Author Archives: Sheila

Leonard Pitts Hits It Out Of The Park

Leonard Pitts has long been one of my favorite columnists. I rarely quote him on this blog for a very good reason: his writing is usually–okay, pretty much always–too good, too precise and evocative to paraphrase or summarize, and I really do try to minimize the direct quotes in these posts.

That said, Pitts made a supremely important point in a recent column, and I need to emphasize it. He began by reporting the blowback he’d received over his use, in a previous column, of the phrase “you people.” As one reader wrote him, “How dare you lump all Trump voters like that?”

His response was direct.

Well, dear reader, I cannot tell a lie. That objectifying language was no accident. Rather, it was designed to make a point. In order to understand that point, you have to understand something else:

I’m an American. By that, I don’t simply mean that I’m a U.S. citizen, though I am. But what I really mean is that I venerate the ideals on which this country was founded.

Unalienable rights. Life and liberty, the pursuit of happiness. Freedom of speech. Of faith. Of conscience. Government by consent of the governed. Equality before the law. Because of those ideals, America already was a revolution even before it won independence from England. Despite themselves, a band of slaveholding white men somehow founded a nation based on an aspirational, transformational declaration of fundamental human rights.

And then came the taco bowl connoisseur and his acolytes. Their values — more accurately, their lack of values — have coarsened the country, impoverished its spirit, debased what once was revered.

His use of the phrase “you people,” Pitts wrote, wasn’t  a call for division; it was employed in belated recognition of the fact that some Americans have “seceded from common cause, common ideals, common hope.”

To put that another way: If I never see another cable-news reporter doing interviews in some red-state diner to help the rest of us “understand” the people there, it will be too soon. How about we send that reporter to a blue-state shopping mall to help the people in the diner understand the rest of us? What they will learn is they have no monopoly on frustration or anger.

Pitts then enumerates what “his” people continue to believe and  those he labels “you people” don’t–freedom of speech, the rule of law, democratic ideals, facts and reason.

You people don’t honor the aspirational and transformational ideas that made this country great. My people do.

For those reasons and more, you people are not my people.

My people are Americans.

Pitts has summed up, in his far more eloquent way, what I have been calling “The American Idea.”

What the culture warriors pontificating about “American Exceptionalism” don’t understand is the actual American exceptionalism that was baked into the country’s origin: the notion that one wouldn’t be an American by virtue of status or identity, but by embracing the philosophy of the new nation, by the willingness to “pledge allegiance” to an entirely new concept of governance.

It was–as Pitts readily admits–mostly aspirational. But with fits and starts (lots more fits than most of us learned in high school history classes), we’ve tried to follow that philosophy to its logical conclusion. We extended the franchise, welcoming non-landowners, freed slaves and women into the ranks of “We the People.” Our courts (again, with fits and starts) protected the rule of law against efforts to subvert it in favor of the greedy and unscrupulous and the efforts of racial and religious bigots.

What has so many of us worried sick right now isn’t simply the realization that so many of our fellow citizens are credulous, racist and mean-spirited. There have always been folks like that (although not as vocal or empowered by rampant disinformation).

We are worried that we are losing that aspirational America, that “American Idea,” to the people Pitts calls “you people”–people who never understood or embraced it.

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Good News

In Christianity, the gospel is sometimes called the “Good News.” The phrase evidently heralds the imminent coming of the Kingdom of God. If you have landed on this page in hopes of a post exploring that concept, you’ve come to the wrong place. I don’t even recognize “Christianity” these days. (Granted, I’m not a Christian.)

In fact, when it comes to contemporary news, I’ve become used to seeing headlines like this one, on articles documenting the ways in which Evangelical “Christians” have become more and more indistinguishable from GOP cultists. 

A group that says its mission is “to halt and push back the forces of darkness” is holding a tactical event in southwest Missouri this weekend to train Christians in “hand-to-hand combat” and “fighting from your vehicle.”

I’m not Christian, but I really don’t think Jesus would approve…

Peter Wehner, a lifelong evangelical, recently wrote an article for the Atlantic about the internal conflicts being caused by the politicization of Christianity. I recommend it.

My “good news” is very different– an explicit rejection of that perversion of belief . There are evidently evangelical pastors who are genuinely religious–that is, concerned with concepts like brotherly love, ethical behavior and the golden rule. 

The Washington Post recently had the story.

Emotions ran high at the gathering of about 100 pastors at a church, about five miles from the University of Notre Dame. Many hugged. Some shed tears. One confessed she could not pray anymore.
 
Some had lost funding and others had been fired from their churches for adopting more liberal beliefs. All had left the evangelical tradition and had come to discuss their next steps as “post-evangelicals.”

