Don't bother reading this if you are like, to the left of Biden. None of this is novel to you.
It is passé to get mad at Matt Yglesias in 2024. I try not to care and only find the funny things he does, like when he wrote a book about how his fellow Americans should compete with China's economic growth rate by more than tripling the country's population. The man's so played out that even Chapo kinda got bored of talking about him. I know all this. I also know it's bad for the brain to constantly browse twitter's For You page, but I still do it because I am a fundamentally idiotic individual. All of these culminated in me coming across this post this afternoon at work.
This shouldn't have made me mad. I wasn't really fuming mad, I was more of the kind of mad that parents get when you were clearly smoking weed in the house so they ask you if you smoked pot just to see if you are enough of their beloved child to not lie to them, and you lie anyway because you were 17. Just a kind of defeated mad.
All of the things in the image Matt screencapped above is probably true. I won't really dispute the facts as presented here. Even more so because it's Fox News reporting what I assume to be something positive about the Biden Admin. What Matt is trying to say here is that Biden has been a net good for America from 2020 to 2024, and that him continuing on to a second term would keep this up.
The problem with this is that all of these figures do not translate to what the average American experiences, and especially what the future of an Average American will experience. Let's take the very bottom category of the image. Some of the less attentive will take a look at this and understandably assume "oh that's nice, that means a lot of houses are being sold!" But let's take a careful look: it says "new home sales price." This means only the prices on houses being sold are going up, not the amount of buyers. And this is also correct: who, especially people around my age who are supposed to be the future of the American working adult, are buying houses? I own two businesses as a 28 year old (an extreme rarity considering they're not some stupid crypto or web3 shit), and I can't afford a down payment on a house. What about a 28 year old nonbinary person working graveyard shifts at a gas station in Georgia? Which of these scenarios is most accurate to them: one where they have the 20-30k in cash to put a down payment on a 2bd 1bath single story house, or one where they can't even live paycheck to paycheck because they are drowning in student loan, car, and credit card payments?
What does a 2.7% decrease in unemployment rate mean to the person who hurt their back and can't work construction anymore, and their disability paychecks can barely cover rent? What if said ex-construction worker got lucky enough to get a part time job to supplement their income and that suddenly makes them disqualify from disability? What does the 2.7% decrease in unemployment mean to a homeless veteran who got so fucked up from his 4 years in Afghanistan that he can't go 2 hours without screaming at the top of his lungs for his buddies atomized by a roadside IED blast?
What does a 15% increase in wages mean to a woman whose landlord raised rent by 150 dollars a month for next year's lease renewal? What does the 15% increase in wages mean to a middle school teacher with a fresh Bachelor's Degree in Chemistry whose student loan moratorium got killed off by the Supreme Court and has to pay off all of their loans?
Statistics, no matter how true, don't mean anything if people can't feel it. I can give you a slice of Kraft American Single and say that it's 25.8134% more cheesier than last year's, but if you can't taste the F L A V O R B L A S T, that 25.8134% figure is meaningless.
Let's take a look at another American president who Biden is compared to a lot, for some reason. FDR served almost 4 presidential terms and is consistently at the top of people's list for Best American President. This is not only because he beat Axis Powers in WW2, but also mostly because he successfully brought the USA out from the Great Depression and into one of the most prosperous nations in the world. A lot of this was done through many, many government programs and subsidies to the American people. WPP, WPA, TVA, FSP (now we know as SNAP)... programs like these not only gave the destitute Americans jobs, but jobs that lead into the American culture and infrastructure being developed further and improving the livelihood for everyone. This is what America needs now, a century later. This is how people see tangible improvements being made to their lives, and support the administration that implemented them. Can you imagine if the FDR administration on his first term did as little as the Biden administration did and just had town criers yelling out stuff like "unemployment rate has decreased 2.7% since the Stock Market Crash!" Would there have been 1924 Matt Yglesias pointing to those children and saying "It's impressive that Roosevelt did so much despite the bad economy!"
Reiterating my first point: none of this is anything new. What I suggested has been proposed by mainstream Democrats with actual platforms and political careers, yet none of this is taken seriously. There is a clear disconnect between the average American and the Democratic politicians. The precedent has been set, yet the Democrats have been asleep at the wheel for 4 years. In eight months, any lead the Democrats had could be lost, yet they only seem to yell and tut-tut at the people desperate for improvements to their lives.
Times have passed. Everyone is tired. The Progressive push from 2015-2020 failed. Bernie Sanders has disappointed many with his attitude towards the Israel-Palestine conflict, and Being a Progressive is no longer the meta platform to set yourself apart as a politician, and the ones claiming to have been one have lately been bleeding fascism especially with the issue of the recent struggle for Palestinian liberty. The old neoliberals we loved to make fun of like Matt Yglesias and the new, younger twitter neoliberals with the globe, sock, Ukraine flag, etc. emojis only seem to rise in popularity from concern trolling people with actual political convictions, telling us that everything is fine actually, and that we are the ones making Biden and the already right wing Democrats shift toward the right.
Especially maddening are these liberals who essentially hold the LGBTQ+ people hostage, saying that Biden is the only thing keeping them from not losing their rights, never mind the fact that states like Kansas and Missouri are already moments away from a Kristallnacht against queer people, passing legislation that nullify gender identities granted by the federal government. They ask: do you not have any heart left for these people? And I do. Every time when my friend who I love very much talk about laws being passed or proposed in her state that strips what little rights or protections she has left, I feel my heart getting ripped into bits inside me, because I can't do anything for her, and because I know that the depraved, eternally damned fuckers can just coast by doing nothing except pressing the "Trump is even worse for LGBTQ+ people!" button and they'd be right, and therefore continuing this ouroboros.
These liberals have won. Whether or not Biden wins, the untrammeled march of apathy and despair will go on, but they don't care. They will always have the stats to back them up and they'd be correct enough to win whatever stupid twitter argument they want to post about. And if they don't, well, half of these fuckers live in Europe anyways so what's it to them. That's what seeing that Matt Yglesias post got me so mad about, all these things I just said being felt in a microsecond, writing all of this shit in an hour and a half.