- reverse pyromania
- Posts
- What's Broken Can Always Be Fixed
TBone sent a Dalia Lithwick piece from Slate about Sheldon Whitehouse’s persistence. He’s been giving speeches about climate change on the Senate floor since 2012, and writing and speaking on the corruption of the Supreme Court for a long time, too. Here’s the part that I liked:
Behind the gloom and doom of “Oh my gosh, here we are; we have this country at the edge of falling away from democracy and mired in corruption,” there’s also the requirement that we look to the horizon. This was done. It can be undone. We have to understand what the problem is and go at it, but we have the tools to undo it.
The whole piece is worth a read, and Lithwick, who’s great, interviewed him for the Slate podcast, so that’s probably worth a listen.
This comes at a time when the Roberts court is showing its true colors, basically green lighting the dismantlement of the Department of Education. Add that to all the wreck and ruin that we’ve seen in the first 7 months of the Trump administration, and there’s a lot that’s broken that needs to be fixed.
The politics of this is simple: first, pointing out that things are broken, and, second, explaining how they’re going to be fixed. The fix can’t be a band-aid. We’ve been in retrograde motion since the Reagan Administration: other than wars, “can’t“ and “won’t” are the watchwords of what government can do. With the exception of Obamacare and Biden’s first year, we’ve had very little major legislation go through Congress. Certainly nothing as life-changing and nation-changing as Medicare, the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act and the establishment of the EPA.
We have some small-bore thinkers in charge of the party. But recent wins from politicians like Mamdani show that people are hungry for big political change. Let’s bring it.
Reply