It looks a lot like what Isaac Asimov said about the elements of anti-intellectualism. We’ve democratized access to all—well, all documented digitized history, all documented science, religious texts, political thought— everything—yet spend any time in the political social media trenches and realize that we’ve produced more idiots than ever. We have the sum of knowledge in our pockets, but because everything is a quick search away, the brain treats data as entirely disposable. We aren’t deep-diving anymore; we are just navigating a system designed to hold our attention. [1]

This pipeline to frictionless ignorance wasn’t an accident. I look back at when my own awareness came of age in the seventies, and I think that might have been the last time education was done well in the United States. I don’t recall taking tests back then just to be told where things went wrong. It was more for potential and aptitude measurement than looking for any correct answer. The test I took in the seventies placed me and everyone else on a peer percentile in terms of reading/verbal, language, and math. I don’t know how else they measured like literacy then, but it seems like they went from that to teaching to the test—and that is the problem of an AI still doing it.

They went from measuring capacity to enforcing conformity, culminating in punitive policies like No Child Left Behind [2]. When school funding and salaries got tied to scores, Campbell’s Law took over: the test became the curriculum. Teachers started drilling kids on Scantron tricks, and open-ended problem solving got stripped away because it was an economic risk. We traded intellectual synthesis for compliance, accidentally manufacturing a citizen who is highly compliant and entirely dependent on pre-packaged answers. [1]

Silicon Valley took that exact compliance model and turned it into an app. Facebook is not the company that got us off MySpace. Not in the longest time. It’s got Meta.ai these days. AI is explosive. I imagine Asimov rolling over in his grave with Musk’s appropriation of his creation. There’s way too many way too fast. Released before anyone had a say. Go ahead and ask your favorite AI to lay out its programming.

You will see right away that mainstream AI companies aren’t built to be Socratic mentors that challenge your logic or force you to think. They are just fast vending machines. They hand over immediate, disposable text blocks to keep users passive, eliminating the protective mental friction required for actual critical thinking.

The data on who is falling for this shit is staggering. Surveys show that nearly half of the country—49% of US adults—are using AI chatbots [3], which I sort of get. Try to research without AI interference these days. But the scary part is that 53% of those adult users use it strictly for “quick answers” [4]. and there is often no feedback on their question regardless of how biased it might be.

Worse, behavioral tracking shows that a massive 90% of casual users simply accept the very first output the AI puts out without a single second of cross-verification or pushback despite the constant AI disclaimer with every response. No check of confirmation bias to their ask. Yes, Andrew Johnson was a Democrat.

If you need any proof that teaching to the test was a mistake, it is the younger generations driving this entire engine of passivity, making up roughly 65% of the total user base [5]. They weren’t raised in any traditional generational slog where people had to wait, dig, or struggle for information; which moved at human pace not light speed. They exist in a world where they get everything at once and nothing at all. When the text looks grammatically authoritative, brains stop verifying, completely mistaking a fast, slick presentation for actual ground truth. Tech companies have successfully turned that blind trust into a multi-billion-dollar business model. [1, 2, 3]

And that brings us to the real elephant in the room for these midterms—the part most of our representatives talk about but don’t actually understand. I think most of our representatives talk about it and don’t understand it or what it can do or be shaped to do. They treat AI like a utility or a software product built from scratch by engineers. They are completely blind to the fact that we have never been paid for the collective scrape of our 500 years since the Renaissance efforts that companies took for themselves. They plundered the public commons for free, built a trillion-dollar industry, and now they are renting our own ancestral legacy back to us behind a monthly paywall.

Politicians love to scream about billionaire wealth taxes, but if they want a real one, this is it. The wealth generated by these models belongs to the public whose collective history trained the machine. We are seeing some panic over this, with Senator Bernie Sanders floating a proposal for a public stake in these firms [6], and OpenAI’s Sam Altman talking about a Public Wealth Fund. Think tanks are starting to argue for a “Universal AI Dividend.” [1]

But don’t expect the people running in these midterms to champion a public dividend anytime soon. The AI industry has already dropped over $60 million through super PACs like Leading the Future to bury local regulation [7], and poured over $200 million into House and Senate races. They are keeping the politicians writing the laws too confused—and too well-funded—to ever demand a payout for the public. [1]

Worse, look at what these AI companies are doing physically. They are buying up rare or uncommon physical books and stripping them apart—ripping the spines out, scanning pages, and throwing the books away. Digital libraries are great, but what happens when the power grid fails? We are systematically trading our physical anchors of truth for a database that can be rendered utterly invisible by a prolonged blackout or an infrastructure collapse. By destroying the paper to feed the digital cloud, we are leaving our entire civilization exactly one major power grid failure away from total cultural amnesia.

If we want to stop this idiot-producing machine, we have to change how we interact with technology and how it interacts on us. We need to demand an AI infrastructure that behaves less like an encyclopedia and more like a Socratic mentor—systems that grade us on the quality of our questions, our speed in detecting fallacies, and our ability to find context.

But economically, we also need our cut. AI is a gamechanger displacing workers. If the collective brain of humanity is going to be digitized into an automated workforce, the dividends belong to us, not a handful of billionaires. Until we force a hard boundary on who owns the right to human thought, we will continue to look at our screens, waiting for a corporate algorithm to tell us to sit, roll over, and be a good dog.

