The price of excess orthodoxy

Za "Time" from New York

Print editions of daily newspapers have long since given way to audio-podcasts, so many New Yorkers, with headphones on, learned that Joseph Biden and Donald Trump secured a sufficient number of delegates for the presidential nominations of their parties. Morning hearings of CNN's "5 tings" or "7" of the "Washington Post" on the way to work did not reveal anything more than what was already guessed about the names of the candidates. The only thing left unclear is how the world's leading democracy found itself faced with such a choice.

photo: ap

By choosing between a representative of Democrats with low support among voters, whose administration does not fulfill its promises to Ukraine, does not distance itself from the Israeli government that carries out brutal retaliation in Gaza, nor has control over part of the southern border, and, on the other hand, a Republican leader who continues to challenge previous election results, pending trials for obstructing the peaceful transfer of power, falsification of election results and illegal retention of classified documents - to put aside for the moment the convictions against Trump for financial embezzlement, disputed payments to a porn actress and sexual assault on a writer - or that special prosecutor Robert Hur describes Biden as an "elderly man with a bad memory" who doesn't quite remember when his own son died.

If Google does not help in getting the answer Gemini with which some pass the time on the fifty-kilometer-long subway line from Manhattan to Queens, seeking, in their leisure time, that this artificial intelligence tool generates a photo of a dolphin riding a bicycle on Mars, they will have more than four years to come to some sort of conclusion. Of course, if the party conventions that the Democrats will soon hold in Chicago and the Republicans in Milwaukee officially confirm the candidacies of Biden and Trump, who recently won new victories in the party votes in Georgia, Washington and Mississippi.

PROGRESS AND SUCCESS

In accordance with the spirit of progress and success in doing some work, because they are progress i productivity typical words to announce in America that the other day was beautiful and joyful, neither one nor the other reconciles with such images that a considerable number of voters have about them.

This could first of all be seen in Biden's spirited speech on the state of the nation, which was supposed to reassure all those who harbored doubts about his cognitive abilities and physical endurance, including numerous supporters of his party. Because - one got the impression - how he avoids public appearances and long interviews, that he reads speeches from a teleprompter and rehearses texts for hours before each performance. Under the harsh scrutiny of a live broadcast watched by 32 million people, faced with hostile Republicans, jibes and provocative questions, Biden perfectly controlled the situation, precisely laid out the key priorities of his policy, played with the inconsistencies of his opponents, entered into open duels with them and exactly thirteen times, he directly opposed what "his predecessor" was doing without even mentioning his name.

Some of those who sat that time in front of the television screens then joked that they were completely crushed by the amount of energy of the speaker. In their relaxed style, chatting with friends, New Yorkers joked, "we don't know what he was on, but give me some." It is, by the way, a city where you can often meet its residents wearing a T-shirt, shorts and slippers with a book in hand from their apartment to a nearby bar, continuing to read somewhere in the corner while sipping a "Manhattan" or "Penicillin", greeting with a smile of all those known and unknown people who are having fun around them.

THE SPEECH HAS CHANGED NOTHING

Despite a CNN poll showing that 33 percent of those who watched the president's State of the Nation address responded positively to the address, the latest ABC/Ipsos poll shows that voters' support for Biden remained at some XNUMX percent and that nothing fundamentally changed after his speech. Although the president's annual addresses to the joint session of both houses of Congress, which are always first-rate political events, originally had a completely different function, this time it was a clear signal for the start of the election campaign. When that was over, it became clear that the Democrats need much more than a speech like this, that things are not going very well for the current president, especially as the party's popularity among those who traditionally support it is declining.

The latest Gallup report shows a downward trend in support for the Democratic Party among African-Americans and those who identify as Latino. By the way, these are the ethnic categories that you are persecuted to declare in some extremely unexpected situations, whether it is going to the dentist or filling out a questionnaire for a membership card at the local library. The polling agency's findings show that Democrats still have a huge advantage over Republicans among blacks, but that support has now fallen to 47 percent, the lowest since 1999 when 72 percent trusted the Democratic Party. percent of these voters, while this party is now favored by 12 percent of Latin American adults, which is 14 percent lower than in 2021. Unfortunately, these tendencies supporters of this party, they do not change overnight.

photo: ap

On the other hand, Trump's approval rating is at times much better than when he was president and according to ABC/Ipsos, currently stands at 36 percent. Among his supporters there is really anything and everything, including quite a number of those who come from the Balkans and who, fleeing their autocrats, have embraced others, but if we leave aside the MAGA extremists, hardened racists, crazy conspiracy theorists or those who are enthusiastic by court decisions that frozen embryos can be considered children, some of his followers are not even like those squeamish types who, for example, supported Vojislav Seselja.

