It is a matter of great interest to me how false perceptions emerge and solidify as they become an accepted consensus, at least among some. Really, how did the Republican Party become the stewards of economic stability and growth when they have been behind every economic disaster since Coolidge and Hoover drove us into the abyss in 1929.

If you examine the record over the last few decades, Democratic leadership is associated with job growth, wage increases, and overall positive economic activity, including gains in the equity markets. Since World War II, the stock market increased the most in the administrations of Barak Obama (plus 148%) and Bill Clinton (plus 227%). Correspondingly, the market fell in only two administrations during this period, both Republican. They fell by 16 percent during Nixon’s tenure and by 22 percent under Bush Junior’s watch.

Nevertheless, Joe six-pack today thinks the Dems are death to their financial future, their job security, and their cherished values. That was not the thinking in my world growing up. I heard the adults in the 1950s chat about the two parties, claiming that Republicans always ruined the economy while Democrats tended to get us into war. Such easy categorizations had an implicit rationale back then. World War I, II, and Korea all started under the Democrats, while the global depression started under the Republicans, who were clueless about what to do when it did begin. Of course, this was Massachusetts which was never considered a mainstream place in any political sense.

Even in good old Wisconsin, there were large swaths of western and northwestern counties, largely rural in character, that were strongly Democratic when I first moved to the state in the early 1970s. The farmers and small business people living there yet recalled the time when New Deal programs helped them weather the bad economic times, kept the family farms from going under and the towns from declining into ghostly apparitions.

Over time, and certainly aided by the growing drumbeats of right-wing propoganda, their gratitude was replaced with growing suspicions and raw fears. The Democrats, they were told again and again, were helping those people who were not like them … lazy minorities living in dangerous urban areas. The elites were poisoning the minds of their children in Universities like UW Madison, clearly a bastion of socialist and Communist thinking. They were permitting alien forces to invade our nation and crime to run wild as those liberals and other ‘woke’ types coddled the evil doers while failing to protect their kind. There was no end to the perfidies to be laid at the laps of the State’s Dems. Today, the rural arts of the state are Republican while the Dems are found huddling in the larger urban centers.

Crime is a good example. Nothing like the irrational fear of rampant rape and pillage to scare people into looking for a strong savior, a Trump or Desantis type. An ongoing survey taps the perception of whether crime in the respondent’s area is growing better or worse. Before Trump emerged on the national scene, Republicans were more pessimistic but the gap was not large. By the time Donald was ousted from ofiice, the gap was some 30 percentage points with 42 percent of Dems saying worse and 72 percent of Republicans saying the same. This was the case even though more from the GOP camp lived in these rural, fairly crime free areas. Trump, and his propoganda outlets, hammered away at the theme that the world in Democratic-controlled areas was falling apart in civil disorder.

One reason behind this ‘the sky is falling’ consensus among Republicans is apparent … the relentless push by the conservative propoganda machine that liberals were permitting evil to run amok. I need not say the obvious, this fear tactic is straight out of the traditional Fascist playbook. Fox news anchors and their guests spotlighted crime some 80 percent more frequently than their MSNBC peers. And they did not emphasisze the good job law enformement was doing.

What was the truth? Well, like all social issues, it is complicated. Reported violent crimes were down in 2022, after Biden took office. However, you would not know this from the continued drumbeat from conservative sources which doubled-down on their pushing of tired shibboleths that crime was rampant wherever and whenever Dems ruled. In fact, homicides were at 8.2 per 100,000 people at the end of the Trump administration. To put that in perspective the rate was 10 per 100,000 when Clinton took office and fell to 6 when he left. The rate was about 5 at the end of Obama’s rule. While many things might contribute to such trends, the rates were highest at the end of each Republican administration. The Dems apparently did a decent job on their watches.

Think about the right-wing prescriptions for violent crimes. They want to put more guns on the streets. They pass ‘stand your ground’ laws where you can shoot down someone whom you believe threatens you. The cowtowns in the old west had much stronger gun laws, often restricting them within city limits. Today’s Republicans want everyone armed and dangerous. And so, when some folk in Texas asked a neighbor to quiet down (he was shooting off a loud gun from his porch), his response was to kill five people including a child. One witness said the assassin claimed ‘that he was on his own property so he could do what he wanted.’ Never forget that gun-related deaths on a proportional basis are much higher in red states as opposed to blue states. Guns do not save lives. Commons sense laws do.

