Author Archives: Sheila

Permit Me To Belabour The Point…

Yesterday’s post focused on a concern with a local government process–the people I cited weren’t opposed to the result, but  to the path chosen to reach that result. Their objection fell into a category that I’ve frequently addressed (okay, belaboured)–a category I call “ends and means.”
Political scientists point to one clear distinction between western constitutional systems and the various dictatorships and theocracies around the globe: the formers’ emphasis on process. We might characterize our Bill of Rights as a restatement of your mother’s admonition that how you do something is just as important as what you choose to do.
“The ends do not justify the means” is a fundamental American precept.
Ask any American if he or she believes we should deport dangerous criminals who are undocumented and the answer will probably be yes. Ask that same American if we should eviscerate the Constitution in the process—hiring masked thugs, arresting people based on their skin color, and jettisoning other basic due process guarantees—and those Americans become far less supportive.

This administration’s disregard for the rule of law and its multiple deviations from the constraints of the Constitution have been particularly shocking, because its contempt for the rules is so blatant, but a glance back through history yields other examples of  administrations pursuing arguably reasonable ends by questionable or improper means. (There is, for example, the relatively recent example of the Iraq war. As I noted at the time, reasonable people might have agreed that ridding the world of Sadaam Hussain was a positive, even if it turned out that he didn’t have weapons of mass destruction. Many of those same people, however, quite properly condemned the dishonest process through which the Bush administration led us into that war.)

As I have often noted, in governance, there are two basic questions: What and How. Ends and means. Our current political polarization is between the MAGA/Project 2025 ideologues who are focused solely on the “what,” and those of us who are intent upon protecting a Constitutional order prescribing “how.” That’s a critical difference.

Some twenty-plus years ago, Rick Perlstein made a point about the political parties that has only gotten more apt.

We Americans love to cite the “political spectrum” as the best way to classify ideologies. The metaphor is incorrect: it implies symmetry. But left and right today are not opposites. They are different species. It has to do with core principles. To put it abstractly, the right always has in mind a prescriptive vision of its ideal future world—a normative vision. Unlike the left (at least since Karl Marx neglected to include an actual description of the “dictatorship of the proletariat” within the 2,500 pages of Das Kapital), conservatives have always known what the world would look like after their revolution: hearth, home, church, a businessman’s republic. The dominant strain of the American left, on the other hand, certainly since the decline of the socialist left, fetishizes fairness, openness, and diversity. (Liberals have no problem with home, hearth, and church in themselves; they just see them as one viable life-style option among many.) If the stakes for liberals are fair procedures, the stakes for conservatives are last things: either humanity trends toward Grace, or it hurtles toward Armageddon…

For liberals, generally speaking, honoring procedures—the means—is at the very core of being “principled,” of acting with legitimacy. Today’s conservatives, however, fight for desired outcomes—the ends, and they are very willing to do so at the expense of what they dismiss as “procedural niceties.”

For example, in a constitutional democracy, the franchise is first among the means. Democrats generally understand the electoral system to be one in which citizens demonstrate their preference for “ends”–for policies–at the ballot box; accordingly, they believe that the more extensive the turnout, the more legitimate the ensuing legislative mandate.

Republicans–focused on ends–disagree.

Red states like Indiana try to eliminate as many urban and minority voters from the rolls as possible–efforts that make all kinds of sense to people who believe they are on a mission to save civilization from an Armageddon where “those people” will replace the good White “Christian” men that their God wants in charge. Those Republican officeholders agree with Machiavelli, who said “We ought to see clearly that the end does justify the means…If the method I am using to accomplishes the goal I am aiming at, it is for that reason a good method.”

The problem is, when an end is achieved by an improper means, it is illegitimate. Even a good end achieved by an illegitimate means undermines the rule of law and threatens social peace.

That’s a lesson Trump is incapable of learning. I’ll belabor that point tomorrow when discussing Venezuela.

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How Is As Important As What…

Those of us who regularly (obsessively?) follow politics and government are currently fixated on the federal administration, and for obvious reasons: every day ending with a y is a day when the Trump caravan of fools and clowns threatens to destroy America domestically and internationally. It’s like driving past a horrific accident–you can’t help but rubberneck.

As understandable as that focus is, however, it doesn’t relieve us of the obligation to ensure the proper operation of local government agencies. (In that context, permit me to indulge my repeated lament about low levels of civic literary–most citizens are blissfully unaware of the existence of local government entities other than the Mayor’s office, the City-County Council and perhaps a zoning board.)

A couple of friends of mine have recently complained that Indiana’s legislature isn’t the only body that doesn’t stay in its lane.

