My partner and I were still buzzing with adrenaline from seeing pop star Dua Lipa close out Saturday night at the Austin City Limits music festival when we were subject to a drunk woman's 10-minute rant about how she hates her Democratic friend. Lipa's tour and album were both titled "Radical Optimism," and were emersed in her curated world for over an hour, dancing and singing with an eclectic crowd of all races and sexual identities, enjoying their freedom as if nearly half the country isn't poised to snatch it all away. We were soon hit with a reality check. As we walked away from the show, we kept pace with a fellow concertgoer as she loudly denounced a friend for voting for Vice President Kamala Harris.

"All she talks about is abortion," the woman, who looked in her late 20s or early 30s, slurred at her two friends. "But she won't listen about the economy. She said she doesn't care about the economy!"

I hadn't attended the Austin City Limits Festival in over 15 years, which made it a useful benchmark for how much cultural progress has occurred since the early years of Barack Obama's presidency.

I was skeptical that this woman felt much financial distress in President Joe Biden's economy, considering she got so loaded at a show where beer was $15 a pop. (I suspect she had been watching the other festival headliner, country star Chris Stapleton, even though he does not share her politics.) My suspicions about her true levels of economic anxiety were confirmed when she turned off the road into her home, in a neighborhood where houses frequently sell for over a million dollars. As I joked to my partner, whatever actual words came out of this........

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