September 2024 – Page 4 – Sheila Kennedy

The Real “Deep State”

Trump and the MAGA movement have used their conspiratorial belief in a “deep state” to suggest that all government workers engage in nefarious efforts to change “their” America into the hellscape pictured by Trump’s disordered brain.

A recent, lengthy essay in last Sunday’s Washington Post provides a good antidote to that alternate reality.

The article begins by explaining the genesis of a little-known award issued by the Partnership for Public Service.

Founded the year before by an entrepreneur named Samuel Heyman, it set out to attract talented and unusual people to the federal workforce. One big reason talented and unusual people did not gravitate to the government was that the government was often a miserable place for talented and unusual people to work. Civil servants who screwed up were dragged before Congress and into the news. Civil servants who did something great, no one said a word about. There was thus little incentive to do something great, and a lot of incentive to hide. The awards were meant to correct that problem. “There’s no culture of recognition in government,” said Max Stier, whom Heyman hired to run the Partnership. “We wanted to create a culture of recognition.”

The award got off to a slow start. Among the first recipients were two FBI agents who cracked the cold case of the 1963 bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham.

Another went to a doctor at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention who designed and ran a program that delivered a billion vaccinations and eradicated polio in India. A third was given to a man inside the Energy Department who had been sent to a massive nuclear waste dump outside Denver, containing enough radioactive gunk to fill 90 miles of railroad cars, and told to clean it up. He finished the project $30 billion under budget and 60 years ahead of schedule — and turned the dump into a park.

All these people had done astonishing things. None had much to say about them. The Partnership called the Colorado guy to see if he wanted to explain the miracle he’d performed. “I just managed the project,” he said. End of story. No story.

This year’s list included a woman at the Agriculture Department who reduced food waste by creating products from fruits and vegetables unsuitable for market, a 400 billion dollar problem; a man in the EPA who conceived and started a service called AIRNow that supplies Americans with the best air-quality forecasts in the world; and a special agent at the Drug Enforcement Administration who led a team that seized 919,088 capsules of especially lethal fentanyl.

The bulk of the article–and although it is fascinating, it is definitely “bulky”–focused on this year’s winner: a man named Christopher Mark, who led the development of “industry-wide standards and practices to prevent roof falls in underground mines, leading to the first ever year (2016) of no roof fall fatalities in the United States.”

Mark is identified as a former coal miner. That description is accurate, although incomplete: he earned a doctorate in engineering after rejecting college for a few years of mine work and political activism after high school. He has used his fixation with mine safety to solve problems previously thought to be insoluble, and in the process has saved many lives.

As Mark has noted, improvements in mine safety relied upon more than just his very significant breakthroughs. In response to a suggestion that his innovations had been the sole reason for the dramatic safety improvements, he clarified that two things had been necessary: new knowledge plus legislation enhancing enforcement. It took enforcement to ensure that mine owners would actually follow the rules and put the new knowledge into practice. “What actually happened was the regulators were finally empowered to regulate. Regulators needed to be able to enforce.”

The article is fascinating, not simply for Mark’s story, but for its rare–and refreshingly honest–look at government work.

When I joined the Indianapolis city administration back in 1977, I brought with me many of the widespread negative impressions of “government workers,” who were–I assumed–folks unable to get jobs in the private sector, people who worked relatively short hours, etc. It didn’t take long for me to discover how very wrong I was. There were certainly some duds, as there are in every workplace, but most of the people I worked with during my three-year stint as head of City Legal were whip smart and devoted to public service. Many worked long hours. Almost all of them cared deeply about what Mayor Bill Hudnut used to call “building a great city.”

They’re the real “deep state.” We’re fortunate to have them.

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A Heartbeat Away

Micah Beckwith and JD Vance share a number of characteristics. Both lack governing experience. Both are lightly tethered to reality. Both are Christian Nationalists. And both are running for positions that–should they win–would put them a heartbeat away from the power to do real and lasting damage.

