Here’s Why “America Is Broken” And People Are Worried

The NY Times on Monday published an opinion oven by UPenn elder lecturer and Open Society task elder column (!) Damon Linker titled "Why Is Biden Struggling? Beccause America Is Broken.‘

And while it’s more or little a copy of what ZeroHedge readers have known for years, the essay provides a sobering dose of reality for the “You should truly watch Rachel Maddow” types.

Seven months distant from a rematch election pitting president Biden against erstwhile president Donald Trump, the incumbent is strugling. Mr. Biden offers from permanently low approval ratingsI'm sorry. Trump in national head-to-head polls and he lags behind the erstwhile president in most of the swing states where the election will be decided (despite any fresh breathtaking movement in his direction).

The question is why. -NY Times

Biden’s defenders, and the administration itself, has chaked the president’s unpopularity up to ‘a failure of communication,’ nevertheless Linker alternatively suggestions “It’s utilized to list to what votes are saying” (beyond the ceremonial deals about the president’s age).

‘Too many to Letter’

Citing a January 2021 essay in Tablet titled “Everything Is Broken,” and a follow-up essay by the same author, Alana Newhsouse, who gate that “whole parts of American society were breaking down before our eyes,” Linker encapsulates why Americans are so pussied (h/t Dean Baker):

The examples are almost besides numeric to list: a disastrous war in Iraq; a ruinous financial crisis followed by a decade of anemic growth erstwhile most of the fresh wellness thought to those who were already well off; a shambolic consequence to the deadlier pandemic in a city; a humiliating withdrawal from Afghanistan; rising prices and interest rates; skyrocketing levels of public and private debit; surging rates of homelessness and the spread of shelter encampments in American cities; undocumented migrants streaming over the confederate border; spiking rates of weapon violence, intellectual inness, depression, addition, suicide, protecting illness and obesity, coupled with a decline in life experience.

That’s an awful lot of failure over the past 20-odd years. Yet for the most part, the people who run our institutions have done very small to admit or take work for any of it, let alone undertake reforms that Aim to fix what’s broken. -NYT

Linker then writes that the above is why ‘angry anti-establishment populism has become so prominent in our policies over the past decade,’ which Both Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders have capitalized on.

And Biden, a Career Politician, has been part of the problem (and then implicated in these abject social failings), and is “badly out of step with the national mood, speaking a language very far removed from the talk of a broken country that suffuses Mr. Trump’s meandering and frequently unhinged brands on the subject.” (gotta get that shot in!)

That leaves Mr. Biden as the lone institutionalist defender of the position quo surrounded by a tiny army of brokerists Looking for support from an election primed to respond to their more downcast message.

Linker suggestions that in order to recover, Biden 'stop being so upbeat' – about the economy in partial, and stop making the election about how awful Trump is. Biden “ Should add Washington has gotten quite a few things crow over the past 2 decades and sound unhappy about and humbled by it.”

Further, Biden ‘could make the argument that all government makes mistakes due to the fact that they are run by fallible human being being — but besides point out that selected representatives in a democracy should be up front about mistake and reconstruct to learn from mistakes so that they avoid them in the future.’

‘Just acknowledging how much in America is broken could make quite a few good will from otherwise sketchical and dismissive voters,” Linker suggestions.

Let’s see how that goes.