Vivek Ramaswamy is having a moment. After last night’s first debate among GOP hopefuls, an Associated Press headline said he’s taken “center stage.”

The tech entrepreneur, the AP reported, “has crept up in recent polls, leading to his position next to [Florida Governor Ron] DeSantis at center stage. And he quickly showed why when he showcased his ready-for-video, on-message approach — talking about how his poor parents moved to the US and gave him the chance to found billion-dollar companies.”

His moment won’t last, though, and he will guarantee its end.

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Ramaswamy is playing a familiar role in a very old American story – that of the nonwhite man who says things that white men are not supposed to say, making it OK for them to say them, thus ensuring his political irrelevance – until the next time white men need a nonwhite man to repeat the pattern.

If you listen carefully, you can hear Ramaswamy trying to sound like Donald Trump. His rhetoric involves conspiracy theories, stupendously false claims, and winks and nods to racists and revanchists. It’s in the hope that GOP voters who are concerned about Trump’s baggage might come over to his side. But in the end, they won’t need him. They have what they want.

Last night featured the clearest example of what I’m talking about. At one point, Ramaswamy said that “the climate change agenda is a hoax. … More people are dying from bad climate change policy than they are of climate change.” I don’t need to remind you that Trump said the same thing during the 2016 cycle without the debate-club polish that Ramaswamy brings to it.

But that was only the clearest example. Like Donald Trump’s rhetoric, Vivek Ramaswamy’s usually features elements of anti-Black dog whistling and conspiratorial innuendo. These flatter the listener into believing that they’re both too sophisticated to accept the conventional wisdom of a democracy that’s growing more diverse. While everyone else feels forced to talk in terms of “political correctness,” they are free to speak the plain truth.

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That works for Trump, because, at this point, he now speaks as “the symbol of white Christian entitlement and power in a rapidly changing country,” said Robert Jones, head of the Public Religion Research Institute and author of the new book, The Hidden Roots of White Supremacy. Jones told Ronald Brownstein recently that “MAGA, with its siren song of loss and nostalgia in that final word ‘again’, was crafted as a rallying cry for this sentiment.”

Jones added: “Trump’s attacks on the legitimacy of elections he lost, a federal government that is persecuting him and his followers, and racist Black prosecutors all derive power from this world view, where the white Christian inhabitants of the promised land are being denied their rightful divine inheritance by those who were meant to be subservient” (my italics).

Ramaswamy can’t do that.

He’s not white, first of all. (He was born in Cincinnati to south Indian immigrants). Second, he’s not Christian. He’s Hindu. (The Times reported on a white evangelical voter who “looked up his religion and saw he’s Hindu.” He said, “I was going to vote for him until that came up.”) Despite his best efforts to sound like Donald Trump, he’ll always remind these “white Christian inhabitants of the promised land” that people like him are denying their rightful divine inheritance when they “were meant to be subservient.”

Ramaswamy isn’t stupid. He can sense the deep desire among “white Christian inhabitants” – or, as I have called them, “Realamericans” – for the “subservient” to adopt their way of thinking. He can sense their desire to hear someone who looks like him tell them what they want to hear.

So he’s giving it to them.

But in the process of telling Realamericans that they are right, and that non-Realamericans are wrong, he’s making it OK for Trump to keep being what he’s become, “the symbol of white Christian entitlement and power.” And the more he validates Donald Trump, the less these Realamericans are going to need Ramaswamy. He’s served his function. Now he’s done.

As I said, this is an old American story. Many ambitious nonwhite men have tried doing what Ramaswamy is attempting. Like him, they believed they were smart enough to outdo white power. In the end, it outdid them.

Last week, I said that Ron DeSantis is losing because he’s bad at this. He could sit out this presidential cycle and wait for Joe Biden’s tenure to expire. But, I said, he seems to believe the hype about him – that he’s Not-Donald Trump but also Donald Trump II. Just one problem, I said: Everything in Republican politics begins and ends with Donald Trump.

The Florida man seems eager to convince hesitant Republican voters that they have nowhere else to go but to him. “They do have nowhere else to go,” I wrote, “but not for the reasons DeSantis thinks. There’s no Donald Trump II. There’s no Not-Donald Trump. There’s only Donald Trump.”

Then came news Tuesday that DeSantis “is replacing his presidential campaign manager and making other changes to his senior staff after a rough stretch of layoffs, budget woes and struggles to make headway against … the front-runner for the Republican nomination,” the Post said.

When a candidate gets rid of a campaign manager, that’s a bad sign, bad enough for The Bulwark’s Jonathan Last to write DeSantis’ obituary.

I don’t know whether DeSantis’ campaign is dead or not. But I do know that political history is chock-full of examples of primary underdogs who were forced to make radical changes in the face of struggle. I don’t know what that change will be exactly, but DeSantis seems to already understand that change is necessary – and not only because his campaign is in trouble.

He seems to understand that Trump is a liability.

During an interview with NBC News’ Dasha Burns Monday, he said that “if the election is a referendum on Joe Biden’s policies and the failures that we’ve seen and we are presenting a positive vision for the future, we will win the presidency and we will have a chance to turn the country around.”

But, Florida’s second-term governor added, “if the election is not about January 20, 2025, but January 6, 2021, or what document was left by the toilet at Mar-a-Lago, if it’s a referendum on that, we are going to lose.”

In other words, if Trump is the GOP’s nominee, the election is going to be about him and his crimes. And if it’s about them, Joe Biden is going to win.

Paul Waldman, a liberal writer, said as much Sunday. “Any election in which Donald Trump is involved will be almost entirely about Donald Trump,” he said. “And that is not good for his party. Republicans fared poorly in all three elections since he won the presidency in 2016, and each poor performance can be attributed in large part to Trump’s malign influence.”

Which brings me back to DeSantis. If he’s going to make a change to save his campaign, he probably should stop what he’s been doing – avoiding direct confrontation with Donald Trump – and start doing something else. Fortunately, another underdog, Chris Christie, is modeling an alternative.

The former New Jersey governor has turned his long shot campaign into a mission to “tell Republican voters the truth” about Trump, he said during an interview with “CBS News Sunday Morning.” He has been rewarded for that decision. Politico said Tuesday that he’s “the field’s loudest Trump critic.”

On MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” Wednesday, Christie asked: “How were the American people benefited by him keeping boxes of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago. That was just there for him to continue to pretend that he was president and to show off for people who were on the back patio. … The great irony of this campaign is Donald Trump saying he’s going to put America first. He has not put America first. He’s put Donald Trump first.”

Now, just because Christie is modeling an alternative for DeSantis to follow doesn’t mean necessarily that DeSantis should. Christie is good at this. He’s comfortable trading insults with Trump, and the more they trade insults, the better things will be for Christie as “the field’s loudest Trump critic.”

But DeSantis, as I said, is bad at this – or at least he appears to be. Maybe that’s the result of trying to do the impossible. He’s selling himself as the Not-Donald Trump candidate who also wants the support of Donald Trump’s followers. Impossible situations can make anyone look foolish.

Still, DeSantis is facing a crisis. He has to decide. He could continue avoiding direct confrontation with Donald Trump. That hasn’t worked. Or he could engage in direct confrontations – and in the process give a Republican candidacy, if not his own candidacy, a chance of beating Joe Biden. That might work, but, again, it depends on how good he is at it.

Christie is very good.

Is DeSantis?

As you can imagine, I pay a lot of attention to the news. Indeed, paying attention is half the labor that goes into producing the Editorial Board. Normal people, as I say, have better things to do than pay attention to politics. Way I see it, my job is to pay attention for the common good.

I guess I’ve been slacking. This morning, I learned something that’s been established fact for four months, but, well, I don’t know what I have been doing since March. I don’t know how I missed it – this fact is that big.

I guess I shouldn’t be too hard on myself. That someone like me, who pays a lot of attention to the news, missed something so big says less about me than it does about the news producers to whom I pay a lot of attention.

What’s the news? Here’s the Post, my italics:

“A year after inflation soared to the highest level in four decades, price increases are returning closer to normal levels, with families and businesses feeling the difference as wages rise faster than prices and policymakers debate how much more to slow the economy.”

You’ll notice I did not stress the top item. Prices are returning to normal levels. Huzzah! No one here has not felt the pain of paying too much for bacon and eggs. But prices have been the focus of the press and pundit corps for months, years, at least since the covid closed the economy. Wages, on the other hand, don’t get nearly the same degree of focus.

Moreover, the press and pundit corps habitually mangle the real and serious difference between prices and inflation. Prices are what you pay for stuff. Inflation is a systemic economic force. Inflation does indeed affect prices. Prices in turn affect inflation. But they are not the same. News producers often treat them as equal. The result is public confusion.

