The following are five predictions about the future of U.S. politics. Some are short-term, others long-term; some are possible, others probable.

One-term presidents. In a time of extreme political polarization and razor-thin electoral victories, we may have to get used to the White House changing hands every four years rather than eight. In 2016, Trump won Michigan by 13,000 votes, Wisconsin by 27,000, Pennsylvania by 68,000, Arizona by 91,000. Biden won those same states in 2020 by 154,000, 21,000, 82,000, and 10,000, respectively. Other states were close as well, such as Biden’s +13,000 in Georgia or Clinton’s +2,700 in New Hampshire. Competitive races are nothing new in election history, and 13 presidents (including Trump) have failed to reach a second term directly after their first, but Trump’s defeat was the first incumbent loss in nearly 30 years. The bitter divisions and conspiratorial hysteria of modern times may make swing state races closer than ever, resulting in fewer two-term presidents — at least consecutive ones — in the near-term.

Mail privacy under rightwing attack. When abortion was illegal in the United States, there were many abortions. If Roe falls and states outlaw the procedure, or if the Supreme Court continues to allow restrictions that essentially do the same, we will again see many illegal terminations — only they will be far safer and easier this time, with abortion pills via mail. Even if your state bans the purchase, sale, or use of the pill, mail forwarding services or help from out-of-town friends (shipping the pills to a pro-choice state and then having them mailed to you) will easily get the pills to your home. Is mail privacy a future rightwing target? The U.S. has a history of banning the mailing of contraceptives, information on abortion, pornography, lottery tickets, and more, enforced through surveillance, requiring the Supreme Court to declare our mail cannot be opened without a warrant. It is possible the Right will attempt to categorize abortion pills as items illegal to ship and even push for the return of warrantless searches.

Further demagoguery, authoritarianism, and lunacy. Trump’s success is already inspiring others, some worse than he is, to run for elected office. His party looks the other way or enthusiastically embraces his deceitful attempts to overturn fair elections because it is most interested in power, reason and democracy be damned. Same for Trump’s demagoguery, his other lies and authoritarian tendencies, his extreme policies, his awful personal behavior — his base loves it all and it’s all terribly useful to the GOP. While Trump’s loss at the polls in 2020 may cause some to second-guess the wisdom of supporting such a lunatic, at least those not among the 40% of citizens who still believe the election was stolen, at present it seems the conservative base and the Republican Party are largely ready for Round 2. What the people want and the party tolerates they will get; what’s favored and encouraged will be perpetuated and created anew. It’s now difficult to imagine a normal human being, a classic Republican, a decent person like Mitt Romney, Liz Cheney, Jon Huntsman, John Kasich, or even Marco Rubio beating an extremist fool at the primary polls. The madness will likely continue for some time, both with Trump and others who come later, with only temporary respites of normalcy between monsters. Meanwhile, weaknesses in the political and legal system Trump exploited will no doubt remain unfixed for an exceptionally long time.

Republicans fight for their lives / A downward spiral against democracy. In a perverse sort of way, Republican cheating may be a good sign. Gerrymandering, voter suppression in all its forms, support for overturning a fair election, desperation to hold on to the Electoral College, and ignoring ballot initiatives passed by voters are the acts and sentiments of the fearful, those who no longer believe they can win honestly. And given the demographic changes already occurring in the U.S. that will transform the nation in the next 50-60 years (see next section), they’re increasingly correct. Republicans have an ever-growing incentive to cheat. Unfortunately, this means the Democrats do as well. Democrats may be better at putting democracy and fairness ahead of power interests, but this wall already has severe cracks, and one wonders how long it will hold. For example, the GOP refused to allow Obama to place a justice on the Supreme Court, and many Democrats dreamed of doing the same to Trump, plus expanding the Court during the Biden era. Democrats of course also gerrymander U.S. House and state legislature districts to their own advantage (the Princeton Gerrymandering Project is a good resource), even if Republican gerrymandering is worse — four times worse — therefore reaping bigger advantages. It’s sometimes challenging to parse out which Democratic moves are reactions to Republican tactics and which they would do anyway to protect their seats, but it’s obvious that any step away from impartiality and true democracy encourages the other party to do the same, creating a downward anti-democratic spiral, a race to the bottom.