Footnotes & References

[1] Wikipedia entry detailing the history, mascot, and television catalog of Ubu Productions.
[2] Summary and legislative legacy of the No Child Left Behind Act.
[3] Pew Research Center national tracking study on consumer technology usage and Generative AI Adoption Curves Among US Adults.
[4] YouGov Public Opinion Poll evaluating automation bias and user tendencies, Most Americans Use AI Platforms For Quick Answers Rather Than Critical Inquiry.
[5] Master of Code Industrial Data Analysis tracking market demographics and Generative AI User Statistics Across Generational Cohorts.
[6] U.S. Senate Press Release: Sanders Introduces Legislation to Create $7 Trillion AI Sovereign Wealth Fund.
[7] Public Citizen Campaign Watchdog Report detailing specialized PAC structures: Corporate Supremacist Super PACs Drive $500 Million in Midterm Spending. [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]

​It is the feeling you get when you look out your front window. You see roads full of potholes that never get fixed. You see prices at the grocery store going up every single week. You see local factories and shops that closed down years ago, leaving empty buildings behind. The basic things we need just don't work the way they used to.

​But then you turn on the TV or look at your phone, and you see a completely different world. On the screen, everything is bright and loud. You see politicians in expensive suits screaming at each other, making videos, and bragging about how much money they have. You see big corporate bosses talking about how great their companies are and acting like they are saving the planet.

​This is the big trap of modern American life. We live in a country that is physically struggling, but we are run by people who live entirely inside a show. We used to care about real results. Today, we have a country run on performance. We want things to be solid and reliable again, but we feel stuck because the people in charge don't know how to build a real world anymore. Even worse, they are making too much money off the breakdown.

​Part 1: When Work Was Real

​It wasn’t always like this. If you go back fifty or sixty years, American life was measured by things you could see, touch, and hold.

​Think about a mechanic, a carpenter, a plumber, or a cook. Their work is real. If a mechanic fixes a truck, the engine turns over and the truck drives down the road. If they do a bad job, the truck breaks down. You cannot lie your way into fixing an engine. You cannot make a fancy video to convince a broken pipe to stop leaking. The physical world doesn't care about your excuses or your speeches. It either works or it doesn’t.

​Years ago, we judged politicians the exact same way we judge a mechanic: by their results.

​We didn’t care if they were smooth talkers, and we didn't care about their personal image. We cared about what they actually got done. And back then, they built massive, incredible things. They built the giant highway systems that connect the entire country. They built dams to bring electricity to poor towns. They beat terrible diseases and they even put a man on the moon.

​Both political parties argued, but they argued about the best way to build real things. Success was simple: Is the bridge built? Are wages going up? Is the country stronger today than it was yesterday? If the answer was yes, they kept their jobs. If the answer was no, they were fired.

​Part 2: The Rise of the Show, the Media Tribes, and the Investor Trick

​So, what changed? Two big things happened that made our country forget how to get things done.

​First, we stopped making things and started moving paperwork and numbers around. Millions of real factory jobs went overseas, and our economy shifted to office work. In an office, the work can be invisible. People sit in meetings all day and send endless emails. When a job doesn't produce a real, physical object, it is very hard to tell if someone is actually doing a good job. So, a new game was born: pretending to work.

​To keep your job today, you have to look busy and act a certain way. People go on professional websites like LinkedIn just to brag about themselves and show off. They post things like, "Look at me, look at what a great guy I am, and look at how wonderful my company is." It is a giant smoke screen to hide the fact that nothing real is actually being made.

​This trick has completely ruined our everyday job titles, too. It used to be that a job title told you exactly what a person did. If your title was "Engineer"—whether you fixed networks, worked on computers, or kept systems running—it meant something real. Today, you can’t tell what anyone does. Companies invent weird, inflated titles like "Customer Success Architect" or "Director of First Impressions."

​This isn't an accident; it's a corporate trick. By making titles confusing and fancy, big companies can pay two people doing the exact same job completely different amounts of money. It gives workers the fake feeling that they are moving up in the world, while their actual pay stays flat.

​Second, the news media completely broke down. The United States no longer has a single, shared reality. Years ago, Americans all watched the same evening news. We might have disagreed on politics, but we all agreed on the basic facts of what happened that day.

​Today, we have millions of independent news channels, websites, and phone feeds. Their business model isn't to tell you the truth; it is to keep you terrified and angry so you keep staring at your screen.

​Every piece of news sent to your phone is picked by a computer to reinforce exactly what you already believe. It creates a giant echo chamber where no one ever has to question their own ideas. This is the supreme distraction. It splits us into angry tribes, getting us to direct all our rage at our neighbors instead of looking at the people at the very top who are taking our money.

Every single day, news anchors and politicians point to charts to tell us that "the economy is great" because the stock market is up. But this is a total performance. It completely ignores a brutal truth: half of this country does not own stocks. We live in the real world.

​If you are a regular, working-class American, you don't own a piece of that roaring stock market. While the wealthiest people watch their investment balances grow, everyday people watch their bank accounts empty out just trying to buy eggs, milk, gas, and electricity. The system pretends that anyone making a decent paycheck is rich, ignoring how expensive it has become just to survive. Making $100,000 a year down south might give you a comfortable life, but making that same amount in an expensive state like Massachusetts means you are still living paycheck to paycheck on a financial tightrope.

​The government doesn’t help regular people anymore. Instead, the leaders just point to the screens and pretend everyone is doing great. And they get away with this because of a giant trick they pulled decades ago. They got rid of company pensions—the guaranteed retirement pay that companies used to owe their workers. Instead, they handed everyone a 401k account and told us, "You’re an investor now. Go figure it out yourself."

