Monthly Archives: February 2017

Are We the Poisoned Darts?

Vox recently had a good analysis of an increasingly pertinent question: is the chaos emanating from Washington part of a diabolical plan to generate social unrest that can then be used to justify the imposition of martial law or its equivalent, or is it evidence (as if we needed any) of the incompetence and ignorance of the embarrassing buffoon sitting in the Oval Office?

That argument is already taking shape around Trump, as he ham-handedly issues executive orders poorly understood by his own bureaucracy and fires members of his administration. It is aptly captured in two recent essays.

The first is by Yonatan Zunger, a Google privacy engineer. It’s called “Trial Balloon for a Coup?” and it reviews the news of the past day or two through the lens of a unifying theory: By putting confidant Steve Bannon on the National Security Council, cutting agencies out of rule-making, and defying a court order, Trump is systematically attempting to reduce any checks on his power. He’s trying to concentrate power in a small counsel of trusted advisers (the “coup”) and avoid legal review.

The second essay is by political scientist Tom Pepinsky, in response. It’s called “Weak and Incompetent Leaders act like Strong Leaders,” and it makes a simple point: The very same actions Zunger interprets as a devious, coordinated plan can also be interpreted as the bumbling, defensive moves of a weak leader who doesn’t know what the hell he’s doing.

As Pepinsky points out, all we have to go on is “observable” action. For example, perhaps Trump put Steve Bannon on the NSC to consolidate power, part of his intent to sideline the establishment figures who actually know something about American foreign policy. On the other hand, perhaps he brought Bannon into the NSC because he doesn’t understand the discussions occurring in that venue (or perhaps everyone in the foreign policy establishment is dragging their feet and otherwise trying to keep him from doing something that will trigger a diplomatic crisis or a war), and he brought in Bannon because he felt the need for a loyal “interpreter” he could trust.

The former is a sign of strength. The latter is a sign of weakness. Both have the same observable implication.

The author of the article, Dave Roberts, prefers the latter explanation; as he notes,

[N]arcissistic, paranoid tribalists are rarely geniuses, because genius requires a certain detached perspective, an ability to step outside oneself, which is precisely what narcissists lack.

In any event, Roberts says that the consequences of Trump’s behavior will be determined not by his intent, but by the strength of the institutions that have shaped our ability to resist.

If we’re looking to understand the course an authoritarian takes through a country and its history — what’s he’s accomplished, what’s likely to happen next — the place to look is not his intent, but the institutions and norms of the country he seeks to dominate. They, not his ultimate goals and desires, are what most determine the ultimate shape and consequences of a regime.

Think of a bull loose in a china shop. How much damage will it do? The relevant variable is not the bull’s intent. A bull’s gonna bull. The relevant variable is how equipped the china shop is to stop the bull. How many tranquilizer darts does it have, or, I don’t know, nets? (I didn’t think this analogy all the way through.)

The point is, how far an authoritarian can blunder forward, violating norms and degrading institutions, is determined by the strength of the norms and institutions he encounters. They determine when, or whether, he is constrained….

What will happen next depends not on Trump, but on America’s institutions and norms — the courts, the military, Congress, civil society, journalism. It is their strength, not his, that will determine how this story ends.

I like this analogy, muddled or not.

Trump is a raging bull. (As Jon Stewart memorably told Stephen Colbert a few nights ago on the Late Show, the “official language” of Trump’s America is bullshit.)

We the People must be the poisoned darts.

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This Does Answer a Common Question

Each time Trump announces a new nominee for a position in his administration, the same question arises: where does he get these people? (The ones who aren’t family members, that is. Family may be equally unfit, but we do know where he gets them.)

Really, who knew there was a vast pool of corrupt, unqualified, mean-spirited people willing and eager to work with Donald Trump?

Juanita Jean points out that Texas is one good source of appalling folks.

You guys remember Yachting Randy Neugebauer – the west Texas congressman we love around here.  Randy bought a yacht with his campaign funds which is kinda strange since he lives in the desert, was the guy who chewed out the national park service ranger on tv for doing her job during the government shutdown that he voted for, yelled “baby killer” at a Democratic congressman during a debate, and called US border detention centers the lap of lovely, and a whole mess of other stuff including how the hell did his son, Toby, become a billionaire.