Those  who planned the meeting–which took place in South Bend, Indiana–had expected 25 pastors. Word-of-mouth expanded it to over 100.  The appeal appears to be part of what the report calls a” larger reckoning” that has been triggered in individuals and congregations that are “grappling with their faith identity in the wake of Donald Trump’s presidency and calls for racial justice following the murder of George Floyd.”

Many of the (formerly) evangelical leaders in attendance at the meeting had been deeply concerned when they learned that approximately 8 out of 10 White evangelicals had voted for Trump in both of his presidential runs–evidence, as they see it, that the evangelical movement has been co-opted by Republican politics.

As the pastors traded stories, they quickly found shared experiences. They lamented their conservative evangelical parents who watch Fox News, as well as their peers who had re-examined their beliefs so much that they lost their faith entirely. They skewed younger, many in their 30s with tattoos covering their arms.

Most of the leaders held some belief in Jesus and the idea that people gathering in churches is still a good idea. Many want their churches to be affirming, meaning that they would perform gay weddings and include LGBTQ people in leadership and membership. They preferred curiosity over certainty, inclusion over exclusion.

According to the article, all of the attendees agreed on two things: they opposed Trump and they opposed racism. (Some of us would suggest that Trumpism is racism, so maybe they only agreed on one thing…) 

One of the most positive signs of change came in a quote from Amy Mikal, who was once a pastor at the Chicago-based megachurch Willow Creek.

“The hardest part is that we were taught to take the Bible literally,” Mikal said. “We want to be a place that asks more questions than provides answers.”

I have previously shared my youngest son’s distinction between a good religion and a bad one: a good religion helps you wrestle with morally-fraught questions about life’s meaning and challenges; a bad religion gives you predetermined “correct” answers and demands that you live in unquestioning accordance with them. Mikal obviously reached a similar conclusion.

The article quoted a different participant, Brit Barron (who had worked for a megachurch in California before she began re-examining her beliefs) for a similar sentiment. Barron opined that “Our job is to create the conversation. If someone opens up and says, ‘I don’t know if any of this is real,’ then we’re doing our job.”

The participants in this meeting understood that the “job” of a pastor is to provide a safe space for questions and debates about morality and faith. That sets them apart from the mega-churches and celebrity pastors who increasingly seem to believe that their job is to program troops for the GOP while raking in lots of money.

The refusal of a growing number of pastors to participate in the con games of the Falwells and Grahams really is “good news.” 

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Supply And Demand

Understanding supply and demand is at the very basis of Economics 101, and thanks to the pandemic, we are seeing a “real world” example of what happens when demand surges, outstripping supply–or at least, outstripping the ability to satisfy demand promptly. For example, the supply-chain problems that have raised prices and fears of inflation have been exacerbated by the gusher of spending that is attributed to demand that was pent-up due to COVID restrictions.

Ezra Klein recently revisited the consequences of imbalances between supply and demand in a column for the New York Times. He focused on the dilemma posed by subsidies–not the pernicious subsidies of corporate farmers or fossil-fuel companies, but well-meaning efforts to help needy American families.

Many of progressivism’s great dreams linger on the demand side of the ledger. Universal health care promises insurance that people can use to buy health care. Food stamps give people money for food. Housing vouchers give them money for rent. Pell Grants give them money for college. Social Security gives them money for retirement. The child tax credit gives them money to care for their children. The minimum wage and the earned-income tax credit give workers more money. A universal basic income would give everyone more money.

Great. Or maybe not…

The problem is that if you subsidize the cost of something that there isn’t enough of, you’ll raise prices or force rationing. You can see the poisoned fruit of those mistakes in higher education and housing…

Klein quotes from a recent paper issued by the Niskanen Center–a think tank I have previously cited, and one  that consistently turns out clear-eyed, impressive research.

We are in an era of spiraling costs for core social goods — health care, housing, education, child care — which has made proposals to socialize those costs enormously compelling for many on the progressive left,” Steven Teles, Samuel Hammond and Daniel Takash write.

There are sharp limits on supply in all of these sectors because regulators make it hard to increase supply (zoning laws make it difficult to build housing), training and hiring workers is expensive (adding classrooms means adding teachers and teacher aides, and expanding health insurance requires more doctors and nurses) or both. “This can result in a vicious cycle in which subsidies for supply-constrained goods or services merely push up prices, necessitating greater subsidies, which then push up prices, ad infinitum,” they write.

The Niskanen paper advises Republicans to stop focusing on “backward-looking deficit reduction strategies based on budgetary gimmicks or dead-on-arrival cuts to existing entitlements.” Instead, it urges conservatives to tackle costs, pointing out that, far too often, Republican proposals to cut government spending “are just shell games that shift costs onto individuals.”