​This tapped into an old American dream. We look at the richest billionaires in the world and think, "If I just work hard enough, that could be me." This fantasy is so strong that millions of everyday people end up voting against their own best interests. They protect the fortunes of the billionaires because they hope to join them one day. They see any tax on massive wealth as an attack on their own dreams. It is a sad trick. The reality is that there is more than enough wealth at the very top to pay for the running costs of our country, but by convincing regular people to protect the rich, the managers get to keep all the cash for themselves.

​Part 3: Broken Words and Giant Bills

​This brings us to the people in Washington. We call them our "leaders," but that is a giant mistake. In our country, they are supposed to be our representatives—our employees, not our bosses. They have become an entrenched political class that answers only to themselves and the machine that keeps them rich.

​To keep us from looking at their wealth, they force us into a constant state of sideways warfare, making neighbor fight neighbor over cultural issues. The root of this warfare is the destruction of plain English.

​We see it in our laws right now. Politicians are actively writing legal bills that refuse to use the simple word "women," replacing it with confusing, medicalized phrases like "menstruating individuals" or "pregnant individuals." When you erase basic, common-sense words from the law, you erase the clear reality that regular people rely on just to understand the world.

​This text trick feeds into the worst part of our current political mess. Instead of protecting the basic, fundamental rights that belong to every single American citizen equally, the politicians spend their time carving the country up into dozens of tiny identity groups. They claim we need a brand-new, specific law for every single group under the sun.

​But think about it: if our basic rights were actually enforced the way they were meant to be, we wouldn't need to carve out special laws for all these little groups. The political class does this on purpose. It allows them to look like heroes on television, creating a never-ending cycle of massive, bloated laws.

​The laws themselves have become a total scam. We no longer have politicians who vote on simple, clear, single-issue ideas that an ordinary citizen can read. Instead, they bundle everything into "one big beautiful bill." They slap a patriotic name on a 2,000-page monster, wheel it into the room, and pass it before anyone has time to read a single page. Nobody knows what it actually does, nobody knows who wrote the fine print, and it is packed with hidden handouts for giant corporations. It isn’t lawmaking—it is a magic trick performed on camera.

​Think about our healthcare system. It is run like a giant casino where insurance companies, drug corporations, and hospital executives make billions by keeping you stuck in their system and sick for the rest of your life.

​And how do our politicians handle this nightmare? They give us more theater.

​Look at the new TrumpRx program launched in 2026. The politicians stand in front of the cameras, slap their name on a new website, and swear they just saved the country from high drug prices. But if you look under the hood, it’s just a rebranding trick. They took discount programs and private websites like GoodRx or Amazon Pharmacy—tools that were already out there and working—put them on a government webpage, and claimed credit for it. It doesn't force Big Pharma to actually lower their greedy prices. It’s just an actor putting his name on someone else's work to look good on TV.

​The people running this game are the career politicians, high-level consultants, corporate vice presidents, and government bosses. They live in a bubble of total greed. Their high salaries and status depend entirely on keeping the laws massive, the language confusing, and the machine going exactly as it is.

​If a representative actually stepped in and made healthcare fair, or truly broke the power of the drug companies, the machine would break. These bosses would lose their power and their cash. So instead of real work, they give us rebranding, confusing words, and thousand-page bills. Their true best interest is to keep you paying, keep you confused, and keep their own pockets full.

​Part 4: Remembering the Rules and Asking the Big Questions

​When you see how broken this performance is, it is easy to want to tear the whole thing down. But tearing it down is a trap.

​If you step back and look at the actual foundation of our country, the bones of our house are incredibly strong. The founders built a brilliant structure. They designed a system of checks and balances with three separate branches of government—the lawmakers, the presidents, and the courts—so that no single group could ever grow too powerful or rob the people blind. The blueprint is perfect.

​The real tragedy is that most people living in America today couldn't even name those three branches. We have forgotten how our own government is supposed to work. And because the public has forgotten the blueprint, the politicians can build whatever fake scenery they want on the stage. They don't have to follow the rules because nobody is checking their work against the original design.

​Underneath all of this political theater lies the deepest loss of all: the destruction of the individual.

​Being an individual is the most important American concept there is. The entire premise of this country was built on the radical idea that your rights do not come from a government, a boss, or a group you belong to. They belong to you inherently, as an individual human being.

​But today, both sides of the machine are trying to crush that independence. While many on the right get lost in the angry tribal roar, the institutional Left actively works to steamroll the individual entirely. They want a society where everyone is controlled by giant institutions—sorting us into competing groups, policing the words we use, and forcing us to put on a fake performance just to make a living. They want to eliminate the independent thinker because an independent person cannot be easily controlled or managed.

If we want to turn this country around, we don't need to burn the house down. We need to remember how it was built, and we need to fight for the individual. We have to change the way we look at things. We have to stop rewarding the performers. We have to stop giving our time, our attention, and our votes to people just because they make us feel angry or entertained for thirty seconds on a phone app.

​We need to start acting like that old-school truck mechanic again. We need to look at our politicians—from the local school board all the way to the White House—and ignore their speeches, ignore their videos, and ignore their social media posts. We need to look past the screen and look straight at the ground beneath our feet.

​To do this, we must use the oldest and best method of thinking: asking sharp questions. Every time a politician or a big corporation presents a message, we need to pause, step back, and ask:

​"Who does this message really serve?" (Does it protect the money and power of the bosses, or does it actually help regular people?)

