You Are On Car Welfare; The Everyday Insanity of Driving

I always think about the absurdity of driving at least once when I’m driving. The system has evolved so slowly over time that we find ourselves in normalized insanity.

When I want to go somewhere I strap myself into a steel box on wheels that weighs about a ton and a half. I strap myself in because it is dangerous out there. Over 35,000 people are killed every year doing this, and for each death about 8 people are seriously injured. Some are crippled for life. The death toll is the equivalent of two fully loaded passenger jets plummeting out of the sky every week. If that were happening the problem would solve itself because nobody would fly. We each have about a 1 in 107 chance of ending our lives in a car accident. We each have a lifetime chance of about 7.5% of being hospitalized after a crash. But we drive. It’s about the freedom of the road, right?

Well, freedom of departure time, perhaps. If you are driving on a two lane road and you drift a couple of feet to the left you will probably smash head on into another vehicle at a combined speed approaching 100 miles per hour. A few feet to the right and you’ll hit a tree, a power pole, a pedestrian, or a building. You have to thread the needle at high speed, surrounded by others trying to do the same. Or, perhaps, not trying quite so hard to do the same. We have all seen drivers engaged in extraneous activities, from placating children in the back seat to talking on the phone. (Phone use causes equivalent impairment to a BAC of 0.14%, or six drinks in one hour) (and no, a hands-free earpiece makes no difference*) Road deaths were declining slightly until the widespread adoption of the mobile phone. Now distraction is starting make inroads on alcohol as a source of highway deaths.

An expression for an exceptionally short time is “the blink of an eye.” Medical science says that this is about a third of a second. At 65 miles per hour that is just over thirty feet of travel. Look down at your dashboard for a full second and you have traveled 95 feet. If you have had even a few drinks and get headlights in your eyes you can be blind for three seconds or more, which is almost the length of a football field.

Those of you who have read my blog before know that I am an energy wonk. Driving is insane on this front as well. A reasonably well tuned car might be 15-20% efficient at converting gasoline into forward motion. Your car is really a rather efficient furnace that happens to roll around with its spare energy. Your car outweighs you about 20:1. Best case scenario, one gallon of gasoline out of 100 actually pushes you, personally, down the road. This is, in theory, the point of the exercise. The other 99% is either wasted as heat or used to push the vehicle itself around.

And push it does. Most of the energy your car does turn into motion is used to push air out of the way. Air drag goes up by the square of the speed. Accelerate from 20 mph to 40 mph and the force needed to keep your car moving goes up four times. Sadly, the average car of 2021 is no more aerodynamic than the average car of 1935. We know how to do much better. The General Motors EV-1 electric car had a drag coefficient (Cd) of 0.19, compared to an average car with 0.3 to 0.4. For comparison, the Cd of a ball is about 0.47. Someone estimated that if the EV-1 had an ordinary four cylinder engine it would get 75 miles per gallon. But no, we want cars that look like slightly rounded bricks.

In total, about 10% of the world’s oil supply ends up in our gas tanks. Put 10% of the deaths in oil-state wars on our account, plus 10% of the oil-based pollution and greenhouse gases.

We drive a lot. People in some major-metro suburbs drive upwards of two hours to get to work, alone in their giant brick-shaped vehicles like everyone else. An average car today travels over 14,000 miles per year. Back in the 70s the number was 7,000 miles. Just for perspective, look up your daily commute on a mapping/navigation app. The standard Google Maps has little icons across the top for cars, bikes, public transit, and walking. Hit the walking icon. For some people their daily commute would take days on foot. A hundred years ago most people were walking to work. Cities and towns were set up that way. Now, because of single use residential zoning, in many suburbs it is illegal to site businesses within walking distance of people’s homes.

It turns out that we don’t get a lot for what we put in to our cars. A writer named Ivan Illich, in his book “Energy and Equity” estimated that an average car owner spent 1600 hours per year either driving, earning money to buy, fuel, and maintain the car, or otherwise engaged in car related activities. At 7,500 miles per year that worked out to 4.6 miles per hour; a brisk walk. I did a basic calculation using the U.S. Department of Transportation estimate of an average 14,263 miles per year for 2019. On average we spend 563 hours in our cars each year and spend $9,561 on the costs of ownership. At a median wage of $19.33 per hour a median American works 494 hours to earn that. This doesn’t include the time we spend in repair shop waiting rooms, at gas stations, or at the DMV. As it is, this works out to 13.5 miles per hour, a reasonable biking speed.