Morton Marcus and Clarke Kahlo have mounted complaints of “mission creep” about our local bond bank–adding a further criticism of the refusal of its board to allow citizens’ testimony and/or complaints at meetings.

As Morton pointed out in a recent column for State Affairs Indiana, the bond bank has an important function–its mission is to issue bonds to pay for critical infrastructure, the capital improvements that local governments pay for over the terms of their useful lives.

That function is explicitly set out in the organization’s mission statement.

Since 2024, the Bond Bank has funded Indiana’s Arts Council. Morton and Clarke Kahlo object to that decision–not, they emphasize, because they disagree with the importance of the Arts Council. They both emphatically support funding the Arts Council with local tax dollars–just not through the bond bank. They attended the Bond Bank board’s most recent meeting to question that line item; however, they were not allowed to address the matter. Or any matter.

The two of them argue that the way government operates–how it chooses to effectuate appropriate governmental activities–is important. As I used to tell my students, in our system, the how is just as important as the what. There are numerous reasons for such a principle; an important one is that when local agencies stick to their missions, citizens can more easily monitor them.

Morton and Clarke argue that the Bond Bank should stick to its mission of funding infrastructure– things like improving our roads and government buildings, waterways, “the transit system, perhaps the Internet, the utilities, all those capital investments on which the residents and workers of this city depend.” As Morton wrote in his column, “If the Civil government wants to support the Arts, and I strongly believe they should, the money should come by vote of the people’s elected representatives, the Council, upon recommendation by the Mayor.”

It turns out that the Arts Council doesn’t just get $500,000 from the Bond Bank. It gets another $500,000 from the CIB, and another sum from the Department of Parks and Recreation. Whatever the justifications for the CIB and Parks Department gifts, Clarke and Morton argue that the Bond Bank’s funding is inconsistent with its mission.

In a written statement, Clarke Kahlo quoted Indiana’s 2020 Civic Education Task Force recommendation that “Since its founding, the United States democracy has relied upon having an informed and active citizenry to maintain our system of ideals and beliefs. In order to be a government by, of and for the people, the populace needs to be engaged knowingly in civic processes.” The thrust of their joint objection is that the lack of transparency and the refusal to allow public comment undermines the opportunity for necessary and informed civic engagement.

The objection raised by these two citizens may seem irrelevant or picky at a time when so much of our governance is under assault. After all, both of them support funding the Arts Council, just not in this particular way. But dismissing their objection would be an error, because it focuses on an important element of democratic systems–what we might call “mission control.” A few days ago, I shared copious evidence that Indiana’s legislature consistently usurps the prerogatives of local, municipal lawmakers. Morton and Clarke are pointing to a similar mission blurring at a local government agency.

In both cases, the failure to honor restraints erodes the ability of citizens to monitor those in authority.

These trespasses obscure information and discourage civic engagement. Failures of governmental guardrails may be most prominent nationally, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t strengthen them locally.

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The Utility Of “Antifa”

Lincoln Square features some of the most acute commentators I read, and I found one recent essay really profound. I will quote several observations, but I encourage you to click through and read the entire thing.

The author, Kristoffer Ealy, began by describing his reaction to a clip from C-Span, in which FBI Security Operations Director Michael Glasheen  testified that antifa represents a major domestic threat.  Congressman Benny Thompson allowed Glasheen to “fully commit” to that assertion, before asking him a series of questions: where is antifa is based? Who leads antifa? Where is its central location? Of course, these are questions that Glasheen couldn’t answer, because–as most informed Americans know–antifa simply means “anti-fascist.”

Antifa isn’t an organization–it’s a political point of view.

As Ealy points out, what made this exchange so embarrassing is the fact that, on paper, Glasheen isn’t a clown like Kash Patel, “whose entire public persona is built on grievance cosplay and unearned confidence.”  Glasheen joined the FBI in 2001, and he knows how the agency is supposed to identify and document real threats.

Which is precisely the problem. This wasn’t ignorance speaking. It was acquiescence. A conscious decision to launder a political narrative through the credibility of a badge and a résumé, because in Trump world, repeating the story matters more than whether it’s true…This man is the fucking FBI Security Operations Director, and that title should come with a baseline expectation that he understands what words like “organization,” “leadership,” and “structure” actually mean…

That is Trump administration 2.0 in a nutshell: absolute confidence paired with complete incoherence. Serious authority chasing imaginary threats while refusing to name the real ones.

In Trump world, words like “antifa” and “woke” function as formless racist dog whistles– useful precisely because they can’t be located, described or inspected.

And because [antifa] has no fixed shape, no formal structure, and no identifiable center, it becomes a catch-all that can absorb whoever is already on the margins: immigrants, protesters, students, journalists, Black activists, LGBTQ people — basically anyone who makes certain people uncomfortable. That isn’t a coincidence. That’s the utility.

