There are a couple of instances in which the "we'll all be dead" paradigm makes its way into history. I guess for people who do economics, Keynes is the obvious one:
In the long run we are all dead. Which is, on the face of it, absolutely true. To quote my father's favorite musical philosopher:
"No one here gets out alive". But just talking about myself, honestly, as a person past the age of 40 who might shuffle on another fifty years, what the actual fuck? Because I have come to grips the way a fragile mortal can having had near misses with blood alcohol flirtations and closed fist frustrations, and who can comfortably assert that my childlessness will proceed apace until my eventual oxygen permit revocation, that if and when I die, I'd like not to have fucked the entire earth up too much for the progeny of others. And I feel that way about the budget, also. We owe more to future generations than a government unfit to do more than bomb other countries and service its debt.
I see a really strong link between Trump's budget nihilism and his climate change nihilism. And for the record, I think this isn't any different from any other dues-paying practicing Republican, either.
I know George W. Bush understood his place in history
might not even matter eventually, because
he'd be dead when his legacy was eventually sorted out. It could seem self-effacing that way, but in a more immediate way, it seems a bit like throwing off responsibility for the history one helped create. As if history would never affirmatively ascribe any blame, or convince one to take in the degree to which one was a person with agency to stop any harm, or constructively benefit lives.
And ever so many followed in this wake--they maintain they know climate change is happening, but can't be arsed to care. Or they deny it utterly, because they are Jim Inhofe or similar. Because the outcomes are not their problem, but service to their donors possibly is? They realize that the debt crisis that looms is a real thing, but want to believe that slippery ideas about how much the economy can grow if people weren't taxed so much does more for us than the very simple idea that government should raise revenues from taxation to pay for the necessities of its ongoing missions.
We need pragmatists in government, and people who not only understand history, but will fight to improve upon it, regardless of the earth that will lay over their remains some day.
Trump thinks a debt crisis will not matter to himself when he is out or office or dead-- the same Donald Trump who records every knock or slight against himself, and rages against it on Twitter.
Dead or alive, we can blame such things as the trade war already hurting people in rural areas, leading people to sell their farms, or the trade war shutting car factories, as mistakes that, regardless of Trump's mortality, can be laid at Trump's feet from a policy stance.
He can leave office or die, in the long run, or even a short, angry, sedentary fat man's run, but he would still be responsible for his policies, his appointments, and the choices he made.
And fucking up the future for American business, farming, manufacturing, is not making America Great Again, ever.
