POLITICO, DC’s go to source for ultra-dork-wonkery within the confines of I-495, invited me to look in the future of 2016 politics and beyond. Darren Samuelsohn asked all kinds of great questions about why Washington seems so unable to think about the long-term future. Is it the leaders? The voters? The media?
My answer? Don’t hate the players, playa – hate the game. And by the way, that game might attract a lot of colorful characters, such as Trump, who just threatened to steal Vermonters’ coats.
I look at this as related to Citizens United and McCutcheon, where you have small groups of people with enormous amounts of money that now the Supreme Court has said, “Yes, that’s speech,” and we can direct our political discussion in the direction of people that have a large amount of money, which is, by definition, a small percentage. That leaves the great masses unrepresented, and the masses have issues such as long-term care for their elderly, collapsing infrastructure, jobs in small towns. Those are real pressing needs that everyday Americans have. And the more we get into the red meat issues and special interests for certain industries or corporations, we disconnect from that which makes the country run.
I actually predict in the future that you’re going to see more extreme and wacky and entertaining and scary political movements because people will go, “I want to hear anybody that says something that means something to me, even if it’s the dark side of my nature.”
More video here. Topics include what we do with Detroit, what America can learn from Singapore and Monaco, and why the Congress needs to bring back the “futurist” agency it got rid of in Newt Gingrich’s Republic Revolution of 1994 (with Harry Reid’s help, BTW), and why we actually we have a pretty nice country and everybody should take a deep breath and look in a positive way toward what is next.