These endlessly useful abstractions are examples of what scholars define as Moral Panic Theory: a strategy in which political figures exaggerate or invent threats with the intention of creating enough fear to justify expanded uses of power.

The threat doesn’t need to be real; it needs to feel urgent. History is full of examples — crime waves that don’t exist, satanic cults hiding in plain sight, caravans that mysteriously disappear after elections. Moral panics work because fear lowers the standard of evidence….

Symbolic threats don’t endanger your physical safety; they threaten your sense of identity. They’re framed as attacks on “who we are,” not on anything that can be measured, tracked, or responded to by people doing actual work. That’s why the danger always feels enormous and urgent, while remaining conveniently vague. The threat is emotional, not operational — which is perfect, because you can’t SWAT-team a feeling, but you can scare people into voting over one.

Ealy is absolutely correct– this is how the warnings about “antifa” are intended to function. Antifa is a symbol meant to trigger “anxieties about social change, racial reckoning, generational shifts, and cultural discomfort.” When the enemy is indistinct and unformed, that enemy can be whoever the moment calls for.

This isn’t simply stupidity. It’s strategy. Amorphous enemies allow governments to police thought instead of behavior. They shift power away from proving harm and toward punishing suspicion, and that’s the part we should be wary of — not because it’s dramatic, but because it’s effective.

This dynamic is what political theorist Timothy Snyder warned about in his frequently-cited book “On Tyranny,.” It explains how authoritarian regimes get people to “obey in advance.” Such regimes use the Moral Panic strategy because it results in fearful people who actually know better complying reflexively.

That’s why Trump deploys federal agents theatrically. Why immigration enforcement becomes spectacle. Why entire communities are treated as suspect. That’s why Trump can casually revive language like “shithole” and know exactly what permission structure he’s creating.

As the essay concludes,

The only genuinely surprising thing about the exchange is that it took this long for someone to ask the obvious questions Thompson asked. Antifa is not the KKK, the Proud Boys, or neo-Nazis. Those groups have leaders, structures, recruitment pipelines, and documented violence. You can investigate them because they exist.

Policing an invisible organization is MAGA’s roundabout way of policing thought. And when fear governs, democracy doesn’t last long after that.

It’s really worth clicking through and reading the essay in its entirety.

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Justifying Bigotry

Given the profoundly anti-intellectual posture of the MAGA movement, with its rejection of science and empirical fact, It seems positively counter-intuitive to speak about MAGA “intellectuals.” But a December New York Times book review profiled the men (and so far as I can tell, they’re all White men) who have mounted “scholarly” defenses of the bigotries that animate the movement.

The book is “Furious Minds: The Making of the MAGA New Right” by political theorist Laura Field, who has written broadly about the movement. She divides her “Furious Minds” into three main groups. “Claremonters,” are clustered around California’s Claremont Institute;  the “Postliberals,” want to curb individual rights in favor of collectivism, which they label  “the common good”; and “National Conservatives,” who “endorse a homogenous nation-state and often embrace elements of Christian nationalism.” She labels another, less cohesive group the “Hard Right Underbelly,” and tells readers that figures in that group adopt “aggressively silly nicknames like “Raw Egg Nationalist” (who has a Ph.D. from Oxford) and “Bronze Age Pervert” (who has a Ph.D. from Yale).” That latter cohort is extremely online, promoting what she describes as a “hyper-masculinist aesthetic.” Several are openly racist and fascist.

What all these groups share is a hatred of liberalism — defined not as a partisan political ideology that is left-wing (though they hate that too), but as a system of government that values individualism and pluralism. Postliberals like Patrick Deneen, a political theorist whom Field credits with “the most palatable, sanitized version of Trumpy populism that one is likely to encounter,” started out by criticizing a liberal establishment composed of mainstream centrists in both parties.

I read one of Deneen’s books–“Why Liberalism Fails”– a few years ago, and was repelled by his thoroughgoing rejection of America’s founding philosophy in favor of a theocratic state rooted in (his version of) Christianity. His dissatisfaction with pluralism and civic equality appear to characterize the other figures she profiles, who she suggests suffer from an “apocalyptic despair, replacing the hard work of thinking and reflecting on the world — in all of its pluralism and plenitude — with a reflexive embrace of coercive political power.”

In her book, Field also examines the fevered misogyny of the New Right, noting that terms like “gynocracy” and “the longhouse” have become “overwrought MAGA epithets for an unbearably feminized and pluralist society.” She doesn’t shy away from admitting the deficits of liberal rationalism, but she also reminds the New Right’s intellectual critics that they are able to indulge their fantasies of authoritarianism thanks to the “freedom and security afforded by the liberal democracy they loathe.”

