A New Version of"With Democrats Things Get Better" Hits This Tuesday
A New Version of"With Democrats Things Get Better" Hits This Tuesday
Catch the presentation live Tuesday, 1pm EST, or a recording here when you can
Fellow optimists,
Each month I create a new and updated version of my core presentation, With Democrats Things Get Better. It is my most important work, a lively distillation of my many years in the fight, and the main source for all this Hopium I have for our future. It should be viewed as a sort of orientation for this site, and I hope everyone here will have time to watch it this month.
With Dems takes 30-35 minutes, and I promise you will leave the presentation proud of your party, proud of your President, and prepared to go out and help us win the big economic debate with Republicans this year.
You can RSVP here for the live showing on Tuesday at 1pm EST or catch a recording here on the Hopium site when you have time. I spend a great deal of time updating it each month so even if you saw it a few months ago it will be new and fresh.
With Dems tells a simple but very powerful story - that since 1989, when the Cold War ended and a new age of globalization began, Democrats have repeatedly made things better when in the White House. In the Clinton, Obama and Biden Presidencies, we’ve seen growth, strong job creation, lower deficits, and American progress. With the two Bushes and Trump we’ve seen something else, something far worse. We’ve seen recessions, higher deficits and American decline. And now dangerous extremism too.
In my mind, the story we tell in With Dems is the most important, least understood story in American politics today. For what it shows is that our politics is not really about left and right, but forward and backward, modern and reactionary, success and failure, good and not so good, pragmatic and extreme. There is one modern, successful political party in America that has repeatedly made things better when in power; and another, which has repeatedly failed to do its part. The frame of left and right so common in our political discourse is “red wavy,” and serves the right by obscuring the good we’ve done and their repeated failures. We must fight against it with all of the energy we can muster.
Working to establish this far more accurate contrast of “Dems good and Rs a wrecking ball” is one of our most important collective projects here at Hopium Chronicles. Consider this graph, one of the core graphs from With Dems. Since 1989 there have been 49m jobs created in America. 47m of those jobs, 96%, have been created under Democratic Presidents. Essentially all of them, over 34 years now. The scale of the failure of Republican economic policy over a very long period of time needs to be more widely understood.
The story we discover in With Dems is very relevant to our current moment, one where we find the Democrats once again fighting to keep our economy growing and the Republicans once again pushing us into recession and now, incredibly, also into an unprecedented default.
To prep for With Dems, be sure to review my post which goes into more detail about the arguments in the presentation, and my new look at yet another strong jobs report.
So hope to see you on Tuesday if you can make it live, or watch it when you have the time. But do watch - With Dems will leave you with a little extra spring in your step. I promise.
Keep working hard all, and thanks for being part of our early days here at Hopium - Simon
Simon, I'm a fan of your WIth Dems Things Get Better preso. I have shared it with a number of people, and it always gives me a lift. I would love advice on how to counter the argument 'you can make numbers say whatever you want them to say,' particularly in light of the WashPo NBC poll that came out this weekend showing President Biden trailing Trump in a head to head match up. I suspect inflation is the big culprit, but given everything that Biden has accomplished and everything Trump has tried to corrupt, it astonishes me anyone beyond his core base wants to vote for him. The Independents number is particularly troubling.
One of the things I'm also makes me incredibly proud to be part of the Democratic Party and greater family/coalition, is that throughout the 20th & 21st Centuries, there is one party that has been a trajectory of improving itself and repairing its past mistakes because of its commitment to a philosophy and therefore the flexibility to expand the ways in which it is expressed, and one party that has repeatedly disgraced its greatest legacies and moved backward due to ideological rigidity and a thirst for being in power that ultimately swallowed them whole. Best example by far is that the Democratic Party was once the party of White Supremacy......but had also always been the part of the working man. We have plenty of work left to do, but we had great principled leaders and activists pushing them through the years that allowed us to evolve into the party the represents the FULL scope of diversity present in our populous, and to be the driving force behind legislation that has fundamentally made things better for more people across those demographic lines. The Republicans greatest legacy, being the party that corrected our nation's most profound and unforgivable sin of slavery, has been disgraced and discarded by their failure to continue to grow with modern society and meet the needs and challenges of our time. Their rigid ideological stance on isolationism and a totally unregulated private sector caused them to FAIL to meet the moment of both world wars and the great depression, and it has caused them to fail repeatedly in this modern age of globalization. No political party will ever be perfect, and the nature of politics is that at it's best, policy is always much slower than culture and therefore disappointing and frustrating.....but my party has been on a growth trajectory for nearly a century of expanding the meaning of fairness, deepening the meaning of freedom, and broadening the scope of inclusion among our citizenry to the endless bounty and abundance of well being this great country has to offer.....I'm goddamn proud to be a part of that.