“Yachting Randy” had retired from Congress, but it appears he will be joining the Trump Administration. In a match most definitely not made in heaven, he is being considered for a job as the head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

Donald Trump is considering Randy to head up the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Elizabeth Warren’s old job.  Did you hear me? The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Why aren’t you hollering and stomping?

Hell, people, you could not trust that guy with a dime.  He will steal the gold out of your teeth.  Plus, he’s crazier than an internationally syndicated Donald Trump tweet.  He’s got loco camped out in his eyeballs.

So “Yachting Randy” joins the growing parade of “you’re kidding, right?” nominees….

Not long ago, I was having lunch with a friend; we were glumly assessing the various harms likely in a country governed (if you can call it that) by this collection of truly appalling choices, and we concluded that their very incompetence might be our salvation–that most of them were too inexperienced and uninformed to be effective. The Trump Administration seemed likely to resemble the Keystone Kops.

But people like “Yachting Randy” and “Oops Rick Perry” and (most terrifying of all) “Sheriff” Jeff Sessions do have government experience. Their prior performance wouldn’t exactly recommend them for positions in a competent administration, and they may not be the sharpest knives in the drawer, as the old saying goes, but they may actually be able to do a considerable amount of harm.

I keep telling myself I’m just having a nightmare…..Could someone please wake me?

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Real Americans

Each day–or so it seems–we are treated to news of yet another set of attitudes or beliefs that divide American citizens. Some of those divisions are beginning to seem insurmountable.

Case in point: According to a recent Pew poll, thirty-two percent of Americans believe that you have to be Christian to be a “real” American. (It would do no good to point members of that 32% to contrary writings by the nation’s Founders–like the occasional commenters who come to this blog to cite Fox News as authority for their evidence-free assertions, these are people for whom history inconsistent with their preferred beliefs is irrelevant. Or “fake.”)

According to Pew,

In 2014, Christians accounted for 70.6% of the U.S. population. Non-Christians and those unaffiliated with any religion totaled 28.7%.

About a third (32%) of Americans say it is very important for a person to be a Christian in order to be considered truly American. Roughly three-in-ten (31%) contend that one’s religion is not at all important.

Presumably, people who identify “American” with “Christian” do so because they believe that the values of Christianity are central to America’s values. (Of course, they ignore that pesky fact that there are some 34,000 different Christian denominations, and a lot of them appear to prioritize rather different sets of values…)

Adam Gopnik addressed the centrality of religious pluralism to our system of government in the most recent New Yorker.

America is not only a nation but also an idea, cleanly if not tightly defined. Pluralism is not a secondary or a decorative aspect of that idea. As James Madison wrote in Federalist No. 51, the guarantee of religious liberty lies in having many kinds of faiths, and the guarantee of civil liberty lies in having many kinds of people—in establishing a “multiplicity of interests” to go along with a “multiplicity of sects.

When I saw the Pew poll, I thought about a column I wrote not long after the 2004 election, which was widely seen as a “values” election. I’m reproducing it, because it is a list of what I consider to be “real” American values. It needs updating–the targets of American resentments have changed somewhat–but it remains uncomfortably relevant.

Let me be quite explicit about my values, which are shared by millions of others—values that infuse the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, values that are absolutely central to what it means to be American.

Americans believe in justice and civil liberties—in equal treatment and fair play for all citizens, whether or not we agree with them or like them or approve of their life choices.

We believe that no one is above the law—and that includes those who run our government.

We believe that dissent can be the highest form of patriotism. Those who care about America enough to speak out against policies they believe to be wrong or corrupt are not only exercising their rights as citizens, they are discharging their civic responsibilities.

We believe that playing to the worst of our fears and prejudices, using “wedge issues” to marginalize gays, or blacks, or “east coast liberals” (a time-honored code word for Jews) in the pursuit of political advantage is un-American and immoral.

We believe, as Garry Wills recently wrote, in “critical intelligence, tolerance, respect for evidence, a regard for the secular sciences.”