As I have said in the past, the American foundational myth is that of the lone individual immersed in a Darwinian struggle for survival and triumph. When stripped of all rhetoric, the American dream is a few fortunate individuals rising to the top while most struggle to stay afloat. As the nation’s wealth and income inequality worsen to levels not seen since the great 1929 crash, so do the ties and bonds that keep us together. It is hard to sustain a sense of togetherness when unfairness abounds and the consequences of failure so obvious and final. It is difficult to remain sanguin or optimistic when a few reap all the rewards, often because of a rigged system that give huge advantages to those well connected, likely those with the correct skin color and enjoying fortuitous backgrounds. My oft repeated mantra is that if you want the ‘American Dream’ you best emigrate to one of several Scandinavian countries that top the list for happy citizens.

When that preferential system favoring the established elite is threatened, fear arises which is followed by uglier possibilities. WASPS once had a comfortable control of the levers of power. Now, that hegemony is seen to be slipping away. Caucasions represented some 76 percent of the nation’s population in 1990. They are down to 58 percent now and will lose their majority status by 2045. This has led to uncomfortable outcomes like the creation of an ‘American First’ caucus in Congress that is dedicated to the preservation of ‘Anglo-Saxon traditions.’ In the past, this would have been labeled a Klu Klux Klan rally. It has led to Trump and Desantis and other autocratic types who wage ‘culture wars’ to keep their followers stoked in a blind fury and thus less able or willing to identify the real sources of their discomfort.

The undisputed ruling group has never been comfortable with the potential loss of power. Their fear leads to hate, which leads to violence. Thus we have the January 6th attack on the Capitol. However, the storm troopers breaking down doors and clubbing police officers were not the white elite but the less educated who could easily be manipulated by blatant forms of propoganda, the ‘Proud Boys’ and their ilk. The easily led are the ones now going to prison, not the ones who fed them lies and pushed them on their way up the Capitol steps. The MAGA hats they wore, and the slogans they shouted, could have been heard by Hitler’s Brown Shirts and Mussolini’s Black Shirts in a prior era. It was the same slogans, the same fears, the same hate, the same violent solutions.

This widespread fears among adults seeps into the consciousness of the young. We have seen depression and anxiety among teens ramp up dramatically over the past decade in particular. Some of their worries are my worries, like climate change and the loss of careers to advanced computers (though I’m too old to wrorry much about either of these). But mostly they look with foreboding toward their futures. That is so different from my youth where, though raised in a family of very limited means, I saw abundant opportunities in front of me.

I strongly think that the young feel the loss of connectedness. The Republican God of ‘each person for himself’ is a lonely and frightening place to be. The Darwinian fight to keep going as the opportortunities for success recede wears on you over time. It affords each of us little succor or hope, which is why the happiest countries are those where government and people care about each other.

Our pervasive despair among the young is first seen by their teachers who, in turn, are battling despair and hopelessness. According to a recent survey, only 12 percent of American teachers are happy in their vocations and some 55 percent are considering bailing out. They are not paid nearly enough to take on the challenges they face or reverse the anxieties of those in their charge.

Is the fat lady singing? By the way, the lady in question presumably belts out a great song at the end of some opera. Since operas are not in English, a numbnuts like me can only figure out when the agony is about to end is when she comes on the stage to sing.

So, once again, I turn my one ear that works to listen for her. I do hear something. I hear that some 75 percent of those supporting Trump yet believe he won the 2020 election despite all the overwhelming evidence to the contrary. I hear that in a ranking of countries on a democracy-autocracy scale created by the CIA, some political scientists have recently downgraded America to the status on an ‘anocracy.’ This would put us somewhere between a mature democracy and an autocracy. This status typically is associated with a heightened risk of social unrest and even civil war. Then I stop listening.

I shake my head and thank my stars that my time here is limited. But some singing still reaches me despite my efforts to shut it all out. Only time will tell if it is her that I hear.