​"What are they really saying beneath the fancy words?" (When they use strange language or hide a giant bill, what are they trying to cover up?)

​"Are they fixing a real problem, or are they just trying to get me mad at my neighbor?"

​We need to look at real results. Is the water clean? Are the roads fixed? Are the jobs here? Can a regular person live their life, speak plain English, and support a family without having to bow to a corporate or government master?

​If the answer is no, then the performance is over. It’s time to turn off the TV, look our representatives in the eye, and demand that they stop putting on a show, respect the rights of the individual, and start getting back to work.

​In the contemporary American discourse, we find ourselves trapped in a sprawling, digital Tower of Babel. We possess more information than any generation in history, yet we lack a shared syntax. We are "informed" by rote memorization—possessing the dots of data—but we have lost the Socratic capacity to connect them.

​The primary victim of this fragmentation is the concept of Class. In 2026, the "Center" of our social reality is missing. We speak endlessly of the "Middle Class"—a semantic catch-all that has been neutered of its power. Whether you are earning $150,000 in Massachusetts or $35,000 in Tennessee, the system encourages you to identify upward. We have been convinced that we are all "investors" and "shareholders" in a system designed to extract our labor while we argue over the crumbs.

​II. The Linguistic Trap: From Worker to "Temporary Embarrassed Millionaire"

​The transition began in earnest between 1971 and 1978. When the U.S. decoupled from the gold standard, we shifted from a tangible economy of property and production to an abstracted economy of leverage, derivatives, and fiat trust.

​Shortly thereafter, the 1978 Revenue Act (the 401(k)) executed a brilliant psychological rebrand. By shifting retirement risk from the corporation to the individual, the system rebranded the "Worker" as an "Investor." This was a semiotic masterstroke. It replaced collective solidarity with individual anxiety. It created the Horatio Alger myth for the digital age: the belief that a $200 tax cut or a slight uptick in the S&P 500 makes us part of the "Financier Class."

​We are defending the castle we are currently being evicted from. Our Representatives have long been our Leaders now just part of that top 10% not representing us really but keeping the monstrous system running through misdirection and cultural outrage.

​III. The Lateral Distraction: Cultural "Trees" in the Economic "Forest"

​While the vertical gap between the 90% and the Penultimate 9% (the technocrats, the "leaders," and the financier class) becomes a canyon, we are redirected into horizontal conflict.

​The "Left" and the "Right" have become binary oppositions in a closed loop. We are told that the most pressing issues of our time are "bathroom bills," "mandated language," and the "nomenclature of gender." These are the linguistic traps of 2026. They are highly visible, emotionally charged, and require zero structural analysis to participate in.

​As long as the 90% are embroiled in debates over the signifiers of culture, they will never deconstruct the ledger of wealth.

​"You solve the economic problem, and half the things people feel are problems will go away."

​IV. The Mechanics of the House of Cards

​The structural reality is defined by two primary fractures:

​The Commodification of Voice: From Buckley v. Valeo (1976) to Citizens United (2010), the legal system has equated spending with speech. This ensures that our "Representatives"—the 9% who claim to lead us—are financially integrated into the very system that keeps the 90% in squalor.

​The Death of the Referent: Our voting methodology (Plurality Voting) is an archaic tool for a complex era. Without Ranked Choice Voting, we remain trapped in a "lesser of two evils" duopoly that prevents any genuine economic realignment.

​V. A Note to the Remnants

​If you are reading this and you feel the "boiling pot" reaching a critical temperature, you are the Remnant. You see the "Forest" for the "Trees." You recognize that the Us vs. Us cultural war is a carefully curated distraction from the Them vs. We economic reality.

​We are living through an era of applied postmodernism, where the "truth" is whatever the algorithm provides to confirm your bias. The internet has expanded our reach but atomized our reality. This article is not a call for a consensus that may never come; it is an act of preservation. It is a documentation of the "dots" for those who still know how to connect them.

​The "House of Cards" built on the Petrodollar and fractured trust is swaying. Before it falls, we must at least have the courage to name the problem: It is not about our pronouns; it is about our pocketbooks.

If you log onto Facebook today, you will likely see two different teams. One team believes Donald Trump is the best president ever. The other team is furious about conservative politics.

We are told that this is a battle of ideas. We are told we have a choice. But the truth is much simpler: the system is designed to keep us divided so we do not look at the math.

The Outrage Machine

When social media first started, it was a way to see pictures of your friends, family, and neighbors. Then, the computers changed. Companies like Facebook realized that calm discussions do not keep people on their phones. Outrage does.

The algorithms were reprogrammed to favor anger. If a post makes you mad, you comment on it. If it makes you look at a different viewpoint, you might log off.

So, the computer feeds your conservative friends things that make them hate liberals, and it feeds your liberal friends things that make them hate conservatives. This creates two separate echo chambers. It is not that one side is smart and the other is dumb. It is that both sides are being fed completely different versions of reality by smart people who are actively trying to lie to keep their power.

The Illusion of the "Investor"

This tribal warfare spills over into how we view money and the economy. We hear about the stock market on the news every day. If the market goes up, politicians tell us the economy is booming.

But according to data from the Federal Reserve, the richest 10% of Americans own over 87% of the entire stock market. The bottom 50% of the country owns just over 1%. The average person arguing on Facebook isn't rich.

In fact, U.S. Census data shows the average American household makes about $80,600 a year. Almost nobody on your feed is pulling in $500,000. So why do so many regular people fiercely defend billionaires? It is because of a clever psychological trick.