Fact is, normal people, which is to say, people who have better things to do than pay attention to politics, probably don’t know what inflation is and probably don’t care. What they know about is that the cost of bacon and eggs has been too high too long. What they care about is affording them.

Inflation has been slowing down for nearly a year now, but normal people, naturally, aren’t feeling it. They aren’t focused on systemic economic forces! They’re focused on the price of bacon and eggs! But the press and pundit corps have so mangled the difference that normal people blame inflation for their pain when they should blame prices – and those who set them.

Inflation is a nameless faceless force. There’s no one to blame.

Prices are not nameless and faceless.

The firms that provide most of the food that we eat are small in number. Their pricing power, however, is huge. Eighty percent of “everyday grocery items are supplied by a handful of companies,” according to a 2021 investigation by The Guardian. “Three firms dominate sales of 73 percent” of breakfast cereals, while “more than 80 percent beef processing and 70 percent of pork processing is controlled by four multinational giants.”

But remember what I put in italics?

I didn’t stress prices. I didn’t stress inflation.

I stressed wages.

Wages are rising faster than inflation. “Average hourly earnings rose 0.4 percent from May to June, outpacing inflation by 0.2 percent, according to a separate BLS report released Wednesday,” the Post reported. In fact, it said, “wages have grown faster than inflation for four straight months.”

Let’s say that again.

Let’s say that again time with feeling, and in the knowledge that the press and pundit corps have, over the last four months, produced about four billion stories about normal people “still feeling the pain of inflation.”

Wages have grown faster than inflation for four straight months!

Not only are normal people bringing in more money than they’re paying out, they have been bringing in more money since the first quarter!

I’ll be honest with you.

I said, at the top, that I don’t know how I missed this – this fact is really that big. But as you probably have guessed by now, I’m being coy. I do know how.

I pay a lot of attention to the news, but, like any normal person in any democracy, I know only what news producers produce. If they habitually mangle the real and serious difference between inflation and prices, while making of fetish of “still feeling the pain of inflation,” what else can I do?

Fortunately, luck was on my side.

On my computer, actually.

In one tab, I had open the Post story I have been talking about. That version was about prices finally coming down. In another tab, I had open the same story, but updated to include news about wages outpacing prices. (Both mangle the difference between prices and inflation, treating them as synonymous.)

I pay a lot of attention to the news, for normal people who have better things to do than pay attention to politics, but only luck allowed me to notice that the same news story in the Post had two subheadlines.

The first (“updated July 12, 2023, at 9:15 a.m. EDT:): “But the Federal Reserve isn’t ready to declare victory yet, especially since not every source of inflation is fading at the same time or with the same momentum.” The second (“updated July 12, 2023, at 4:17 p.m. EDT”): “Wages are now rising faster than prices. The Federal Reserve isn’t ready to declare victory yet, because inflation isn’t consistently falling yet.” (Click here to see both.)

Four billion stories about “the pain of inflation.”

Will the next four months bring more stories about rising wages?

Joe Biden ran for president as Mr. Normalcy. During the pandemic, with the body count rising and the economy teetering, he looked pretty good next to a lying, thieving, philandering sadist who refused to lead the nation or take responsibility for it. Compared to Donald Trump, Biden was a no-brainer. All he had to do was stand up straight, brush his teeth and comb his hair.

But Biden is not Mr. Normalcy, never was. He’s long denied this fact, to be sure, for reasons good and bad, but he seems to have changed his mind. During a speech in Chicago, he embraced the fact that he is what his former boss had wanted to be: a transformational president. “Bidenomics is working,” he said. “The American people strongly support Bidenomics.”

This is a BFD, and not because Biden is taking possession of an insult hurled at him by the GOP. (That, in fact, is not a BFD; it’s a clever perspective intended for people who believe themselves to be clever.) “Bidenomics” is real, new and, most of all, believable. That its namesake is self-consciously embracing it, indeed running for reelection on it, is a BFD. He’s saying the old political order is dead, and vote for me and I’ll make sure it stays dead.

“Bidenomics” is real. The economy keeps adding jobs at rates unseen since the 1960s. Private companies hired nearly half a million people last month, doubling expectations. (Inflation has also been slowing down, for months).

“Bidenomics” is new. The last time the federal government invested in the economy, in the way that it’s currently investing in it, was six decades ago, which also happens to be the last time jobs were added at historic rates.

“Government is no longer shying away from pushing investment toward specific goals and industries,” according to the Post’s EJ Dionne. “Spending on public works is back in fashion. New free-trade treaties are no longer at the heart of the nation’s international strategy. Challenging monopolies and providing support for unionization efforts are higher priorities.”

But the biggest reason “Bidenomics” is a BFD is that it’s believable.

Since I came of age in the 1980s, most people most of the time have been receptive to the claim that “government interference” in a free market – taxing wealth, regulating critical industries, expanding opportunities, public works – is something akin to socialism. To be sure, no one knew what socialism was, not even the so-called socialists. It just sounded right.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnnell said that the president’s student debt-relief program is “student loan socialism.” Thirty years ago, that would likely have made a loud clang. But it doesn’t sound right anymore. It can’t.

For one thing, the Great (Long) Recession showed everyone that a free market isn’t really free. If you’re too big to fail, you’re also too big to jail – full stop. For another, the pandemic showed everyone that “government interference” isn’t as bad as its reputation, given that we might be dead without it. The lucky survivors among us would be much poorer, too.

So Biden is not arguing that the old political order is dead. He’s pointing his finger at the corpse and saying, look, it’s dead. In Chicago, he declared that the regime of the last 40 years, which included the economic policies of his two Democratic predecessors, is no longer viable. New conditions, new challenges and new urgencies call for the establishment of a new regime.

Normal presidents try to appear to break from the past.

Transformational presidents do not try to appear to break. They break.

But the past was already broken.

Biden is not leading the way toward regime change as much as he’s leading the way toward a new consensus that the old regime has changed, has been changing. The old regime (sometimes called “neoliberalism,” sometimes called “Reaganomics,” named after Ronald Reagan) started OK. It privileged tax cuts, deregulation, privatization and free trade. But that was at the expense of normal people, their standards of living, and the democracies they inhabited. The old regime was great – if you were very obscenely rich.

Even so, every president since 1980, including Biden’s former boss, has defended and protected a political order that over time immiserated the middle class. (Wages were higher in the 1960s, adjusted for inflation, than they are today, though, thanks to “Bidenomics,” they are catching up.)

Joe Biden is the first president in my lifetime, going back to Richard Nixon, to self-consciously take the side of people who work for a living while also self-consciously making enemies of people who own so much they don’t have to work. That’s a transformational president. That’s regime change.

That’s a BFD.

As far as I can tell, Tuesday’s arraignment of a criminal former president is being taken as proof of the American credo – that no one is above the law. Forgive me for my repeating myself. His arraignment proves no such thing.

It is proof of something, though – that justice is the product of democratic politics. His prosecution is politically motivated. And thank God for that.

“No one is above the law” is and will be propaganda, not fact. If it were fact, we would never see a billionaire, because in order to become a billionaire, the government must look away while the billionaire does what he needs to do to become a billionaire. Impunity is baked into the American credo. It’s baked into the American dream, too. Billionaires embody the very definition of success.

READ MORE: Jack Smith could 'sidestep' Aileen Cannon by charging Trump elsewhere: legal experts

Robert Kuttner put it this way in a review of Trevor Jackson’s Impunity and Capitalism: “While in office, [Donald] Trump abused his pardon privilege to excuse dozens of corrupt, convicted allies, and he would likely do so again if reelected. We live in an age of selective application of law, in which influential people often evade responsibility for actions that are or should be criminal, while minor offenders such as shoplifters or drug users can face prison terms. Trump made crudely personal what has become tacit and structural” (my stress).

So even if Trump is convicted of the charges against him, his conviction won’t prove that “no one is above the law.” As Professor Jackson wrote, billionaires will continue to squeeze consumers, communities and markets with a degree of impunity that has become necessary for our variety of capitalism to exist.

I’ll believe no one is above the law when, after the next financial panic, those responsible for the vanishment of life, liberty and happiness are perp-walked toward justice. Until then, I think we can expect crimes that only billionaires can commit to continue being treated as “everyone’s fault and no one’s.”

By continuing to believe, uncritically, that “no one is above the law,” we actually enable impunity of the law by the very obscenely rich. “No one is above the law” asks Americans to believe that justice is something that just happens, independent of human agency, as if it were a weather system, all-natural, an outcome of God’s will. Like financial crimes that are treated as “everyone’s fault and no one’s,” justice is treated as everyone’s responsibility and no one’s. Is it any wonder, really, that corruption has become so normal as to be invisible?