In the societies they want to emulate, dissent from the preferred ideology of the regime isn’t tolerated. But of course, they seem convinced that the autocracy they favor would be founded on their preferred beliefs…

These “intellectuals” are trying to provide philosophical coherence and theoretical grounding for what is actually an emotional and irrational MAGA movement founded on revulsion for modernism and the social changes that they believe are eroding the dominance of White Christian males–hence their efforts to provide “principled” defenses of racism and misogyny, and the necessity of White Christian control.

As the Times’ book review concludes,

In a memorable passage, Field breaks the fourth wall and addresses the men whose cramped extremism has become so familiar to her. “You take the liberal world for granted, too,” she writes. “This has allowed you to don the language of grievance and oppression far too lightly, without having given enough thought to what oppression actually means — the kind of oppression that doesn’t let you love who you want to, or vote in free elections or not be disappeared.”

Field detects a strain of decadence underlying the fanaticism, with soft, comfortable men mistaking cruel titillation for insight and trying their mightiest to look tough: “It is unseemly, and it is unmanly, and some of you will miss your liberalism when it’s gone.”

We the People need to protect and defend the liberal democratic society that gives these ungrateful “cramped extremists” the freedom to defend the morally indefensible.

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Another Year Is Gone…

It’s New Year’s Eve. Another year is over.

And what a year! Not only did America not make progress, we woke every day to the rantings and transgressions of a profoundly ignorant, senile, mentally-ill maniac who–to our everlasting national shame–occupies the Oval Office.

The good news is that the Resistance grew stronger throughout the year. Seven million genuine patriots turned out for No Kings Day, and smaller protests around the country have continued weekly. The lower federal courts have continued to block the unconstitutional efforts to turn America into a fascist state. Jimmy Kimmel is still on the air, thanks to the millions of Americans who expressed their displeasure by dropping their Disney subscriptions. Democrats over-performed dramatically in virtually every election held in 2025, from school boards to governors. Law firms that “bent the knee” lost partners and clients to those that refused to do so. Even Rightwing pollsters show Trump’s approval far, far underwater–and continuing to decline. And the MAGA movement’s bigots are fighting each other.

All of that is good.

If we can hang on, minimize the ongoing, daily damage being done by this inept, lawless administration (and avoid a “wag the dog” war with Venezuela) maybe we can make it to the midterms and a big Blue wave. As we enter 2026, I’ve got my fingers crossed, hoping for an even more robust resistance. (Not just my fingers; I bought a voodoo doll…)

In what I think is a good sign, the Chattering Classes are beginning to focus on the “after”–on the reforms that will be necessary when this period of insanity is over. I think it’s another good sign that the conversation isn’t about returning to an admittedly non-ideal status quo. After all, if America hadn’t had genuine problems with our governance, if we hadn’t closed our collective eyes to the glaring evidence of economic unfairness, if we hadn’t ignored the growing lack of civic literacy and engagement, it’s unlikely that Trump would ever have been elected.

If we are very fortunate, and we emerge from the current nightmare having learned some valuable civics lessons, there will inevitably be arguments about what the necessary reforms should be. There is some uniformity on the structural side–guaranteeing the right to vote, overturning Citizens United, and getting rid of gerrymandering, the filibuster and the Electoral College, for starts.

And perhaps–just perhaps–we will have been sufficiently chastened by this current, profoundly embarrassing interregnum to admit to ourselves that America is far from “Number One” in social policy, and that we could learn a lot from those “high tax” countries whose citizens regularly rank as far happier than we are.

A resident of one of the Scandinavian countries was recently quoted pointing out something I’ve frequently noted: our fixation on “low taxes” ignores what he called the “real life” tax. As he said, when you add what we pay in taxes to what we pay for health insurance (and copays), college tuition and daycare (all of which are “free” in his country, in the sense that they are benefits paid for through their taxes), Americans not only end up paying considerably more than the citizens of those “high tax” countries, but our access to medical care, college and daycare is unequal. (When it comes to health care, our fragmented system also loses the substantial economies of scale–which is why we pay far more for far less than any other first-world country.)

Right now, of course, Americans aren’t debating policies, governmental or social. Right now, we’re just hoping to emerge from this cold civil war with enough of our constitutional infrastructure intact to make reform possible. So here’s my wish for the coming year: that the resistance continues to grow, that there is a huge Blue wave in November, and that an re-invigorated House and Senate discharge their constitutional duties of oversight and impeachment.

(Meanwhile, witch that I am, I’ll keep sticking pins in that voodoo doll…)

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