What Trump assassination attempt reveals about politics today

Everybody, Peter Zion coming to you from the Lake of the Ozarks. It is the 14th of July and last night, Donald Trump was injured lightly in an assassination attempt. Now, I’m not going to give you a blow by blow of what went down because the details are still very sketchy looks like it was a 20 year old registered Republican who’s donated money to Democrats, which tells us absolutely nothing. The stupid surface, of course, will be doing their own investigation in league with local law enforcement at the FBI. And we will wait for more details to see where that takes us. But I wanted to put this all into context. There’s a lot of things going on in the world right now. And that suggests we’re going to be in a more politically volatile period. First big thing America is going through, it’s once in every generation political rearrangement, something that Trump is part of the Americans have a first pass post single member district political system, which means that you will vote for a single person who will then represent a very specific geography you don’t vote for a party. In doing this American parties tend to be fairly weak and so they tend to be coalition’s of coalition’s. So you get multiple political factions that banded together around a single tent, in order to get one more vote than whoever comes in second. So today, for example, the Republican Party has traditionally been made out of people who are concerned with budget deficit, people who are conservative national security, people are concerned about business regulation, you get social conservatives, that sort of thing. Well, as technology and demographics and economic patterns evolve, the factions make less sense. And so the factions rise and fall within the coalition’s and if things get stressed enough, they end up falling out of the coalition altogether, maybe becoming swing voters maybe going to the other side. What we’re seeing right now is that in spades for the Republican coalition, the business community and the national security community in the fiscal community, they’ve all been basically ejected from the party. But Donald Trump has been successful in drawing other groups away from the Democratic coalition. So for example, union voters are no longer considered Democrats, by their voting patterns, and Hispanics have shifted the white a bit. This is still a very much a work in progress. And Donald Trump is benefiting from this as much as he is losing from this. But if you think about what’s happened in the last 3040 years, we’ve had the rise of hyperglobalisation. And now it’s fall, we’ve had the height of the baby boomers in the workforce. And now the retirement, not exactly a shock to think that we are going to manage our political system differently. So that’s the first big peaks America politically is in movement. Second, the world economically is in movement. The whole point of the post world war two global consensus was that the Americans will take care of the guns and keep everyone safe. The Americans will open the market and make the global sea safe for everyone’s commerce in exchange you side with the Americans in the Cold War. And that provided the basis for everything from the alliance with Taiwan, Korea and Japan to NATO. And that’s created the world that we know it’s also created the economic backdrop and the security backdrop that made the rise of China possible, because during the Cold War, the Cold War, China was one of those allies. Well, that whole system is breaking down. Two reasons. Number one, the Americans can’t pay for it anymore and don’t want to the Americans have refashion their navy. So instead of hundreds of ships that can patrol the oceans, they have a few clusters of ships that are really good for fighting wars. So the ability of having that global coverage isn’t there. And Americans politically, are tired of paying the economic price of keeping the world open for everyone, because it’s put everybody else in an advantage versus American workers. And that just doesn’t fly in today’s populist era. The second issue is that when you do economic Felipe develop when you do industrialize you also urbanize. And after seven decades of urbanization, people are having fewer and fewer children around the world. Well do that for seven decades. It’s not that you’re running out of 10 year olds and 20 year olds, you’re in and out of 50 year olds and increasingly 60 year olds. And this decade, the 2020s was always going to be the decade that a lot of countries slipped away from having a workforce that can support the globalized system in the first place. After all, if you don’t have consumption, you don’t have trade. So this whole system, the American political network is evolving and the global economic network is collapsing and reforming. What this all means is there’s a lot of change out there in the way we live the way we work, who we service with our businesses where we get our goods, and when things change people with a vested interest in the system. don’t always make it and people get scared and people get angry. And that is when you get violence. We’re going to get into the state level with a series of military conflicts. The first of those has already happened in Ukraine, we’ll probably get one in China before long. And in the case of the United States, in periods of political change like this, that’s when we get our domestic political and violence happened in the 1930s, when we had the Great Depression, and that political reorientation, it happened with reconstruction. And it happened with the Civil War. So I don’t want to suggest that this is the beginning of more of the same. I’m saying that the factors that define our world are evolving, and we’re going to change with it. And for the United States over all, this is a net gain in many, many ways. But going through the process of getting from where we’ve been and what we’re comfortable with, to where we’re going in something that’s unknown, unfortunately, is going to generate a lot of stresses along the way. And we saw some of that last night.