Several years ago, I heard that in the Age of Information after the birth of the internet, information would be segregated out of ordinary circulation. Information would be traded among the powerful and important people and the less powerful people would be out in the cold ignorant shadows. I laughed. Surely that would never happen in the United States where people can use libraries or the internet to learn whatever they want to know about almost any topic.
Because of the Trump Presidency, everyone now has heard of “fake news.” And the nation seems divided about all kinds of political information that is traded in a gossipy way without people ever having a sense of truth about the stories and without meaningful resolution of what these political stories say about us. People are told partisan stories and they are expected to choose either the version on the left or the version on the right. What if neither version is true? What if the divisiveness that people see in our politics is the entire point of these political stories?
A confused public doesn’t really know what our government is supposed to be doing anymore. Congress is trying to impeach the President again, a la Nixon, but what Congress isn’t doing is honestly trying to improve anything. We are supposed to believe that Congress is legitimately distracted when they are too busy to get anything done but the great undoing. The Congressional political trajectory has been destructive enough to cause the ominous loss of our middle class, and Congress still hasn’t reformed its policies. Doing more of the same banking deregulation, tolerance for monopolies, privatizing government and privatizing military, trading foreign influence, fiscal and monetary malfeasance and malinvestment isn’t helping anyone in the long run because it destroys more than it can ever build. Neoliberalism has short circuited our Country’s ability to solve its own problems. Gradually our political and economic problems are undermining still more of what the middle class once had and once could do.  Congress’s bad policy package is making what was once easy to accomplish, now impossible.
If you want to learn more about the changing political ideologies in the U.S. over its political history, buy a copy of Political Catsup with Economy Fries available at Amazon.com.