actually give people the protects they promised them when they went off to fight in our name. and one thing that stays with me, mike, the idea that only one half of 1% of americans actually fought in the war since 9/11. and the impact of that has been felt much more deeply in rural areas. twice the number of casualties in small towns and cities as there are in big cities. and we re still reckoning with the effects of it. we have to write it down and document it and read about it in order to know what happened. there is so much at play here, we just scratched the surface. a really good and important new book wildland: the making of america s fury. hope you come back and talk more about this. good to see you. still ahead, our next guest wrote that america risks being, quote, the first large modern society to go from fully developed to failing. a detailed look at how we got where we are economically as a nation. best-selling author curt anderson joins us next on morning joe. hor c
the democrats were jettisoned by. you re absolutely right, all boats did not rise, and as you say, certainly in housing and all kinds of other ways, there was a built-in structural racism, absolutely. so during the democratic primaries there was all this tiptoeing around the idea of reparations, for instance, and i do think one of the structural ideas that needs to be on the table, not probably tomorrow, but, you know, as was talked about in the primaries, this incredible, almost ten to one ratio of household wealth among white people to among black people. and that hasn t improved with all the progress of civil rights. how do you improve that? i don t think you do it that s a thing that probably can t be done incrementally.
but we want to know what happened, why did it happen. lots of things are wrong that are not criminal. the united states has draconian punishments for crimes and it often makes it very difficult to prove a crime. we don t need to send people to prison. we need to know what happened and why. we need an informed democracy. so stop thinking about this through the criminal justice lens and think about it through threats to democracy lens and just seek knowledge, not punishment. and, mika, david is so right. i ve heard people, enough people coming on the show saying so-and-so is going to go to jail for this or go to jail for that. that s why it s so important seeing what the republican senate intel committee said. every time somebody says russian hoax and what a grave threat this was. and another thing, too, i want to follow up with what john just said. if you really believe it s a russian hoax, because i have
that now evolved into the qanon types and the type of evil geniuses that kurt writes about in his second book. i would love to ask kurt, there is this intertwining of these two things, qanon types and the economic types, and how does this get unwound? that s you couldn t have put it i couldn t have put it better, walter, thank you. they are connected. and you really see one place in which the republican conservative basically saying we re no longer necessarily good with committed to facts, committed to factual reality. you see it in 89- 90, when george h.w. bush administration was about to have a massive climate change initiative, right. that was a bipartisan idea. we got to fight this climate change thing, get global warming down. john sununu, as a definite evil
and by the way, equalizing that doesn t need to be all that crazily expensive. so i would say that s one of the things that ought to be on the table. another thing i wanted to talk about, maybe if anybody else has anything to say, is the wall street part of this, which also, for folks in the 1980s, was so important in changing the system, changing who was supposed to do better in the american economic system, from main street to wall street. and the degree to which before the 80s wall street did not run our economic system, and after the 80s they really have. and the stock market and the dow became the all-encompassing metric for how things were doing. and of course, you know, a tiny fraction of americans own a vast majority of stock, even though half of us own stock in some