Monthly Archives: June 2025

Words Of Wisdom

One of my “go to” sources for political news and thoughtful analysis is Talking Points Memo. I nearly always find myself in agreement with its editor, Josh Marshall–and especially in his “cut to the chase” commentaries on our current political situation.

Recently, Marshall considered the navel-gazing of the “usual subjects.” He began by citing two recent Bulwark essays. One, by Matt Yglesias, engaged in the sort of “analysis” that drives me up the wall–Yglesias criticised the Democratic Party for clinging to positions that he believed imposed “a decisive disadvantage when it comes to winning the Senate in 2026 and in a challenging position when it comes to the Electoral College.” He argued for a “major repositioning on issues like guns and fossil fuels (among other issues) to make Democrats more competitive in states like Iowa or Texas.

Jonathan Last made a very different argument–and like Marshall, I found it far more persuasive.

The argument was that Democrats are the opposition and that the role of the opposition, especially in such a binary, Manichean moment, is to systematically disqualify the party in power. Any naval-gazing or attempted rebrands are somewhere between irrelevant and counterproductive.

Amen.

Marshall argues that pundits’ emphasis on policy prescriptions misreads the situation in which we find ourselves–that it is a bias held by people who think and write– and that ignores reality. “Opposition parties win when they manage in whole or in part to discredit the party in power — almost always with a ton of help from the party in power itself.”

I spent 21 years teaching law and public policy. I absolutely believe in the importance of policy prescriptions, in the need to consider what the evidence teaches us about policy decisions and mistakes. But if there is one thing I am absolutely convinced of, it is that elections aren’t won or lost by adjusting the nuances of this or that policy.

As Marshall notes,

Democrats who are currently focused on repositioning the party away from being “woke” sound like they’re in a time warp. People are scared about losing their jobs. They’re upset about authoritarian attacks on the rule of law. There’s deepening pessimism about a looming recession. A big focus on “wokism” seems mostly like someone speaking from the past. It’s just not what people are thinking about right now. They’re worried about Trump and the climate of chaos and uncertainty.

Again: politics is all about salience. That’s why people so frequently get themselves mixed up with polls. Maybe your issue has 80-20 support. But if it’s not what voters are voting on, it’s irrelevant. Americans overwhelmingly oppose Trump White House cuts to medical research. But it’s not getting a lot of traction at the moment. Because most people don’t know about it. It’s not a driving focus of the news. It’s salience is low. So it makes sense for Democrats to do everything they can to focus more attention on it.

There’s a mountain of evidence to the effect that people who are against something are more likely to cast ballots. I am confident that every person who participated in the No Kings Day protests will get to the polls.

As Marshall says, the salient issue right now is Trump and the damage he is doing to America. It isn’t only Democrats who are appalled by the assaults on reason and competence and liberty. As one of my favorite protest signs has it, IKEA has better cabinets, and a majority of Americans recognizes the damage that is being done by these clowns and ideologues–to the economy, to health care, to America’s global role, to constitutional governance.

For that matter, every Republican I worked with “back in the day” when I was a Republican and the GOP was a political party rather than a fascist cult is horrified by Trump and terrified by the direction he is taking the country.

Marshall is absolutely right that Democratic success depends upon opposition to Trump and MAGA, not to the fine-tuning of  a positive vision. As he points out, “the positive vision emerges from the outlines of what you oppose. But fundamentally the job of an opposition is to oppose. Don’t overcomplicate it. It’s not simply that you gain more ground from opposing than from grand-strategizing. You learn more from it too.”

America has a lot of long-term systemic flaws, and we need to pay attention to them and fix them. But right now, we need to rid America of today’s Confederates, the MAGA White Nationalists who are trying to remake us into a very different country.

You don’t debate the best way to make the plane safer while it’s going down.

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Listing The Obscenities

On Tuesday evening, I participated in a Zoom hosted by Indivisible of Central Indiana. It was focused on Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill,” and if you can stand yet another enumeration of that insult to Americans, I’m posting my comments below.