Since I last enumerated the statements from the SnydeReport’s “Book of Beckwith,” that running list of Beckwith’s wack-a-doodle statements has grown. Among the recent additions: Beckwith has compared vaccinations to “what the Nazis did to the Jews,” and says vaccine mandates are “paramount to rape.” He’s provided “3 reasons why you should be a “Christian Nationalist” and insisted that the fact that Fishers (an Indianapolis bedroom community) had allowed a Pride parade proves his contention that the community has long been guilty of “sex grooming.” Here’s the quote:

Sexually grooming children has been a part of the Fishers culture for a long time. From what’s happening in the Library to the schools and now this. It’s unfortunately par for the course.

If you think JD Vance is less of a looney, allow me to refer you to a recent column by E.J. Dionne in the Washington Post. (For those of you unfamiliar with Dionne, you should know that he is a deeply religious person, not a critic of religiosity.) His observations about Vance were part of a column suggesting ways that Kamala Harris might bring Americans together to support families and children.

Rather unintentionally, JD Vance has created an opportunity for her to do this. Trump’s running mate is the perfect foil for Harris to show that being pro-family and pro-children requires bringing our warring political tribes together.

Vance has had quite a time of it, trying to explain away his misogynistic language. It’s not just his comments about “childless cat ladies” or his claim that teachers who don’t have kids of their own are a problem for education. (That one took this student of the Sisters of St. Joseph and Benedictine monks aback.) Especially revealing was his dismissal of “women who think that, truly, the liberationist path is to spend 90 hours a week working in a cubicle at McKinsey instead of starting a family and having children.”

He later added: “They’re all fundamentally atheist or agnostic. They have no real value system.” With God out of the picture, they seek meaning in movements for “racial or gender equity.”

I won’t even mention Vance’s assertions that immigrants from Haiti are eating their neighbors’ cats and dogs…..

Most folks who are politically active agree with Mike Braun when he dismisses his running-mate’s bizarre and deeply unpopular opinions by pointing out that voters don’t base their votes on who’s running for Lieutenant Governor. Candidates for Vice-President almost never matter either.

In this particular election, however, voters should rethink their importance.

I’m not the only person noting that MAGA Mike Braun is 70, and that– while he seems healthy– actuarial tables suggest the odds of “something happening” aren’t insignificant. Having a culture warrior Lieutenant Governor who knows little or nothing about agriculture or tourism–the tasks assigned to the office–is troubling enough. The thought of a Governor Beckwith who might have to deal with a public health crisis or uphold the Constitutional separation of church and state is another matter entirely.

At least Braun seems currently healthy. The odds favoring JD Vance’s ascension to the Presidency in the event Trump wins are much, much higher. Trump’s mental and physical deterioration has become too obvious to ignore, even by our “sane washing” media. Granted, he has always displayed significant signs of mental incapacity, but it has gotten steadily worse. As one Facebook meme notes, if your grandpa “went off” on sharks and electric cars and Hannibal Lecter, you’d take him in for evaluation. You certainly wouldn’t put him in charge of anything.

Furthermore, if Braun’s age of 70 is a legitimate concern, what can we say about Trump, who is 78–an age when even sane people begin to decline. The odds of Trump making it through a four year term without dying (or hiding under a desk babbling nonsense) are miniscule. America would then get President Vance, whose weirdness has been on continual display and whose entire experience with government has been 18 months as a Senator.

Neither Beckwith nor Vance could be elected to those posts, but both would have better-than-even odds of ascending to them.

In a normal year, with two normal political parties and second-tier candidates with normal qualifications, we’d be justified in ignoring those odds. This year, we aren’t.

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Public School Successes

I frequently post critiques of privatization–with special emphasis on school privatization, aka educational vouchers. Some twenty or so years ago, privatization enthusiasts had a standard answer for every perceived government malfunction: let the private sector do it! This approach had multiple, significant drawbacks, and as those drawbacks became too obvious and costly to ignore, the early enthusiasm faded–except in education, where the “market can solve all problems” ideologues were joined by rightwing activists pursuing a vendetta against teachers’ unions, and by religious folks who chafed at separation of church and state and wanted a First Amendment “work-around.”

