Four Hours at the Capitol is a new documentary on the events of January 6th this year, when thousands of Americans converged on the Capitol Building seeking to overturn electoral results they were unahppy with after being encouraged to do so by the President. For anyone with access to HBO, I would encourage taking the time to watch it.
A lot of discussion around historically abberrant civic behavior (threats made at school board meetings, armed gatherings outside election offices, violent breaches of the nation’s Capitol, etc.) focuses on Left-Right divides, but an interesting article in The American Journal of Political Science suggests that a better continuum to use may be Establishment vs Anti-establishment.
According to the researchers, it is the anti-establishment trait that “is correlated with several antisocial psychological traits, the acceptance of political violence, and time spent on extremist social media platforms. It is also related to support for populist candidates, such as Trump and Sanders, and beliefs in misinformation and conspiracy theories.” This seems to make sense . Folks aren’t joining wanna-be militias/gun clubs and decking themselves out in tactical gear because they’re just so gung-ho in support of certain types of foreign policy, limited government and balanced budgets (tenets of what used to pass for Republicanism) — they’re doing these things because they have grievance against an entity or institution, if not against the entire establishment altogether.
Further, it is possible and likely that leaders from established parties are stoking and growing this anti-establishment fervor among their constituents. And while most voters would probably tell you that politicians do not decide which way they feel about an issue, most voters are wrong.
In any event, it is worth considering how politics used to be on the Republican side of the aisle:
John Hallmén is a macro photographer in Stockholm who, as best as I can tell, uses an old school bellows system and modern-day frame stacking technology to combine dozens or hundreds of individual shots together to create stunning images of really small things — mostly entymology-related. Links to his work are here and here,
AN interesting thing to consider ahead of the coming week is that four years ago, a Republican House, Senate and White House enacted their first significant legislation of the Trump Era, the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017. Through this legislation, somewhere between $1.8 and $2.2 Trillion would be added to the national debt over ten years, in order to permanently cut corporate tax rates by 18%, while temporarily reducing the tax rate for individuals and married couples by a couple of percentage points. The law did other things, like preventing estates from having to pay any taxes at all; whereas previously Estates in excess of roughly $5M were taxed, after the Act was passed, an Estate was allowed to pass the first $14M+ to its heirs, tax-free.
I think about this as the ‘Build Back Better’ (BBB) legislation is pending final drafts, and we await the final implementation on the Infrastructure Bill (BIB). Folks will complain about all the ways that either bill isn’t perfectly to their liking and folks have alredy been complaining about how ugly they find the process of legislating to be. But an experiment has been run here, and the GOP–when in power–first used its majority to run up the deficit so they could reduce taxes on corporations. Conversely, the Democratic Party has used its majority to finally deliver funding for Infrastructure Renewal and Programs to help actual people — and without running up the deficit to do it.
To me, that is the story.
Another interesting thing to think about is that there is apparently market demand for $700 wheels you can put on the bottom of your computer.
currently reading: The Overstory by Richard Powers, Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman, The Entrepreneurial State by Mariana Mazzucato
last viewed: Four Hours at the Capitol
last full listen: Soundtracks by CAN (1970)
griff.works 
