The Post-Partisan Emporium

  EVERYBODY KNOWS THE CAPTAIN LIED Everybody knows that the dice are loaded Everybody rolls with their fingers crossed Everybody knows the war is over Everybody knows the good guys lost Leonard Cohen – Everybody Knows Having heard this Leonard Cohen classic on the radio a few days ago, the lyrics have been rattling around in my head as a perfect description of the dystopian horror show we are experiencing in the world today. The song has a dark, foreboding, cynical tone, capturing the sense of a coming catastrophe which everybody can see coming, but we are helpless to stop. Cohen wrote the song in 1987 and it perfectly captures the mood of a Third Turning Unraveling, where greed; narcissism; the breakdown of societal trust; confidence in governmental and financial institutions; and the deterioration of society into the “haves” and “have nots”; sets the stage for the  Fourth Turning Crisis  of financial collapse, war, and a violent bloody resolution by 2032. Third Turnings are periods o

  The Real Book About the "White Working Class" Interview with Les Leopold, author of "Wall Street's War on Workers," the book neither party wants you to read MATT TAIBBI Mingo County, West Virginia. In late February a new book by journalist Paul Waldman and University of Maryland professor Thomas Schaller called  White Rural Rage  hit the bookshelves. The book was a compendium of  Hee Haw!  caricatures of hayseed America mixed with a blunt diagnosis: rural Americans are disproportionately racist, conspiratorial, authoritarian, and supportive of political violence, key culprits in the rise of Donald Trump. “Rural Americans,” Waldman and Waller wrote, “are overrepresented among those with insurrectionist tendencies.” Media response was instantaneous and ecstatic.  Morning Joe  hyped  White Rural Rage  as if it were a cross of  What Happened  and  The Grapes of Wrath;  Mika Brzezinski sat rapt as Schaller described rural voters as “ the most racist, xenophobic, an