We believe, to use the language of the nation’s Founders, in “a decent respect for the opinions of mankind” (even non-American mankind).

We believe in the true heartland of this country, which is anywhere where people struggle to provide for their families, dig deep into their pockets to help the less fortunate, and understand their religions to require goodwill and loving kindness.

We believe that self-righteousness is the enemy of righteousness.

We really do believe that the way you play the game is more important, in the end, than whether you win or lose. We really do believe that the ends don’t justify the means.

In our America, borrowing from our grandchildren so that we can pay for a costly war without taxing the President’s buddies and campaign contributors is not moral. Dividing the nation into red and blue, gay and straight, moral and immoral, welcome and unwelcome, is not moral. Excusing our own sins by pointing to the sins of others—torturing people, or engaging in “holy war” because “they” do it too, is not moral. Lying—about sex or Weapons of Mass Destruction or an opponent’s war record—is not moral.

On Election Day, claimants of the “ Christian values” label came to the precinct where my youngest son was working and said they were there to “vote against the queers.” In my precinct, when I handed a Democratic slate to a voter, he accused me of being a “friend of Osama.” A friend’s son registering voters for Baron Hill in a church was called a “fag lover.”

The people who live in my America need to reclaim the vocabulary of patriotism and values from those who have hijacked the language in service of something very different.

Unfortunately, that column remains pertinent.

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The Privatizer-in-Chief

Between tweets, Donald Trump is a big proponent of privatization, and those he has named to cabinet positions share his passion for turning government over to the private (for-profit) sector.

A couple of examples: Betsy DeVos wants to privatize public schools; Jeff Sessions is a fan of private prisons. (Neither of these ideologues is likely to let mounting evidence of their favorites’ poor performance persuade them otherwise; evidence is so last century!) So it shouldn’t surprise us that of the (many) really bad ideas being championed by our erratic new President—a man who has never worked in government and quite obviously never considered the meaning of “public service”—is using private companies to repair America’s decaying infrastructure.

This proposal raises all sorts of practical questions, of course, but when you peel back all of the reasons to suspect that our genuine need to repair our roads, bridges and electrical grid is being used to leverage another giveaway to the rich and connected, there is a more profound issue that generally gets ignored: who should own and benefit from the country’s infrastructure?

I was prompted to focus on that question by an article in Engineering News-Record, (not, I confess, a periodical I regularly read. My husband, a retired architect, is a subscriber.) The article described a legal challenge to the Gordie Howe International Bridge being built by  the United States and Canada. The challenge to the authority of Michigan’s Governor to acquire land for the approach to the bridge was brought by the Moroun family, private owners of an existing bridge, the Ambassador, also connecting Detroit with Windsor.

The Morouns claim that their own bridge could lose 75% of its traffic, and they have threatened to close it.

What is really being lost here is the public interest. Infrastructure should serve public needs; instead, the current bridge is a profit-generating enterprise owned and controlled by a family whose interests are the bottom line, not the common good. That’s not to say that private interests can never build roads or bridges to augment those constructed with our tax dollars, but those efforts should be undertaken with a clear understanding of the primary purpose of the network they join and the risks they assume.

This is not an isolated case.

America’s prolonged anti-tax hysteria has meant that local governments—desperate for revenues to provide public services—have increasingly sold off public assets. In my home city of Indianapolis, the city entered into a fifty-year “lease” of its parking meters in 2011, trading control of its curbsides and parking rates for up-front cash. The results—which haven’t been pretty—are an object lesson in why such infrastructure should be civically owned and operated.

After Indianapolis leased its parking meter operations to a private company, rates skyrocketed, hours expanded and the number of metered spaces increased. But when I last looked, the city was receiving only about a quarter of the revenues the private vendor projected when it paid $20 million to the city for the right to operate the meters until 2061.

Aside from everything else, the length of the contract was unconscionable. Decisions about where to place meters, how to price them, what lengths of time to allow and so on have an enormous impact on local businesses and residential neighborhoods. They are decisions requiring flexibility in the face of changing circumstances; they are most definitely not decisions that should be held hostage for decades to contracting provisions aimed at protecting a vendor’s profits.