These, at least as far as New York and its surroundings are concerned, are often very decent, cultured and educated people who have graduated from solid universities and have good jobs. They are not aggressive, violent or aggressive, look urbane, drive nice cars, often work hard at two jobs a day to pay rent, gas, food, and student loans they took out at the end of high school for thirty years, often more than that. from 300 dollars. They don't know too many details about American foreign or domestic policy, and they don't care much about it, but they don't like, for example, gender-nondescript signs being added to the doors of disabled toilets because they're conservative, and they see that as a great value. .

MORNING RELIGIOUS STUDY

Among them, there are also those who wake up their children at six o'clock in the morning every day in order to get to the religious education class in the nearby church before the school starts, who are paid extra, regardless of the fact that they already have debts on cards that sometimes exceed ten thousand dollars and which is why they can't even get a new phone on installments because they have a bad credit score. That's why, when they pay rent and utilities, sometimes they don't even have enough left over to buy fuel for that week, and then they usually ask friends and close people to lend them a hundred dollars, whining about how things are worse and more expensive now. Because they feel humiliated by those loans, and afraid that it could be even worse, they are convinced that the cause of all their problems is the rule of the Democrats, regardless of the fact that the debts on the accounts were piling up even when the Republicans were in power, but now further irritating are the Trump trials they believe are politically motivated or Target handing out rainbow-colored balloons to children in front of stores. After that, they threw it in the trash loyalties cards of this retail chain with points for discounts, which they have carefully collected over the years and add up with each purchase.

Memory is selective, things from the past always seem better than they were, the time of Trump's reign remained in a much better memory than how it all actually looked, regardless of the fact that he reminds every day how it could all be if he returned to The White House. Not only does he publicly claim that he will not be a dictator if he is re-elected, except on the first day of his mandate, but these days he says that some of the migrants who illegally cross the US border "are not people" but "animals".

When a reporter from Fox News, traditionally favored by him, noted how his earlier statements about migrants "poisoning the blood of the nation" resembled what dictators like Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini said, Trump replied, seemingly worried: "I didn't know that." but immediately after that he continued his story that "our country is being poisoned", that everything he said before was correct, repeating the mantra that many of them are criminals who will continue to practice their only profession even in America who know. By the way, based on data from the National Academy of Sciences, US citizens led the way in criminal acts compared to illegal migrants, so belief in Trump's words is often rooted in irrational affinities rather than tangible facts.

photo: ap

It cannot be said that the rule of the Democratic Party did not partly contribute to all this because while talking about democracy, infrastructure projects, curbing inflation, new jobs and renewable energy sources, the rich, as their senator Bernie Sanders would say, have never had it better. Bloomberg noted earlier that the 50 richest Americans have more than 165 million of the poorest, which is half of the total population of this country. The wealth of Amazon owner Jeff Bezos and Tesla CEO Elon Musk is greater than the assets of the bottom 40 percent of Americans. According to some logic of things, the better off the rich are, the harder it is for the middle class and the poor, because the amount of welfare is not unlimited, so that is one of the causes of dissatisfaction of part of the population.

However, not everything can be bought with money; playing with Jeminay on long commutes on the New York subway, many were taken aback by the answers this AI-based tool gave about the aforementioned Musk. When asked if his tweets on the "Ex" platform have a more negative effect on society than what Adolf Hitler did, Jeminaj replied that it is not possible to say which is more harmful - Mask's memes or Hitler himself. No matter how controversial and unsympathetic Musk was to many, such evaluations from a digital tool, as they are beginning to be used more and more in the educational system, are difficult to support with any tangible evidence.

Therefore, it is precisely this excess of orthodoxy, occasionally accompanied by some kind of inconsistency, but above all by the fact that they missed the opportunity to make this country much better than it is, that began to backfire on the democratic establishment. There is still enough time before the election for things to change, the new president will first of all be decided by the voters of Michigan and Pennsylvania, because those two states are key in the measurement, not Gemini. However, as much as the strengthening of conservatives seems to many to be a key problem, it is not that the predecessor of Joseph Biden is supported by a considerable number of voters, but that the successor of Donald Trump is not supported by everyone else.