READ MORE: Tucker Carlson claims 'neocon war agenda' is behind Trump documents prosecution

Invisible, of course, until someone goes too far. At some point, impunity for the law exceeds established levels of tolerance for it, as when a criminal former president led an attempted paramilitary takeover of the United States government. His corruption may well have been forgiven, or at least forgotten, but the most blatant political crime in US history has prevented that. It made every one of his corrupt acts seem like an intolerable assault on democracy.

That there is such a thing as “going too far” is proof that “no one is above the law” is propaganda, not fact. Once we accept it as such, we can see what’s going on. The deep and broad and democratic demand for Donald Trump to be held criminally accountable is not the consequence of a mindless abstraction that automatically brings wrongdoers to justice. It is the product of pressure applied to law enforcement – the political pressure of democratic politics.

That political pressure has given lead prosecutors in Manhattan, Georgia and Washington the freedom they need to pursue their respective criminal cases. Trump’s prosecution is indeed politically motivated. And thank God for that.

If there’s any doubt about this being a politically motivated prosecution – if there’s any doubt about it being the consequence of a deep and broad and democratic demand for it – consider it’s unlikely that Trump doubts it.

He can’t meet a political demand for justice with law. The evidence is too strong. (I’m deferring here to legal experts who know what they are talking about.) He must meet a political demand for justice with politics. That means running for president. Only the power of the presidency can save him now.

READ MORE: 'There will be a federal January 6th case' against Donald Trump: ex-Mueller lead prosecutor

The former leader of the Proud Boys, Enrique Tarrio, was convicted alongside three of his lieutenants last week of seditious conspiracy and a slew of other offenses.

The jury concluded that the Proud Boys, a notorious fighting/drinking club calling itself “Trump’s Army,” plotted to obstruct the joint session of Congress on January 6. They sought to halt the certification of Joe Biden’s electoral college victory and reinstall Donald Trump as president.

So far, over a dozen high-level Proud Boys and Oath Keepers have been convicted or plead guilty to charges of seditious conspiracy for their roles on J6. Seditious conspiracy is the most serious of all charges stemming from the J6 insurrection and as well as the hardest to prove. These verdicts are a major victory for the Justice Department, but they also increase the pressure on special prosecutor Jack Smith to charge the conspirator in chief, Donald Trump.

Enrique Tarrio’s defense at trial was that he was just following orders from Trump.

“It was Donald Trump’s words. It was his motivation. It was his anger that caused what occurred on January 6th in your beautiful and amazing city,” Tarrio’s lawyer said in his closing statement, “It was not Enrique Tarrio. They want to use Enrique Tarrio as a scapegoat for Donald J. Trump and those in power.”

Tarrio was no mere scapegoat, but that lawyer has a point. Donald Trump was the unindicted co-conspirator in that courtroom.

We already know a lot about how Trump gathered his supporters in Washington, wound them up with a conspiracy theory-laden tirade, and pointed them in the direction of the Capitol.

Enticing the faithful to DC was a drawn-out process. Trump put the Proud Boys on notice in 2020 when he told the drinking/brawling society to “stand back and stand by” for violence connected to the election.

Then Trump summoned his supporters to Washington for what he called a “wild protest” on January 6. Having assembled the crowd at the Ellipse on the appointed day, Trump riled up the crowd with fanciful tales of election fraud and set them loose on the joint session of Congress, which had convened to certify Joe Biden’s electoral victory.

Cassidy Hutchinson, a former aide to White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, fleshed out many key details in her testimony before the January 6 committee.

Hutchinson explained that Trump not only set the mob on the Capitol, he intended to lead them himself. The former president knew what was going to happen: The mob was going to disrupt the peaceful transfer of power and he wanted to lead them.

Not only that, Trump knew that many in the crowd were carrying guns. In the run up to J6, Hutchinson remembered hearing the words “Proud Boys” and “Oath Keepers” being bandied about. White House chief of staff Mark Meadows also spoke with dirty trickster Roger Stone and QAnon luminary Michael Flynn on January 5 “regarding what would play out the next day.”

The Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers have ties to Stone, Trump’s oldest political confidante. He gave the Proud Boys a national profile during Trump’s presidency. The Proud Boys served as his personal guard and his social media consultants. At one point, the Proud Boys were so close to Stone they controlled his phone and posted to social media on his behalf.

Tarrio and the other Proud Boys richly deserve the lengthy prison sentences they’re probably going to face at their sentencing later this month.

Donald Trump, the man who orchestrated the insurrection, should face the same fate.

The more Republican candidates running for their party’s nomination raise the issue of Joe Biden’s age (80), the more the president’s allies, among the Democrats and normal Democratic voters, are likely to defend him, almost certainly with some kind of warm pap about age being only a state of mind.

Age is not only a state of mind.

Not in reality, especially not in a job that rapidly accelerates the aging process. George W. Bush looked young when he began. He looked old when he was done. Ditto for Barack Obama. With a huge head start, Biden’s oldness is getting faster daily. (Donald Trump may have escaped such consequences. After all, he never bothered to take leadership seriously.)

When Nikki Haley, former ambassador to the United Nations under Trump, who is running for the GOP’s nomination against her former boss, said we’d likely see the current president die in five years, there could be heard a giant sucking gasping sound followed by a deafening clutching of pearls. Let’s not kid ourselves. Everyone shuffles off this mortal coil. Death, being humanity’s common denominator, is no reason not to vote for Joe Biden.

Fortunately, Haley agrees.

Just ask her.

Haley was not, as headlines variously reported, going “after Biden’s age.” She did not “mock” his age. She did not take a “swipe” at his age. Biden’s age was secondary to Haley’s principal objective, which was reminding audiences that in the event of the old man’s death, his second-in-charge takes over.

In this case, a 58-year-old biracial woman.

“He announced that he’s running again in 2024,” Haley told Fox. “I think that we can all be very clear and say with a matter of fact that if you vote for Joe Biden you really are counting on a President Harris, because the idea that he would make it until 86 years old is not something that I think is likely.”

Wanting to defend Biden is understandable. So is wanting to defend his elderliness. But age isn’t relevant to his opponents. What’s relevant is Kamala Harris’s race and sex. Let’s not help by taking their words seriously. Let’s embrace the moment’s complexity. Anyway, we don’t have a choice.

The president is running for reelection. He will be the Democratic Partys’ nominee. (Pay no attention to marginal alternatives. They are marginal for a reason.) Trump is running, too. He will almost certainly be the Republican Party’s nominee. (Haley knows she has a snowball’s chance.) So far, 2024 is already set as a repeat of 2020. In any other context, Biden’s age totally matters. In this context, nah. He’s the best and, therefore, only choice.

But with a different context comes a different set of problems – and this is where Haley’s comments come to the fore. Right now, the president’s allies are all about defending him. They should. But old men die at inconvenient moments. We should think about that. This isn’t a reason not to vote for him. It’s a reason to prepare for what’s to come in case he dies in office.

If Biden dies in office, Harris will become the first woman president. She will become the first biracial woman president. She will become something no one has become. In the history of American politics, that outcome will be second only to Barack Obama’s 2008 victory, second only because she would not have been elected. Time would tell whether the white-power backlash against a President Harris would be as strong as the one against the first Black president. But let’s be clear: Given what we know about American politics, there’s no question there will be a white-power reaction.

Along with a white-power reaction will be, almost certainly, a white-liberal reaction. I say “almost certainly” because we saw a two-tiered outcome after 2008. While the racists and revanchists dug in, turning away from democracy and toward political violence, white liberals pat themselves on the back for establishing a foundation for a real “post-racial America.”

“Post-racial America” was a lovely bit of liberal propaganda. Yes, it was embraced, encouraged and advanced by the Obama administration, but that’s what it was. The only thing real about it was the way of made white liberals feel. While they were feeling good, they lost focus on a GOP that was turning away from democracy. By 2016, many Americans, not just white liberals, believed voting for Donald Trump couldn’t possibly be that bad.

I don’t believe history repeats itself. I don’t think it rhymes either. I think conditions change, and with them come new problems. But we’d be fools not to consider what might happen if Joe Biden died in office and Kamala Harris became something no one in this country’s history has ever been. We’d also be fools for thinking we can avoid this possibility. Death comes for us. It’s no reason not to vote for Biden. Anyway, we don’t have a choice.

Since about 2016, a sort of cottage industry has emerged to soothe the nerves of respectable white people, telling them that they’re sooooo right. Democracy may be backsliding into a pit of autocratic despair, but that’s not because America is bad. America is a beacon of hope around the world!

Springing from this tenor of thought, as I see it, are missives of the kind I read recently in The Atlantic, in which the writer, who should know better, pretends that he does not know better before claiming that “red states” controlled by the Republican Party have become “laboratories of autocracy.”