(One argument might be addressed before moving on. Democrats generally make it easier for people to vote and support the elimination of the Electoral College, though again liberals are not angels and there are exceptions to both these statements. Aren’t those dirty tactics that serve their interests? As I wrote in The Enduring Stupidity of the Electoral College, which shows that this old anti-democratic system is unfair to each individual voter, “True, the popular vote may serve Democratic interests. Fairness serves Democratic interests. But, unlike unfairness, which Republicans seek to preserve, fairness is what’s right. Giving the candidate with the most votes the presidency is what’s right.” Same for not making it difficult for people who usually vote the “wrong” way to cast their ballots! You do what is right and fair, regardless of who it helps.)

Democratic dominance. In the long-term, Democrats will become the dominant party through demographics alone. Voters under 30 favored the Democratic presidential candidate by large margins in 2004, 2008, 2012, 2016, and 2020 — voters under 40 also went blue by a comfortable margin. Given that individual political views mostly remain stable over time (the idea that most or even many young people will grow more conservative as they age is unsupported by research), in 50 or 60 years this will be a rather different country. Today we still have voters (and politicians) in their 80s and 90s who were segregationists during Jim Crow. In five or six decades, those over 40 today (who lean Republican) will be gone, leaving a bloc of older voters who have leaned blue their entire lives, plus a new generation of younger and middle-aged voters likely more liberal than any of us today. This is on top of an increasingly diverse country, with people of color likely the majority in the 2040s — with the white population already declining by total numbers and as a share of the overall population, Republican strength will weaken further (the majority of whites have long voted Republican; the majority of people of color vote blue). A final point: the percentage of Americans who identify as liberal is steadily increasing, as opposed to those who identify as conservative, and Democrats have already won the popular vote in seven of the last eight presidential elections. Republican life rafts such as the Electoral College (whose swing states will experience these same changes) and other anti-democratic practices will grow hopelessly ineffective under the crushing weight of demographic metamorphosis. Assuming our democracy survives, the GOP will be forced to moderate to have a chance at competing.

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Students and alumni of Missouri State (and perhaps some of the University of Missouri) at times wonder if MSU will ever become the largest university in the state. While past trends are never a perfect predictor of the future, looking at the enrollment patterns of each institution can help offer an answer. Here are the total student growths since 2005.

Mizzou
Via its Student Body Profile reports and enrollment summary (Columbia campus):

2005 – 27,985
2006 – 28,253
2007 – 28,477
2008 – 30,200
2009 – 31,314
2010 – 32,415
2011 – 33,805
2012 – 34,748
2013 – 34,658
2014 – 35,441
2015 – 35,448
2016 – 33,266
2017 – 30,870
2018 – 29,866
2019 – 30,046
2020 – 31,103
2021 – 31,412

Missouri State
Via its enrollment history report (Springfield campus):

2005 – 19,165
2006 – 19,464
2007 – 19,705
2008 – 19,925
2009 – 20,842
2010 – 20,949
2011 – 20,802
2012 – 21,059
2013 – 21,798
2014 – 22,385
2015 – 22,834
2016 – 24,116
2017 – 24,350
2018 – 24,390
2019 – 24,126
2020 – 24,163
2021 – 23,618

In the past 16 years, MSU gained on average 278.3 new students each Fall. Mizzou gained 214.2 new students per year, an average tanked by the September 2015 racism controversy. Before the controversy (2005-2015 data), Mizzou gained 746.3 new students per year (MSU, over the same ten years, +366.9). From a low point in 2018, Mizzou has since, over a three-year period, gained on average 515.3 new students (over the same time, MSU saw -257.3 students — one school’s gain is often the other’s loss). This is too short a timeframe to draw unquestionable conclusions, but with Mizzou back on its feet it seems likely to continue to acquire more students on average each year, making MSU’s ascension to the top unlikely.