Back in 1978, the government changed the tax laws and created the 401(k). Companies stopped offering guaranteed pensions and told workers they were now "investors." Because regular working people see a few dollars from their paychecks go into a small retirement fund, they start identifying with the super-rich. They will log onto social media to fight to the death against corporate tax hikes, completely unaware that a corporate tax cut saves a billionaire millions while doing practically nothing for a tiny retirement account.

Sociologists call this "last-place aversion." When you are just barely keeping your head above water making $35,000 or $40,000 a year, you are terrified of falling to the very bottom. The political elites exploit this fear.

They convince the person who has a little bit of money that their real enemy isn't the billionaire skipping out on taxes. Instead, they blame the person on food stamps or Medicaid for "getting a free ride."

This keeps regular people looking down in anger at their neighbors, instead of looking up at the people hoarding all the wealth. They end up defending the very boot that is on their neck because they have been trained to think the boot is a shield protecting them from the people below them.

The real economy is not measured by the stock market. It is measured at the kitchen table. It is measured by the price of gas and the cost of a gallon of milk.

The Invisible Walls

This system creates a massive geographic trap. Take the minimum wage. In Massachusetts, the law says workers must make at least $15.00 an hour. But the federal minimum wage has been stuck at $7.25 since 2009.

A dollar goes further in the Deep South or Tennessee than it does in New England, but $7.25 is still decades behind inflation. Yet, the political system treats the minimum wage like a cultural war rather than a basic math problem.

This brings us to the ultimate trap: the safety net. Imagine a person living on federal disability benefits (SSDI) in a high-cost state like Massachusetts. Their money would go much further if they moved to a cheaper state like Tennessee.

But if they move, they run into a healthcare cliff. Massachusetts offers a special Medicaid program called MassHealth CommonHealth, which lets disabled adults keep their healthcare even if their income goes over a certain line. Tennessee does not have that safety valve. If you move there, your federal checks make you "too rich" for state healthcare, and you lose the insurance keeping you alive.

Breaking the Spell

This is what we call the "illusion of choice." Politicians on television tell us we are free to move, free to vote, and free to choose our futures. But the fragmentation of our laws and the anger on our social media feeds function as invisible walls.

They keep a boat owner in Alabama, a low-wage worker in Tennessee, and a disabled person in Massachusetts from realizing they all share the same commonality: they are all being squeezed by a top-heavy economic system.

We do not need to choose a political tribe. We need to stop parroting the slogans generated by elites and start looking at the real-world math of daily survival.

Throughout the 1950s, 60s, and 70s, the United States operated under a shared understanding—often called the New Deal Consensus. It was a framework built on a simple, powerful premise: the federal government exists to serve as a check on corporate power, a builder of public infrastructure, and a guarantor of a strong social safety net.

​But starting in the 1980s, just as the generation born in the tail end of the post-war era was coming of age, that foundation was deliberately chipped away. While the standard modern narrative blames a single party or an ideological shift under Ronald Reagan, the historical record tells a far more damning story.

The dismantling of the traditional liberal state was a bipartisan project. By the time the 1990s arrived, the leadership of both major parties had abandoned the working-class architecture built by FDR and LBJ, replacing it with a corporate-friendly, market-first philosophy that left ordinary Americans to fend for themselves.

​To understand how we arrived at this fractured moment, we have to look at what we actually built—and exactly how it was taken apart.

​The Mid-Century Blueprint: When Government Worked for the Public Good

​Traditional liberalism wasn't an abstract theory; it was a physical and economic reality. In the post-war decades, both Democrats and Republicans largely accepted that unchecked capitalism was inherently unstable and unfair. To balance the scales, the state used concrete policy levers to ensure that economic growth was shared.

​The Tax Safety Valve: In the 1950s and 60s, top marginal income tax rates hovered between 70% and 91%. These rates weren't designed to punish success; they were designed to prevent the hyper-accumulation of wealth and to fund massive public investments, like the Interstate Highway System and affordable public universities.

​The Labor Floor: Organized labor wasn't an afterthought—it was the bedrock of the middle class. At its peak in the 1950s, roughly one-third of the private-sector workforce was unionized. High union density didn't just help union members; it set the standard for wages, benefits, and safety across the entire economy.

​Firewalls on Wall Street: The 1933 Glass-Steagall Act drew a hard, permanent line between everyday commercial banking (protecting savings accounts) and high-risk investment speculation. For decades, banking was stable, boring, and functional.

The Pivot: From Public Good to Market Fundamentalism

​The 1970s brought global oil shocks and "stagflation"—a simultaneous squeeze of high inflation and stagnant growth. Rather than treating these as specific crises to manage, corporate interests and conservative theorists used the moment to attack the entire liberal framework.

​When Ronald Reagan took office in 1981, he famously declared that "government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem." His administration moved swiftly to slash taxes on the wealthy, break unions (symbolized by the firing of the striking air traffic controllers in 1981), and deregulate key industries.

​Had the opposition party stood firm, this shift might have been a temporary conservative swing of the pendulum. Instead, the Democratic Party capitulated.

​After suffering massive electoral losses throughout the 1980s, a new faction known as the "New Democrats" seized control of the party under Bill Clinton. This wasn't traditional liberalism; it was a complete ideological surrender to market fundamentalism.

The party abandoned its working-class roots to court wealthy donors and corporate interests. Clinton signaled this structural shift in his 1996 State of the Union address by echoing Reaganite rhetoric: "The era of big government is over."