“How do you improve the performance of the nation’s public schools?” was–and remains– a fair question. Urban school districts, in particular, face multiple challenges, and when the question of how to meet those challenges became an everyday topic following publication of A Nation at Risk, political figures offered two wildly competing suggestions: “the market can solve everything” ideologues insisted that competition from private schools would incentivize public school improvement; supporters of public education lobbied for additional resources, to be deployed in line with reforms suggested by new academic research.

As we know, vouchers won the political debate. It was a disarmingly simple fix, championed by people who not-so-coincidentally stood to gain from it. Unfortunately, however, despite the promises, vouchers have failed to improve test scores or educational outcomes. (They have been a financial boon for well-to-do families, however, a fact that will make it much more difficult to end these boondoggles.)

Surprisingly, the news is much better from those much-maligned public school systems. Take, for example, Chicago’s public schools, once one of the worst performing systems in the country. As the American Prospect recently reported, “a system that used to be ridiculed has become a model for schools in other cities.”

In 1987, a visit from Bill Bennett–then Secretary of Education–prompted labeling Chicago’s schools the worst in the country. Half of the district’s high schools ranked in the bottom 1 percent nationwide, nearly half of the students dropped out before graduating, and some schools were physical danger zones. Since then, however, Chicago’s public schools have become markedly better.

Black and Latino third graders from low-income families have been, at least according to 2017 data, outperforming their counterparts elsewhere in the state. Graduation rates rose to 84 percent in 2023, within hailing distance of the national average. In 2022, three-fifths of high school graduates enrolled in college immediately upon graduating high school, an increase from previous years, countering the national trend of declining college attendance during COVID; more of them are earning degrees than in the past. This track record is among the best urban school systems in the nation.

A new book, “How a City Learned to Improve its Schools” explains that structural changes, and the policies and practices that they generated, have emerged from a continuous improvement, ‘tortoise beats hare’ approach. As the book readily admits, Chicago’s improvement hasn’t been a straightforward march-to-success narrative. Struggles and setbacks have included teacher strikes, fights over school closures, administrative churn, and high-profile CEO misconduct.

But through it all, the system has continued to improve.

Graduation rates and other measures of accomplishment have continued their steady rise. Nor has the system lost its penchant for evidence-driven changes. The most significant example is the ongoing expansion of early education, with its demonstrated promise of shifting the arc of children’s lives, auguring well for their success. A commitment to experimentation has prompted the system to partner with the University of Chicago Education Lab in testing promising innovations, such as intensive math tutoring for ninth and tenth graders who were mired amid long division and fractions; and a summer internship program that has given students the soft skills they would need in the world of work.

Chicago isn’t alone. Another book, “Disrupting Disruption: The Steady Work of Transforming Schools” highlights three other successful systems: Union City, New Jersey; Roanoke, Virginia; and Union, Oklahoma–systems with a majority of students who are low-income and disproportionately racial and ethnic minorities. In each of these districts, the graduation rate has steadily increased and the opportunity gap has essentially become a thing of the past.

What lesson should we take from all this?

The American journalist H. L. Mencken said it best: “Every complex problem has a solution which is simple, direct, plausible — and wrong.” Fixing thorny problems is almost always an incremental task requiring consistent, evidence-based analysis and constant adjustment. Americans have an unfortunate penchant for simple, “plausible” remedies that don’t require hard work.

Far too often, as with our current costly, divisive and failed voucher programs, those “simple” ideologically-motivated solutions don’t improve anything–they just add new problems to the old ones.

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Christian Nationalism And The Election

The Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) has published a report titled American Values Atlas, summarizing research into support for Christian Nationalism in all 50 states. The report also examined how religion, party, education, race, and other factors intersect with Christian Nationalist views.