The actual number is undoubtedly lower. There’s also the $100 billion annual cost of vehicle air pollution, including 53,000 deaths, and $242 billion in economic losses from crashes. We have a personal transportation system with a death toll that rivals the opioid epidemic and an ROI on our time and money that can’t beat a bicycle rickshaw.

Most of the money we spend on driving is hidden. Put bluntly, we are all on car welfare. A study by the Vermont state government found that a pay-as-you-go gas tax would double the price of fuel. That is, if we paid the full cost of road building and repair, law enforcement, and other driving-related government expenses in a gasoline tax it would add $3.25 to the price of a gallon. That gallon of gas is subsidized anyway. If we paid all the associated costs of gasoline (oil company subsidies, pollution related illness, our military guarding oil shipping lanes, etc.) then gasoline would cost at least $10 per gallon. At an unsubsidized $16 per gallon, how much would we drive?

We don’t distribute the costs evenly either. It’s one of those startling engineering truths, but damage to roads by vehicles goes up by the fourth power of the vehicle weight per axle. A Fiat 500 has a curb weight of around 2500 pounds. A Ford F150 crew cab pickup has a curb weight about twice that. Per mile traveled, the Ford pickup will cause 2⁴ or 16 times the damage to the roads. A U.S. General Accounting Office study found that a fully loaded semi (5 axles, double tires) causes 9600 times the damage of a passenger car. Of course, neither the F150 nor the semi pays anything close to that kind of premium for damaging the roads. Car welfare is a fraction of truck welfare.

The problem is that we are trapped. Our entire lives are twined around the automobile. That technology defines our lifestyles, our daily schedules, urban design and our city, state, and federal budgets. It has squeezed out alternatives in our budgets and our landscape. Most importantly, it has squeezed the alternatives out of the general public imagination. For most Americans, owning and driving a car seems an inexorable, unquestioned part of life. It’s just how you get places. And you have to get places because they aren’t close. Traffic is like the weather; something to be endured but not changed.

Your choice of car is an expression of your identity as much as a mode of transportation. This is true whether you thought about it that way or not. Cars are inescapable in film and television, as background, as enabling technology, as drivers of plot, and as symbols. The idea of an American future without cars is relegated to dystopian, post-apocalyptic science fiction.

Many years ago, when I was converting cars to electric power, one of my business partners said, “Converting cars is easy but converting people is hard.” The primary problem of transforming our transportation system is changing minds. Most people don’t think there is a problem. Most that do realize there’s a problem think that the solution involves a modification of cars; new fuel, self-driving, tweaks.

There’s another saying: The problem will eventually solve itself, but not in a nice way. The automobile era is just that; an era. Geology and physics will not let this go on forever. In the U.S. we have a quarter billion two-ton steel boxes on wheels, each driving 14,000 miles a year, traveling 65 miles per hour, with one person per car, over huge flat strips of petroleum and gravel. There is no way to reform that into sustainability. The inevitable decline in the quantity and quality of fossil fuels will end the car era. The only question is whether we anticipate this and change our ways before the crisis hits.

So, what do we do? First, get the big money out of politics. This is my “Carthago delenda est.” Until those who profit from wasted energy and lives can no longer choose our lawmakers we will get no change.

If we can win that battle, we need to take a step back and look at basic principles. We tend to mistake mobility for access. We want to get to work, to get food, to see each other, to play. Right now that means going some distance, so we think about speed and comfort and route capacity. However, what we really want is to end up in close proximity to these things. Changing zoning and urban design could bring these things closer.

Some people and places are, by necessity, farther than a walk or bike ride away. Climate and terrain may be a problem. In that case, we should consider the number of people on any given route, the necessary level of comfort for the distance, the appropriate speed for the distance and environment, terrain, local climate, and the built environment. The point being, start with a clean sheet of paper and try to use the least amount of materials and energy per passenger mile to get the job done safely. The result won’t look like a car on a road.

