opportunity for active participation and genuine human connection.

I’ve done my best to weather the attacks, with the interests of Omegle’s users – and the broader principle – in mind. If something as simple as meeting random new people is forbidden, what’s next? That is far and away removed from anything that could be considered a reasonable compromise of the principle I outlined. Analogies are a limited tool, but a physical-world analogy might be shutting down Central Park because crime occurs there – or perhaps more provocatively, destroying the universe because it contains evil. A healthy, free society cannot endure when we are collectively afraid of each other to this extent.

In recent years, it seems like the whole world has become more ornery. Maybe that has something to do with the pandemic, or with political disagreements. Whatever the reason, people have become faster to attack, and slower to recognize each other’s shared humanity. One aspect of this has been a constant barrage of attacks on communication services, Omegle included, based on the behavior of a malicious subset of users. To an extent, it is reasonable to question the policies and practices of any place where crime has occurred. I have always welcomed constructive feedback; and indeed, Omegle implemented a number of improvements based on such feedback over the years. However, the recent attacks have felt anything but constructive. The only way to please these people is to stop offering the service. Sometimes they say so, explicitly and avowedly; other times, it can be inferred from their act of setting standards that are not humanly achievable. Either way, the net result is the same.

I didn’t really know what to expect when I launched Omegle. Would anyone even care about some Web site that an 18 year old kid made in his bedroom in his parents’ house in Vermont, with no marketing budget? But it became popular almost instantly after launch, and grew organically from there, reaching millions of daily users. I believe this had something to do with meeting new people being a basic human need, and with Omegle being among the best ways to fulfill that need. As the saying goes: “If you build a better mousetrap, the world will beat a path to your door.” Over the years, people have used Omegle to explore foreign cultures; to get advice about their lives from impartial third parties; and to help alleviate feelings of loneliness and isolation. I’ve even heard stories of soulmates meeting on Omegle, and getting married. Those are only some of the highlights. Unfortunately, there are also lowlights. Virtually every tool can be used for good or for evil, and that is especially true of communication tools, due to their innate flexibility. The telephone can be used to wish your grandmother “happy birthday”, but it can also be used to call in a bomb threat. There can be no honest accounting of Omegle without acknowledging that some people misused it, including to commit unspeakably heinous crimes.

As a young teenager, I couldn’t just waltz onto a college campus and tell a student: “Let’s debate moral philosophy!” I couldn’t walk up to a professor and say: “Tell me something interesting about microeconomics!” But online, I was able to meet those people, and have those conversations. I was also an avid Wikipedia editor; I contributed to open source software projects; and I often helped answer computer programming questions posed by people many years older than me. In short, the Internet opened the door to a much larger, more diverse, and more vibrant world than I would have otherwise been able to experience; and enabled me to be an active participant in, and contributor to, that world. All of this helped me to learn, and to grow into a more well-rounded person. Moreover, as a survivor of childhood rape, I was acutely aware that any time I interacted with someone in the physical world, I was risking my physical body. The Internet gave me a refuge from that fear. I was under no illusion that only good people used the Internet; but I knew that, if I said “no” to someone online, they couldn’t physically reach through the screen and hold a weapon to my head, or worse. I saw the miles of copper wires and fiber-optic cables between me and other people as a kind of shield – one that empowered me to be less isolated than my trauma and fear would have otherwise allowed.

Fox host Bret Baier texts internally that night: “There is NO evidence of fraud. None. Allegations — stories. Twitter. Bulls---. Nothing concrete. That will affect the spread in any of these states.”

While texting about Trump and his business ventures, host Tucker Carlson says: “All of them fail. What he’s good at is destroying things. He’s the undisputed world champion of that. He could easily destroy us if we play it wrong. It’s so obvious.”

Bartiromo speaks with Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani on the phone, and Giuliani acknowledges he “can’t prove” that Pelosi has an interest in Dominion, according to a tape of the conversation unearthed by MSNBC. Giuliani also says it’s “a little harder” to prove allegations against Dominion than other claims.

Carlson texts, “With Trump behind it, an alternative like newsmax could be devastating to us.”

Host Neil Cavuto cuts away from a news conference after White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany says Democrats are “welcoming fraud” and “illegal voting.” “Whoa, whoa, whoa,” Cavuto says, adding, “Unless she has more details to back that up, I can’t in good countenance continue showing you this.” An employee on Fox Corp. executive Raj Shah’s team emails Shah and others about Cavuto, labeling it a “Brand Threat.”

After Fox reporter Jacqui Heinrich fact-checks a Trump tweet mentioning Fox’s coverage, Carlson texts, “Please get her fired. Seriously. … It needs to stop immediately, like tonight. It’s measurably hurting the company. The stock price is down. Not a joke.”

Also internally, Ingraham calls Powell “a complete nut” and says: “No one will work with her. Ditto with Rudy.” Carlson responds: “It’s unbelievably offensive to me. Our viewers are good people and they believe it. … She’s soliciting ‘millions of dollars’ in checks made out to her personally.”On her show that night, Ingraham refers to “affidavits from people who have been working in ballot counting for 20 years, who cited really disturbing things that they had seen.”

Pirro executive producer Jerry Andrews emails Fox executives Meade Cooper and David Clark, saying Pirro’s upcoming monologue “is rife w conspiracy theories and bs and is yet another example why this woman should never be on live television.”Fox internally fact-checks Pirro’s upcoming monologue, designating a claim about Dominion’s ties to Venezuela as “INCORRECT/CANNOT CONFIRM.”Nov. 21Return to menuPirro makes the claim on her show anyway, saying, “The president’s lawyers [are] alleging a company called Dominion, which they say started in Venezuela with Cuban money and with the assistance of Smartmatic software, a back door is capable of flipping votes. And the president’s lawyers [are] alleging that American votes in a presidential election are actually counted in a foreign country. These are serious allegations, but the media has no interest in any of this.”

Fox anchor Eric Shawn does an on-air fact check of Trump’s claims about voter fraud and a “massive dump of votes” in key states, calling Trump’s allegations “false and unsubstantiated.” In an email exchange about the segment, Scott tells Cooper that segment was “bad for business” and notes it clashed with other Fox programming. “This has to stop now,” Scott says.

In an email exchange with Ryan, Rupert Murdoch says, “Wake up call for Hannity, who has been privately disgusted by Trump for weeks, but was scared to lose viewers!”

In an email to Scott, Rupert Murdoch proposes having Fox’s three prime-time hosts combine to say something to the effect of “the election is over and Joe Biden won. We are all disappointed, but it happened.” He adds that it “would go a long way to stop the Trump myth that the election stolen. And the basis of his 2024 campaign.” The hosts never deliver such a message.

This article proposes to explain why education is so difficult and contentious by arguing that educational thinking draws on only three fundamental ideas&emdash;that of socializing the young, shaping the mind by a disciplined academic curriculum, and facilitating the development of students' potential. All educational positions are made up of various mixes of these ideas. The problems we face in education are due to the fact that each of these ideas is significantly flawed and also that each is incompatible in basic ways with the other two. Until we recognize these basic incompatibilities we will be unable adequately to respond to the problems we face.