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As Heather Cox Richardson has said, the Republicans’ “One Big, Beautiful Bill” is MAGA’s attempt to replace the government we’ve had since the 1930s with one that reflects the goals of Project 2025.

It is also an effort to rob the poor to further enrich the wealthy.

The Bill is 1000+ pages, but in this brief presentation I want to highlight the major elements—and alert you to the fact that, despite the fact that it is billed as a “budget,” it has numerous, damaging non-fiscal provisions which should be ruled non-germane in the Senate, but may not be.

Before getting to the truly horrifying fiscal mischief, let me share with you some of the most egregious non-fiscal provisions:

  • A measure to cripple the courts by prohibiting any funding from being used to carry out court orders holding executive branch officials in contempt. Passage of this measure would enable Trump and his officials to defy court orders at will.
  • The addition of billions to various parts of Trump’s deportation efforts, ramping up those efforts to the tune of an additional trillion dollars That includes $45 billion for construction of immigration jails (more than 13 times ICE’s current detention budget.) In addition, it would allow the indefinite detention of immigrant children and would charge families $3,500 to reunite with a child who arrived alone at the border. Asylum seekers will be charged an “application fee” of at least $1,000.
  • The administration would be given authority to label nonprofits as “terrorist-supporting organizations,” and terminate their tax status- an open invitation to suppress the free speech and activism of climate and civil liberties organizations, among others of which Trump and MAGA disapprove.
  • The bill would eliminate the National Weather Service, making local weather reports far less accurate.
  • One provision would allow the administration to sell off national parks.
  • A particularly ugly provision repeals the $200 excise tax on the sale of gun silencers, which have no lawful purpose other than concealing shootings.

Other bits of “fine print” more directly support the major goal of the bill, which is, as I’ve noted, to protect the extremely wealthy against efforts to get them to pay their fair share of taxes–basically, the bill exempts rich people from paying their dues to the country that made their accumulation of wealth possible. (For example, the bill would basically eliminate an Estate Tax that is already massively favorable to the top 1%.)

The “guts” of the bill are the fiscal provisions. Basically, the bill is an effort to fund the extension of Trump’s tax cuts for the rich by eliminating health care for the poor and middle class.

The Congressional Budget office estimates that as many as 16 million people would lose health insurance under the House-passed version of the bill. The annual cuts to Medicaid would average over 70 billion dollars a year—the same amount millionaires and billionaires would gain in tax cuts. The media has focused on those Medicaid cuts, but a number of analysts have explained that measures that have been minimized as “technical revisions” would essentially repeal Obamacare.

Not only would millions of individuals lose their health insurance, the consequences of these cuts would close many, if not most, rural hospitals and would have a dramatically negative impact on local economies, ironically mostly in Red states like Indiana. Economists have estimated that depressed local spending under the House bill would force the loss of 850,000 jobs. (Health care is the largest employer of any sector of the economy; it employs 18 million workers.)

Republicans who claim that they’re just adding “work requirements” to Medicaid are lying—the budget cuts 715 billion from Medicaid and 335 billion from Obamacare (the Affordable Care Act). And prior experience in the states has demonstrated that work requirements do nothing but erect paperwork barriers that throw eligible people off Medicaid; as we’ve learned from those previous efforts, Medicaid recipients who are able to work are already working—most Medicaid recipients are disabled, elderly or children.

There’s much more. The bill weakens the Child Tax Credit, by lowering the eligibility income threshold, so millions of children will suddenly become ineligible. It expands school vouchers–continuing the GOP effort to destroy public education and shift tax dollars to religious institutions, in violation of the First Amendment. It includes a variety of “Stealth Cuts’ to the Affordable Care Act that will increase out-of-pocket costs and make insurance more expensive for those people who are fortunate enough to retain it.

As if the assault on poor folks wasn’t mean-spirited enough, the bill also has deep cuts to SNAP. The House-passed version would cut nearly $300 billion from SNAP, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, according to Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimates. That would be by far the largest cut to SNAP in history, and it would mean that millions of low-income families would lose some or all of the food assistance they need to afford groceries and feed their children.