Predicting future enrollment patterns is rather difficult, of course. Over the past decade, fewer Americans have attended university, including fewer Missourians — and that was before COVID. Like a pandemic or a controversy, some disruptors cannot be predicted, nor can boosts to student populations. But most challenges will be faced by both schools: fewer young people, better economic times (which draws folks to the working world), pandemics, etc. The rising cost of college may give a university that is slightly more affordable an edge, as has been Missouri State’s long-time strategy. An increased profile through growing name recognition (it’s only been 16 years since Missouri State’s name change), success in sports, clever marketing schemes (alumnus John Goodman is now involved with MSU), ending Mizzou’s near-monopoly on doctoral degrees, and so on could make a difference, but there remains a huge advantage to simply being an older school, with a head-start in enrollment and brand recognition.

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In most states, during normal times, you can use unemployment insurance for at most 26 weeks, half the year, and will receive 30-50% of the wages from your previous job, up to a certain income. This means $200-400 a week on average. One must meet a list of requirements to qualify, for instance having been fired from a job due to cutbacks, not through fault of your own. Only 35-40% of unemployed persons receive UI.

This means that at any given time, about 2 million Americans are receiving UI; in April/May 2020, with COVID-19 and State measures to prevent its spread causing mass firings, that number skyrocketed to 22 million. Put another way, just 1-3% of the workforce is usually using UI, and during the pandemic spike it was about 16%. Just before that rise, it was at 1.5% — and it returned to that rate in November 2021, just a year and a half later. Indeed, the number of recipients fell as fast as it shot up, from 16% to under 8% in just four months (September 2020), down to 4% in six months (November 2020). As much pearl-clutching as there was among conservatives (at least those who did not use UI) over increased dependency, especially with the temporary $600 federal boost to UI payments, tens of millions of Americans did not leech off the system. They got off early, even though emergency measures allowed them to stay on the entire year of 2020 and into the first three months of 2021! (The trend was straight down, by the way, even before the $600 boost ended.)

This in fact reflects what we’ve always known about unemployment insurance. It’s used as intended, as a temporary aid to those in financial trouble (though many low-wage workers don’t have access to it, which must be corrected). Look at the past 10 years of UI use. The average stay in the program (“duration”) each year was 17 or 18 weeks in times of economic recovery, 14 or 15 weeks in better economic times (sometimes even fewer). Four months or so, then a recipient stops filing for benefits, having found a job or ameliorated his or her crisis in some fashion. Some “enjoy” the 30-50% of previous wages for the whole stretch, but the average recipient doesn’t even use UI for 20 weeks, let alone the full 26 allowed. This makes sense, given how much of a pay cut UI is. Again, many Americans stop early, and the rest are cut off — so why all the screaming about leeching? Only during the COVID crisis did the average duration climb higher, to 26-27 weeks, as the federal government offered months of additional aid, as mentioned — again, many did not receive benefits for as long as they could have.

Those that receive benefits will not necessarily do the same next year. In times of moderate unemployment, for example, about 30% of displaced workers and 50% of workers on temporary layoff who receive benefits in Year 1 will reapply for benefits in Year 2. The rest do not refile.