The conservative enthusiasm for moving Medicare beneficiaries onto (often more expensive!) private plans “risks being little more than an accounting trick — a purely nominal change in ‘who pays’ that would do little to address the underlying sources of cost growth.

What is needed, according to Klein, the Niskanen authors and others quoted in the article, is a new focus on innovation, and public policies that encourage it.

Klein says progressives are finally figuring this out, most  clearly when it comes to climate.  Biden’s agenda would increase the supply of renewable energy and advanced batteries and build the supply of carbon-neutral transportation options. Environmentalists understand that markets alone cannot solve the climate crisis, and Democrats are coming to recognize that the same is true for much else on the progressive docket.

Klein shares a quote from a member of Biden’s Council of Economic Advisors.

The transportation, rail, public transit and port investments will reduce efficiency-killing frictions that keep people and goods from getting to markets as quickly as they should,” they wrote. “The child and elder care investments will boost the labor supply of caretakers. The educational investments in pre-K and community college will eventually show up as higher productivity as a result of a better-educated work force.”

As he concludes:

A list like this could go on. It’s not clear whether it’ll be in the reconciliation bill, for instance, but Biden has proposed an expansive plan to increase housing supply in part by pushing local governments to end exclusionary zoning laws. And in California, that’s exactly what’s happening, as I wrote a few weeks back. A decade ago, progressives talked often of making housing affordable, but they didn’t talk much about increasing housing supply. Now they do. That’s progress.

Yes. As Aaron Bastani, another author Klein quotes, puts it, “the world we should want requires more than redistribution. It requires inventions and advances that render old problems obsolete and new possibilities manifold.”

Getting to that world will require overcoming the fear of change that is roiling the world we currently inhabit.

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The More Things Change…

As life in these United States has gotten steadily less civil and more hostile, I have had increasing “flash-backs” to a scene from the movie “An American President.” The scene is near the end of the film; it’s a press conference where the President (played by Michael Douglas) finally has had it with Bob Rumson, the candidate from the opposing party. The entire speech is great, but this is the dialogue that sticks with me:

We have serious problems to solve, and we need serious people to solve them. And whatever your particular problem is, I promise you Bob Rumson is not the least bit interested in solving it. He is interested in two things, and two things only: making you afraid of it, and telling you who’s to blame for it.

The speech especially resonated with me (and undoubtedly with other members of historically marginalized populations), thanks to centuries of experience with being the scapegoats for society’s ills. Jewish history, for example, has made me an especially nervous observer of the GOP’s QAnon cult, with its uncanny echoes of  Nazi propaganda.

As someone named Hunter posted to Daily Kos,

The “QAnon” movement is not a set of new conspiracy theories, but a recasting of some of the most popular neo-Nazi, white supremacist, antisemitic themes of the last century for broader conspiracy consumption. Nazi-era antisemitic conspiracy theories declared that “Jews” were secretly controlling the world, that they were working to undermine governments and cultures, and that they drank the blood of children in secret rituals.

QAnon’s version is identical: A shadowy cabal of “globalists” is secretly controlling the world, is working to undermine governments and cultures (for example, through a “great replacement” of Americans with new nonwhite immigrants, as supposedly funded by wealthy Jewish American George Soros), and is secretly trafficking children to harvest compounds from their blood. The most bizarre of Nazi and neo-Nazi themes have found eager new homes in the brains of supposed “real” Americans who have invariably settled on the same targets and solutions as their neo-Nazi enablers: Round up the “globalists”—meaning liberals, socialists, Democrats, those who fight for LGBT rights, those who treat immigrants with decency—and jail them. “Lock them up.” Purge them.

Observers have been warning that the movement has begun exhibiting  a less-veiled antisemitism.

Recently, John Sabal, identified as an “influential QAnon promoter” recommended a notoriously neo-Nazi film to his followers–a film identifying Jews as the architects of communism, World Wars I and II, and the sabotage of Naziism. “Europa – the Last Battle” is a 10-part film that claims Jews created Communism and deliberately started both world wars as part of a plot to found Israel by provoking the innocent Nazis, who were only defending themselves. Sabal told his 70,000 followers that it was “The most important historical film of all time.” (When Vice News reported the recommendation, Sabal claimed he hadn’t actually watched the film and didn’t know it was anti-Semitic. Right.)

As Vice also reported

While this film has been shared by some of QAnon’s more fringe and extremist figures, the fact Sabal feels emboldened to share it so publicly is a testament to how antisemitic thinking has become normalized within the movement…

When one follower did attempt to criticize Sabal for posting the link, other members of the channel quickly attacked that user, claiming they were some sort of undercover agent of the “deep state.”

Others credulously claimed the user criticizing Sabal had misunderstood the film: “I’m sorry that’s what you took away from our neo-Nazi film. It’s really about how killing the Jews is necessary and good because they’re not real Jews,” one of Sabal’s followers wrote.