SNAP has been the nation’s most effective anti-hunger program, and the bill cuts it by roughly 30 percent. These extreme cuts are actually deeper than the $230 billion in cuts the original budget resolution called for because the bill adds tens of billions of dollars in new spending for farm programs, and pays for those dollars by taking more food assistance away from people with low incomes.

And despite the GOP’s purported concerns about budget deficits, the bill blows up the budget deficit. According to the Congressional Budget Office, the bill will increase borrowing by a total of $2.4 trillion by 2034, because the $1.3 trillion in cuts to Medicaid, food stamps, and other programs don’t even come close to canceling out $3.7 trillion in tax cuts for the rich. Just the tax cuts going to the richest 5 percent outstrip the cuts to Medicaid and food stamps by 300 billion. If you add in interest costs, the total debt the bill creates exceeds $3 trillion.

This is just a horrible bill, and it needs to be defeated.

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Journalism In The Age Of Trump

History confirms the existence of what we might call “fringe folks” in every society–people who, for whatever reason, have embraced conspiracy theories and/or rejected credible evidence of reality. The question for our age is: how did we get to a point where these deluded and arguably dangerous individuals have assumed authority? What has enabled a certified nutcase like RFK, Jr. to hold sway over the health of Americans, or a man seemingly devoid of contact with either knowledge or reality to become President of the United States?

As regular readers of this blog know, I attribute much of this state of affairs to our current information environment–a fragmented environment that allows Individuals to “curate” their preferred realities. (I used to tell the students in my Media and Public Affairs classes that if they really believed aliens had landed in Roswell, I could find them five internet sites with pictures of the aliens…)

I think it is fair to say that one of the reasons for the proliferation of alternate media sources, including widespread propaganda outlets, has been the inadequacy of mainstream, “legacy” journalism. There’s a reason that so many of the most professional journalists have abandoned their positions with those legacy outlets and decamped to places like Substack–a reason why so many of us depend upon the daily reports from reputable scholars like Heather Cox Richardson and Paul Krugman, and look askance at news reporting that continues to “sanewash” and normalize behaviors that are objectively insane and abnormal.

A recent example: my husband and I were watching an NBC national news report on the shocking assault by administration goons on California Senator Alex Padilla, when he tried to ask a question of Secretary Kristi Noem. The report repeated Noem’s assertion that the Senator had failed to identify himself. It didn’t call that assertion a lie, despite the fact that widely available video of the incident showed that Padilla had done so. 

Shouldn’t we be able to rely on journalists to highlight lies being told by Trump’s collection of clowns and ideologues? Why has it been so difficult for legacy media to call a lie a lie?

Recently, a reader shared with me an article from the Columbia Journalism Review, exploring that question. It began,

Perhaps the most basic task of journalism is to distinguish truth from falsity. To identify the facts, and to present those facts to a readership eager for information. Journalists may once have believed that their responsibility stopped there—but in today’s media environment, it’s become clear that delivering facts to the public is not so straightforward. Distinguishing true from false, which often entails calling attention to false information, risks amplifying and even legitimizing that information. There is no better contemporary example of this problem than the media coverage of Donald Trump.

Trump’s brazen dishonesty in his public comments is without political precedent in this country. During his first term, the Washington Post’s fact-checking database clocked 30,573 untruths. That rate shows no sign of slowing during his second term, and now he seems to be combating accusations of lying by simply manipulating who is allowed in the press pool.

Granted, as the article notes, journalistic norms weren’t created for a President like Trump. The belief that “both sides” of a situation should be covered ignores the reality that both sides often don’t deserve equal weight. (It also ignores the fact that many issues have more than two sides, but that’s a different problem..)

The article argues that legacy journalists need to find new ways to talk about false information–for example, not describing a tweet or statement as “racially charged,” but as racist; calling a lie a lie, not a “misleading statement.”

The Columbia Journalism Review is a respected journal, and I was happy to see that it was taking on what has proved to be a hugely consequential problem, although its discussion is arguably too little and too late. Thousands–probably millions–of citizens now get their information (or misinformation/lies) from non-legacy sources, from the Internet’s wild west of sources peddling everything from informed analyses to ideological claptrap.