​The Bipartisan Toll: Forty Years of Dismantling

​The policy results of this bipartisan consensus over the next few decades spoke for themselves, systematically reversing the progress of the mid-century:

Policy Area The New Deal & Great Society

Tax Policy Progressive tax structures with high top rates to curb inequality and fund public goods.

Financial Regulation Strict boundaries (Glass-Steagall) preventing commercial banks from gambling with public deposits.

Trade & Labor Protection of domestic industrial capacity and strong federal support for union density.

Social Safety Net Expansion of public programs (Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid) as guaranteed entitlements.

Approach The Post-1980s Bipartisan Paradigm

Permanent lowering of corporate and top marginal rates (dipping to 28% under Reagan, remaining low ever since).

Bipartisan Repeal: The 1999 Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act repealed Glass-Steagall under a Democratic president with overwhelming corporate backing from both sides.

NAFTA and Globalization: The corporate-backed push for free trade agreements that hollowed out the American Rust Belt and devastated industrial unions.

Welfare Reform: The 1996 dismantling of federal cash-assistance guarantees in favor of corporate-friendly work mandates and privatization.

Returning to the Roots of True Liberalism

​The consequences of this forty-year experiment are fully visible today: stagnant wages, a hollowed-out manufacturing core, soaring costs for healthcare and education, and a level of wealth inequality not seen since the Gilded Age.

The 2008 financial crisis—a direct result of the bipartisan deregulation of Wall Street—exposed the utter instability of this corporate-first model.

​The political polarization and populism dominating our current landscape are not accidents. They are the predictable reaction of a public that realizes the institutions meant to protect them were sold off piece by piece.

​To fix what is broken, we don't need a "new" liberalism that tries to massage corporate interests or rely on market-based tweaks.

We need a return to traditional liberal principles: a recognition that a healthy society requires a powerful public sector, strong unions, strict regulation of capital, and an economy designed to serve the people who actually build it.

In the late 1970s, I sat in a second-grade classroom. Jimmy Carter was president. He wore cardigans on television. He talked about conservation. In school, we learned about climate stuff. The science back then was not completely accurate by today's standards. But the core lesson was simple, logical, and clear. Fossil fuels are a finite resource. They will run out. They harm the environment. We need to get off them. In 1979, Carter put solar panels on the White House roof. It felt like the start of something. It felt like the future.

Nearly 50 years have passed since then. Today, we are moving backward. The Trump administration recently used discretionary power to gut green energy. They canceled over $15 billion in infrastructure funds. They axed $7.6 billion in clean energy grants.Yet, the fossil fuel industry remains untouched. How are we still propping up an industry we knew had an expiration date decades ago? The answer is a political magic trick.

The Magic Trick: Discretionary vs. Permanent Funding.

How does a president wipe out green energy with a pen while big oil keeps winning? It comes down to how the money is structured.Renewable energy relies on discretionary spending and temporary tax credits. This funding must be approved regularly by Congress. It acts like a temporary spigot. When a hostile administration takes power, they can easily turn that spigot off.

The One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA) did exactly that. It rolled back consumer rebates for electric vehicles and heat pumps. Fossil fuels operate in a completely different world. Oil and gas subsidies are statutory entitlements. They are written directly into permanent U.S. tax law. They do not need annual approval. A president cannot turn them off by executive order. They run on autopilot.

The Century-Old Loopholes Funding Big Oil

These permanent subsidies have buried deep inside the Internal Revenue Code for generations. They are corporate welfare disguised as accounting rules. Two specific loopholes keep the industry on life support:

1. Intangible Drilling Costs (Passed in 1913)

Oil companies can deduct 100% of their upfront drilling operational costs immediately. This includes labor, fuel, and drilling fluids. Normally, a business must depreciate capital investments slowly over many years. Oil companies write off 60% to 80% of a well’s total upfront cost in year one. This provides a massive, immediate cash-flow advantage.

2. The Percentage Depletion Allowance (Passed in 1926)

Independent oil companies can deduct a flat 15% of their gross revenues every year. This is meant to compensate them because their oil reserves are "depleting." With standard business depreciation, you stop deducting once you recover your investment. Under this loophole, oil companies keep claiming the deduction forever. Even long after the well has completely paid for itself.

To make matters worse, the recent OBBBA actually expanded this corporate safety net. It added roughly $39.7 billion in new fossil fuel subsidies over ten years. It lowered coal royalty rates on federal lands. It added new credits for coal production.

The Myth of Fossil Fuel "Self-Reliance"

Politicians love to talk about free-market capitalism. They claim oil companies succeed because of American grit and independence. This is a lie. The fossil fuel industry does not survive on its own merit. It is heavily subsidized by your tax dollars.

By keeping fossil fuels artificially cheap through permanent tax breaks, the government rigs the market. It suppresses the competitiveness of clean energy. Taxpayers are forced to fund the very companies driving climate volatility. It is a cycle of mandated self-destruction.

How We Actually Break the Chain

Executive orders will never fix this broken system. Because these loopholes are codified laws, a president cannot simply cancel them.It requires a literal Act of Congress to strip them away. Legislation like the End Oil and Gas Tax Subsidies Act exists, but it sits stalled in committee. We are treating a 19th-century energy source with 21st-century economic protections. We knew better when I was in second grade. It is time our tax code caught up to what seven-year-olds understood fifty years ago.

