It’s hard to believe that this little old blog has been going since 2002, but it has. You would think that closely monitoring the last 19 years of American politics and culture would have landed us in the looney bin. From the post 9/11 horrors, to the Iraq war, social security privatization and the various corrupt practices of Dick “4th Branch” Cheney, to the financial catastrophe of 2008, “Hope and Change”, Obamacare, Benghazi, the Donald Trump nightmare, pandemic and insurrection, we’ve been here. And those are just some of the highlights. To say we live in interesting times is a massive understatement.
But we ain’t seen nothing yet. These next few years are going to tell us whether or not we will go the way of other modern authoritarian nations like Hungary or whether we will maintain some semblance of a liberal democracy. I honestly don’t know how it’s going to go. The election of Donald Trump still stuns me and everything that has happened since 2020 is a reminder of just how fragile our system really is.
Frankly, there are many aspects of it that I wish could just be scrapped — the Senate, for instance. But as James Fallows pointed out in his newsletter, we’re stuck with it. Nonetheless, there are are some things that can be done, such as eliminating the filibuster, anti-trust rules, term limits for federal judges, including the Supreme Court and a bigger House of Representatives all of which are worthy reforms. Voting rights are must haves or we’re sunk.
I wish I was optimistic about those things. Unfortunately, they seem to be a very heavy lift even though a majority of Americans would back such reforms. So we’ll have to see how our rickety system holds up over the next few years and if the people remain engaged enough to protect it.
Here at Hullabaloo we’ll keep covering all of this, including the failures of the media to do their jobs, and at least try to keep readers informed by synthesizing as much of the information that’s floating around out there as we can. If you share our alarm about the state of our nation and you would like to support this little outpost in the ever expanding independent media world, you can hit one of the buttons below or use the snail mail address on the left.
Thanks so much. And Happy Hollandaise everyone!