Journalists used to be gatekeepers, deciding what news was needed to keep the citizenry informed. There were certainly problems with that role, but I would argue that the information world we inhabit today–where each of us must be our own gatekeeper–is no improvement. Quite the contrary.

I wonder: If mainstream journalists had been doing their jobs these past couple of decades, would we now have a federal government composed of racist cranks and misfits and conspiracy theorists? I doubt it.

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The Roots Of MAGA

Regular readers of this blog have already encountered my analysis of the MAGA cult: white people–mostly but not entirely male– terrified of losing social dominance, and deeply disoriented by a modern world in which ambiguities and “shades of gray” threaten to overwhelm the “faith-based” verities they cling to.

These are the same people who supported Hitler in the 1930s, and support other autocrats today–and the rest of us are in danger of losing America to these limited and terrified folks if we don’t understand the roots of their movement. A recent Substack essay from The Rational League mined the available research and confirmed much of my thesis. (In the quotes below, I’ve omitted the copious citations–to access them, you should click through.)

It began:

It was never about taxes or trade or immigration, at least not in the ways its supporters claim. It was about fear. About losing status. About the aching dread that the world no longer bends to you. And when power begins to slip, the mind scrambles to make sense of its new fragility. That’s when people reach not for reason, but for revenge.

As the research demonstrates, our divisions are not political –they are far deeper and more primal. The essay quotes studies that explain “what happens when large groups of people feel their dominance is being eclipsed, by demographic shifts, cultural liberalization, economic globalization, and the slow unraveling of myths that once placed them at the top of the social food chain.” In such environments, “facts become irrelevant. The mind will do what it must to protect the self. And it will vote for whomever promises to punish the world for changing.”

Support for Donald Trump, and the movement that continues to orbit him, is not best explained by ideology. It is better understood as a reaction to psychological discomfort. A fusion of fear, status anxiety, and identity protection. It draws power from ressentiment, not reason. From feelings of insulted entitlement, not informed civic interest. Trump didn’t awaken this current, he merely performed it better than anyone else .

This is not speculation. It is the clear consensus of two decades of psychological, neurological, and political science research. What follows is not just a condemnation of MAGA’s authoritarian drift, but a forensic examination of how it thrives, in the mind, in culture, and in power.

The research tells us that fear is situational–a “psychological accelerant that turns political disagreement into existential warfare.” When people feel threatened, when they find themselves living in a world they no longer understand, they respond by demanding order and obedience, and the punishment of those who refuse to obey. Fear, the academic literature tells us, isn’t just a side effect of MAGA– it’s the selling point. Trump’s message was simple: “the world is dangerous, but I will protect you, and hurt the people you fear.”

MAGA cultists believe that society is under siege. In numerous studies, MAGA folks have scored high for Right-Wing Authoritarianism (RWA), defined as “submission to strong leaders, aggression toward deviant groups, and strict adherence to tradition. The more threatened people feel, the more they long for control, hierarchy, and retribution, all things Trump promised in spades.”

Trump’s followers are not irrational. They are reacting, often viscerally, to a perceived collapse of the world they knew. Crime is down, but they feel unsafe. Immigration enriches the economy, but they feel invaded. Diversity increases opportunity, but they feel erased. Trump doesn’t need to solve these problems. He just needs to affirm that they exist, and promise to punish whoever caused them.

In other words, status anxiety is what motivates the MAGA base–fear of irrelevance. The MAGA base consists of those who once felt socially dominant and now feel displaced. Trump promises to put them back on top.

The essay is lengthy and well worth reading in its entirety. It cites the copious scholarship that explains the authoritarian phenomenon and the danger it poses to democracy.

This isn’t just a movement of bad ideas. It’s a movement of deeply felt insecurity, fused to a political figure who offers vengeance, not vision. And in that fusion, the need for power replaces the desire for truth. The need to dominate replaces the value of liberty. The need to feel morally superior replaces the capacity for self-reflection….

The threat is not just Donald Trump. The threat is the psychological scaffolding that made him possible, and that will remain long after he is gone, unless we dismantle it at its source.

