2/People sometimes think of Hispanic Americans as a perpetually underprivileged group. But while Hispanics still lag whites in economic terms, the gap has been shrinking recently.
3/This isn't just on paper, either. Most Hispanic Americans FEEL upwardly mobile. And this has been true for a while.
Canceling student loans would benefit lots of low-income Americans who didn't have rich parents to pay for their college, and who went to school in order to move up in the world.
And because loan forgiveness per person would be capped, we don't have to worry about most of the money going to doctors or lawyers. The loan forgiveness would be widely spread out, and the vast majority would go to working class and middle class people.
Matt Yglesias is right that gun control is not a great issue for the Dems. But while he emphasizes the optics of the issue, I have a different argument: I think that at this moment in American history, liberals need to own more guns.
I also think liberals should join the military more.
But there's an additional reason that I didn't mention in that post.
One reason Republicans are going so crazy, I think, is the Turner Diaries fantasy -- the idea that "the Right has the guns", and so civil disorder and breakdown will favor the Right.
Just because bad guys do a bad thing and don't go to prison for it doesn't mean it's "normalized". The bar for normalization is much higher than that.
In particular, Trump's presidency never felt normal, and I would argue it was never popularly regarded as normal or treated as normal by our institutions or culture.
In fact, newspapers articles regularly now label Trump's claims "false", "misleading", "baseless", and even "lies". Which is of course correct, but also suggests that Trump got *less* normalized over time.
This could be an illusion from talking to two different sets of people, but it seems like the folks who say "We're the richest nation in the history of the world, of course we can do X" are the same folks who say "We're a tottering dysfunctional empire on the verge of collapse"..
Of course in reality both are fantasies, we're a developed country with some unique structural issues and challenges but overall a pretty good place to live.
And of course, both "we're the richest" and "we're about to collapse" are histrionic statements intended to motivate policy change and counteract status quo bias, which of course both statements fail to do.