Our Politics Can Be Brutal

January 30, 2026

Doug Leyendecker

Welcome to This Week’s Leyendecker View

Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.
– Steve Wozniak

FAVORITE READS OF THE WEEK

AI guru challenges LLMs
They are wrongly focused.

In defense of inherited wealth
It’s of greater value than higher taxes.

FAVORITE WATCH OF THE WEEK

The science of aging
Get smarter about it.

THINKING OUT LOUD

Our Politics Can Be Brutal
Sausage making isn’t pretty

A friend of mine recently sent me the following message: “Doug, we are in a negative spiral because the left is going to pound us with negative sentiment until November. Their goal is to win.”

Well of course their goal is to win. It is every party and politician’s goal to win. But how one goes about trying to win is revealing—and perhaps not in the way you might think.

My friend has a point. Negativity sells. If you think the news has been ugly, be prepared for much more. With the midterms ever in sight, it might only be getting started.

Creating and propagating negative narratives is, unfortunately, effective political strategy. This is thanks to a deeply ingrained psychological phenomenon known as negativity bias. We pay more attention to the negative than we do the positive as a mechanism of survival. Only by being aware of threats can we take action to avoid them.

If we get lost in the beauty of the flowers, the hungry lion hiding in the brush behind us will surely seize on our distraction and go in for the kill. Better to remain vigilant for the lions and strike them before they strike us.

With each passing month, the left is going to turn up the dial on scaring the hell out of people.

Trump is Hitler. Trump is a despot king. This is our last chance to save our democracy. The right are all racists. AI is coming for your job. The system is rigged against you. ICE are the gestapo. The economy is in a freefall. The economy is rigged. Capitalism is evil.

And the news media will be right there waiting to aid and abet. After all, thanks again to that negativity bias, negative news performs better than positive news. Negative stories hook people in the fear cycle, making them feel like they must keep watching, day in and day out, to learn just how disastrous whatever event becomes and to feed their own political biases. As people engorge themselves on rage and fear, the media sells more ads and rakes in more money.

Will it work? We’ll have to wait and see.

But in the meantime, our very real problems in need of serious solutions will still need very serious solutions. We need to fix the economic conditions that have exploded our debt. We need to fix runaway health care costs. We need to fix our public education system that is failing students. We need to fix our higher education system that has put millions of people into burdensome debt. We need to repair our social fabric that’s been tearing apart at the seams for many years. We need to figure out if AI will become good for us all or just for its owners. And we must repair and restore the nuclear family.

Wouldn’t it be nice if, instead of running campaigns on fear and rage, politicians ran them on ideas? And competed on ideas instead of who’s got the better vitriol that can go viral? Unfortunately, this is sausage making in our democratic republic. The next nine months will be all rage bait. Perhaps the question is—why are our elections so often like this?

Because the alternative is authoritarianism.

A free country must give a wide berth to debate. Often so wide that it bumps into rage and hate. Without this radical free speech that our Founding Fathers concretized in the Constitution, we would have no freedom at all. And with this precious gift of free speech comes the cumbersome privilege of tolerating speech we ourselves might find loathsome.

And wouldn’t you know, this freedom of speech has a way of winding up in campaigns. Just because one wants to run for office doesn’t mean they know it’s wise to be responsible with speech. Politicians want power, and they’ll use every tool they can to get it and maintain it. Our Founding Fathers knew the nature of politicians, and this knowledge loomed large as they drafted the Constitution.

Our recent election cycles are by no means the first and won’t be the last littered with bile and negativity. This is part and parcel with freedom. And our system was brilliantly designed to handle the most bruising of election cycles, if even begrudgingly.

By contrast, dictatorships allow no speech they disagree with. But what does it matter, as they also don’t allow free and fair elections.

As Winston Churchill once said, democracy is the worst form of government, except all others.

So, yes, buckle up. We’re in for a bumpy ride. It’s not going to be fun. But it’s better than the alternative.

THE RANDOMS

The idea that layoffs and the lack of new hires is really the result of the post-covid over-hiring spree rather than AI is floating around out there.

It should not surprise us that President Xi is firing senior military leaders after Chinese military technology proved impotent in Venezuela.

Google tells us that ICE is operating in all 50 states and that Texas, Florida, and California lead in deportations. How is it that Minnesota has turned into the center of the ICE conflict?

Do the ICE activists kind of remind you of the activists who silenced Covid vax skeptics?

Is it a coincidence that ICE protests in Minnesota showed up right after massive fraud was found there? Were these protests a coordinated effort to shift the narrative in Minnesota?

More and more countries are quitting their net-zero goals. It appears they have discovered the impracticality of achieving a goal that will further and significantly harm their economies and burden their citizens. And they have the perfect foil in Trump, who is ardently pro fossil fuels. Instead of having to admit that decarbonization alchemy was never real, they can just blame Trump.

I am not yet convinced that today’s technological innovations, which are destroying jobs, are creating an equal number of better jobs than they are destroying. I continue to think Luddite theory might finally have its moment because ours is no longer a goods-producing economy. When the majority of an economy is service providing, then it seems natural that technology would replace minds with software, RAM, and hard drives.

Why is the price of gold setting records but not the price of cryptocurrencies?

ECONOMIC NEWS

Economy

US economy may grow faster
The Fed seems to think so
Durable goods orders signal growth is coming
Factory orders are rising
Is lower consumer confidence a lagging indicator?

Labor

UPS to cut 30,000 jobs, Amazon cuts 16,000
AI is not a labor killer, yet
The company training AI to replace you
The great graduate job drought

The Lone Star

Census says Texas is #1 for population growth
Austin start-up takes on Nvidia
Robo restaurant coming to Houston

BUSINESS

Finance

Looks like big IPOs will dominate
Private credit needs continuation funds
BlackRock private debt fund takes 19% haircut
Almost two-thirds of VC funds are going to AI
Here comes PE consolidation

Real Estate