Unfortunately, this informative essay doesn’t tell us how to go about “dismantling it at its source.”

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Do Protests Work?

In the run-up to Saturday’s “No Kings Day,” there were several comments to this platform and to my Facebook feed to the effect that protests “don’t work.” (I think some of those commenters are folks making excuses for their non-participation, but a couple came from people I think of as activists, people I know to be deeply concerned about where we Americans find ourselves today.) I’ve previously shared my belief that these protests–when peaceful and large-scale–can be enormously consequential mechanisms for change, and in the run-up to the most recent demonstrations, I took a look at the academic literature, to see whether the evidence supported or rebutted my conviction.

As always, it depends.

The scholarship confirmed the effectiveness of protests that are large-scale, sustained and nonviolent. Broad-based, diverse demonstrations have been shown to bring pressure on government–one study documented instances in which sustained protests over three years accomplished desired changes. Others traced historical examples; in the U.S., there was the civil rights movement, in India, Gandhi’s nonviolent movement.  In the Philippines, protests toppled Marcos, and in several Eastern European countries, anti-communist demonstrations contributed to the weakening of the USSR.

Reading the academic literature is one thing. Personal experience is another–and as I read through some of these articles, I couldn’t help comparing today’s political protests with a not-altogether-different type of demonstration–Gay Pride.

Speaking of Pride, in Indianapolis, No Kings Day coincided with the city’s annual Gay Pride parade. This elderly blogger joined with Indivisible of Central Indiana this year, before departing to join the No Kings protest at the Indiana Statehouse. (A busy day for an old lady…)

Pride celebrations began as protest demonstrations. They are now common, but I still remember when they began, and I think there is a real parallel to be drawn between the protests now erupting nationwide and the expressive effects of those early Pride parades. Like today’s protests, they sent a message. Over time, as those celebrations have grown to include many thousands of participants and onlookers, that message has been culturally adopted by a majority of Americans, although there is still a minority frantically trying to reverse that acceptance. (I was happy to see that the Indianapolis event was once again enormous–if there was fall-off in participation from corporations or institutions intimidated by the Trump administration, or by our stae-level Trumpers like Attorney General Todd Rokita, it sure wasn’t evident.)

As JVL wrote in The Bulwark,

There are two ways protest movements break through. The first is when they create violence. The second is when they become stunningly large.

Violence can cut both ways. If protestors are violent, the violence hurts their cause. But when peaceful protests provoke the state into violence, it can help.

Size, by contrast, has no valence: Mass is power. Full-stop.

Size is persuasion. It creates bandwagon effects. It sows doubt in the minds of the opposition. It opens new avenues of resistance.

Massive, sustained nonviolent expressive activities matter politically. As JVL noted, they essentially act as a holding action. “They cannot themselves achieve tangible objectives. But they can slow the authoritarian project’s advance.”

Such events have another, underappreciated positive effect: they give encouragement to the participants, who see evidence that they are most definitely not alone–that many other people share their goals and aspirations (not to mention their anger and/or anguish.) That recognition stiffens spines and encourages additional activism.

The academic research I consulted suggested that large-scale demonstrations increase democratic attitudes–and longer-range, increase voter participation.

Given the current state of insanity in Trump’s America, it’s also worth noting that massive decentralized protests make it harder for our would-be dictator to focus on individual locations to which he can send the National Guard or the Marines.

With that generalized background, what can I say about Saturday’s No Kings Day? First and foremost, turnout nationwide was enormous. Demonstrations involved millions of people in some 200 cities and towns across the country. Despite the fact that it rained in many cities, including mine, thousands of angry Americans ignored the downpours and took their signs and tee-shirt slogans to the streets. During the day, media from cities large and small featured videos of huge and animated crowds.

If they were paying attention, the composition of the enormous crowd in the protest I attended should have frightened  elected Republicans. Although they were far more diverse than the town halls I’ve previously attended, a significant percentage of the participants were middle-aged and older White folks who in other times might have been expected to vote Republican. These angry citizens can’t be dismissed as wild leftists–they were pissed off Americans, many of whom had never previously joined a protest.

It was great!

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