Author Archives: Sheila

An Excellent Reminder

A recent column by one of my “go to” pundits, Jennifer Rubin, reminded me once again why political communication is so difficult. Terms like “liberal” and “progressive” have been redefined by ideologues to facilitate their use as labels, rather than as explanatory terms. Perhaps the saddest example is misuse of the word “conservative,” which the media continues to apply to MAGA politicians, despite the fact that they embrace positions and arguments that are far–far–from traditional conservatism.

Rubin has tackled yet another term that is widely misunderstood: centrism. As she writes,

Centrism isn’t a mushy tendency to compromise. It isn’t a brain-dead fondness for style over substance. Above all, it is not to be confused with “moderation” — the futile and frankly foolish attempt to carve out a space halfway between the extremes of MAGA authoritarianism on the right and rabid nihilism from the left.

If climate change is a fact, to take one example, then splitting the difference with climate deniers is nonsensical. And if the MAGA movement assaults truth, then telling half of the truth or telling the truth half the time isn’t centrism. It’s absurdism, and a sure path to meaninglessness and nihilism.

Centrism, rather, is a mind-set. It’s more than humility, tolerance and restraint, although all of those are necessary elements. Above all, it’s an approach to governance, and not a list of specific policy prescriptions. It can be bold, pragmatic and popular.

Rubin defines centrism as a willingness to admit that all wisdom does not reside on one side of the political or ideological  spectrum. It “recognizes that capitalism and regulation, individual merit and social justice, and diversity and cohesion not only can coexist but must operate in tandem within a healthy, balanced society. Centrism, in short, stands for the proposition that ideological tensions are best resolved when we incorporate elements from conflicting perspectives.”

The essay proceeds to show how Biden’s immensely successful Presidency has benefitted from a (properly understood) centrist approach to undeniably progressive goals, and how centrism (again, properly understood) has won elections around the globe. As Rubin reminds us, centrism rejects Manichaeism, and respects coequal branches of government. As she also observes, ideologically extreme courts that abandon that measured, centrist approach lose legitimacy. (Someone should tell John Roberts…)

As she concludes:

We can attribute democracy’s woes around the world to failure to spread economic prosperity, demographic change and the decline of civics education, as well as religious fundamentalism, information bubbles and globalism. Some combination of these factors inevitably leads to support for strongmen who vow to fix intractable problems that “messy” democracy cannot solve. But we are looking in the wrong places for our answers.

We can address all those challenges provided the spirit of centrism prevails. Centrism can accommodate diversity, secure democratic norms, and preserve a credible and independent judiciary, all essential and foundational to liberal democracy.

I agree with all of the points Rubin makes, especially her definition of centrism. But that definition prompts another observation. Centrism–understood as Rubin defines it–looks an awful lot like another quality in short supply in our political class: maturity.

Mature individuals are reflective. They exhibit self-awareness. They embrace civility. Maturity includes the ability to consider all sides of a debate, the ability to embrace persuasive elements from different perspectives. If there is any evidence that any segment of the MAGA movement is mature, I’ve missed it.

It isn’t simply the childish and increasingly nasty response to Kamala Harris’ candidacy. Trump’s entire vocabulary (which apparently stopped expanding in third grade) is that of a playground bully. He doesn’t try to communicate–he merely spews insults. (He is guilty of many things, but civility is certainly not one of them.) His MAGA supporters happily emulate his crude and childish behavior. The trolls that occasionally post here underscore that observation–they simply insult, evidently unable to make anything remotely like rational arguments for considered positions.

Rational arguments. Considered positions. Those are markers for Rubin’s “centrism” and for what I define as maturity–and far too many of our contemporary political figures lack both. The GOP is currently the party of Donald Trump and Marjorie Taylor Green, and it would be hard to find more immature, unreflective (or more embarrassingly ignorant) standard-bearers.

I applaud Rubin’s effort at actual communication, but that effort fails to take into account the fact that today’s MAGA Republicans aren’t just incapable of actual communication, but disinterested in it. They remind me most of monkeys in the zoo throwing feces.

We need to start electing people who display a modicum of self-awareness, and are actually interested in communicating and governing. That apparently excludes MAGA.

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Project 2025, Public Education And The Public Good

Today’s post is a bit longer than usual, so consider yourself forewarned.