That last sentence circles us back around to job #2, right after campaign finance reform: persuasion. As I said before, the ubiquity of cars combined with massive hidden subsidies has squeezed alternatives out of our collective imagination. The costs and consequences of the car have been compartmentalized away from our driving experience. The beginning of change is the awareness of the flaws in life as it is. The facts and numbers I have laid out for you here have to become part of the general public consciousness before people will be willing to change. Even then, there will be an excruciating process of unwinding our emotional attachment to the present system. Every fact has an emotion attached. The people and corporations that benefit from our subsidized carnage will weaponize these emotions. It will be a generational battle.

To reiterate: Geology and physics will end the automotive era even if we don’t. Our only decision is whether we pull over and park or drive off a cliff.

*I know what you’re thinking. Bullshit. No. Drunks think they are driving just fine. The science is done. You are not magically different from everyone else in this regard. If you think someone who downs six shots and drives is immoral then ignore your phone while you drive.

Chill to Fight Climate Change

There’s something you can do today to fight climate change. It’s effective, it’s easy, it costs nothing, it doesn’t require a lifestyle change, and most of you are going to hate it. You are also going to hate me for bringing it up because there is no rational reason not to do it. It is literally a crime not to. Literally.

 Stop speeding. Drive the speed limit. That’s it.

 Here’s the math. (If you don’t like explanations, speeding in the U.S. is responsible for at least 4.2% of our oil use, 1% of world oil use and 15,000 deaths annually)

 At highway speeds, most of your energy goes to pushing air out of the way.  Air drag increases by the square of your speed. Double the speed means four times the drag.  A small increase in speed ends up making a lot of difference in energy use.

 Compared to driving at 65 miles per hour, driving 75 mph will cost you 15% of your gas mileage and driving 80 mph will cost you 20%.

It’s hard to get an exact number on what percentage of drivers speed, and by how much. Study results vary. Generally speaking, about 75% of drivers speed, and about 80% of drivers surveyed think that driving ten to twenty miles per hour over the speed limit is fine. Absolute speed limit compliance is low. Biased self-reporting undoubtedly minimizes the problem.  It would be safe to say that 75% of drivers are losing about 15% of their mileage by speeding.

Road transportation accounts for 40% of our oil demand. Multiply it all out and about 4.5% of U.S. oil use is just due to speeding. The U.S. accounts for 20% of world oil demand, so speeding Americans increase world oil demand by about 1%.

Just an aggressive driving style, minus speeding, can cost drivers another 25%, so slowing down *and* calming down behind the wheel could cut world oil consumption by 2%.

We’d still have the other 98% of oil-based emissions to deal with, but it is free, it is easy, and it’s the law. When I say it’s the least we can do, I mean it’s the very least we can do.

If contributing to the survival of the planet isn’t enough to motivate you, consider the more direct deaths. According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, speeding was a contributing factor in 9,478 deaths in 2019. An MIT study found that air pollution from vehicles causes 53,000 deaths annually. The inefficiency of speeding causes about 10.5% of those, or 5,565. If everybody slowed down, 15,000 Americans would not have to die prematurely. One of them could be you, or someone you love.

Cruise control is your friend, and a friend to nature. Set it at the speed limit. Cease worrying about speed traps. It’s really, really the very least you can do.

Former Officer Kim Potter is Obviously Lying

This will be a brief one, because it is fairly simple. As you probably know from the news, Officer Kimberly Potter, a 26 year veteran of the Brooklyn Center, Minnesota police department shot Daunte Wright during a traffic stop. She is now under arrest for 2^nd degree murder. She claimed that she had mistaken her pistol for her Taser, and hadn’t meant to shoot Mr. Wright. Just before shooting him she yelled “Taser!” three times, and afterward she said “Holy shit, I shot him!”

Here is a photo of Officer Potter in uniform.

 

Notice that her service pistol is on her right. She drew her pistol right handed during the incident. Now notice the yellow handle of her Taser at the bottom of the photo. It is on her left side, with the butt of the Taser facing back. This makes sense for a left handed draw. This in turn makes sense because it would allow her to draw her Taser without encumbering her right hand, in case she wanted to draw her service pistol.

