America This Week, November 16th, 2023: "Emergency Election"

Well, we have a lot to get through this week. Oh, go ahead, I'm sorry.

But yeah, if people can stand all the mood effects from the traffic, you know I'll be fine.

And with that, this was a busy week, Walter we had. We're moving into this area of pre-election season where people start positioning themselves for themes they're going to adopt. On on either side of the aisle. And there was a succession of events that took place last week. But I think a good place to start is with some seemingly unconnected news that you felt like it was worth bringing up. Beginning with one news story that happened in L..A.

We can get to another thing. But what are some of the infrastructural highlights of the American experience from the last couple of weeks?

The last time this kind of damage was done to a major freeway was the North Ridge earthquake, but this was a human quake. At the same time, up in San Francisco, they were cleaning things up. So, you know, the Chinese leaders, Xi could visit a kind of Potemkin version of San Francisco.

Meanwhile, back in New York, at the same time, this was happening. I was talking to a friend who had to commute from, or travel at least from Grand Central Station up to Albany. But wasn't able to. Because a parking garage had started disintegrating, a huge heavy concrete parking garage above the Amtrak tracks had started disintegrating. And they had to close the, you know, that little dinky rail line between New York City and the state capital in Albany.

The cause of the fire hasn't been released. And the thing about the story is that it just it was no longer a story, like 10 minutes after it came out.

These things happen so often now that they have ceased to become issues in American life and in most parts of the country. The reality of decaying, declining, terrible infrastructure is just sort of a fact of life. And I remember going overseas when I was a kid and thinking, God, everything looks so decrepit. now, I think the opposite every time I go overseas.

And this clearly is an issue for voters because it affects their daily lives. Is it not? I mean, I? And that is also what Trump picked up on when he when he ran in 2016, that's like that was the theme of his speech.

We don't win anymore, everything looks terrible, right? And and it's the same thing that.

On pillars, the fire was enormously hot, like I say, it melted guardrails. There's no clear picture of when you'll be able to commute on the 10 freeway anymore.

And the idea that this can be swept under the rug on a national level is, you know, I guess, possible in the age of controlled media. But it can't be swept under the rug on the Southern California level. And you know, a good measure of how Twitter sort of outpaces the news anymore is how well it was covered there. I mean, I've gotten granular data on how it's affected commute times in Los Angeles, but.

I think I saw a New York Times headline yesterday. In fact, I know I did. And maybe we should look this up on the front page, it said. Something like California Freeway disaster. Drivers don't sweat it.

I know, I know that. That was the headline. Don't drivers, don't sweat it.

I mean, dude, when I saw this on the front page of our greatest newspaper, I was just like, What, that's how you cover it.

Nord Stream pipeline blows up. Well, infrastructure sucks these days, doesn't it?

So they're being told, Oh yeah, well, you know, there was a highway fire in Los Angeles. But you know, all those folks down there, they'll, you know, they're just soldiering on bravely. Like we all did, you know, after 9-11 or whatever, it is right, like, it's just.

It's just reassuring to them, you know, that view of things.

We're just slow, you know, we're just slowly getting used to this new world. And I love how the thing that causes people not to sweat it is that everything else is so shitty already. Um, right, right, you know what's great on the curve here? What do you expect in L..A..?

You know, right, right, it's all right, it's all. There's already fires, you know, burning on the sidewalk from encampments, and you know, other things, so you know, in the in the great, dystopian landscape, what's in a burning freeway?

You know, he began by talking about how great, because he announced in the Trump Tower, he first of all talked about how big the crowd was and how comfortable everyone was. And then, he says, And I can tell some of the candidates they went in, they didn't know the air conditioner didn't work, they sweated like dogs. He's talking about their announcements. They didn't know the room was too big because they didn't have anybody there.

How are they going to beat ISIS? And then he goes on to talk about how China beats us. When was the last time you saw a Chevrolet in Tokyo? You know, when do we meet? Beat Mexico at the border?

Now they're beating us economically, the U.S. has become a dumping ground. This is just the constant refrain of this campaign. And it scores with people, whether they like him or not, right?

Because he's, he's exactly the person who is not saying, Yeah, well, you know, another highway blew up, but that's fine, because, you know, people are used to it, right?

And that people who want to understand why Trump's campaign did well, these are two obvious data points that you have to look at. The country is crumbling, nobody's really being accountable for it. And that's just a huge opening for somebody like him who doesn't have any, you know, any dog in the fight to just rip on leaders for ignoring.

And Newsom kind of did his own version of Don't sweat it when people said, Listen, why are you, you know, cleaning it up for Xi when you can't clean it up for the people who pay for the cleanup with their taxes? And he's like, Well, it's true, because it's true. Yeah, we're cleaning it up for him. That's true because it's true, that was another quote.