As we’ve learned more about the various elements of “Plan 2025,” it looks increasingly like an all-out attack on the America most of us believe in. There’s the assault on women (the effort to take us back to what those nice White “Christian” men consider our proper role as breeders and housemaids); the fight to remove any and all elements of a social safety net (who needs health insurance or Social Security?); the multiple provisions favoring the wealthy over the middle-class; and a full-scale attack on public education.

Time Magazine, among others, has reported on the education portion of the White Nationalists’ plan.

Project 2025, the policy agenda for Former President Trump’s potential first year back in the White House published by the far right conservative think tank the Heritage Foundation, has been making waves recently. Some of the many destructive proposals within the agenda include the elimination of the U.S. Department of Education—along with federal education funding and any civil rights protections—and the diversion of public money to private school voucher programs instead.

Make no mistake: The goal is to end public education. 

As the article goes on to detail, the measures in Project 2025 are a continuation of the same efforts we’ve seen the past several decades– efforts to turn education into a consumer good available to those who can afford such luxuries. 

We are on the brink of a new wave of public school closures, another step in the decades-long project to divest and dismantle the institution of public school. Disguised as “school choice,” federal, state, local, and private actors have prioritized paying for  private and charter schools, hoarding educational resources for the haves and depleting resources for the have-nots.

The policies that Project 2025 plans to prioritize—government payments to families sending their children to private school and creation of new charter schools that are run like businesses—have expanded in the last few years, starving public school districts that serve all students of already insufficient resources. In the 2023-24 school year, at least 70 school districts, including in San Antonio, Texas, Jackson, Mississippi, and Wichita, Kansas, announced permanent closures of public schools, impacting millions of students. These districts are resorting to the harmful, discriminatory, and ineffective so-called ‘solution’ of closing schools in Black and Latine communities, stripping those communities of their local public schools.

The schools already being closed are (not so coincidentally) those in the poorer areas of cities–the schools that serve low-income and minority students, and that have historically been underfunded– depriving the communities around them of “community resources like adult education, polling locations, a place to hold community meetings, and access to democratic community control through school board elections.”

Despite the original rhetoric about opening access to “better” schools for underprivileged kids, voucher programs now primarily benefit upper-middle class parents, many of whom were previously paying to send their children to private and parochial schools.

What is ironic about this effort to deny educational opportunities to those with the fewest resources is how costly it is.

Pro Publica reports that the voucher program in Arizona has “blown a hole” in that state’s budget.

Arizona, the model for voucher programs across the country, has spent so much money paying private schoolers’ tuition that it’s now facing hundreds of millions in budget cuts to critical state programs and projects.

Two years ago, Arizona passed the largest school voucher program in the history of education. The program was generous: “any parent in the state, no matter how affluent, could get a taxpayer-funded voucher worth up to tens of thousands of dollars to spend on private school tuition, extracurricular programs or homeschooling supplies.”

In just the past two years, nearly a dozen states have enacted sweeping voucher programs similar to Arizona’s Empowerment Scholarship Account system, with many using it as a model.

Indiana was one of those states.

Yet in a lesson for these other states, Arizona’s voucher experiment has since precipitated a budget meltdown. The state this year faced a $1.4 billion budget shortfall, much of which was a result of the new voucher spending, according to the Grand Canyon Institute, a local nonpartisan fiscal and economic policy think tank. Last fiscal year alone, the price tag of universal vouchers in Arizona skyrocketed from an original official estimate of just under $65 million to roughly $332 million.

As a result, Arizona has cut $333 million out of water infrastructure projects (as the article pointed out, this in a state where water scarcity is a huge issue). It cut tens of millions of dollars for highway repairs, and $54 million from Arizona’s community colleges, among other cuts.

In Indiana, voucher program costs have ballooned to $439 million, some 40 percent higher than in 2022–2023.

Despite the enormous costs– vouchers haven’t improved educational outcomes. 

In the Public Interest recently noted that the assault on public education is part of a larger attack on the very notion of a “public good.”

We define public goods as the things we all need to survive and thrive–the big things: public health, mobility, knowledge, democracy, shelter, clean air and water, the ability to communicate with each other (including, lately, broadband access). Public goods include things we need everyone to have. Those are things that we can only do if we do them together. It is part of our responsibility to each other, and it forms the basis of our society. And for a very long time in the United States, there was a consensus that we need every child, not just one’s own children, to get a high-quality education.