In order to draw her Taser right handed, she would have to reach all the way across her torso to her left side. Then she would have to pull the retention strap on the Taser with her fingertips. Then she would have to turn her right hand upside down, thumb down, palm outward. Then she would have to bend her wrist at an angle to match the horizontal butt of the Taser. Then she would have to draw the Taser straight up about five inches and bring it across her torso. Try that series of motions right now.

To draw her pistol she would have to reach down to her right hip, push out on the retention strap with her thumb, and draw like a cowboy. Try that motion right now.

Now try to imagine any cop, much less a 26 year veteran, mixing up those two series of actions. It is absurd.

Besides this, her Taser is bright yellow plastic and, according to the manufacturer, weighs about 10 ounces. A semi-auto pistol of the type police generally use is going to weigh over 32 ounces and is blued steel. That’s hard enough to mistake, even under stress, but the bizarre cross draw required to deploy the Taser is enough.

So why did she say what she said? Most likely because she knew her and her partners’ body cameras were on. She was playing to the inevitable future viewers of that video. Her cry of “Taser!” isn’t an indication of a mix-up. It is proof of intent.

The MEWBI; An Investment Vehicle for Congress

Members of Congress are incredibly smart investors. That was sarcasm. What I mean to say is that historically, the portfolios of members of Congress outperform the market by 20%, with senior Republicans outperforming the market by 35%. In early 2020, former senators Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue, among others, were criticized for extremely opportune stock trades not long after a classified briefing on the COVID-19 pandemic. Occasionally a member of Congress gets too blatant and actually gets prosecuted for insider trading.

This is a problem of appearance and outcomes. Congress has low enough popularity without insider trading scandals, and confidence in government is essential to a democracy. More importantly, having members with half an eye on their portfolios is going to nudge the legislative steering wheel in a direction that favors one industry over another, wealth over work, and Wall Street over all.

There has been a proposal out there for a while that simply prohibits members of Congress from owning individual stocks. They would have to invest in broad based mutual funds or index funds. They might have to hand over their investments to a blind trust to be managed secretly for the duration of their time in office.

Fair enough, but not enough. Even if they have their investments in a blind trust, they know that their money is in the stock market and that they will get that money back. They will have an interest in a rising market rather than a rising standard of living for ordinary Americans. About 60% of Americans own no stock at all, and the richest 1% own about 50% of the stock market. In theory, stock value is based on the expectation of future earnings. Many of the ways that corporations achieve higher earnings aren’t beneficial to your average person. That is, they can make more money by paying us less, charging us more, outsourcing, union busting, skirting health and safety regulations, and polluting the environment.

What we need is an investment vehicle for members of Congress that aligns their financial interests with the financial interests of the average American. To that end, I have come up with an index called the MEWBI, or Median Economic Well Being Index.

To start with, it’s based on the U.S. median wage. Note: median, not average. This avoids the “Bill Gates walks into a bar” effect. (When Bill walks into a bar, on average everyone in there is now a millionaire.) Median wage is the annual income halfway between the highest and lowest wage earners in the country. In 2019 the U.S. median household income was $68,703, according to the Census Bureau.

However, median wage isn’t enough. If median wage goes up but the cost of living goes up more, life hasn’t improved. What I’d like to get at is discretionary income. That is, the money people have left over after they pay for housing, food, healthcare, basic transportation, and other necessary expenses. There is a useful number for this called living wage or livable wage. That is a calculated number that estimates the most basic living expenses depending on where people live. It’s calculated on the county level for each state and for various situations: single, single parent with one to three children, couple with one or both parents working and one to three children. (To find the living wage for your area, click HERE.)

I don’t want a separate index for every county and situation in the U.S., so I need to simplify. The Census Bureau finds that the average household size in the U.S. right now is 3.23 people. I’ve looked around at livable wage for various places and noted that the wage for one parent with two children is close to that of two parents with one child, and both those numbers are close to a chart of state livable wage averages. In between Kentucky at $43,000 and Hawaii at $61,000 I find an average for all 50 states of $50,460.

Subtract $50,460 from $68,703 and I get a rough and ready $18,243 in discretionary income. An important note: livable wage is bare bones. Food, shelter, healthcare, plus soap and toothpaste is about it. A lot of what we would consider moderately necessary is not included. Still, it’s supposed to be a directional indicator, not a perfect snapshot. Knock off the dollar sign and it’s just 18,243.

