Episode Details

In this episode, we explore from the great recession to january sixth. So in early 2009, the United States government passed like more sweeping legislation in just a matter of months than it had in decades. Right. Just massive restructuring of huge sectors of the economy. Exactly. But then just four years later, you have a U .S. senator literally standing on the floor of Congress spending hours reading green eggs and ham to an empty room. A completely paralyzed room. Yeah. Right. So how do the gears of the most powerful country on earth just seize up that quickly? Well, it's honestly one of the most drastic institutional whiplashes in modern history. I mean, we usually view history as this slow, gradual evolution. Sure. But when you look closely at this specific 10 -year window, you realize the pressure was building up incredibly fast. right beneath our feet. Welcome to a brand new deep dive. Today we're opening up a stack unconstitutional overreach. Right. They believe centralized government expansion was the disease. And then on the political left, you had the Occupy Wall Street movement kicking off a couple of years later in 2011. But their anger was directed at corporations and economic inequality. Yeah, they looked at the exact same financial crash and saw a total lack of accountability for the financial institutions that actually caused it. Exactly. You have these two immense populist waves building up simultaneously. Both factions felt entirely left behind by the establishment, but they were pointing their fingers in diametrically opposite directions. And that exact anger, that feeling that Washington was playing a game the voters weren't invited to, is what fundamentally broke the legislature in 2010. The whiplash of the 2010 midterm elections is really staggering. It is. The Republican Party, fueled by that grassroots conservative Tea Party opposition, they win a landslide victory.