The Plan Was to Help American Workers. It Backfired.

Projection is claiming others are guilty of what exists only in your mind.

 

This is so well written it feels like a work of art.



My earliest political memory is watching the Berlin Wall fall. I was six years old. We watched together on the nightly news—strangers embracing, people swinging hammers at concrete, everyone laughing. I didn’t know what the wall was or why it mattered. I remember how happy everyone looked. I remember thinking that smashing the wall looked like a lot of fun. I wanted a hammer too.

I’ve spent my career as a political scientist learning why moments like that almost never happen. And why, sometimes, they do.

On a Saturday afternoon in March 1911, Frances Perkins was having tea near Washington Square when she heard screams. She ran toward the smoke rising from the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory and arrived in time to watch 146 workers—mostly young immigrant women—burn to death or leap from ninth-floor windows. The doors had been locked to prevent theft. The fire escapes collapsed. The city’s tallest ladders reached only the sixth floor.

She witnessed it all. She later called it “the day the New Deal was born.”

Perkins understood that the fire was a policy outcome. Every death had been produced by specific legal choices—the absence of fire codes, the permissibility of locked exits, the treatment of workers as inputs rather than persons. The horror of that day was not that the system failed. It was that it was functioning exactly as designed.

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My deepest fear is not that we fail to survive this moment—it’s that we survive it only to return to the status quo that made it possible. That we exhale, declare victory, and leave in place the Electoral College, the filibuster, the gerrymandered maps, the money-soaked elections that allowed a minoritarian movement to capture the state in the first place. The point is not to get back to normal. Normal is how we got here.

The wall looks permanent until the day it comes down. So it goes with all institutions. They are not immutable fixtures but human creations, designed to solve the problems of one era and replaceable when they fail the next.