This is still not good enough. There’s the question of inequality. A particular median wage doesn’t tell us about the balance of billionaires to unemployed homeless people. How can we tell that? There’s what is called the Gini coefficient or Gini index. It’s a number between zero and one. A nation with everyone earning the exact same income would have a Gini of zero. A nation with one multibillionaire and everyone else earning nothing has a Gini of one. The U.S. has a Gini Index of 0.48. A lower Gini index is a sign of more equality and by inference a more solid middle class. Since lower is better in this case, I’m using 1 minus the Gini to invert it, giving the U.S. an inverse Gini of 0.52.

Multiply 18,243 by the inverse Gini and we have 9486.36.

What about unemployment and underemployment? There are two numbers I’ll use for that. One is the labor force participation number, the percentage of people of working age who have jobs. It’s around 61.5% lately. The other is the so-called U-6 unemployment rate. In the news you generally see the U-3 rate, but that doesn’t account for people who have given up and aren’t filing for unemployment anymore. It also fails to account for people who want to work full time but are only working part time. The U-6 covers these people. Because lower unemployment is better, I’ll invert that as well. The U-6 is at 11.7% as I write this, so the inverted U-6 is 82.3%. Multiply those two factors in and we get a MEWBI of 4,801.47.

So, what do we do with this number? We use it as the basis of a long term investment vehicle.

Any investment requires a counter party. When you buy a bond, the counter party is the institution that is willing to pay you interest on your money; a city, state, or national government, or a business. When you buy a share of stock, there has to be someone willing to sell. That means someone who believes that there is a better place for their money than that stock. It’s a vote of no confidence. So where do we find a counter party who is willing to invest in the future increased poverty of average Americans?

I consulted with my friend The Broker.

(He must remain anonymous because of his work, but he is an experienced investment advisor specializing in ethical/sustainable investment. You can imagine him as a Batman villain; a middle aged man in a charcoal gray pinstripe suit covered in little green dollar signs, wearing a dollar-green burglar’s mask. “Well, Robin, the only clue is a stock certificate from a defunct Canadian mining company.” “Holy margin call, Batman! It’s The Broker!” But I digress.)

He made a counterintuitive but ingenious suggestion. The structure would be a bond with a variable return depending upon the performance of the MEWBI. The counterparty would be the U.S. Treasury Department. But wait, you say, isn’t the Treasury Department interested in general prosperity? Yes, exactly, but remember that we are only talking about 538 elected officials; The House, the Senate, the President, and the Vice President. The total net worth of the House and Senate together is about $8 billion. A few percentage points of return on that would be a rounding error for the Treasury. In fact, if Congress manages to dramatically improve the lot of lower and middle class Americans, then that percentage will be swamped by added tax receipts.

Here’s how it would work. As soon as a candidate is elected, that congress member-elect must transfer all assets into the MEWBI fund at the Treasury. This should be done tax-free to avoid penalizing them for a forced sale. The MEWBI funds would pay an inflation adjusted interest rate that would be added to or subtracted from depending on the performance of the MEWBI. Essentially, it would be a five year treasury note with a bonus, or a penalty.

The money would stay in the MEWBI fund for the duration of their service. When they retire or get voted out, the assets would reverse vest. That is, on departure they get 50% of their MEWBI assets back to invest how they please. After five years they get another 50% of what’s left, and so on. The reverse vesting is to prevent them from jumping immediately from Congress into corporate lobbying or serving on the board of some malevolent business or think tank. Their alignment of interests with the ordinary American will have a long tail.

Some might say, “But won’t this discourage people with a lot of wealth from serving in government?” Wow, why didn’t I think of that? If your main focus in life is making piles of money through stock investments, public service is not for you.

This would be a tough sell to Congress. About half are millionaires. The fifty wealthiest of them each have a net worth from the tens to hundreds of millions of dollars. It would take a huge, concerted effort to pressure them into relinquishing their suspiciously high returns. Like campaign finance reform, it would have a high return on investment for the median (not average) American.