Here are a few of their findings.

Roughly three in ten Americans qualify as Christian nationalism Adherents or Sympathizers.
Residents of red states are significantly more likely than those in blue states to hold Christian nationalist beliefs.
Nearly four in ten residents of red states are Christian nationalists (14% Adherents and 24% Sympathizers); nearly twice the proportion of blue state residents. (Forty percent of Hoosiers!)
Support for Christian nationalism is strongly correlated with voting for Trump in the 2020 election.
At the national level, Christian nationalism is strongly linked to Republican party affiliation and holding favorable views of Trump.
Republicans (55%) are more than twice as likely as independents (25%) and three times as likely as Democrats (16%) to hold Christian nationalist views.
Christian nationalists are more likely than other Americans to see political struggles through the apocalyptic lens of revolution and to support political violence.

The full report enumerates the beliefs of Christian Nationalists, and I encourage you to click through, but perhaps a more forceful explanation of the movement was expressed in an article by Rick Perlstein in the American Prospect about one Right-wing apostate.

Matthew Sheffield was once a rising star in the conservative movement. As Perlstein notes, however, his career as a formidable “persuader” on the Right was doomed “because he cared about the truth.”

His damnable allergy to propaganda had already shown out by the time he came up with an idea for a study during a stint at Virginia Commonwealth University. It asked: Where Do Columnists Come From? “And my general thesis was that newspaper columnists who are on the right come out of political operations, and ones from the left come out of—journalism.” That is to say, they carry with them journalistic values of fairness and accuracy, by which conservative columnists remain blessedly unburdened.

The lengthy column traces Sheffield’s efforts on the Right and his eventual move to a reality-based Left. What finally led to his exit from the movement was his recognition of a central element of Christian Nationalism: a fundamentalism incompatible with reality.

When it comes to conservatism, “the one thing that non-Republicans don’t understand is that almost all of them are bizarre religious fundamentalists. Even the ones who don’t present that to you.” And that’s how they learn to reason: as fundamentalists. Sheffield saw it over and over again on the job…

The last straw was when Sheffield learned about a lawsuit evangelicals filed against a liberal church in North Carolina, before the Supreme Court’s gay marriage ruling, that was blessing gay unions. “I was just horrified at all the awful things they were saying, and how anti-American they were, how they literally don’t believe in freedom of religion,” he said. The conservatives’ argument was: “Unless you’re historically rooted in your doctrines, you don’t have religious freedoms.”

As Perlstein notes,

Liberals tend to maintain a lingering sentimental attachment to the idea that people calling themselves “Christians” are, well, Christian as the word is commonly understood outside the evangelical world. Faith, hope, and charity, turning the other cheek, that sort of thing. The people who most clearly understand and articulate their imperialist designs for the rest of us tend to be apostates like Sheffield, Matt Sitman, and Frank Schaeffer.

Sheffield was asked to explain to liberals how someone can be interested in the profession we call “public service” and not be interested in serving the public, and he replied “The core American reactionary motivation is that they want to force the public to obey their principles.”

The conservative movement, he says, is “100 percent controlled by extremists. And they are very, very wealthy. So they can afford to push a politics that almost no one believes in. We’re not to that point yet, but let’s just say that at some point in the future the Republican Party is not getting even 15 percent in elections. They’re rich enough, fanatical enough, that they wouldn’t change. They would just keep trying to push the same things. And it might get more extreme. It will get more extreme. They have no relationship to the political marketplace.”

Who needs mere votes when you’re in direct touch with God?

If PPRI’s research is correct, a third of the American public either fully endorses those beliefs or is sympathetic to them.

The last thing we need in this country are elections that empower the Micah Beckwiths among us–at any level.

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The Book Of Beckwith

The Snyde Report–an Indiana website promoting the state’s Democratic candidates–has begun including what it calls The Book of Beckwith–quotes from Micah Beckwith–in its daily reports.