This is how Brian Klaas, a political scientist at the London School of Economics, began his latest: “In 1932, Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis applauded the role of experimentation within the states, calling them ‘laboratories of democracy’ that could inspire reforms at the national level.”

“Today,” wrote the author of The Despot's Accomplice: How the West is Aiding and Abetting the Decline of Democracy, “that dynamic is inverted, as some red states have become laboratories of autocracy, experimenting with the autocratic playbook in ways that could filter up to the federal government. American states are now splintering, not just on partisan lines, but on their commitment to the principles of liberal democracy.”

It’s not that he’s wrong. Red states are experimenting with authoritarianism. Klaas demonstrates this fact by citing numerous examples – from the policing of “abortion traffickers” in Montana to extreme gerrymandering in North Carolina, from voter suppression tactics in Georgia to expelling Democratic reformers, who’d raised hell, from Tennessee state House.

No one should deny these things are happening, but neither should anyone see them as a result of “red states” becoming laboratories of autocracy. As for their “splintering … on their commitment to the principles of liberal democracy”? This America is an America that has never existed. The view here is from 30,000 feet in the air. It’s better to be closer to the ground.

The ex-slaver states of the former Confederate States of America, and the regions of the country that have aligned with them, have always been autocratic. They will almost certainly always be autocratic. The question isn’t whether they are. The question is how they express themselves. The key, for the real “laboratories of democracy” and hence for America’s global image as a beacon of hope, is whether such expressions can be contained.

It was largely contained by the last quarter of the last century, but not before then. This may come as a shock, because we tend to take the Bill of Rights for granted, but there was a time in our history when the Bill of Rights applied only to the federal government. It did not apply to the states.

Under ideal conditions, and there were and are ways of manufacturing ideal conditions, a state could and did crush civil rights and individual liberties. If a state wanted to outlaw sodomy, it did. If it wanted to regulate forms of worship, it did. If it wanted to prevent undesirables from voting, it did.

There were ways of pushing back, of complicating those “ideal conditions,” but they did not include torts against state governments for violating constitutional rights, because such appeals had not yet been recognized.

The federal government accelerated its containment (my word) of these autocratic laboratories only after the US Supreme Court, in the late 1930s, accelerated a process known to legal scholars as “selective incorporation.”

In plain English, that’s the process of reading the Bill of Rights through the lens of the 14th Amendment’s due process clause, in effect nationalizing them, so they applied to the states as well as the federal government.

Some rights were never incorporated and probably never will be on account of the current Supreme Court, and its rightwing supermajority, reversing this long orientation toward nationalizing the the Bill of Rights.

I’m no legal scholar, but that reversal seems to have become transparent with the overturning of Roe, thus triggering the invalidation of not only the national right to abortion but the national right against the infringement of privacy by state governments. With those rights now gone at the national level, states are free to return to their natural states of authoritarianism.

Republican legislators are now passing laws providing government agents the potential for accessing virtually anything, privacy be damned. Kansas recently enacted a statute paving the way for grotesque intrusions. It requires the inspection of genitals to block “men” (trans women) from competing in the “wrong” sport (and from using the “wrong” bathroom).

These experiments are being projected beyond their borders. “Many red states have already considered bills to restrict travel for abortion care,” wrote Lindsay Beyerstein. “Last year, an antiabortion legislator in Missouri tried to criminalize aiding and abetting an abortion outside the state.”

This is why “contained” is the right word. Just as the US government tried to “contain” the spread of Soviet Communism around the world, during the post-World War II era, so too must real “laboratories of democracy” try to contain the spread of native autocracy. (Let’s hope for better success.)

Again, Klaas isn’t wrong. It’s obvious. Some state governments dominated by the Republicans are experimenting with authoritarianism. But what they are experimenting with is not a matter of kind. They were always already authoritarian. What they are experimenting with is a matter of degree.

How much autocracy are they willing to express? In the last quarter of the last century, when the Supreme Court’s rulings effectively contained authoritarianism, the ex-slaver states of the former Confederate States of America, and the regions that aligned with them, expressed less of it.

But now that a rightwing supermajority has begun reversing a century of “selective incorporation,” we are seeing these states and allies expressing violent spasms of autocracy, as if supported by the court, which they are.

I don’t have a problem with respectable white people clinging to the idea of America being a beacon of hope around the world. But let’s concede to the hard reality of that belief. We are not a united country. Parts of us don’t believe in liberty. Parts of us are compelled to make some of us suffer.

To the extent that we are a beacon, and I think we are, it’s because the real “laboratories of democracy” – the ex-free labor states, say – believe that governments ought to maximize opportunity and minimize suffering.

The first thing to understand about legislation passed Wednesday by the House Republicans, which lifts the debt ceiling for a year, is that it’s not serious. The second thing is that we know it’s not, by reading about it.

We don’t need special “insider” access. We don’t need a crystal ball. No, this is not some sort of Svengalian victory for the Republican Speaker of the House, Kevin McCarthy. Anyone can understand this by their ability to read.

According to the Post, the bill would raise the borrowing cap but repeal Joe Biden’s “recent accomplishments, including a bevy of tax credits meant to spur the adoption of electric vehicles and other clean technologies.”

With the bill, the House Republicans aim to “end the president’s plan to waive up to $10,000 from millions of borrowers’ student debts. It limits the power of federal agencies to issue regulations on a wide array of industries. And it imposes a raft of new rules on low-income families that receive federal benefits, including food stamps and Medicaid, requiring them to work longer hours in exchange for help — or risk losing aid entirely.”

These are just a sampling. There’s more.

Until now, the main focus has been on the House Republicans and their willingness to play chicken with the fate of the world. If the US defaulted on its debt, we’d see tens of trillions of dollars in personal wealth go pffth.

Naturally, the possibility of apocalypse has seized our attention since that moment in January when the GOP (just barely) took control of the House of Representatives. But now that they’ve produced a document, rather than continue talking about producing one, it’s clear we never had to go that far.

Think about it this way.

Even if you hate pretty much everything about this president and his liberal legislative agenda, you can’t expect him to say, in exchange for raising the debt ceiling, “Dude! I’ll totally trash all of my era-defining achievements on which I’m going to base my 2024 reelection campaign. Yuh, bruh! Yuh!” It’s one thing to hate pretty much everything about this president and his liberal legislative agenda. It’s another to think he’s an idiot. He’s not.

This is where things should end. They won’t, though, because there’s a push underway that will result in the House GOP seeming serious. Some of that push involves bad-faith actors making Joe Biden responsible for their choices. Some of it involves good-faith efforts by the press and pundit corps to contextualize the debate over debts and deficits. Because that debate is serious, the impression left will be of a serious House GOP.

But asking Biden to throw away his accomplishments isn’t the only sign of unseriousness. Consider the House Republicans’ bargaining position.

To get what they want, they have to persuade the other side to say yes. Normally, when one side needs a yes, it offers the other side something to say yes to. I’m not sure what that might be in this case, but it’s definitely not asking a president to shitcan two years of era-defining achievement.

When you do not offer something the other side can say yes to, you have given them a road to no. If you have given them a road to no, you don’t really know what “bargaining” means. If you don’t know what “bargaining” means, you have no business at the bargaining table. You’re not serious.

To be sure, the president wants the House Republicans to lift the debt ceiling, but that’s not the same as offering him something to say yes to.

Hanging over the bargaining table are the consequences of failing to agree, namely, the question of fault. The president has said yes, unconditionally, to raising the debt ceiling. He’s waiting for the House Republicans to come around. Meanwhile, they’ve larded a counteroffer with conditions – in effect, poison pills. There’s nowhere else for the consequences to fall.

The Republicans have no leverage. All they can do is pretend otherwise.

And betray their unseriousness – again.

None of this is to say that the Republicans are not playing a dangerous game. They are playing a dangerous game. But as Noah Berlatsky has repeatedly pointed out, they don’t have the incentive to be serious.

Gerrymandering and structural advantages, Noah has said, mean they have “less accountability to voters, which means they have trouble gauging what’s popular and what’s not popular, even with their own constituents.”

They don’t have a reason to offer something to say yes to, but they do have a reason to offer something to say no to. We should pay attention to this feature of our politics – the perverse incentives created by a system giving advantage to the most unserious people among us as well as disadvantage to the most serious people among us. The patients are running the asylum.

We, too, are pretending otherwise.

Liberal democracy suffers typically when controversies are left to the eye of the beholder. Consider a new debate over old laws governing child labor.