A Double Barreled Counter-Reformation

I’d like to dedicate this post to the late, beloved, Katherine Smith. Kay and her husband Dutton were like family to me, as her extended family are still. Kay was a constant reader of this blog and quite often emailed me about my writing, offering comments and encouragement. When you die, if you find yourself in an afterlife and Kay isn’t there, you are not in heaven.

 First, I’d like you to imagine yourself as an average peasant in Western Europe in 1516, the year before Martin Luther nailed his 95 theses on the door of Wittenberg Cathedral. The Protestant Reformation is not yet even an idea. There is no “Catholic Church.” There is just “The Church.” It permeates personal, family, economic, and political life. For someone living in Koln, or Naples or Lyon in 1516 there is nothing else. Sure, there are a few Jews about, and you’ve heard, perhaps, of Muslims and Hindus, but these are oddities. Tuck this idea away for later; there was a time when, for the people of Western Europe, there was only one spiritual option, and no concept of any other.

Then, after 1517, there were other versions of Christianity. Lutheranism, of course, and Calvinism. John Knox took Luther’s ideas to Scotland and founded the Presbyterian Church. Suddenly, there were options. The Catholic Church did not tolerate this loss of power and preeminence.

The century between the mid-1500s and mid-1600s is the era of what is now known as the Counter Reformation. It was fought on an array of battle fronts:  political, legal, military, theological, and organizational. The Vatican engaged in diplomacy, cracked down on dissent, and fomented wars. It also formed new organizations, such as the Jesuits, set scholars to work clarifying its theology, and actually engaged in some internal reforms. I won’t dig too deeply into this, since the Counter Reformation has filled a stack of books. It is enough to say that it got brutally violent, with torture and executions, and was finally ended by a vicious war, now known as the Thirty Years War. The terrorism and starvation partially depopulated northern Germany by its end in 1648. Catholicism didn’t yield power quietly, and the aftershocks of that fight persist to this day.

Now imagine yourself as a heterosexual Christian white man in 1947. Perhaps you are working in a unionized factory job or farming. Perhaps you are going to college on the GI Bill, preparing yourself for the white collar world. Whatever your path, your place is analogous to the peasant of 1516, in terms of your demographic identity. Desegregation is in the future. The heyday of the civil rights movement hasn’t arrived. Women’s rights aren’t a thing. Likewise LGBT rights, or even their existence. Secularism is a fringe idea, and psychotherapy is for rich kooks. Like a fish not understanding water, your preeminence in American society isn’t something you even consider. It’s just the way things are.

Nothing big ever happens for just one reason, but I’ll blame our present situation on the beginning and the end of democracy. To be more nuanced, I’ll say the beginning of the beginning of democracy and the beginning of the end. The dates I’m thinking of are not 1776 or 1787 to start and 2016 or a future date to end. I’m thinking of 1965 and 1976. I’ll start with the beginning of the beginning.

From 1787 to 1920 half the population, that is, women, could not vote. A country where half of its citizens are disenfranchised can’t really call itself a democracy. Until 1965, members of racial minorities were not guaranteed the right to vote. Even after 1965 it was only a right on paper in many places. Voting is not the entirety of democratic rights, but it is foundational, and it was missing before then. Functionally I’d combine the Voting Rights Act of 1965 with the Civil Rights Act of 1964 as the laws that finally allowed all Americans political participation. (At least on paper)

This was, as we know, not universally popular. Put it in the context of a cascade of social revolutions in the United States. None of these revolutions is complete, but they have each become mainstream in their goals and in public understanding. The civil rights revolution gained traction in the 1950s and 1960s. Its successes were a catalyst. Women’s rights became prominent in the 1970s. LGBTQ rights (originally primarily focused on gay men) gained prominence in the 80s and 90s, with a milestone of marriage equality in 2015. In the first years of the 21^st century secular rights, or more generally the rights of non-Christians started getting serious attention. As noted, none of these revolutions is complete, but they all have much more strength and prominence than they did decades ago. Again, this is not universally popular. Layered on top of all of these was what I call the psychological revolution. Americans became more and more comfortable with the idea that people could seek help to analyze their emotional problems and change their behaviors and beliefs, rather than just copying the mistakes of their parents. This has been a huge threat to traditional authority.

