The Four Stupid Things of the Apocalypse
This is the Antediluvian Period of American History
Obviously I should have a hot take on tariffs, or feds arresting judges, public money for religious schools, or that kangaroo that caused a massive traffic jam and a two-car accident in Alabama. But I can’t shake the feeling that the specific stories are a distraction at this point. Some of them are worth commenting on. But reporters (and a lot of people on social media) keep writing variations of, “Look at this terrible thing they just did. Do you believe us that he’s bad now? Now do you see? Can you please vote for someone else now?” And I think that approach elides both the nature of the danger we’re in, and the steps we might take to protect ourselves from similar problems in the future. Tariffs, arrested judges, taxpayer-funded religious schools, and kangaroos are just some of the many problems that naturally arise from electing a dictator (who also happens to be a fucking idiot). If Democrats respond to Trump by removing tariffs, protecting judges, restoring the separation of church and state, and requiring strict liability for kangaroo owners — and, of course, protecting immigrants, reforming the courts, and so on — they will still, I think, have utterly failed to address the fact that a plurality of American voters wanted Donald Trump to be their president. Again. And that 6 million Democrats stayed home in 2024, and let it happen.
Here’s what I think the problem is:
Back in 2017, at the end of Obama’s two terms in the White House, I wrote a piece on the Medium that people liked, and shared. It got picked up by Crosscut (now Cascade PBS), and got some good Seattle-area exposure for a little while. The hook for that piece was Amazon’s search for “HQ2,” and how every city in America was limbering up to beg for the honor of hosting the new Amazon headquarters. In Seattle, my home town and also home of “HQ1,” the conversation was mostly a lot of recriminations and blame. “Why doesn’t Jeff Bezos love us anymore? What did we do?” Then HQ2 turned out to be the world’s most cynical ploy to get cheap office space, and people pretty much forgot about it. But, for me, when I wrote the essay, Amazon was almost beside the point. The point, for me, was that most of the jobs I could find advertised in Seattle at the time would leave a single childless adult with a full-time job cost-burdened for rent. Not people working fast food jobs — though the argument that those jobs shouldn’t pay enough for people to survive on is also bullshit — but office jobs, that wanted applicants with degrees. The question of whether Amazon stayed in Seattle or fucked off to Crystal City, Virginia was only relevant to Seattle to the extent that it would make the (non-Amazonian) people of Seattle better or worse off. And my basic thesis was that I had a hard time imagining an Amaz-exit would make things materially worse for the people on the bottom half of the income distribution.
When I wrote that Crosscut article, eight years ago, the U.W. was hiring an Administrative Coordinator at the College of Education, paying $2,794 - $3,708 per month. The average monthly rent for a one-bedroom in Seattle was $1,249. Then as now, the federal government defined a worker as “cost burdened” if they spent more than 30% of their gross pay on rent and utilities. At the very high end, an office job at one of the best-funded public universities in the world, after eight years with a Democrat in the White House, would have left a worker cost-burdened with 33% of their gross income going for rent. At the low end of the salary scale, it would have been 44%. When you figure those numbers into what that worker’s actual take-home pay would be, the situation got a lot worse. A worker with a full-time state job would have had less than $1,000 a month, in 2017, for food, clothes, healthcare, student loans, transportation, and entertainment. Amazon was/is supposedly important because it’s good for the state’s tax base or whatever. But if the state’s tax base couldn’t afford to pay a full-time worker enough not to be cost burdened by rent, what the fuck’s the point?
Now it’s eight years later and a Program Assistant job advertised at the University of Washington is offering $3,664 - $4,428 per month. The average rent for a one-bedroom apartment in Seattle, with an average of 648 square feet of space, is $2,084 per month. At the high end of that wage scale, the program assistant would be spending 46% of their gross pay on rent. At the low end it would be 57%. The cut-off for a single person in a one bedroom apartment not being cost-burdened in Seattle, with current rents, is $6,947 per month; $83,360 a year; or about $40 hour. It’s hard to know for sure how many Seattle jobs pay less than that, but fewer than half seems like an entirely plausible figure.
Here’s the thing: this is not a temporary state of affairs. It’s been eight fucking years since I wrote that essay — which would be bad enough — but this was a problem well before 2017. Biden did more than any president in my lifetime to try to put money in the pockets of people on the lower end of the wage scale, but landlords and retailers just jacked up prices to soak up that “surplus,” (which is, by the way, not a bug but a longstanding feature of classical capitalism) and now things are worse than when we started. We can blame mysterious “market” forces for the high price of housing in Seattle, or talk about how U.W. is just following the dictates of the labor “market,” but the fact remains that “the market” has created a situation where about half the jobs in Seattle don’t to pay enough for someone to rent a one-bedroom apartment in-city without being cost burdened. So what the fuck good is “the market” if that’s the outcome it gives us? And, to repeat: this is not a new problem. It’s been getting steadily worse for a long, long time.
Most Democrats aren’t saying anything about fixing it. Not really.
They sort of do, sometimes. Every once in a while they push for some totally inadequate version of a higher minimum wage. They go through the motions on some kind of Nudge strategy for “encouraging” affordable housing in the city with the absolute minimum of meaningful policy change or public spending. But those aren’t solutions. They’re inducements. They don’t fix “the market.” They provide temporary reprieves. And we know where that leads, because we can open the U.W.’s job website and see it; we can look at 8 years of their best efforts, and see that things are worse. Long-term, none of these pissant “incremental” changes are remotely up to changing the aggregate reality; that a majority or near-majority of people with full-time jobs can’t afford rent. One of the ways you can tell that Democrats aren’t pursuing a solution for this is that it’s been happening for decades, during which time incremental progressivism has enjoyed some unprecedented successes — but things are worse instead of better. Sure, Republicans have had control of the federal government for big chunks of that time. But Seattle, King County, and Washington State are all firmly in control of Democrats. So what’s their fucking excuse? Bailing water out of a boat at some fraction of the rate that water is coming into the boat isn’t “incremental change.” It’s slower drowning.