It seems beyond the imagination of many conservatives that people might—or should—care about and feel any responsibility regarding the plight of someone who is not within their own personal sphere or realm of identity. (It also seems of a piece with the way former Ohio Senator Rob Portman became receptive to gay rights only after his own son came out to him.)

Margaret Thatcher once said of society “There is no such thing! There are individual men and women and there are families.”

Such a narrow and individual approach to public policy is at the root of the notion of “school choice,” a catchy name for programs like vouchers that essentially move public money from public schools to private schools. It holds that K-12 education is best offered as a function of the marketplace, something with which only school age children and their parents should be concerned. It doesn’t view education as the necessary component of a functioning democracy, nor does it value the social cohesion that universal public education can foster…

The reality of “school choice individualism” is that schools that receive public money that comes from all of us via vouchers want to be able to exclude some of us.  They don’t have to follow the rules of public schools—they can pick and choose students, and they can–and do–discriminate against anyone they choose: those with disabilities, families who are part of the LGBTQ community, and religious affiliations they deem unacceptable.

The article concluded with a dig at JD Vance’s oft-expressed disdain for public goods and “childless cat ladies.”

While many conservatives don’t seem to regard public education as a public good but rather as an expression of a shopping preference for families, the vast majority of Americans do see education as a public good. And that includes those who have school-age children, those with children who are now adults, those who have never had children, and even, we’re sure, quite a few cat ladies.

Meow…

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A Factual Rebuttal

In the wake of Joe Biden’s decision to withdraw from the Presidential campaign, media attention turned from the just-concluded Republican convention to the Democratic ticket. While that’s understandable, it’s also important to revisit the fantasies promulgated at that GOP lie-fest. I particularly liked one of those reviews, penned by David French in the New York Times, because French is a conservative former Republican, whose analysis cannot fairly be attributed to progressive ideology.

French-who was a Mitt Romney delegate at the 2012 Republican convention– noted that this year’s event “was the first that revolved entirely around a fundamentally false premise: that in our troubled time, Donald Trump would be a source of order and stability.” As he noted, if past performance is any indication, a second Trump term would be as chaotic as the first.

To bolster their case, Republicans misled America. Speaker after speaker repeated the claim that America was safer and the world was more secure when Trump was president. But we can look at Trump’s record and see the truth. America was more dangerous and the world was quite chaotic during Trump’s term. Our enemies were not intimidated by Trump. In fact, Russia improved its strategic position during his time in office.

Convention speakers emphasized the same themes that Hoosiers saw in the GOP’s primary fight–especially ominous warnings about crime and crime rates. These arguments reek of what Yiddish speakers call “chutzpah,” because acceptance of GOP arguments about public safety requires swallowing a Republican “alternate reality.”

As French notes,

The most egregious example of Republican deception centered around crime. The theme of the second night of the convention was “Make America Safe Again.” Yet the public mustn’t forget that the murder rate skyrocketed under Trump. According to the Pew Research Center, “The year-over-year increase in the U.S. murder rate in 2020 was the largest since at least 1905 — and possibly ever.”…

It’s particularly rich for Trump to claim to be the candidate of order when the crime rate rose during his presidency and is plunging during Joe Biden’s. In 2023, there was a record decrease in the murder rate, and violent crime, ABC News reported, “plummeted to one of the lowest levels in 50 years.”

French also reminded readers of Trump’s utterly unAmerican approach to international relations, which consisted of dumping on the country’s longtime allies and cozying up to autocrats and dictators–especially Putin.

Trump’s argument about foreign policy is also fundamentally deceptive. Throughout the convention, we heard variations of the same theme: Russia didn’t invade any other country under Trump, and Iran was broke and powerless. But again, this is misleading. Far from being frightened and intimidated by Trump, both Russia and Iran directly attacked American troops when he was president.

In 2018, Russian mercenaries and their Syrian allies assaulted an American position in northern Syria, leading to a four-hour battle during which American forces deployed artillery and airstrikes to beat back the attack. In 2020, Iran fired a volley of ballistic missiles at American troops in retaliation for our strike against Qassim Suleimani and injured more than 100 American service members.

In both instances, our forces handled themselves with courage, professionalism and skill, but if Russia and Iran were so frightened of Trump, why did they attack Americans?

Trump enabled Iran to restart its nuclear program, and ordered a precipitous withdrawal from northern Syria that abandoned our Kurdish allies, creating an opening for Russia. (Russians filmed themselves occupying an abandoned American base.)

