Pylimitics

The US is not going back to the way we were. And good riddance, in my view. Without meaning to, American society and business practices have become a means of enriching and aggrandizing despicable people. This is not entirely new, but it seems to me that it’s more common and systemic now. There is not just one cause for this, but I can identify some of them. The politics of the odious Reagan and those around him. The business success of the odious Jack Welch and his acolytes. The economics of Milton Friedman and George Stigler. The jurisprudence of the odious Robert Bork. The odious preachings of the beyond odious Jerry Falwell.

All of these things contributed to a zeitgeist in which demonstrably terrible people like Bezos, Musk, the Trump crime family, Alito, Thomas, Zuckerberg, and countless others have succeeded wildly in their respective domains. Their successes are lauded by too many.

I’m old enough to remember when bad behavior, particularly by a public person, was recognized and acted on. It seems like there was something cultural that functioned as a counter-impulse to blatant self-dealing, cheating, overt lying, and related behaviors that, in classical antiquity, were called out as evil.

So the bad guys have become ascendant. But I have the sense that the zeitgeist is shifting and their antisocial, inhumane natures are not just becoming known (these were never secrets, really), but _regular people_ are reacting with disgust. And by _regular people_, I mean the decent folks everybody knows, and almost everybody _is._

So the US is never going to be the same. But maybe we can be better.