I phone banked on two Sanders campaigns. This didn’t start with Trump or even in most of our lifetimes. Both parties, and yes most voters of both of them, would rather set the country on fire than have anything resembling economic equity or someone having their basic needs met without a subjective judgement of “deserving” it. We could have ended homelessness inexpensively at any time under any administration, we could have made prison rehabilitative, it would have literally saved the country money to invest in both, yet I’ve heard more Democrats and Republicans speak of such desperate populations as the problem instead of the society that put them there.

This collapse was a choice we made over and over again.