Trump’s obvious disrespect for our allies harmed American interests then, and if he wins they’ll harm American interests again. At the end of Trump’s term, Russia was stronger, Iran was unbowed, and America’s relationship with our key allies was more tenuous. Trump had even threatened to yank the United States out of NATO, our most important alliance, an act that would fulfill one of Putin’s fondest hopes.

As French concludes, Trump wants voters to empty their minds of the past so that he can fill it with his own “alternative facts.”

The Republican National Convention was one long exercise in creating memories of a Trump term that never existed. The real Trump term was chaotic and dangerous from start to finish, and if Americans’ memories don’t improve soon, the voters who seek peace and stability will instead bring us violence and tears.

The problem is, for the MAGA cult, reality is irrelevant. Climate change is a hoax, NATO isn’t worth supporting, Brown immigrants are all criminals…the list goes on, and at its base is the real glue holding the cult together–White Christian Nationalism and nostalgia for a (largely non-existent) past in which White men dominated the government and the culture.

A Republicans vote is a vote for the Confederacy.

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Deconstructing Liberty

There are so many words we Americans throw around, assuming we are communicating–assuming that my understanding of term X is the same as your understanding of term X. Often, the similarities in understanding are sufficient to allow us to communicate, at least superficially–but sometimes, it’s worth delving into the nuances of words the meanings of which we take for granted.

Like “liberty.” 

An article from Civic Ventures pointed to a reality that many economists have noted (a reality of which most of our politicians seem unaware): genuine liberty requires a measure of economic security. The expression of even the most basic civil and democratic liberties depend upon a basic floor of economic security–you are unlikely to indulge your right to free speech or participate in democratic deliberation if your entire life is spent scrabbling for food and trying to keep a roof over your head.

The article begins by quoting Nobel prizewinning economist Joseph Stiglitz on the effect of income inequality on democracy:

“As income inequalities grow, people wind up living in different worlds. They don’t interact. A large body of evidence shows that economic segregation is widening and has consequences, for instance, with regard to how each side thinks and feels about the other,” Stiglitz writes. “The poorest members of society see the world as stacked against them and give up on their aspirations; the wealthiest develop a sense of entitlement, and their wealth helps ensure that the system stays as it is.”

And because that gap between the haves and have nots has become so vast, he writes, something much more significant than personal wealth is at stake: Our very democracy is imperiled.  “Democracy requires compromise if it is to remain functional, but compromise is difficult when there is so much at stake in terms of both economic and political power,” Stiglitz concludes. 

Stiglitz also points out that economic security is an essential component of freedom. It doesn’t matter how “free” you are from government intrusion “if you’re one $500 expense away from total economic ruin and your rent goes up by hundreds of dollars every year. “

The article goes into a lengthy discussion of America’s economy, explains the successful performance of a variety of measures initiated by the Biden administration, and ends with a very important point:

After the success of the Child Tax Credit, it’s become clear that direct cash payments with no strings attached are a much more successful poverty reduction program than vouchers or other kinds of means-tested relief programs. There’s still a lot to debate about guaranteed income programs—I’m particularly concerned about them being misused as subsidies for low-wage employers—but it’s clear we’re entering a new phase of the public guaranteed income discussion. 

The question is no longer about whether it makes good sense to make direct investments in people. Now, the conversation is turning to how and when we make those investments happen.

That conversation should include a recent, fascinating interview of philosopher Elizabeth Anderson in Persuasion. Anderson has long been focused on the workplace, and the relative absence of workers’ rights enjoyed by non-union employees. She  echoes Stiglitz’ concerns about the effects of economic deprivation on democracy, and the individual’s ability to participate in political activity on anything remotely like an equal basis:

One of my agendas is to get us thinking more systematically about class inequality, because recent political discourse has been mostly focused on race, gender, sexual identity and sexual orientation issues. And one of the things I want to do is bring class back in. Looking at class, I think, provides us a better basis for building cross-cutting coalitions along the other identities. But also because we’re in a state now where our class inequality is quite extreme and it’s getting worse. And that’s not just a matter of how much money people have, but about their political power. In practice, a society which has lots and lots of billionaires is never going to be able to insulate politics from the overwhelming power that money supplies—political power, political influence. And so we have a threat to democracy here.