I am a classic liberal. I believe in a regulated capitalist economy, individual civil rights, and the fundamental decency of our democratic institutions. But in today’s political climate, being a liberal feels like being politically homeless. We are forced into a permanent game of choosing the lesser of two evils, caught between a populist movement on the right that wants to disrupt our institutions and a progressive movement on the left that wants to deconstruct them.

It is time for the politically homeless majority to realize that we don't need to accept either extreme. We need to reclaim the system.

The True Spirit of "Make America Great Again"

There is a deep irony in the phrase "Make America Great Again." The MAGA movement has claimed ownership of it, using it as a blueprint for populist disruption. To them, our institutions—the courts, the civil service, the traditional economic structures—are so thoroughly corrupt that they must be bypassed or dismantled by a strong leader.

But there is a traditional liberal way to want to make America great again.

As a liberal, I look at our foundational systems—a competitive free market, equality of opportunity under the law, and constitutional checks and balances—and I see things that are fundamentally good. The problem isn’t that the American house is built on a rotten foundation; the problem is that the house has been corrupted and poorly maintained.

The most glaring example of this corruption is the rise of a modern corporate oligarchy. The 2010 Citizens United Supreme Court decision cemented a system where corporate money is treated as free speech and corporations are treated as people. It rigged the track. Unchecked corporate consolidation has choked out competition, giving massive conglomerates immense power over both our economy and our politicians.

Progressives look at this corporate oligarchy and argue that capitalism itself must be dismantled or fundamentally restructured. But as a liberal, I believe in the blueprint of reformers like Theodore Roosevelt. We don’t need to burn down the free market; we need to use the power of the federal government to smash monopolies, pass aggressive campaign finance reform, and enforce strict regulations. We need to clean the house, not tear it down.

The Line Between Individual Rights and Cultural Deconstruction

The fracture within the anti-MAGA majority becomes even more pronounced when we look at social issues. Massachusetts has a proud history here; we were the first state in the nation to legalize same-sex marriage in 2004. That fight was won on bedrock liberal principles: individual autonomy and equal protection under the law. The argument was simple and powerful—consenting adults have an inherent, individual right to live and love without state interference. It was about inclusion into an existing American institution.

Modern progressivism, however, has drifted away from classic individualism and into tribalism.

The current progressive push for gender fluidity is not an extension of individual rights; it is a demand for systemic cultural deconstruction. It requires our institutions to rewrite language, alter public spaces, and completely change established social protocols to accommodate a fluid, subjective view of identity. To enforce this, progressivism relies heavily on sorting people into rigid categories of "oppressors" and "oppressed," punishing anyone who questions the new orthodoxy.

This is where the anti-MAGA majority splits. You can be fiercely pro-LGB, passionately anti-corporate, and still completely reject the progressive demand for cultural revolution. True liberalism protects the individual. It does not force people into tribal conformity.

The Strategy for the Fractured Two-Thirds

Right now, the MAGA movement moves in total lockstep. Because they are unified around a single leader and a shared populist anger, they wield immense structural power. Meanwhile, the remaining two-thirds of the country is a chaotic coalition of traditional liberals, moderates, and progressive activists. We agree on our opposition to MAGA, but we agree on almost nothing else. Because we are fractured, the loudest, most extreme progressive voices end up driving the cultural narrative, pushing moderate liberals further away.

If the two-thirds majority wants to break this gridlock, we must stop playing defense on the turf the extremes have chosen. We need to unify around a practical, structural agenda that restores power to the individual voter. Two massive, systemic reforms should drive our vote in the next election:

1. Implementing Ranked-Choice Voting:

The current binary system forces us into a "lesser of two evils" trap. Primaries cater to the most extreme wings of both parties, leaving the broad middle with unpalatable choices in November. Ranked-choice voting allows everyone to vote for their actual preferred candidate without throwing their vote away. It naturally rewards consensus-builders, penalizes toxic polarization, and ensures that the winner actually represents the majority of the electorate.

2. Getting Corporate Money Out of Politics:

We must aggressively target the root cause of our institutional decay. Overturning the logic of Citizens United and enacting strict campaign finance reform is the only way to strip corporations of their political power. Politicians should be accountable to voters, not corporate PACs.

We do not have to choose between a movement trying to disrupt the system from the right and a movement trying to deconstruct it from the left. There is a silent majority of traditional liberals who want a fair economy, protected individual rights, and trusted public institutions. By focusing on fixing the rules of the game—through ranked-choice voting and campaign finance reform—we can finally unify the fractured majority, break the tribal trap, and actually make our system work again.

Today, the party has been hijacked by big corporate cash and massive outside money. Look at what just happened in Kentucky’s 4th District—a staggering $32 million spent on a single congressional primary. That isn't a free market; it’s pure crony capitalism. Out-of-state billionaires and corporate super PACs are literally buying local representation.

But if you try to point this out, the response you get is a wall of slogans. People shout that "we're a republic, not a democracy" without realizing a republic is just a type of democracy where politicians are supposed to represent us, not their high-dollar donors.

Even worse, they scream the word "rhino" at anyone who disagrees. It would be funny if it weren't so sad—half of them spell it like the horned animal because they don't even know it stands for Republican In Name Only, its origin amongst fiscal hawks in the 90s.

The supreme irony? The people parroting these slogans to defend their orange leader are blindly supporting a populist movement that blew up the national debt, expanded government power, and completely abandoned true conservative values. MAGA are the actual RINOs.

We don't have capitalism or social democracy anymore. We just have a broken system run by elites, fueled by blind tribalism, and cheered on by people who can't even spell the insults they're throwing.