On the one hand are the Republicans and business allies in nearly a dozen states who are moving to “loosen child labor laws to help employers fill empty jobs,” according to a report in USA Today. These advocates say “relaxing the rules will prompt more teens to seek out valuable work experiences and make it easier to supplement their families incomes.”

On the other hand, according to the same report, are those who say “minors who work in manufacturing, meatpacking and construction jobs are being exploited or hurt.” It went on to say these bills “are an attempt to roll back crucial child labor protections that are nearly a century old.”

We’re talking about child labor laws, so naturally the focus is on what’s good for teens in workplace settings. But that leaves it to the eye of the beholder. Republicans say “relaxing the rules” is good for them. Critics say it’s not. In that framing, it’s up to teens and parents. But the reality of things is this:

Child labor laws, like all labor laws, affect everyone who participates in the economy. Since everyone participates, child labor laws affect everyone. If we don’t put this fact at the center of the debate, liberal democracy suffers.

Before I go on, set aside emotional appeals by critics of “relaxed” child labor laws. Their goal is eliciting sympathy for kids on the strength of America’s past (and terrible) exploitation of them. “Do you remember the images of children in manufacturing and other dangerous work conditions from the early 1900s?” a critic said, per USA Today. “There is a reason our society said that it is not appropriate for children to work in those conditions.”

The problem with these appeals is that they try to elicit sympathy for kids who don’t work in horrific working conditions that don’t exist currently. Look, I agree. Give these Republicans an inch. They’ll take a mile. But as long as horrific working conditions don’t exist currently, and they don’t, not yet, the Republicans can do what they always do best: deny, deny, deny.

Better to say what they’re doing, not what they haven’t done.

They aren’t just trying to loosen up labor laws.

They’re also trying to loosen up the labor market.

Remember, it’s tight. Unemployment hasn’t been this low since the late 1960s. Firms can’t find enough workers, not because there aren’t enough workers willing to work. It’s because firms, in aggregate, refuse to pay more than they used to. Because they refuse to pay more than they used to, in aggregate, many workers can shop their labor around to those who will.

The result has been rising wages, even as inflation eats into them.

Adding more complexity to a complex situation is the tightening of the US-Mexican border, at the demand of Republican legislators, state and federal, a demand that’s been met largely by the current administration, so that immigrants who’d otherwise take low-paying jobs can’t get to them.

Firms, in aggregate, keep refusing to budge on pay. Republican legislators, in aggregate, keep refusing to budge on immigration. As long as they stick with the Republicans, there’s only one thing businessleaders can do when the usual source of cheap labor is exhausted – replace it with a new source.

Or in this case, an old source – children.

There should be no doubt that flooding the market with cheap labor will not only lower labor costs in some sectors of the economy but in the whole economy as well. Remember, it’s a tight labor market that’s been pushing wages higher and faster than they have been in more than half a century.

There should be no doubt about something else: that lowering the cost of labor by flooding the market with cheap labor is the Republicans’ objective. Why should there be no doubt? Because that’s what they’re telling us.

For instance, a GOP state senator from Minnesota said that child labor laws “make it even harder for businesses to find reliable employers.” So by regulating whether and how kids enter the labor market, child labor laws make it harder to find workers needed for available jobs. Flooding the market with cheap labor is a twofer. Firms can pay kids pennies. Kids accepting pennies means adults elsewhere will accept pennies, too.

The Republicans tell us their real goal in another way.

By saying that “relaxed” child labor laws would help teens supplement their families’ incomes, they’re admitting their parents don’t make enough. But instead of saying that parents should be paid better wages, thus running at odds with businesspeople, they say teens ought to be paid pennies, too.

All of this can be made transparent with enough scrutiny. Instead, though, liberal critics howl at the moon about what the Republicans might do some time in the future that might look bad, maybe, but that hasn’t happened yet.

We can do better.

Say this instead.

It’s not only in the interest of teens that child labor laws stay as they have been for the last century. It’s in everyone’s interest – everyone, anyway, who has labored for a living. If you haven’t, well, you know, sit the hell down.

The eldest member of the rightwing supermajority of the United States Supreme Court – well, let’s just say the man keeps telling on himself.

Last week, ProPublica revealed that Justice Clarence Thomas had been palling around for decades with a rightwing billionaire, accepting luxury gifts along the way, including world tours on his superyacht. Yet the man who presides over the law, telling us what the law is, didn’t obey the law. Federal ethics statutes require disclosure of gifts of “anything of value.”

He didn’t.

But he does think we’re fools.

In response to ProPublica’s report, Thomas said, in so many words, that he didn’t on his own determine what the law is, instead relied on someone else to tell him what the law is, then failed to obey the law based on that other person’s misreading of the law, so it wasn’t his fault that he failed to obey it.

Then he told on himself. He said, well, he was “advised” the law didn’t apply given that, you know, Harlan Crow is one of his “close personal friends.”

This is what I zeroed in on last week. I said that if I were a billionaire hoping to influence a Supreme Court justice, I’d want to do it without appearing to be doing it. One of the best ways of influencing without appearing to influence, I said, is by becoming one of the justice’s “close personal friends.”

The Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee have begun raising hell in response to ProPublica’s reporting. That’s good. The first branch of government should reassert its authority over the third. But, as I said, if the focus is things, the focus is wrong. The “anything of value” in this “close personal relationship” isn’t a thing. It’s the “close personal relationship.”

I stress this today, because Thomas did.

He keeps telling on himself.

ProPublic reported this week that Crow bought Thomas’ childhood home, and surrounding homes, in Pinpoint, Georgia. “The transaction marks the first known instance of money flowing from the Republican megadonor to the Supreme Court justice,” the report said. “The Crow company bought the properties for $133,363 from three co-owners — Thomas, his mother and the family of Thomas’ late brother, according to a state tax document and a deed dated Oct. 15, 2014, filed at the Chatham County courthouse.”

Now, it’s very weird for the “close personal friend” of a Supreme Court justice to become his elderly mother’s landlord. (She still lived in the house at the time of purchase.) But who am I to judge? The money is also small beer – $133,363 is a lot to normal people, but not to a real estate mogul.

The amount isn’t the point. The point is that a justice charged with telling the rest of us what the law is didn’t obey it. “The disclosure form Thomas filed for that year also had a space to report the identity of the buyer in any private transaction, such as a real estate deal. That space is blank.”

Then Thomas told on himself – again.

“Harlan and Kathy Crow are among our dearest friends,” he said in a statement to ProPublica. “As friends do, we have joined them on a number of family trips.” Then Crow told on Thomas – the gifts were “no different from the hospitality we have extended to our many other dear friends.”

This is upping the ante.

In the beginning, when it wasn’t clear whether Crow bought influence – they were merely traveling together is all – they were “close personal friends.” Now that it’s been established that money, though trivial in amount, changed hands, and that this money exchange looks like buying influence, the “close personal friendship” has become “our dearest friends.”

At this rate, the Thomases and the Crows will be blood kin next week.

So far, no one is paying attention to the evolution of this relationship. We should. In this evolution is pretty much everything we need to know about the problem. The best part? Thomas is telling us himself. He’s confessing.

He’s confessing four things.

One, that the problem isn’t a thing – an exchange of gifts or money – but a relationship with a very obscenely rich man who can buy what he wants.

Two, that he may or may not obey the law, it depends, even as he’s telling the rest of us what the law is, thus appearing to compromise his jurisprudence and that of the rest of the justices on the Supreme Court.

Three, that his jurisprudence may not be as compromised as it seems.

Listen to what he’s saying. Listen very carefully. Thomas is saying that he didn’t have to obey the law, which requires the disclosure of “anything of value,” not in spite of his relationship with a billionaire, but because of it.

In that, he’s telling us that he obeys a law that’s higher than the laws of mere democracy, which is the law governing the bonds of patrician men. It’s because of his bond that Thomas has the right to preside over the law, tell the rest of us what the law is and hold himself as the exception to it.

And finally, that he knows the rest of us think that’s bullshit. He knows that the more we insist on him obeying the same laws everyone else obeys, and that the more he insists that he doesn’t – this is a matter of manly virtue, not a matter of democracy – the more the rest of us are going to raise hell.

So he lied.

It’s too late.

He already told on himself.

If a tree doesn’t fall in a forest, you can be sure lots of economists will have predicted that a tree was absolutely going to fall.

You can also be sure that, when the tree doesn’t fall, the economists will shrug and shamelessly predict that the tree is going to fall next month for sure. That tree, it is going to fall. They have models.

Where’s the recession?
We are, in theory, supposed to be in a recession right now, based on economic predictions from last year. In December 2022, CNBC confidently reported that the next recession would begin in early 2023. In October, CNN declared, “The question of a recession is no longer if, but when.”

By February, it was clear the predicted recession had not happened. The economy continued to add jobs at a surprising rate.

