Returning To The Norms Is Not Good Enough

Senator Chris Murphy presented some dire responses in his recent interview with The Bulwark:

I don’t disagree with him. Trump and his cabinet of sycophants and syphilitic idealogues are going to pull out all the stops to birth a Theocratic hellscape of military-backed white nationalism.

Given that there are likely a million or so Substack articles offering alarm bells and warning sirens, I’d prefer to talk about how we find a way to move forward toward something new instead.

Another of Sen. Murphy’s quotes from the same article got me thinking:

This struck me as interesting because that’s the premise of Progressivism in a nutshell.

My neo-liberal friends love to talk about the institutions and the norms. “They must hold,” I see and hear from them quite frequently.

I always do a head nod in response, to the side with a look of, “Well…I guess?”

The norms are great and all when things have been great for you. But what about those in the marginalized communities? Here in Asheville, it took six weeks for us to have potable water again after Helene came through. The Flint, Michigan water crisis took four years and nine months. Today, finally, it meets the standards of the Safe Drinking Water Act, and the Michigan Department of Environment, Great Lakes, and Energy reports lead levels continue to decline which is great, but what about the system that led to it happening in the first place?

Families who lost loved ones asserted United Healthcare was using AI to deny claims unfairly in a lawsuit filed last year. "The elderly are prematurely kicked out of care facilities nationwide or forced to deplete family savings to continue receiving necessary medical care, all because [UnitedHealth's] AI model 'disagrees' with their real live doctors' determinations," they say in the filing.

Breonna Taylor was shot dead in her apartment in 2020. One of the officers who fired into her apartment (he shot through her windows for some reason) was finally convicted on one charge of civil rights abuse in November of 2024. Two others are charged with civil rights abuses and obstruction offenses for putting together a falsified search warrant. Another previously pleaded guilty to conspiring to put the warrant together and cover up the actions of other officers.

George Floyd was suffocated by an officer in the street. It took a nationwide protest effort to even get law enforcement to charge anyone for his murder.

Real wages for the lowest-paid workers have increased by merely 17% since 1979. For the top 1% they have increased by 160%.

The ACA has brought health insurance to millions of Americans, but the #1 reason for bankruptcy continues to be medical debt, over $220 billion.

Homeownership in 2004 was 69%, the peak of the last 40 years. It has since declined to around 65.6%.

While inflation has come down significantly, prices remain higher than where they were pre-COVID. U.S. food prices are up 25% since 2020, which hurts lower-income Americans more than those at the middle and the top.

Yes, the norms and the institutions are better than Theocracy, but going back to where we were is not good enough.

The next few years will present ample opportunity to witness Capitalism run amok. While I am not one who believes Capitalism is inherently bad or evil, unchecked Capitalism without the trappings of Socialism and a real, strong social safety net is dangerous to the long-term well-being of a Democratic society.

We are mired within this upcoming dystopia because the norms didn’t provide enough juice to the working class and the top 1% felt unaffected by the struggled everyday Americans face consistently.

I liked many of the policies put forward by MVP Harris’ campaign and I thought they were a good start towards a more Progressive system. Yet we cannot rely on law enforcement to protect us when they suffocate people in the streets, a falsified search warrant can lead to murdering people with consequences that take 5 years, or when a city can reroute its water system and poison its people with lead and other contaminants and spend 4 years trying to minimize the response instead of fixing the damage they caused.

Our problem stems from a system of laissez-faire Capitalism that has diluted our media, allowed one person to amass over $300 billion in wealth while teachers have to beg on social media for school supplies, and a militarized law enforcement that the incoming President wants to make immune to criminal prosecution.

We can create something better than what we had, but the way back will only provide us more of the same, and that’s not good enough.