I don’t think it is a coincidence that a set of novels from the 1990s popular among Christian conservatives was called the “Left Behind” series. The books chronicle the trials of a group of Christians left behind on earth during the biblical Armageddon. For a straight, white, Christian conservative in the United States it must feel that way these days. All their assumptions of innate righteousness and superiority are being denied. The fact that they are supposed to even think about these subjects in an analytical way seems an insult.

For a large number of white Americans, the Civil Rights Act was a chastisement. It said, “What you learned from your parents and your society was morally wrong. The way you have acted your entire life has been wrong. Many things you believe now, institutions you value, and your instinctive habits of social interaction are morally wrong.” This was true. Still, nobody likes to be told even a fraction of that. Only fictional characters such as Dr. Evil from the Austin Powers movies, or Shakespeare’s Richard the Third actually decide to be evil. Real people, even racists and authoritarians, think that what they do is right and that they are moral actors.

Add up the cascade of revolutions, right and necessary though they were, and you get two things in this demographic; intense resentment and existential anxiety. It is because of this that the Democratic Party hasn’t won a majority of the white vote since 1964.

We are living during a period of counter-reformation. It’s a double barreled counter-reformation. I’m focusing on the social aspect of it, but there is also an economic side. Wealthy people and corporations have been pushing back on limits to their power since the Sherman Anti-Trust Act of 1890. The robber barons of the 1890s hated the reforms of their era as much as the next generation hated the reforms of the New Deal and the rise of unionization. Their children despised the high income tax rates of the 1950s and the clean air and water laws of the 1970s. The reason this matters is that the wealthy have used the discontent of conservative Christian racists to their own ends from the Civil Rights era onward. The resentment against government action to protect marginalized groups was ginned up into a generalized resentment against government regulation, holding back or rolling back restraints on wealth and corporate power.

And then we elected a black president. He was charismatic, intelligent, educated, charming, and a talented orator. Heads exploded all over the country. The birther movement came out of the utter incompatibility of the white supremacist worldview with such a man at the top of the world’s social and political pyramid. I personally can’t comprehend the nuclear level of cognitive dissonance that this event must have created.

Two ordinary politicians failed to defeat him. He was followed by his Secretary of State, a woman who had committed the crime of being unapologetically intelligent, experienced, opinionated, ambitious, and not conservative.

Enter the demagogue.

Eric Hoffer, a social philosopher, wrote The True Believer, published in 1951. It was his explanation of how mass movements arise and how demagogues incite their followers to mass violence. He was writing in response to the rise of Hitler, but devised a general theory.

The short version (historians forgive me) goes like this: A group of people feel that they are losing power, status, and economic success. Often these are the “New Poor,” once thriving but recently down on their luck. They feel as if the center of power has shifted away from them. A demagogue tells them that this is not just the way of the world and the path of history. No, they *deserve* to have power, status, and prosperity. That power has been stolen from them by deceptive and criminal means. A well-defined other group is responsible. This other group can be defined by race, politics, religion, nationality, or some combination thereof. The demagogue tells the aggrieved group that it is their destiny to achieve the greatness of their past by defeating the scapegoated group.

The techniques of this movement start with insults and propaganda and work their way up through boycotts and demonstrations to discriminatory laws.  Then comes stochastic violence followed by planned violence. An important point is that it doesn’t start with atrocities. It begins with scapegoating, stigmatizing, and dehumanizing the targeted group(s); political speech. The true believers incrementally escalate their behavior. By the time they reach planned violence, there is no going back. To go back is to admit that they are bad people who have done reprehensible things. To go back is to risk ostracism and violence.

I see the U.S. as being in the beginning of the stochastic violence stage. I’m not saying there hasn’t been state sponsored violence all along. I’m limiting myself to the path of the general public over last few decades.

Earlier, I mentioned the beginning of the beginning of democracy and the beginning of the end, in 1976. I place the beginning of the end in 1976, because that was the year of the Supreme Court case Buckley v. Valeo. The case was about campaign finance laws, and the Supreme Court struck down certain restrictions on campaign spending, notably limits on total expenditures by candidates and outside groups, and narrowed the scope of donor disclosures. It wasn’t the end of the world, but the beginning of ever larger inputs of money into American politics. Incrementally more money went into politics, exploding after 2010, when Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission struck down restrictions on corporations spending money to advocate for or against candidates. That was followed in 2014 by McCutcheon v. FEC, which struck down aggregate limits on individual political contributions. From 1976 on, cash has been king.

