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They only know seethe with their selected guru in revenge therapy daily The party of revenge daily As if in the arena watching Cassius Clay pummel the opponent in a fervor glee

More than money: it takes time. Decades, at least. Decades of serious, clear-headed effort.

It's took up to 100 years to attain and a lot of vigilance to maintain. Rebuilding will take longer than most of us will be alive.

So it has to be sold in specific and human terms: "Musk is defunding children's hospitals. Let's hear from this nurse who works at one." Many people think billionaires are cool and could not define "oligarchy" if a lit match was an inch from their foreheads.

Americans have been told for decades that the government sucks and the national debt is a disaster waiting to happen. Left and Right hate the government in different ways and for different reasons. Opposing Trump and Musk is an institutionalist project. That is a tough sell.

To be clear, I don’t have an answer. I am looking for ideas. This is unusual for me - I am better known for my "strong opinions, loosely held." But this time, I am truly loose. I think this is something we - journalists and the public - need to grapple with together. And I welcome your thoughts!

I think it would be great if more Americans knew how hard it can be to get indoor plumbing in large parts of Russia. For example. Most Americans can't imagine that life outside of America could be any different, let alone intensely more miserable.

Comparative would be helpful. In some ways you're asking the question "what is a government for" or "what does a government owe to their citizens?" Perhaps look at poverty numbers, but use something like ALICE instead of federal poverty line. www.unitedforalice.org/overview

A few thoughts, continuing with EPA as an example: Taking famously bad situations/locations - smog, river fires, Superfund cleanup sites - and digging into the data over time (like, I’d love a picture+data pairing where you can see images of the same skyline over decades, alongside the numbers 1/

I feel like some data speaks volumes. e.g. no major carrier loss of life for 20+ years (something like that). Same with polio. I bet some models could be made showing adding or taking away food aid causes n deaths. It does get a bit wonky which is the problem, right? People need education on this.

Remembering the "fall of the Iron Curtain" and pictures of people sweeping inches of coal dust off their porches, not being able to hang laundry out, kids walking to school swaddled in masks. That was a potent msg for the Clean Air Act!

Yep.