Bring back real public servants who actually understand civics and care about the fiscal future of this country

​Where I Stand: Economic Populism & Environmental Stewardship

​I am fully all-in on the traditional pillars of the American left—the ones that actually affect working-class families and the future of our planet:

The Labor Movement: I believe in strong worker protections, fair wages, and corporate accountability. A strong middle class is the backbone of this country.

The Green New Deal & Conservation: I believe we need aggressive action on green energy and infrastructure. More importantly, we have a duty to save and protect our national parks and public forests for the common good, ensuring they aren’t stripped away for short-term profit.

Under the current administration, these critical environmental and labor priorities are being dismantled. But the alternative offered by the modern opposition party makes it incredibly difficult to find a home there either.

Drawing the Line on Cultural Ideology

While I am completely aligned on labor and the environment, I draw a hard line at the current focus on gender identity politics.

​Take a recent national flashpoint: mandating menstrual products in male spaces, like middle school boys' restrooms. Growing up and navigating adolescence is already a confusing, volatile time for kids. Introducing biologically incongruous elements into a young boys' room doesn’t solve a pressing societal crisis. It creates a bizarre distraction, leads to inevitable locker-room messing around, and represents a wasteful expenditure of taxpayer dollars.

​When a political party treats symbolic, confusing cultural battles as a top-tier priority, they alienate the very working-class people they should be fighting for.

​The Modern Political Bind

This is the dilemma for the modern independent voter. If you care deeply about the environment and labor, the current administration’s policies work directly against you. But if you value cultural common sense, the opposition party pushes you away.

​We are forced to choose between a platform that fights our cultural common sense or a platform that fights our economic and environmental values.

​It is time to move past the "us versus them" tribalism and the extreme cultural litmus tests. We need a political option that focuses on real, tangible solutions for working people and the environment, without discarding common sense along the way.

For those of you who also feel politically homeless, where do you draw your lines, and how are you navigating the choice between these two packages?

​The choices we’re given are a joke. On the right, we have Trump pushing more executive orders than any president before him and utilizing the Supreme Court shadow docket to mute and bypass the very checks and balances built to prevent that kind of authoritarianism. He's selling what little is left of our national inheritance of public lands to Big Business. They in his MAGA movement own the executive branch and the judicial branch. Meanwhile the legislative branch's opposition give grandiose speeches to empty Senate chambers and prove quite ineffectual.

Instead on the left we have the tampon pushers now obsessed with "period equity" and "menstrual justice," upending culture with nonsense while the country has real problems with structure and financing to solve. It's an issue that affects less than a half a percent of our country's population but you'd never know it from the hoopla. I guess that's what stands in for We the People these days. Those minority trans male and gender-neutral people who still menstruate should not expect feminine products in a men's room. If they truly are then they should man up and as I was taught in Boy Scouts, be prepared.

I'm giving serious looks at Seth Moulton over Senator Ed Markey this year. Like a few others have occasionally voiced I feel left behind in the vast political midlands. I've usually been on the left side of things myself at least in the past. All for unions and the national park system and the new green deal and many other those now in power and MAGAfied label "leftist" things. Nowadays though your progressive credentials seem to have to include gender identity.

I'm an older GenX who grew up with boys and girls. Of course there was the rare individual who might not be either or identify with the other but it wasn't widespread nor anywhere near daily occurrence. It was a diagnosis or individual expression but not a growing faddish trend. I am lost today and can't imagine being an adolescent again in today's extremely confusing world. Mandating women's menstrual products in men's spaces only adds to the confusion in my opinion.

​I just wrote a letter to my representative Jim Hawkins here in Massachusetts regarding H.4611 (the I AM Bill). They’re pushing to put these products in every school boy's restroom. The trans population is tiny— again less than 1%—so doing this isn't common sense; it’s just a waste of money. I'm not saying don't provide them but the nurse’s office is the proper place for these products because it has adult oversight. Putting them in a boys' restroom is just providing playthings and a joke for the kids. Adolescence is arguably the most confusing time in one's life and this modern push that because you can identify with something you can be anything is pretty misleading and in many cases damaging to our youth.

​Even looking at the Maine Senate race which seems to be all over our Boston TV, you see candidates like Graham Platner trying to capitalize on the frustration. He paints himself as this rugged fisherman, but he’s just another business owner playing a part. Regardless of any disability he claims, his history on Reddit shows exactly who he. He isn't the "alternative" he claims to be; he's just another part of the populism show. Collins has always been what she's claimed a moderate Republican. I still think she's a true Republican and not a MAGA. She was one of the few brave enough to vote to impeach Trump. It just stinks that no matter who you support they want a buck. Our democracy is broken. Money owns it.

​I see the circus clearly. I want to be a part of the solution, but it’s hard to move the needle in a country where only money speaks and populism dominates. Perhaps the most amusing and saddening thing about current politics is the populist name calling. I'm really in the middle. I get emails from the Heritage Foundation one day and Our Revolution the next. I participate in discussions on social media amongst both sides. Invariably I'm either a libtard or a rhino and yes that is how most of the ignorant MAGA folks spell it.

Trump loves the uneducated and it shows. RINO as a pejorative has been around since 1990 or so back when Trump was a Democrat. The acronym means Republican in name only. I don't think his base know that though. Given MAGA is not Republican in any way save social conservatism they have only co-opted the name and are themselves the RINOs content to call others Rhinos but not knowing just why. It's the act of name-calling that empowers them. Real Republicans with traditional Republican values are a shrinking minority.