Throw the bums out! Get a different set of bums!

(This is a political rant. If that’s not your cup of tea, best to skip it.)

I’ve been saying for a long time that the United States has late-stage Soviet Union energy right now. The system is broken and isn’t working for the average person.

The average American works too hard for too little, and keeps watching the people at the top getting richer and richer, and they get madder and madder. This was a “throw the bums out” election.

In fact, I’d argue the 2016 and 2020 elections also were “throw-the-bums-out” elections. The country remains more or less evenly divided, so we just kind of swing back and forth, Obama to Trump to Biden back to Trump. We’re flailing.

Institutionalists — like Gorbachev in the Soviet Union, or Obama and Biden in the U.S. — try to shore up the existing institutions by tinkering with them at the edges. “Have faith in our systems,” they say. But people have lost faith, and what’s needed are sweeping changes.

I’m a Gen X’er, and things have been “tough” in this country for most of my lifetime. Sure, I know compared to sub-Saharan Africa and Central America, we’re spoiled. We eat too much, waste way too much energy, and buy too much crap.

But when I say “tough,” there are literally cities all over Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Indiana and other states where the factory closed in 1990 and it’s still sitting there abandoned. And all that’s left in town are dollar-stores, thrift-stores and maybe some welfare agencies.

The people who live there are either working menial jobs, like home health care, or they’re on disability pensions, and as soon as their kids get old enough, they join the military or move away. The houses are falling down, the schools are lousy, the roads are lousy. It’s a story repeated all over the United States.

Yes, we have a very high standard of living compared to 95 percent of the world’s population, but people aren’t seeing that; they’re seeing the school fall apart every day, and their emptied-out downtown.

I was in a group chat on Tuesday night with some other media people as the returns were coming in. One of them said, “I was born in Youngstown three weeks before the mills all closed and I graduated with a newspaper journalism degree in 1999. I’ve always lived with doom.”

Former U.S. Labor Secretary Robert Reich says:

“While the economy has improved over the last two years according to standard economic measures, most Americans without college degrees — that’s the majority — have not felt it.

“In fact, most Americans without college degrees have not felt much economic improvement for four decades, and their jobs have grown less secure. The real median wage of the bottom 90 percent is stuck nearly where it was in the early 1990s, even though the economy is more than twice as large.

“Most of the economy’s gains have gone to the top.”

A few weeks ago, we were in New Orleans. My wife was at a conference for work, and I was playing hooky. People have been asking me, since we got back, is there still damage from Hurricane Katrina? (Well, what kind of damage: Physical or psychological?)

The touristy areas are great, including the waterfront, Canal Street and the French Quarter.

Outside of the tourist-traps, people are struggling. The city lost 40 percent of its population immediately after Katrina; today, the population is still down 25 percent compared to 2020.

One day, while my wife was working, I went “walkabout” all over Central City and Treme. And those neighborhoods are struggling.

The photo at the top of the page is the public health center on North Rampart Street. Based on Google Street View, that wall collapsed three years ago and the building still looks like that. No one, not the state of Louisiana nor the City of New Orleans nor the federal government, has fixed it. Charity Hospital, a 2,680-bed facility which was flooded during Katrina, never reopened and sits abandoned in the heart of town.

There are pockets of that decay all over town, but I’m not trying to single out New Orleans; you can find stuff like that all over Pittsburgh, too, and all over the United States, as soon as you leave the tourist areas and go into working-class neighborhoods.

National elected officials — Democratic and Republican — have literally been promising to “bring back” our communities my whole life, but no one has done much, in part because it would require raising taxes on the wealthy to subsidize housing and education — and they won’t do that, because the wealthy donors who put them into office won’t allow it.

Now, Trump is promising sweeping changes. Nevermind the fact that he was already president for four years and didn’t help rebuild communities; in fact, the genius (in his own mind) real-estate developer couldn’t get an infrastructure bill passed. (Joe Biden did that.)

As with Putin in Russia, I think the economic cures Trump is promising to provide this time are going to be much worse than the disease. (The cures will literally be worse, if he actually does put Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in charge of health and human services.)

Also, setting aside Trump’s awful social and immigration policies for a moment (which is like saying, “other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was Ford’s Theater?”), the corruption of his next administration is going to be mind-blowing. We already know he’s a scam artist; the Supreme Court has now said anything he does while president cannot, by definition, be against the law. He and his crew are going to loot everything they can carry away.

Then why did people vote for him? Yes, I’m sure racism and sexism against Kamala Harris played a part; compared to Joe Biden’s narrow victory four years ago, about 15 million fewer people voted for her. That means a lot of Democrats stayed home. (Fewer people voted for Trump, than in 2020, too — about 1 million fewer.)

But mainly, I think people are frustrated. They don’t think government works. From their perspective, why would they want Biden’s vice president to be president? For what, four more years of tinkering with broken, slow-moving institutions, to maybe make them a little bit better?

There are giant problems all over the country, and the Democrats do tiny little things that help a tiny little bit, but they don’t make big changes. People are frustrated. They want big changes and they’re tired of promises.

Trump and his cadre of technology-company billionaire supporters — Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Peter Thiel, Marc Andreessen — are offering quick and easy solutions. One of Trump’s slogans this year, in fact, was “Trump Will Fix It.”

So, we Brexited ourselves. And just as Brexit in the United Kingdom caused chaos and wrecked that country’s economy, it’s is going cause chaos here, too. Climate change is going to get worse and worse, and more and more wealth is going to get transferred to the top 1 percent of people — the people we just put in charge of fixing the problem they are responsible for.

As Reich says, Trump’s “policies will hurt ordinary workers even more. Trump’s tariffs will drive up prices. His expected retreat from vigorous antitrust enforcement will allow giant corporations to drive up prices further.”

But the mantra of a lot of technology start-ups in Silicon Valley is “move fast and break shit,” so that’s what they’re going to do.

That not a way to build a sustainable company, let alone a society, but that’s what the United States has just voted for. God bless America!