We have to take care of people
Which just does not seem to be on the agenda
I remember a long time ago, not in a galaxy far, far away, but then, the next state north, a controversy over spotted owls. It was about preserving their habitat, old growth forests, versus the livelihoods of the people who cut those forests down.
Many years later, I visited Oregon, driving along U.S. Highway 101, and was amazed by the scenery as I drove along the tree-lined road. I had been thinking I needed to get out of California and was exploring southwest Oregon.
Then I happened to look to the side, through those trees. I guessed about 50 feet through, the scenery opened up onto clearcut forests. The stumps had just been left there with no visible attempt whatsoever at reforestation.
It was very clear to me, driving further, that I wasn’t in California anymore. I was in a very conservative area, angrier than anything I had—at that time—seen in California.
More faintly, I recall that the spotted owls had lost the fight. And environmentalists had alienated the working class.
Now, it’s hard to see how you preserve a lumberjack’s livelihood by cutting down all the trees and not replanting them—and I did see further along that trip, as I turned inland along a river whose name I don’t remember, that some areas had been replanted. But of course, the ecosystem never really recovers. It is forever altered.
To this day, some environmentalists have failed to learn the lesson. The trees were still cut down. The local ecosystems are still forever altered. And now it would seem likely that a lot of lumberjacks are out of work anyway.
Neoliberals, Democrat and Republican alike, repeated and compounded the environmentalists’ mistake, thus leading more or less directly to the rise of Donald Trump. We’re still relying on fossil fuels, even as with Trump’s utterly stupid, utterly failed war on Iran, a significant portion of the world’s supply has been cut off. Those fossil fuels will still eventually run out. Politicians enabled and negotiated a race to the bottom in wages, environmental protections, and labor protections, in the name of ‘competitive advantage,’ that a lot of U.S. workers lost.
But a lot of Trump-supporters are toxic men recklessly driving pickup trucks rigged to put out dark black smoke (“rolling coal”) that surely isn’t good to breathe, especially when they they see a less environmentally hostile vehicle.
It’s not just in the U.S. hard right-wing anti-immigration political parties seem to have been on the rise just about everywhere, even in some of the places where extreme poverty and extreme violence drive people toward western economies where people only see the “pull factors” that attract people to richer countries, not the “push factors” that drive them away from home.
Keir Starmer just had to resign as prime minister of the U.K. He lost because so-called “centrism,” really still conservatism, has failed to deliver improvements in declining living standards.[1] In New York City, three Democratic Socialist politicians just beat out so-called “centrist” Democrats in a primary election marked by fury at the establishment’s failure to improve declining living standards.[2] And whatever their political persuasion, a lot of people are furious that Trump’s utterly stupid, utterly failed war on Iran has raised fuel and grocery prices,[3] which isn’t helping to raise declining living standards either.
A lot of powerful folks still aren’t learning the lesson that you have to take care of people. They just can’t get past the stupidity of making the rich richer at everyone else’s expense. They refuse to understand that if you want to control immigration, you have to do something about the conditions that drive people away from home. They seemingly buy into Ayn Rand’s disdain for anyone who isn’t rich.[4]
It is certainly true that New York City is not the rest of the U.S.,[5] just as it is true that Manchester, where the mayor was Andy Burnham, who now seems headed for a coronation as Starmer’s successor, isn’t the rest of the U.K. But it is also apparent that populist anger, whether on the right or the left, will not dissipate without an improvement in declining living standards.
And unless the elite wake up to this reality, the establishment they are so desperate to uphold will look more and more like those clearcut forests I saw in Oregon.
[1] Zack Beauchamp, “The fall of Britain’s prime minister is a warning for America,” Vox, June 23, 2026, https://www.vox.com/politics/492756/keir-starmer-resigns-democrats
[2] Jack Blanchard with Dasha Burns, “The new king of New York,” Politico, June 24, 2026, https://www.politico.com/newsletters/playbook/2026/06/24/the-new-king-of-new-york-00973348
[3] Aaron Blake, “The scale of Trump’s political blunder in Iran is coming into focus,” Cable News Network, June 22, 2026, https://www.cnn.com/2026/06/22/politics/trump-iran-deal-poll
[4] Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged (1957; repr., New York: Plume, 1999).
[5] Jack Blanchard with Dasha Burns, “The new king of New York,” Politico, June 24, 2026, https://www.politico.com/newsletters/playbook/2026/06/24/the-new-king-of-new-york-00973348