Hamsters

The best thing you can read on the internet today. 

It and all the comments should be required reading for everyone.

heisenbergreport: 300-million-hamsters

A clip but read it all plus the comments. Lots of good stuff.

The current system doesn’t benefit everyday people who, by and large, live like hamsters. Whether you make $40,000 or $200,000 per year, you’re a hamster. Chances are, your day goes something like the following. You wake up, wander around an enclosure embellished with odds and ends that someone else thought you’d probably enjoy looking at (or laying on). You work, where that almost always entails some iteration of digging a hole only to fill it back up again. You go back to your enclosure and run full speed for 20 minutes on a conveyor belt (or ride 20 miles on a stationary bike to nowhere). You eat something very similar to what you ate the previous day, usually out of the same bowl (or one that looks just like it). Then you curl up and sleep in a corner. You’re a hamster.

With just a few exceptions, politicians want to keep it that way. But 300 million hamsters is a lot of hamsters! If they suddenly decide, collectively, that they want more out of life, there’s not a lot anybody can do to stop them — not if they act in concert after concluding that for all their differences, they’re united in a pitiable existence that’s become intolerable.

The best way to prevent a hamster rebellion is to ensure they never recognize a common cause, or if they do, that they see it as secondary to what makes them different. Politicians know that exploiting social issues is a foolproof way to prevent the public from uniting around the only truly common cause: Shared economic precarity, either outright or relative. That’s why they spend so much time feeding America’s culture wars.

Republicans prey on deep-seated prejudices and anxieties to lure voters who, from a purely economic perspective, have absolutely nothing in common with the GOP and stand to lose whatever pittance of money and bargaining power they have to Republican economic policies. Democrats pretend to care about income inequality, but the message is everywhere and always couched in the language of the culture wars: “Only we care about African American communities” or “We’re the party of gender equality” and so on.

Note that there’s one exception: Bernie Sanders. Bernie gets it. He tried to unite Americans around the only thing they all have in common. Twice. Twice he tried to lead a hamster rebellion. In a testament to the notion that preventing Americans from finding common cause is a bipartisan effort, Republicans never had to worry much about Bernie. Why? Because Democrats made sure he never won a primary.

How does this all relate to the Fed and the fight to control inflation? Well, it’s pretty simple, really. If the public loses faith in the money and long-term inflation expectations become truly unanchored, all of the divisive social issues that politicians spend every waking hour inflaming in a bid to ensure the public is too preoccupied with divisions that don’t matter to find common purpose in the only thing that does, will be supplanted, virtually overnight, by existential questions about survival in the face of rapidly devalued money and the perception that the people who are supposed to ensure the money’s stability lack not just the will to do their job, but in fact the capacity.

And one comment

This comment (directly above) is indicative of why Americans will always be hamsters. They don’t want transformative change. They want to hang out in their enclosures and hope that, over time, they can buy a larger enclosure. Centrist politics has failed this country. Neoliberalism has failed this country. If you look at the trend, you could argue that every single administration going back four decades has generally failed this country given that working people have become worse off, and worse off, and worse off over the entire 40-year period. Eventually, working people got so sick of it that they elected a reality TV show host and when he lost an election, a handful of them were mad enough to storm Congress with sticks and baseball bats and bear spray.

So yeah, sure, it’s all going great. Inflation is transitory. Powell’s got this all under control. Biden’s approval rating isn’t 38 (that’s 38, with a three at the front). Joe Manchin doesn’t run the country. And the reason the GOP is increasingly dominated by unhinged conspiracy theorists has nothing whatsoever to do with a lack of hope, a lack of education and the generalized sense in which this country is becoming the closest thing to a failed state as you can get in a developed market.