However, we must be nuanced thinkers. Multiple things can be true at the same time. UI can also extend unemployment periods, which makes a great deal of sense even if UI benefits represent a drastic pay cut. UI gives workers some flexibility to be more selective in the job hunt. An accountant who has lost her position may, with some money coming in and keeping a savings account afloat, be able to undertake a longer search for another accounting job, rather than being forced to take the first thing she can find, such as a waitressing job. This extra time is important, because finding a similar-wage job means you can keep your house or current apartment, won’t fall further into poverty, etc. There are many factors behind the current shortage of workers, and UI seems to be having a small effect (indeed, studies range between no effect and moderate effects). And of course, in a big, complex world there will be some souls who avoid work as long as they can, and others who commit fraud (during COVID, vast sums were siphoned from our UI by individuals and organized crime rings alike, in the U.S. and from around the globe; any human being with internet access can attempt a scam). But that’s not most Americans. While UI allows workers to be more selective, prolonging an unemployed term a bit, they nevertheless generally stop filing for benefits early and avoid going back.

To summarize, for the conservatives in the back. The U.S. labor force is 161 million people. A tiny fraction is being aided by UI at any given moment. Those that are generally don’t stay the entire time they could. Those who do use 26 weeks of benefits will be denied further aid for the year (though extended benefits are sometimes possible in states with rising unemployment). Most recipients don’t refile the next year. True, lengths of unemployment may be increased some, and there will always be some Americans who take advantage of systems like this, but most people would prefer not to, instead wanting what all deserve — a good job, with a living wage.

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There is often much screaming among conservatives that big government programs — new ones like universal healthcare, universal college education, or guaranteed work, and long-established ones like Social Security, Medicaid, and Medicare — somehow lead to dictatorship. There is, naturally, no actual evidence for this. The imagined correlation is justified with nothing beyond “that’s socialism, which always becomes totalitarianism,” ignorance already addressed. The experience of advanced democracies around the world, and indeed the U.S. itself, suggests big government programs, run by big departments with big budgets and big staffs helping tens of millions of citizens, can happily coexist alongside elected governing bodies and presidents, constitutions, and human rights, as one would expect.

Threats to democracy come from elsewhere — but what’s interesting to consider is how conservatives have things completely backward. Big government programs — the demonstration that one’s democracy is a government “for the people,” existing to meet citizen needs and desires — are key to beating back the real threats to a republic.

In a recent interview with The Nation, Bernie Sanders touched on this:

“Why it is imperative that we address these issues today is not only because of the issues themselves—because families should not have to spend a huge proportion of their income on child care or sending their kid to college—but because we have got to address the reality that a very significant and growing number of Americans no longer have faith that their government is concerned about their needs,” says the senator. “This takes us to the whole threat of Trumpism and the attacks on democracy. If you are a worker who is working for lower wages today than you did 20 years ago, if you can’t afford to send your kid to college, etc., and if you see the very, very richest people in this country becoming phenomenally rich, you are asking yourself, ‘Who controls the government, and does the government care about my suffering and the problems of my family?’”

Sanders argues that restoring faith in government as a force for good is the most effective way to counter threats to democracy.

And he’s right. Empirical evidence suggests economic crises erode the rule of law and faith in representative democracy. Depressions are not the only force that pushes in this direction, but they are significant and at times a killing blow to democratic systems. Unemployment, low wages, a rising cost of living — hardship and poverty, in other words — drive citizens toward extreme parties and voices, including authoritarians. Such leaders are then elected to office, and begin to dismantle democracy with support of much of the population. Europe in the 1930s is the oft-cited example, but the same has been seen after the global recession beginning in 2008, with disturbing outgrowths of recent declining trust in democracy: the success of politicians with demagogic and anti-democratic bents like Trump, hysteria over fictional stolen elections that threatens to keep unelected people in office, and dangerous far-right parties making gains in Europe. The Eurozone and austerity crisis, the COVID-induced economic turmoil, and more have produced similar concerns.

What about the reverse? If economic disaster harms devotion to real democracy and politicians who believe in it, does the welfare state increase support for and faith in democracy? Studies also suggest this is so. Government tackling poverty through social programs increases satisfaction with democratic systems! The perception that inequality is rising and welfare isn’t doing enough to address it does the exact opposite. A helping hand increases happiness, and is expected from democracies, inherently linking favorability views on republics and redistribution. If we wish to inoculate the citizenry against authoritarian candidates and anti-democratic practices within established government, shoring up loyalty to democracy through big government programs is crucial.