QAnon believers are an increasingly important part of the GOP.  When the Sabal story broke, he was preparing to host a conference featuring a significant number of Republican lawmakers, including two sitting Arizona Representatives, Wendy Rogers and Sonny Borrelli. Multiple Republican candidates were scheduled to speak, including candidates from the swing states of Michigan, Arizona, and Nevada.

This is not an isolated example. As Hunter noted in his post,

Conservatism in general is increasingly flirting with antisemitic speech and candidates: In Idaho, a Republican with a long history of antisemitic speech, one who claims “all Jews are dangerous,” is enjoying his local party’s support for joining the local school board.

Call it QAnon. Call it fascism, Nazism, racism. It’s all about fear of the “other”–all about having someone else to blame for what is wrong with one’s life. People of color, Jews, Muslims, LGBTQ folks…you know–“those people.”

After WWII, we can’t claim ignorance of where this sort of thinking leads.

I used to think it couldn’t happen here. I was wrong.

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Hear Ye, Hear Ye…

For those of us desperate for any good news, any glimmer of hope that America might eventually emerge from the purgatory into which we’ve been plunged by the MAGA party, a newsletter from the Brennan Center recently offered that glimmer. (No link, sorry.)

On September 30, President Biden announced ten more federal court nominees, bringing the administration’s total number of nominees to 53. Biden also announced four nominees to serve on local D.C. courts.

Biden’s eighth slate of nominees includes two civil rights lawyers and three current or former public defenders. Several of the nominees, if confirmed, would also mark historic firsts: the first Asian American man on the Western District Court of Washington, the first Asian American woman on the Southern District Court of California, and the first Hispanic district court judge in Ohio.

According to CNN, more than 25% of Biden’s nominees to date are Black, 21% are Hispanic or Latino, and 23% are Asian American or Pacific Islanders. Close to 75% are women. In addition, 32% of Biden’s judicial nominees are former public defenders and 25% are civil rights lawyers.

Biden is confirming judges at a rate faster than any other president at this point in their term since Richard Nixon, according to Bloomberg Law. Sixteen of Biden’s judicial nominees have been confirmed so far.

I feared–and still fear–that Mitch McConnell and Donald Trump had ensured a generation in which the federal courts would be lost to principles of justice and equality. After all, they did manage to elevate a number of ideological and, frequently, demonstrably unqualified partisans to those courts. The Biden Administration is clearly aware of the need to ensure the ongoing integrity of the courts, and equally aware of the need to populate the bench with Americans who are both competent and representative of the country as a whole.

So–good news. I’ll take it.

Unfortunately, all the emerging reports about America’s courts are not as positive as that one. That same newsletter relayed the conclusions of an investigation by the Wall Street Journal that found 130 federal judges had violated U.S. law and judicial ethics by “overseeing court cases involving companies in which they or their family owned stock.”

The Journal reported that between 2010 and 2018, 129 federal district court judges and two federal appellate judges had failed to recuse themselves from 685 cases in which they or their families had a financial conflict, and that approximately two-thirds of the rulings subsequently favored the judges’ or their family’s financial interests.

One of the reasons for this country’s current angst is the public’s loss of trust in the institutions of American government. Trump certainly accelerated suspicion of government bureaucrats with his paranoia about the “deep state,” and he fed a wide variety of conspiracy theories, but much of the loss of trust preceded him. (My book, Distrust American Style, was published in 2009, and the phenomenon was anything but new.) Confidence in the administration hit an all-time low under Trump (and for good reason), but Congress has been utterly feckless for well over a decade.

The courts were, for a time, the holdout.

With McConnell’s success in remaking the Supreme Court into an instrument of partisanship, and four years of appointments of partisan hacks  (mostly White men) to the federal bench, those of us who’ve been paying attention lost hope that the courts would salvage constitutional principles–or at the very least, stem the tide.

I doubt that the Biden Administration has the political capital to do what very clearly needs to be done: either enlarge the Supreme Court or impose limits on Justices’ terms of service. Scholars of the judiciary have been advocating various mechanisms for expanding  the Court for years–far preceding McConnell’s mischief–for reasons of efficiency; they’ve also been advocating term limits in recognition of the fact that Justices live much longer than they used to. (Terms of 18 years, the usual recommendation, would probably be long enough to insulate Justices from political pressure– the original reason for lifetime appointments.)

In the absence of meaningful structural change, the nakedly partisan makeup of the Supreme Court is likely to keep trust in the courts low–leaving discontented citizens with nowhere to turn for redress of grievances.

Of course, speaking of “redress of grievances,” we might remind folks that there is this thing called the ballot box…

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