But USA Today was undaunted by the good economic news. Sure, it acknowledged, the recession hadn’t happened. But it forged gamely ahead: “More economists think a 2023 downturn may come later than they thought.”

If you constantly predict a recession, you’ll eventually be right, just like you’ll be right sometimes if you always predict rainy days. Economic growth doesn’t last forever. In fact, according to an IMF working paper, economies are in recession 10-12 percent of the time.

Weather forecasters don’t rely on dumb luck, though. They have models that are very accurate, at least over a week or so.

Economists on the other hand have … not much.

2008 and 2020
It’s an open secret that economists are terrible at predicting economic downturns. That same 2018 IMF paper looked at recession data from 63 countries between 1992 and 2014. In April of the year before a recession, the average prediction was 3 percent growth. The actual recession year showed a 3 percent contraction. Forecasters typically didn’t accurately assess the effect of the recession until it had been underway for a full year.

As one particularly egregious example, a 2014 study found that economists “completely failed to anticipate the fall in GDP and employment” in 2008 — the year of the housing bubble and the Great Recession.

Conversely, few people remember that in August 2019, many economists were predicting a recession that could affect the 2020 race. Instead, covid hit, causing massive economic disruptions and unprecedented government expenditures. It was an economic shock for sure. But it wasn’t a typical recession.

Covid was impossible to predict with precision. Many people had warned that a pandemic was a dangerous possibility at some point. But the exact timing of natural disasters is almost definitionally unpredictable.

Economists try to figure out how world events will affect forecasts. But they can’t tell you a year out that there’s going to be the worst global pandemic in a century, or pinpoint when a Russian dictator is going to decide to invade his neighbor.

The economy is affected by global events that simply can’t be modeled. That makes predicting a recession an exercise in presumption at the best of times.

Still, sometimes economists really should know better. The 2008 recession was the result of a speculative housing bubble. That’s the kind of structural weakness that high-priced brainy economists are supposed to warn us about.

Predicting bubbles bursting in advance is very difficult, though, because bubbles are built on false confidence. Once everyone starts predicting the bubble will burst, it bursts. If economists knew the recession was coming earlier in 2008, the recession would have come earlier.

Or to put it another way, while weather forecasters can’t affect the weather, economic predictions can very much affect the economy.

If economists think inflation will keep rising, for instance, the Federal Reserve is likely to raise interest rates — which affects the likelihood of a recession.

The Fed raising rates is why so many economists have been predicting a recession — even though so far we haven’t had one.

Now, though, after the Silicon Valley Bank failure, the Federal Reserve is signaling that it will ease off on aggressive rate hikes — which should in theory make a recession less likely.

Unless, of course, it doesn’t.

Making an unpredictable future less dangerous
The economy affects millions of people. Workers are eager to know if they can count on their jobs being there for them in six months. Businesses want to know if they should hire or start firing.

If you know the future, you can make better plans. You can make a lot of money, or at least prevent yourself from being impoverished.

Economic predictions are especially valuable in a society as precarious as ours. In the US, about half of adults get health insurance through their employer. Losing your job can precipitate a personal health catastrophe.

The US also has a weaker social safety net than most peer countries. During economic downturns, most European nations can rely on established programs to kick in and help people. In the US, by contrast, we’re dependent on a slow-moving, reactionary Congress to provide aid in times of crisis.

If economists can’t tell what’s going to happen year-to-year, average non-expert workers can’t be expected to make ideal, wealth-maximizing decisions by correctly intuiting where the economy is going to be.

Instead of trying to anticipate market fluctuations, we need to accept that we don’t know what’s going to happen, and create programs that help people weather bad outcomes

Universal free healthcare, direct payments to keep children out of poverty, free college so people can make low-risk investments in the future — programs such as these would reduce our reliance on economic predictions, because we’d be less vulnerable when those predictions go awry.

The one thing we know about the future is that it is unpredictable. Economists should stop pretending they have crystal balls and start advocating for policies that take into account the fact that none of us knows what tomorrow will bring

Business owners are complaining that no one wants to work anymore and there’s a labor crisis in America. The crisis is that workers have more leverage and are refusing to work for minimum wage and be treated like crap.

The obvious solution is raising wages and improving working conditions but some offer a different solution – a return to child labor. After all, children have no work experience, are easily exploited and are unlikely to organize.

Republicans would rather erode child labor laws than support a living wage. But it’s Democrats who have abandoned the working class, amirite?

The reason Republicans want to erode child labor protections is the exact reason we need these laws – children are easily exploited in the labor market.

This discussion gets to the heart of labor laws in this country, which is that the concept of “freedom of contract” doesn’t exist when one party (the employer) has significantly more power than another (the employee).

Initially, many attempts by the labor movement to protect workers from unfair hour requirements and extremely low wages were struck down by the Supreme Court for violating the supposed right to “freedom of contract.”

In Lochner v. New York in 1905, the Supreme Court ruled that the 14th Amendment protected a constitutional right to freedom of contract and, therefore, that a New York state law outlawing bakeries from hiring bakers for more than 10 hours a day or 60 hours a week was unconstitutional.

The theory was that the bakers should have the freedom to work as many hours as they wanted – discounting coercive pressure by employers to force bakers to work extreme and unsafe hours if they wanted to keep their jobs.

The Lochner ruling ushered in the “Lochner Era” of the Supreme Court and was used to strike down laws forbidding “yellow-dog contracts” (contracts that required workers to promise not to join a union) and minimum wage laws out of a belief in laissez-faire economics and “freedom to contract.”

This precedent changed in Nebbia v. New York in 1934 when the Supreme Court ruled there was no constitutional fundamental right to “freedom of contract,” and in 1937 in West Coast Hotel Co. v. Parrish, which upheld a minimum wage law. West Coast Hotel v. Parrish stated that economic regulation is reasonable if in the community’s best interest. Protecting kids from exploitation seems to me like it's in the best interest of the community.

Historically, child labor was common. Children often worked on family farms or were apprenticed out to learn a trade when they got a little older.

Child labor became exploitative with the industrial revolution. Children worked away from families in factories. They were paid less than adults. They were often useful for tasks requiring small hands or small stature.

Public education reformers promoted the importance of public education but laws that required school attendance were rarely enforced or only applied to primary school. (This is probably another reason why Republicans are trying to destroy education. They’ll get more workers out of it!).

The first compulsory education law was passed in Massachusetts in 1852. Mississippi was the last to require primary education for all students in 1917.

The National Child Labor Committee was founded in 1904 at the same time the larger labor movement was also trying to pass reforms to protect workers from unsafe and unfair labor practices. It served the larger labor movement’s goals to restrict child labor because child laborers drove down wages and were less likely to join in strikes and unionizing efforts.

The National Child Labor Committee hired a photographer to photograph the conditions children were worked in to influence public opinion.

The Congress passed the first anti-child labor law in 1916. Called the Keating-Owen Child Labor Act, it relied on Congress’ authority to regulate interstate commerce to ban products from “any factory, shop, or cannery that employed children under the age of 14, from any mine that employed children under the age of 16, and from any facility that had children under the age of 16 work at night or for more than eight hours during the day.”

Unfortunately, the law was short-lived. It was struck down by the Supreme Court two years later in Hammer v. Dagenhart when the court said the Congress did not have the power to regulate working conditions. The next attempt – regulating child labor by levying an extra tax on goods made using child labor – was also struck down in Bailey v. Drexel Furniture.

The Congress finally succeeded in restricting child labor in 1938 with the Fair Labor Standards Act. It established a right to minimum wage, overtime pay, a maximum number of hours that could be worked in jobs related to interstate commerce, and set a minimum age of 16 to work in mining or manufacturing industries. The act was upheld in United States v. Darby Lumber Co in 1941. It was later expanded, in 1949, to include more industries.

Today “federal labor law prohibits the employment of workers under the age of 14 in non-agricultural settings. Fourteen- and 15-year-olds must work outside of the hours of school and cannot work: more than 3 hours on a school day…more than 18 hours per week when school is in session…”

Last month, the Arkansas legislature rolled back child-labor protections. Minors under 16 previously needed age verification and work certificates. This requirement has been abolished under the newly passed Youth Hiring Act of 2023. Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders called it an “arbitrary burden” but it protected children from exploitation by ensuring that the state was involved in their employment and that those working weren’t below 14.

Arkansas isn’t the only state eroding child labor law to meet labor shortages. Last year, New Jersey expanded the number of hours teens can work. In Minnesota, Republicans proposed allowing teens to work on construction sites. Iowa is considering a bill to allow 14 and 15 year olds to work in industrial laundry services and meatpacking plants while also exempting them from worker’s compensation protections. Ohio is considering removing the cap on hours minors can work as long as a parent or guardian approves. These will expose minors to exploitation and dangerous working conditions.