I’ve written about it before, but a summary of the USPIRG study, “The Wealth Primary,” is in order. USPIRG investigated the relationship between campaign fundraising and victory. They found that:

The candidate who spends the most money wins, 92% of the time.

High spending candidates outspend 2^nd place candidates by an average of 3:1.

80% of the high spender’s money is donated by multi-millionaires and billionaires.

Being the high spender doesn’t absolutely guarantee a win, but not raising enough money guarantees a loss. Equally important, having opinions that offend rich people dramatically reduces a candidate’s chances. This has played out in legislation. Some researchers polled wealthy people and ordinary people on their policy opinions. Then they compared that to the fate of bills in Congress. They found that the positive opinion of wealthy people almost guaranteed passage and the negative opinion of the rich killed bills. The opinions of ordinary people had no effect.

What does campaign finance have to do with racial counter-reformation? The tsunami of cash hobbled the Democratic Party. Democratic candidates who might have appealed to the economic self-interest of racially disgruntled white people were incrementally replaced by apologists for wealth and corporate dominance. We saw the rise of the corporate Democrat, the Wall Street Democrat, the Third Way triangulating Democrat. The Republican Party had been corporate and wealthy for most of the 20^th century, but they hid that behind the shields of anti-communism, religiosity, and racism.

The Democratic Party could have offered more than lip service to working class and middle class Americans, but most of the politicians who would have done that couldn’t make it through the money filter. Sure, we get an AOC or Bernie in hyper-blue districts, but the majority have been carefully selected for their dilute corporate liberalism. Economically indifferent, corporate friendly social policies like marriage equality get through. A decent minimum wage and fair labor laws have no chance. Given the choice between that and policies catering to racism and bigotry, voters either go Republican or go home. We saw this in 2016. The split was 25% Trump, 25.3% Clinton, and almost 50% either staying home or voting for no-hope third party candidates. A candidate getting a slim majority of the disillusioned would have beaten both mainstream candidates.

I don’t have a glib solution to these problems. The money filter has a ratcheting effect on incumbents. None would want to reduce the role of campaign cash because that’s how they succeeded, and to do so would be to admit their true masters. The racial/religious Counter Reformation is a generational battle. We just have to see it with clear eyes and fight it out politically.

Part of seeing it with clear eyes is to see it through the eyes of the reactionaries. To them it is a fight for survival. Normal rules don’t apply. They will lie, cheat, even kill for their cause. Part of seeing it through clear eyes is realizing that facts mean little and emotion means everything. I recommend George Lakoff’s book “Don’t Think of an Elephant” for lessons on the successful emotional framing of political subjects. That framing is for the disengaged middle third of American politics. The reactionaries won’t be convinced. We can’t change them; we can only outlast them.

Here’s the most important tool, expressed as a fantasy. Imagine if I could pick up a bottle on the beach and release the Law Genie. The Law Genie would grant me one law, passed in the House and the Senate, signed by the president and approved by the Supreme Court. It would be this: Limit political contributions to a day’s wages at the federal minimum wage. Right now that’s $58. It would apply to candidates, parties, PACs, 501C this and 401C that. Anything to do with electing lawmakers or making laws. Political entities could raise as much money as they want, but would have to do it $58 at a time. Bill Gates and the guy who mows Bill’s lawn would have the same political clout. Exxon Mobil and a gas station attendant would be equal. Likewise multi-billionaire Jeff Bezos and an Amazon warehouse worker.

Until this or something very close to this happens, wealth will govern America. Take your favorite political cause – fighting climate change, ending police violence, livable wage, healthcare reform, education reform, whatever – write it on a piece of paper, crumple it until it is soft, and wipe your ass with it. Forget about it. You aren’t going to get it in a plutocracy. The people who make laws were carefully selected for their wealth-friendly beliefs. Focus on the single point of attachment that allows the wealthy and big business to steer our country – campaign cash. The wealthy will decide who wins primaries until we level the playing field. It will be the fight of the century.