Read together, these articles–and really, hundreds like them–focus on a very troubling aspect of America’s current reality. We have millions of people who are effectively disenfranchised by poverty. They may have rights “on paper,” but the constant struggle to put food on the table precludes any enjoyment of those rights, and similarly precludes any meaningful participation in the democratic process. 

Do the working poor really enjoy “liberty” in any meaningful sense?

Think about that–and re-read my arguments for a UBI…

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How Conspiracy Theories Work

I have a confession to make. In the aftermath of the attempt on Trump’s life, my first reaction was suspicion that he’d arranged the whole thing. After all, it would be just like him to produce a scenario where he could play the brave victim…and with the death of the shooter, there would be no evidence…

Okay–not my finest moment. But a cursory scan of my FaceBook page provided evidence that I wasn’t the only person open to similar fantasies, and that, in turn, led me to consider just how America got to the stage where conspiracy theories have more force and impact than facts.

An interesting experiment sheds some light on that inquiry: a while back, The New Republic ran an article detailing a “prank” that illustrated how such theories spread. The article began:

Bird propaganda is everywhere, once you’re trained to recognize it. Since the Cold War, children have eaten their breakfast cereals with Toucan Sam and spent their after-school hours learning at Big Bird’s oversize feet. Television has streamed into our homes and onto our smartphones under the strutting sign of NBC’s rainbow peacock. Penguins gaze out at us from our bookshelves. Eagles, the government insists, are patriotic symbols of strength and freedom. Duolingo uses an earnest but irritating green owl to engineer our digital behavior and shame us into learning rudimentary Portuguese.

As you catch your breath from this unnerving revelation, you should also know that there is a growing movement online determined to reveal the truth: that none of this is benign, none of it accidental. That Americans are being birdwashed into docility and obedience.

Calling itself Birds Aren’t Real, this group of primarily Gen Z truthers swaps ­memes and infographics on social media (the official accounts boast more than 800,000 followers on TikTok and 400,000 on Instagram), challenges the powers that be with combative media appearances, and holds rallies across the country. They explain that the U.S. government secretly ran a “mass bird genocide” starting in the late 1950s, replacing the real avian population with sophisticated surveillance-drone look-alikes. Bird-watching now goes both ways.

The group’s leaders even published a book, in which they “revealed” that the government’s bird genocide plot was hatched by “notorious CIA director Allen Dulles—when he wasn’t spearheading the MK-Ultra mind-control program.” They provided “evidence” of the complicity of presidents from Eisenhower to Biden, and a field guide for recognizing bird-drones in the “wild.”

“Birds Aren’t Real” was an elaborate prank, what the article calls “a knowing satire of American conspiratorial thinking in the century of QAnon–an experiment in misinformation. And it demonstrates the elements needed for a successful conspiracy theory. First of all, it offers a “theory of everything”—a way for people to make sense of the world’s complexity and contradictions, to tie up all the loose ends. Good conspiracy theories offer “arguments by adjacency,” meaning that arguably related credible facts are used to “prove” wilder claims, “offering just enough truth to make you wonder.”

Finally, successful conspiracy theories are able to perform a kind of psychic alchemy for their followers. On the one hand, they drain pleasure from everyday life. Nothing can be innocent; everything is wrapped up in the plot. QAnon supporters pull away from friends and family, convinced that the people they most love have become satanic cultists. Birds Aren’t Real tells you that you can’t enjoy simple joys like nature walks and bird-watching, family Christmases (eating turkey is “ritualized bird worship”), or even your pets. People with birds at home are advised “to calmly pack your things in the middle of the night and leave. Make sure your bird does not see you leave.” Your pet bird never loved you, for it was merely a government drone-robot, but at least now the imminent danger has passed.

The article notes that conspiracy theories offer people agency in a world that seems fallen to pieces, and it reports and analyzes the efforts underway to combat them. It’s a fascinating–albeit somewhat depressing–read.

When I thought about the elements needed for wide acceptance of a conspiracy theory, I realized mine lacked them. My reaction was more a suspicion than a theory–it didn’t explain everything (like why anyone sane thinks Trump is fit to be President); the only available “argument from adjacency” is that Trump, who lies constantly, is demonstrably capable of inventing and spreading misinformation. And my theory would hardly offer agency to those of us who are shocked and saddened by realizing that large numbers of our fellow Americans are drinking Trump’s Kool-Aid.

There’s probably a lot of overlap between MAGA folks and those who believe that Birds Aren’t Real….

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