As Indiana readers know, Beckwith is one of the four far-Right theocratic candidates on this year’s statewide Republican ticket. He’s the only one who has publicly described himself as a Christian Nationalist, although it is highly probable that Jim Banks and Todd Rokita share that mindset. (Unlike Beckwith, however, they’re sufficiently politically savvy to avoid publicly embracing it.)

Here are some “Beckwithisms” from a recent report on “the book of Beckwith.”

Micah, 1:8 -Pastor Micah Beckwith pushes the racist White Replacement Theory in post.
Pastor Micah Beckwith, Republican candidate for Lt. Governor and self described Christian Nationalist pushed the racist White Replacement Theory in a recent Facebook post.

Micah, 1:7 – Micah Beckwith compares vaccination policies to Nazi Germany’s treatment of Jews.
“And that to me is the issue here, because now you’re, it’s what the, it’s what the Nazis did to the Jews. They legitimized some citizens to be legal citizens and, they, they delegitimize, they made delegitimize citizens out of the Jews.”

Micah 1:6 – Pastor Micah Beckwith shares post advocating that brown people crossing the border should be shot
Pastor Micah Beckwith, the MAGA Republican Lt. Governor candidate shared a post on Facebook advocating brown people crossing the border should be shot. No comment from Pastor Beckwith’s running mate, Mike Braun.

Micah, 1:5 – Micah Beckwith states people should not vote for a politician who is not pro-life
“I always tell people. Don’t vote for a politician if they’re not first pro-life because the Declaration of Independence says there are three unalienable rights that our creator has given us and has the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. And if he will not protect, your life, he will not protect your liberty and he will not protect your pursuit of happiness.”

Micah, 1:4 – Micah Beckwith states The Indy Star, members of the left and Methodist and Lutheran ministers want to cut off the private parts of children “they were praising that these pastors for saying you’re doing the right thing by, by allowing people to be able to cut off the private parts of children and, and so I think again the reason that The Indy Star sees me as a threat and they should because they want to do an act, they want to act things that are just plain wicked.”

Micah, 1:3 – Micah Beckwith states The Indy Star wants to mutilate children, put pornographic material in the hands of children and murder babies. “They want to murder babies. I mean, like, so I’m against that. So, they probably are a little scared.”

Beckwith is running for Lieutenant Governor, a post dealing with tourism and agriculture, not “biblical fidelity,” but like his fellow culture warriors, he displays little to no interest in those boring governmental tasks. And while Braun constantly minimizes the importance of his running-mate’s theocratic extremism, Braun–as Star columnist Briggs recently pointed out–is 70, an age where life insurance “gets more expensive for a reason.”

If Beckwith was truly an aberration, that would be one thing–but he isn’t. Thanks to Indiana’s extreme gerrymandering, which has moved the “real” election in many districts to the primaries (where GOP challenges come from the Right), Republican candidates for legislative office have become more and more extreme. I’ve written about the contest in District 24, where the Republican running for the Statehouse is a Beckwith clone, but that isn’t the only Indiana contest featuring a looney-tunes Republican more focused on culture war than on the mundane tasks of governing.

I would ordinarily hesitate before calling a political candidate a “looney-tune,” but a look at the “Book of Beckwith” really requires that label. Does any sane American really believe that the “Star, members of the Left and Methodist and Lutheran ministers” want to “cut off the private parts of children”? That we should indiscriminately “shoot Brown people at the border”? That vaccinations are a Nazi plot? Etc.

Granted, the Presidential election is by far the most important choice voters will face this year, closely followed by contests for the House and Senate. But we ignore state down-ballot races at our peril. Thanks to a state legislature in thrall to a super-majority of Rightwing extremists, Indiana is rapidly becoming a “health desert,” where medical care–especially but not exclusively for women–is increasingly difficult to access, where public education is being purposefully starved in favor of religious schools, and gun ownership with no pesky “strings” attached is proliferating.

Hoosiers need to Vote Blue all the way down the ballot.

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