The contract profited the vendor at the expense of citizens. More often than not, new  construction interrupts adjacent parking. If the city is managing its own meters, it can choose to ignore that loss of parking revenue, or decide to charge the developer, based upon the City’s best interests. Street festivals and other civic celebrations also require  that meters be bagged, and usually there are good reasons not to charge the not-for-profit or civic organization running the event. The Indianapolis contract requires the City to pay the vendor whenever such interruptions disrupt its projected revenue from those meters.

There was never a satisfactory response to the obvious question “why can’t we do this ourselves, make parking decisions based upon the public interest, and keep all the revenues to provide badly-needed public services?” Why couldn’t Indianapolis retain control of its infrastructure, and issue revenue bonds to cover the costs of the necessary improvements? (Interest rates were at a historic low at the time, making it even more advantageous to do so.) If the administration at the time was too inept to manage parking, it could have created a Municipal Parking Authority and hired that competence. There really was no compelling reason to enrich private contractors and reduce future (desperately needed) City revenues. (That “up-front” payment was very enticing, of course. Let subsequent administrations worry about the long term.)

There are times when so-called “public-private partnerships” are useful and appropriate. There are other times when they amount to theft from the public till. It behooves us to distinguish between those situations, and to remember that constructing and maintaining an infrastructure owned by and operated for the use of all our citizens, rich and poor, is one of the most basic obligations of government.

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Why Good Republicans Should Vote Democratic in 2018

When I left the GOP in 2000, John Keeler, an eminently thoughtful and civil legislator, asked me what I thought it would take to keep people like me–not just reliable Republican voters, but active  and involved party workers–from leaving. I responded that I would have remained a Republican had the party continued to be the party I’d originally joined–my version of a refrain that I have often heard in the years since, “I didn’t leave the GOP, it left me.”

When I run into people I worked with in the Hudnut Administration, or on campaign committees supporting Republicans like Bill Hudnut and Dick Lugar, the conversation often turns to bewildered “what the hell happened” commiserations. My students (who appear to have overwhelming animus for today’s GOP and its priorities) find it hard to believe that the party wasn’t always a refuge for anti-woman, anti-minority, anti-immigrant, anti-science, anti-government know-nothings.

One consequence of Trump’s election has been a vast increase in political activism by previously unengaged citizens of all ages. And that participation–not to mention demographic data showing a rapidly graying GOP and a young, diverse and growing Democratic party that did not bode well for the future electoral prospects of the Grand Old Party even before Trump– is not a good sign for Republicans.

Right now, the GOP is dominated by a relatively small group of white, elderly political and religious fundamentalists. If it weren’t for highly successful gerrymandering and the Electoral College, the GOP would already have been consigned to permanent minority status.

That wouldn’t be good for America. America needs two responsible, adult parties.

Here is the choice faced by “real” Republicans– the ones who still believe in facts and evidence, in compromise and bipartisanship, in working toward the public good–those who recognize that the last election was not a fight between candidates with contending policy preferences , but an atypical and dangerous departure from democratic norms.

Those Republicans can continue to vote, however reluctantly, for any candidate with an “R” beside the name, and (assuming the country survives Trump/Pence) watch with dismay as the radical cult that is now the GOP dwindles into inconsequence. Or those rational, good-government Republicans can take the party back, and grow it by returning it to its roots in the socially tolerant and fiscally conservative “big tent” politics that have been displaced by the zealots, alt-right bigots and assorted “true believers.”

In order to do that, however–in order to reassert control by the adults–the current iteration of the GOP has to be defeated. If the party is to be resurrected, its faithful voters in those bright-red gerrymandered “safe” districts are the only ones who can do it. They have to declare “enough,” and the only way to do that is by voting Democratic in 2018 and then picking up the pieces, restoring sanity and–quite possibly–saving the two-party system.

If the Trump/Pence/Bannon administration continues on its current course, if enough reasonable Republicans are sufficiently embarrassed and repelled by Mitch McConnell’s appalling behavior in the Senate and by the GOP’s “lunatic caucus” in the House, it might actually happen. (But then, I’ve always been an optimist….)

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