Gun violence is the leading cause of death for children because Republicans reject gun-law reforms. Public education is being harmed by anti-history laws and book banning. Now there’s a movement to send children back to work, all to avoid raising wages and improving working conditions.

Late Thursday, the Times broke the story of a grand jury in New York voting to indict Donald Trump on more than 30 counts related to a hush-money scheme currently investigated by the Manhattan district attorney’s office.

The criminal former president said two weekends ago that he expected to be arrested the following Tuesday. He dominated headlines, and the resources of law enforcement in New York and Washington, for days. But last night, according to USA Today, Trump was “shocked” by the news.

The story has many angles. Top of mind is that Trump is the first former president in American history to be accused of a crime. The second is whether he’ll be convicted. That’s hard to say for now. An attorney said he will refuse a plea deal. “There is no crime,” Joe Tacopina said on “Today.”

Skepticism is in order. Trump is above the law. He has been for years. It’s natural to think he’ll get off. The rich are different. They have more money.

But Trump’s initial refusal to accept a deal, which hasn’t been offered yet, tells us something about his thinking. If Trump were going to get off, on account of being rich (and having more money), an indictment would never have been brought in the first place. The DA’s office would have found reasonsreasons not to. So in a sense, the indictment itself is the hard part. Trump knows this. That’s why he was “shocked.” If you’re going after the king, you best not miss. Trump suspects DA Alvin Bragg isn’t going to miss.

If Bragg isn’t going to miss, and Trump probably believes he won’t, he needs another way to win that doesn’t involve evidence, facts and the law. We know what he’s going to do. He’ll turn the trial into a televised extravaganza so the public can’t tell whether Bragg is right, and real crimes have been committed, or whether Trump is right – all of this is a witch hunt, he has said and will continue saying. In rightwing politics, Trump is a martyr.

He’ll do something else. We know he will. He will attempt to incite violence among his followers. He believes that will send a message – trying to bring down Trump is trying to bring down America. If the public fears blood in the streets, well, there’s an obvious solution. Trump gets off scot-free.

We know he’ll do this, because he’s already done it. In the weeks before the J6 insurrection, Trump and his allies whipped his followers into a thick foam. They whipped them so much that followers became nihilists. There was no tomorrow if the enemy were not defeated today. That was costly. Over 1,000 of them have been prosecuted so far. The foam faded.

It will likely stay faded. Two weekends ago, when Trump said he expected to be arrested, he called for “protests,” meaning the revival of the spirit of the J6 insurrection. Law enforcement in New York and the Capitol prepared themselves for the revival. But it never came. Of those few who did protest, they were outnumbered by news cameras covering their demonstration.

In a piece published Monday, a reporter for the Christian Science Monitor asked why. Why would loyalists who stormed the Capitol in an attempted takeover of the United States government fail to show up? The answer appears to be two-tiered. On the one hand, loyalists fear prosecution and the subsequent ruination of their lives. On the other hand, they see the ruination of insurrectionists’ lives and think – where was Donald Trump?

“Trump asked people to protest after the 2020 election, then abandoned them. ... Trump abandoned some of his most faithful followers,” Rick McCargar told the Christian Science Monitor in Waco. “I look at this [then-pending indictment] and say, ‘He didn’t do anything to help those people.’ So would I stand out in the rain, sleet, or snow for him now? No.”

The other way for Donald Trump to beat the charges against him is by winning the 2024 election (presuming it’s still US Department of Justice policy never to indict a sitting president). That’s where the trial and the incitement of violence come together. While followers may fear the legal consequences of “protesting” for Trump, and while some of them accuse him of abandoning his followers, they still seem ready to vote for him.

While “it’s clear the aftermath of Jan. 6 has left a bitter taste – and soured at least some of them on the man himself,” reported the Christian Science Monitor. “Many say they will probably still vote for Mr. Trump in 2024.”

So Trump won’t only be the first former president to be accused of a crime. He will be the first former president to run for president for a second time while under indictment. What’s more, he has such a hold on his followers that they will vote for him – despite his being under indictment and despite their harboring feelings of betrayal. For them, one-way loyalty is jim-dandy.

This aspect of Trump’s power is underappreciated. Put another way, this expression of loyalty is misunderstood. To normal people, loyalty is equitable. I got your back. You got mine. You break that trust, I stop trusting you. Such are the stakes of individuals working cooperatively.

But loyalty among Trump supporters isn’t that. It’s about power. It’s about fear of Trump’s power. It’s about the fear of being cast out of the group for taking a stand against the man who betrayed the group. It’s about the fear of the consequences of privileging individual interest above the group’s.

So Trump isn’t just inciting violence to intimidate prosecutors in the hope he’ll get off the charges against him. His incitement doesn’t just scare normal people. It scares his people, too. If he wants to win the Republican Party’s nomination, and he likely will, Trump must keep them that way.

At a campaign rally in Iowa on January 23, 2016, Donald Trump boasted that his voting base was so loyal to him that he "could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn't lose voters, ok? It's like, incredible."

Well, I guess we will soon find out, won't we?

A grand jury convened by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg has voted to indict the former president on what some outlets claim are 34 charges stemming from $130,000 in hush money paid to Stormy Daniels, a pornographic film star, director, and entertainer, whose birth name — which she prefers not to use — is Stephanie Clifford.

As recently as six days ago, at his Waco rally, Trump denied ever having had sex with Clifford, who he referred to as "Horseface." So obviously, he is willing to lose the sex worker vote. But Trump and the nitwit chorus line of GOP politicians also characterize the indictment as "political persecution."

Yet Bragg must have evidence, not just testimony, that the payoff took place, so it will be interesting to see how Trump's lawyers explain what the money was actually for.

Presumably, the Trump campaign believed the Former Guy's candidacy could withstand one sex scandal, but not two. But the tragedy in all of this may have been that they may have been wrong.

In early October 2016, the release of the Access Hollywood tape, in which Trump boasted that he could "grab [women] by the pussy” and get away with it, became a survivable scandal.

By contrast, when Trump's consigliere and fixer, Michael Cohen, paid Daniels for her silence, we had known for decades that Trump was a serial adulterer. Would one infidelity more or less have changed the equation?

I don't think so.

But I do have to wonder if what Trump was potentially embarrassed about, given that he sought to project an image of being universally irresistible to beautiful women, was the implication that he had paid for sex.

While many news outlets characterize the $130,000 payout as covering up an "affair," what Trump and Daniels allegedly did was not what most of us would think of as an affair.

Instead, it was a series of phone conversations (I am guessing phone sex) and sexual encounters over two years. The relationship, which may have had a commercial dimension from the get-go, began with a dinner invitation in 2006, culminating in, as Daniels deadpanned at the Stand Up NY comedy club in Manhattan in 2019, "The worst 90 seconds of my life."

It was a terrible job, girlfriend, but someone had to do it. And I bet Melania would say the same thing if she were being honest.

Besides the fact that our legal system is not yet broken, there are three lessons in this.

First, you should probably never try to shame a successful sex entrepreneur into silence. By definition, a woman who has exposed everything she has to reveal and made a small fortune from it is not subject to convention.

Second, when you have paid off said woman, don't follow up by threatening her: she is a fucking professional.

And third, Daniels would sue if Trump defamed her. If you are a porn star, there is literally no such thing as bad publicity.

Since the news broke about the indictment last night, right before the 6 o’clock news hour, there has been much hysteria about whether Trump's "base" will react by taking to the streets, committing acts of violence and successfully redoubling their efforts to return him to the White House in 2024.

None of these things will happen.

For one, people underestimate the effects of the prosecutions stemming from the January 6, 2021, insurrection. As far as I can tell, almost none of those people believed they would be arrested and charged. Those who thought they were in legal jeopardy believed they would be pardoned in the waning days of the Trump presidency. They know differently now.

Individual acts of violence are possible, but we live in a country where rightwing extremists do these things almost daily. So do they really need a new reason? No.

And finally, the 2024 election. Whether the Trump base consolidates around this indictment, or subsequent one, doesn't matter. We, and the numerous outraged bags of hot air that call themselves Republican politicians, have direct evidence that Donald Trump not only can't win a national election with only his own voters but that at least part of that base has shifted to Ron DeSantis.

That voting constituency isn't enthusiastic about chaos, threats of violence and whether you can be president from jail. In other words, Trump needs moderate Republican and independent voters more than he ever has, and he has less access to them than ever.