So don't sweat it. And what me worry? And hey, you know, life's a bitch are the new slogans, the new anti Trump slogans? And I just don't think that's going to work. Causing people to ignore things like burning freeways in order to see the larger issue of democracy is going to be a difficult haul if that's what they want to do.

And the headline is Donald Trump leads Biden Joe Biden in five or six key battlegrounds polled by The New York Times. But everybody wigged out about it. Because it not only showed that Trump was ahead in a lot of these places, but that, even more significantly, that he was gaining with demographics he hadn't done well with before, so young people, minorities. So, for instance, an analysis from our reporter Shane Goldmacher.

Trump is performing better in more diverse battlegrounds. It's a sign of how the racial coalitions, the two parties, are shifting. And so everybody went into full wig out mode. After this poll came out, particularly, I think the youth thing caught some folks by surprise, although there are some other polls that show that maybe that wasn't so representative.

But they're explaining that by saying that young people are unhappy about Biden's commitment to Israel. I don't know that that's the case. I think it probably has more to do with young people entering the workforce. And feeling like they're never going to own a home, or they're never going to not live with six other roommates, or whatever it is.

Why they would vote for Trump, necessarily, I don't know, but certainly it's not a great environment for young people, so I don't know.

And whether Paul Krugman thinks we are misjudging our economic situation, as he's written recently, or what, it's pretty clear. Because I spent time in a big city, Las Vegas, I just came from that. I'm here in New York. It's pretty clear that at the edges of things, stuff's falling apart. And as the parent of two young people and someone tapped into the fortunes of those in their 20s. I can tell you that the view from 23 looks pretty rocky unless you have the greatest job at Facebook.

And so coalitions among those who are vulnerable economically are going to fray in this world. And I think the New York Times even nods to that, with a quote in that piece saying where somebody says, My life personally has been affected by the Biden administration. Yeah, there's a lot of discontent out there, and it's a lot of discontent. Based on things like burning freeways and inflation and high interest rate, the lack of any path toward home ownership, and so on. And no wonder.

There's some Yosarian type character in there, and there's. It's a bunch of military people. And one of them is saying, we're going to bomb Constantinople off the map, and somebody quips, Why don't we just bomb the map?

And and this makes me think, because, you know, you and I spent the last year or so spending talking a lot about the government department that's supposedly in charge of critical infrastructure, you know, the Department of Homeland Security, the Cybersecurity Infrastructure Security Agency. You know, that's sort of partly connected to general infrastructure, but DHS as a whole, they're in charge of infrastructure. But they poured a ton of energy into suppressing what people talk about.

And it feels like there's not so much energy into fixing the actual infrastructure, right? So what I'm trying to get at is there's a bipartisan effort.

She's the former South Carolina governor. She called for name verification on all social media profiles. She said When I get into office, the very first thing we have to do social media companies. They have to show America their algorithms. Let's see what they're pushing, why they're pushing.

This is a national security threat.

And so, you know, now, basically there's a candidate, she's technically running for president, although she's a total non-factor in the race. But this is basically, you know, a mainstream Republican candidate who is calling for the same kind of oversight over speech that, you know, we've seen, we've seen from the other side for a while now, so is the Gaza situation going to be that issue that finally consolidates the other side? I don't know. I mean, I don't think that Republican voters are there yet, do you?

Make people register their names on social media. Because I think that how we talk about things is the biggest issue in the land. Nobody's like that, except these people. Because nobody but them has control over the tools that will, you know, make this possible, and nobody but them benefits from controlling those tools. This is not a popular issue, and yet they talk about it as though it's the greatest threat to our society.

But, you know, I don't know, but it's part of this larger issue that I'm having trouble kind of threading together. Which is, there's an enormous amount of discontent. And rather than deal with it rather than admit it as an issue.

They want us to be thinking about things that are happening overseas and threats that are not real to most people.

Right, I mean, that's what it feels like is happening heading into this presidential election year. You know, there's not a whole lot of people talking about where the discontent is coming from in the country. That is such that people would be voting for Donald Trump, even so, even still, after all these years.

That's the media's fault. That contained basically this idea that the reason for the poll result is that the press is not doing an adequate job of communicating the dangers of a Trump win, she writes. Instead, journalists have emphasized Joe Biden's age and Trump's freewheeling style. They blame the public's attitudes on quote polarization as if they themselves have no role.

And she says, we need less pussyfooting, more vigor and repetition, and less talk about Biden being old. I mean, who's talking? They're talking about stuff like their highways being on fire, not having to step over dead people on the way to work, or, you know?

Things not being in stores because they were all sold out.