This is the basic problem with the Democratic brand of Not Being Donald Trump. Mass homelessness, wealth inequality, and the destruction of all hope for a gigantic percentage of Americans to succeed financially doesn’t mean we should hand power over to Nazis. But if a slow spiral into poverty, economic serfdom, and an unpleasant death from a preventable illnesses is what Democrats are offering — and it is, demonstrably, what they’re offering — then “or else Nazis” starts to seem like a pretty abstract (not to say entirely hollow) threat. Trump and Musk are, in fact, staging a coup. But successful revolutions don’t really start with successful revolutionaries; they start with a failed establishment. The salary for a Program Assistant at the University of Washington is something Democrats have absolute, total, and undisputed control over. It’s a public university in a Democratic city, in a Democratic county, in a Democratic state. And someone starting out at the low end of that wage scale would be paying 57% of their income for a one bedroom apartment in the city where the job is located.
If we want an electorate that won’t elect a dictator — who won’t destroy the economy with tariffs, arrest judges, fund religious schools with our tax dollars, or let kangaroos run wild on our freeways — the first step has to be a broad political coalition committed to changing the math of life for working Americans. Not just with inducements, but with structural changes to how the economy functions. We can use those structural changes to deal with other issues that are looming on the horizon. Unemployment due to AI and mechanization is going to hit a tipping point sooner than any of us want to admit. We need a Green New Deal to address climate change. Health, nutrition, housing, and access to basic services are all problems that could be addressed through a voluntary job guarantee.
And this doesn’t just need to happen at the federal level. In fact, there’s a good argument to be made that changes to federal voting patterns should be an effect rather than a cause of local policy change, and changes in the party mission. For right now, California, Washington, and Oregon should be making their state governments into powerhouses of innovation, and bold, persistent experimentation. Massachusetts should be taking the lead. New York should be taking the lead. The goal isn’t to give the Democratic Party over to the radical left. The goal is for party leaders to set policy goals that will make housing and other necessities affordable to anyone working a full time job, for the foreseeable future — and to shame anyone who calls that agenda “radical” into silence.
I can see all the reasons that seems impracticable. But I honestly think the alternative is, “or else Nazis.” A Democratic Party that doesn’t commit to massive, systemic change is going to keep losing elections. We can’t keep treating social justice like an optional feature on the car of American democracy. This idea that corporations, and upper-middle class and wealthy people not wanting to pay taxes is somehow an intractable political challenge that can’t possibly be overcome no matter what the stakes — but that poor people should be flexible and willing to compromise on this whole, “housing, food, dignity, and healthcare,” thing by voting for Democrats who totally fail to improve living conditions for people on the bottom half of the income distribution for decades honestly strikes me as one of those policy stances that makes “or else Nazis” start to seem somewhat morally justified. Like, “You know what? If someone working a full time job can’t afford an apartment, maybe your iPhone should cost $4,000, and your 401(k) should shit the bed, and your student loans should be managed by the Department of Defense from now on.” When Bill Clinton sold poor people down the river with his welfare reform act in 1996, he called it the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act. Well, Donald Trump is the Political Responsibility and Karmic Reconciliation Act. Now we can all experience some fraction of the helplessness and chaos 50 years of inaction have created for the people who used to be Democrats’ staunchest supporters.
Of course most of the people who are going to get screwed by this are exactly the people who don’t deserve it — civil servants, teachers, public universities, poor people, disabled people, minorities, women, and LGBTQ people. To go back to our sinking boat metaphor, “slower drowning” seems pretty cruel and fucked up — until you get a chance to experience “faster drowning.” So maybe poor people will be temporarilly beaten into submission. Maybe they’ll go back to supporting Democrats, for a little while. That certainly seems to be what a lot of centrist Democrats are holding out for. Hillary Clinton’s whole campaign was basically, “Vote for me even though you know I won’t help you — or else Nazis.”
But that’s not going to keep working. The stakes are only going to get higher. All the stuff that’s been in the background all these years — wildfires, water quality, microplastics, mass extinction, AI, mechanization, Chinese imperialism, Russian imperialism, WMDs — is bursting into our present, and the rate at which it destroys the lives of people closer to the bottom is only going to speed up. That, in turn, will increase their level of desperation, and their willingness to smash things when they go to the polls. We need collective action. We need to dislodge vested interests and invest in a range of solutions to find out what works: for AI, for the environment, food security, democracy, information technology. All these issues are accelerating in importance. We need government that can move at those speeds. And instead, everyone’s holding everyone else hostage with Donald Trump. “Or else Nazis,” is pretty much the campaign slogan for the whole left — except Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Pete Buttigieg, and Bernie Sanders. Maybe Jasmine Crockett. I respect Cory Booker and Elizabeth Warren a lot, but I worry they might both just be too conventional for the present moment. We’re out of time for committees trying to decide whether we should do a thing or not. We need to be moving.
I don’t know what people think they’re going to lose if they abandon moderation and rush toward greatness, but I know what they’ll get if they don’t.
Fuckin’ Nazis. That’s what.