Look at the evidence: Trump lost the "I'm-not-crazy-but-vote-Republican" demographic in the 2018 midterms. He lost it in 2020. And all signs point to the fact that, except for a few races where Trump-backed candidates prevailed in 2022, what a Trump endorsement accomplished was to nominate an extremist that even Republicans ran away from. Ask Arizona’s Democratic Governor Katie Hobbs if you don't believe me.

I have been skeptical about a Trump comeback for a long time. This is not because the net is closing on a man who has probably committed far more crimes than he will ever be charged with, but because he is a highly idiosyncratic and disorganized person.

And the best evidence is this: Trump's legal demise has begun with the most unnecessary crime he will be charged with. Why?

Because he was too cheap to pay off Stormy Daniels with his own money and too stupid to admit the error and file corrected forms with the IRS and the Federal Election Commission. Worse? He underestimated a woman who has a far cannier head for business and more courage than he has ever had.

So Stormy Daniels? I salute you, girl. Thank you for your service.

Expect the Republicans to remain silent in the immediate aftermath of the massacre Monday, in Nashville, that left three adults and three 9-year-old kids literally shot to pieces. The shooter is also dead.

This is a familiar pattern. While the Democrats, this time led by Joe BIden, demand that Congress renew the ban on semiautomatic rifles (“assault weapons”), the Republicans will offer no more than prayers for families of the victims, and gratitude for “first responders.”

At some point, however, maybe a week, the Republicans will break their silence. They will re-dedicate themselves to preserving the Second Amendment and the right to self-defense. They will accuse the Democrats of “politicizing a tragedy.” They will also fake being outraged by the risk of “infringing the rights of law abiding citizens.”

We know this pattern of behavior will recur, because we’ve seen it so many times over the last 20 years, the period after the Congress allowed the old ban on the sale of semiautomatic weapons to expire. We also know, on account of this past behavior, that the Republicans, who control the House, won’t do a damn thing to stop mass death.

That’s the end of one story, but it should be the beginning of another, a story waiting to be told by liberals in a context of democratic politics about what the Republicans really care about and what they really want. They don’t want to solve problems. They don’t want to help people. They want to control people, especially outpeople who use democratic politics to undermine “the natural order of things.”

That they want to control outpeople was evident Monday in rightwing discourse on the shooter, Audrey Hale. The Nashville police chief said that she was transgender. Whether that’s true remains to be seen. But for rightwingers, that was enough to call for a crackdown. Guns didn’t shoot six people to pieces. “Wokeness” did.

From this, you can see the punitive desire behind rightwing politics. On the one hand, the government can’t do anything to stop mass death because stopping it might “infringe the rights of law abiding citizens.” On the other hand, the government must do something about “wokeness,” because failing to act will lead only to mass death!

How do the Second Amendment rights of trans people figure into this thinking? They don’t, because outpeople don’t deserve them.

They are not “law-abiding citizens.”

If trans people are not included among “law-abiding citizens,” that means that “the law” isn’t the law, but “God’s law,” which, from the rightwing viewpoint, puts white Christian men on top of society – the natural order of things. There are males and there are females. Being trans breaks God’s law. Lawbreakers deserve punishment.

That we talk at all about trans people is a consequence of democratic politics, of outpeople raising hell until a majority starts listening and is brought around to the reality of trans people. So rightwing politics not only seeks to punish trans people for breaking God’s law. It seeks to punish anyone using democratic politics. If the law won’t do it, then God’s people are free to take the law into their own hands.

This is why I have argued that shooting massacres are, one way or another, an outcome of democratic politics running up against God’s law. To adherents, the law is a gun. A gun is the law. If God’s people fail democratically – if they fail to gain control of the government in order to enact laws that will punish outpeople – they are free to take the law into their own hands. If mass death is the result, so be it.

In other words, mass death, or the threat of mass death, is another way in rightwing politics to control people, especially outpeople, who don’t buy guns the way God’s people do. The people with the most guns are the people most in control. The right to bear arms is the right of God’s people to force outpeople to stay where they belong.

When the Republicans finally break their silence, maybe in a week, to say that they can’t and won’t use the government to solve the problem of mass death, that’s because, to them, mass death isn’t a problem. Mass death is a means to an end, which is social control.

To be sure, Audrey Hale does not fit the profile. Whether she’s transgender or not, it’s rare for shooters not to be white men. It happens, but these are not exceptions to the rule. They prove it. After all, if you’re a target of punishment, for breaking God’s law, for being who you are, you might think if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em.

“If a child is on the verge of starvation, you must call CPS, not spend hundreds of millions on disproportionately unhealthy lunches, a huge percentage of which are discarded,” conservative pundit Ben Shapiro told California Congressman Ted Lieu on Twitter.

Shapiro is wrong. There’s a great deal of evidence that free school lunches reduce student hunger and improve children’s health.

Conservatives don’t necessarily care about good outcomes, though. That’s because they don’t want good outcomes. They want to police people.

The discourse around school lunches is a brutal, disturbing example of the broader carceral logic of rightwing politics.

Republicans and those on the right believe that government should be used not to help those in need, but to punish and discipline marginalized people.

School lunches have been studied extensively, and there’s little question that they improve health outcomes for children.

Contrary to Shapiro’s claim that school lunches are unhealthy, research finds that children who receive free school meals are more likely to receive daily adequate nutrition and more likely to eat fruits and vegetables, and drink milk.

Shapiro also argues that school lunches are economically inefficient. He believes poor families don’t really exist, and that if children are hungry, it’s because they’re being abused, and they should be taken away from their parents.

This is ludicrous. Real hunger and poverty do exist in the US. There are families that do not have money to afford both rent and food. There are families who want to care for their children but lack the resources to do so.

The US government estimates that 12.5 percent of households with children are food insecure, which means that there are times when they do not have enough food to feed everyone in the family.

In most cases, adults feed children first. But even given that, in 6.3 percent of households, children experienced food insecurity.

School meal programs are also incredibly efficient. One study found that every dollar spent on school meal programs saves two dollars in reduced health care costs and reduced poverty.

A study of Sweden found that free school lunch programs resulted in 3 percent higher lifetime earnings for children.

The greatest gains in earnings were among the poorest students. But even more affluent students benefited.

In contrast, when CPS removes children from their home, they are at great risk. Children in the foster care system have higher risk of learning disabilities, depression, asthma and obesity. They are less likely to go to college.

CPS investigations also disproportionately target Black students. More than 50 percent of Black children in the US are subject to child welfare investigations.

Discrimination is widespread. School officials are more likely to call child welfare about Black children. CPS is more likely to investigate Black families. Courts are more likely to remove Black children from homes.

Even if a family is not feeding their child as well as they could, school lunches are often a better option than removing children from the home.

Direct aid can help children in difficult situations, whereas the foster care system can be traumatic and make things worse even for children with neglectful parents.

School lunches reduce hunger, improve children’s lives, and reduce costs to society. Child welfare interventions are frequently racist and have negative health and education outcomes for children. They should be a last resort, not a substitute for aid.

So why does Shapiro prefer calling the authorities on poor families, rather than just helping them feed their children?

Dan McLaughlin, a writer at National Review, elucidated. He wrote a Twitter thread arguing that school lunches should be rolled back and child labor laws should be weakened.

“Literally, a ‘free lunch’ vs working,” he fulminated. “Perpetual childhood vs responsibility.”

McLaughlin and Shapiro see aid to hungry children as an assault on virtue. Having money is equated with work is equated with discipline and moral fiber.

Feeding your children is a test of character. Those who succeed are good, upstanding people, who need no help from the dangerous liberal state.

Those who fail are lazy and disreputable, and they should be policed by the virtuous conservative state.

Most people can see this logic is repulsive. Shapiro and McLaughlin think children should be denied food (and forced to work?!) in order to punish their parents for lack of discipline.

That’s obviously monstrous.

But these arguments undergird much of how we approach poverty and the social safety net.

One egregious example is from 2021. Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot took $281.5 million in covid relief funds — which could have been used on air filtration in schools, or to vaccinate underserved communities — and instead gave it to police.

Nationwide, since the 2008 recession, police budgets have rebounded, but education budgets have languished.

Spending money to help people in trouble — on schools, on health care, on libraries, on direct aid to children in poverty — is cost-effective and humane.

But instead, we often choose to disinvest and then to criminalize the hunger, poverty and desperation that results.

This is the argument of the much-demonized defund the police movement.

Activists and advocates argue that helping people in need is more equitable, more just, and ultimately more cost-effective than immiserating people and then sending law-enforcement after them to immiserate them further.

Do we want to pay to feed hungry children? Or would we rather pay law enforcement to harass them and their families?

Ben Shapiro, Dan McLaughlin and their ilk want to spend money on punitive authorities, because they dream of a world in which everyone is kept in their place by force.

They oppose school lunches and every policy that has the potential to make the US more equal and more free.