It is as Sanders said: the most important thing for the government to do to strengthen our democracy and even heal polarization (“Maybe the Democrats putting $300 per child per month in my bank account aren’t so evil”), is simply to help people. To work for and serve all. Healthcare, education, income support, jobs…such services help those on the Right, Left, and everyone in between. This should be done whether there is economic bust or boom. People hold fast to democracy, a government of and by the people, when it is clearly a government for the people. If we lose the latter, so too the former.

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In the past year, it has been heavily impressed upon Kansas Citians that one’s health is to a significant degree determined by factors beyond one’s control. The COVID-19 era is a key moment to further break down the reactionary notion that personal health choices are all that stands between an individual and optimal physical and mental well-being. It’s broadened our understanding of how health is also a product of social conditions.

The first and most elementary fact to note is that viruses, while often focusing on vulnerable populations such as the elderly, are not often entirely discriminatory. They end the lives of the young and healthy as well. Regardless of one’s habits of eating, exercise, or not smoking, random exposure to illnesses new or old as one shops for groceries or rides in an Uber helps introduce the point: The environment often makes a mockery of our personal choices, as important as those are.

The family you are born into, where you grow up, and other factors beyond your control — and often your own awareness — have a large impact on your development and health as a child, which in turn impacts your health as an adult. (And the environment you happen to be in continues to affect you.) Poverty, extremely stressful on the mind and body in many ways, is the ultimate destructive circumstance for children and adults alike. Take the disturbing life expectancy differences between the poor and the better-off, for instance. In Kansas City’s poorest ZIP codes, which are disproportionately black, you can expect to live 18 fewer years on average compared to our richest, whitest ZIP codes, as Flatland reported on June 22. Poor families are less likely to have health care offered by an employer or be able to afford it themselves. They live in social conditions that include more violence or worse air and water pollution. They can at times only afford housing owned by negligent landlords slow to take care of mold, and cope with a million other factors.

During the pandemic, what serious observers of the social determinants of health predicted came true: Black Kansas Citians were hammered by COVID-19. Here we feel, today, the cold touch of slavery and Jim Crow, which birthed disproportionate poverty, which nurtured worse health, which resulted in Black Kansas Citians being more likely to catch coronavirus and die from it, as The Star reported even in the early stages of the pandemic. Worse still, on Feb. 24, the paper noted that richer, whiter ZIP codes — the areas of less urgent need — were getting disproportionately more vaccines than poorer areas with more Black residents. The vaccines were first shipped by the state to health centers that were convenient for some but distant from others.

Imagine history and race playing a role in your health, how soon you could get a shot. Imagine transportation options and where you live being factors. Likewise, imagine the kind of job you have doing the same: Lower-income workers are more likely to have front-line jobs at restaurants and grocery stores, where you can catch the virus. The privileged, better-off often work from home.

Whether it is drinking water you don’t know is unsafe or working at a job that requires much human contact during a pandemic, the determinants of health stretch far beyond exercising, eating right, and choosing not to smoke. To reflect on this fact is to understand a moral duty. If social conditions affect the health of individuals and families, it is urgent to change social conditions — to build a decent society, one without poverty and the many horrors that flow from it.

In this moment, one important way to help move toward this goal is to urge the U.S. House to pass the reconciliation budget that just passed the Senate, to extend the direct child tax credit payments to families, boldly expand education and health care, and more. Onward, a better world awaits.

This article first appeared in The Kansas City Star: https://www.kansascity.com/opinion/readers-opinion/guest-commentary/article253638658.html or https://edition.pagesuite.com/popovers/dynamic_article_popover.aspx?artguid=1ce78851-fef4-4f5d-b7a4-448618c1526c.

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