Sheila

It Isn’t Left And Right

May 11, 2025

I’ve become convinced that the contending “analyses” of MAGA/Christian Nationalist extremism and its far-left antagonists really misses the real nature of our current political and social distress. The root of our dysfunctions isn’t really policy differences or political orientations. It’s fundamentalism versus broad-mindedness.

A recent article from The American Prospect about the death of the right-wing crank David Horowitz reminded me of a conclusion I’d reached several years ago, when I became reacquainted with a distant cousin who had moved back to Indianapolis after many years on the West Coast. I hadn’t seen him since college, when I was one of the very few family members who defended his very unpopular left-wing political activism. (Despite being pretty conservative myself at the time, I was appalled when Bloomington’s then-prosecutor brought charges against my cousin and a few others for their “socialist” activities.)

Fast forward some thirty-plus years, and–lo and behold–he’d “evolved” into a Right-wing true believer. Just as doctrinaire, but from the opposite political pole.

The article about Horowitz made the point that such changes aren’t uncommon. (Remember the intellectuals who defended their move from Left to Right as a response to being “mugged by reality”?) Horowitz was a communist in early life who transitioned into a rabid Right-winger.

Decades before “woke” became a term of derogation, Horowitz began raging at the academic community: not just the far left, but even social democrats who criticized the far left, like Todd Gitlin, who figured prominently on a Horowitz-devised list of 100 dangerous academics who would be fired if Horowitz ruled the world. Even conservative leaders who declined to drink the Trump Kool-Aid were traitors to the cause: Writing in Breitbart, Horowitz labeled neocon Bill Kristol a “renegade Jew” for the sin of supporting a different presidential candidate in the 2016 Republican primaries. Fellow former lefties who’d repudiated the far left for mainstream conservatism, like the Manhattan Institute’s Sol Stern, also ran afoul of Horowitz’s diktats for their failure to join the far-right Visigoths taking arms in the culture wars. In 2021, Stern co-authored a New Republic piece with Ron Radosh (both of whom had known Horowitz since his far-left days) in which they documented Horowitz’s career-long commitment to violent extremism. “In that earlier era,” they wrote, “he celebrated the burning of a bank by a student mob. Today he’s an intellectual pyromaniac who honors the MAGA mob that attacked the U.S. Capitol on January 6.”

Horowitz’ new certainties influenced some of the worst MAGA ideologues, including the odious Stephen Miller.

The problem with individuals who go from hard-Left to hard-Right–or from hard-Right to hard-Left–really has little to do with the “epiphanies” that trigger their philosophical changes. The real issue is their obvious need for doctrinal certainty in a very complicated and uncertain world. These are people who simply cannot tolerate the ambiguities of modern life–who are desperate for a world rendered in black and white, a world without any shades of gray.

Let’s think about that.

The noted jurist Learned Hand famously said that “the spirit of liberty is the spirit which is not too sure that it is right.” My youngest son has similarly distinguished “good religions”–which help people wrestle with moral dilemmas– from dangerous ones that tell people what they must believe and how they (and others) must act.

Neither of these insights are meant to suggest an apathetic approach to important values. They are, however, recognition of the importance of intellectual humility, what we might think of as a scientific approach to our understanding of the world we inhabit. (One of the reasons some religions reject science is because scientific hypotheses are always open to falsification. Absolute certainty is unavailable.)

Reasonable people can mediate or surmount most differences in policy preferences and political philosophy. (Granted, not all.) Fundamentalism, however, abhors and rejects compromises. It leaves no room for “agreeing to disagree.” The philosophy of “live and let live” that permeates America’s Bill of Rights is anathema to True Believers.

Unfortunately, rigid adherence to any worldview– scriptural, dogmatic or ideological–inevitably leads to the drawing of distinctions between the ingroup of “righteous” folks and everyone else, and justifies all manner of inhumane behaviors.

I don’t know what psychological issues lead people to these rigid and dogmatic places. But I am convinced that the need for certainty, intolerance of difference, and the rejection of ambiguity and intellectual humility are far more damaging to the American Idea than the particulars of philosophy at either end of the political spectrum.

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A Constitutional Convention?

May 10, 2025

During the past couple of weeks, the subject of a Constitutional Convention has been raised twice: once during a question-and-answer session following a speech, and once via an email from a good friend. So it would seem reasonable to revisit the subject, and explain why I find that prospect–as proposed currently– horrifying.

Would it be possible to improve upon our centuries-old charter? Sure. We now see flaws that have emerged over the years, (If nothing else, there’s the Electoral College–a system used by no other country, for reasons that have become increasingly apparent…). If the idea of a reasonable review seems innocuous, however, we can be disabused of that conclusion simply by looking at the people pushing for a redo. The most prominent are ALEC (the far-Right American Legislative Exchange Council) and the Heritage Foundation. (Yes, the same Heritage Foundation that produced Project 2025.)

The goals of these and the other ideologues advocating such a convention are entirely inconsistent with the values of the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights.

Back in 2017, members of Indiana’s legislature were calling for such a convention, and I explained my opposition. As I wrote then, proponents clamoring for shortcuts to major change—revolution, a new constitution—always assume that the changes that ultimately emerge will reflect their own preferences and worldviews. History suggests that’s a naive assumption.

Indiana’s proponents wanted the state to join the calls for a Constitutional Convention. They claimed that a convention could be limited to budgetary matters–to devising “a framework for reigning in overspending, overtaxing and over-regulating by the federal government and moving toward a less centralized federal government.”

Constitutional scholars disagree with the assertion that such a convention could be limited to specified goals, but even if it could be, the specified matters would open a Pandora’s box. Think about it.

Wall Street bankers could argue that financial laws are “over-regulation.” One definition of “overspending” might be the massive subsidies enjoyed by (very profitable) U.S. oil companies; others might be Medicare or farm subsidies. Many Americans think we spend too much on the military; others target foreign aid. “Less centralization” could justify virtually any limitation of federal government authority, from FDA regulation of food and drug quality to laws against discrimination.

But the risk isn’t simply that a convention could rather easily be hijacked by people who disagree with the conveners about the nature and extent of needed changes. It isn’t even the likely influence of well-heeled special interests. The real danger is in calling together a presumably representative group of Americans and asking them to amend a document that few of them understand.

At the Center for Civic Literacy I founded at IUPUI (now IU Indy), we focused on the causes and consequences of what we’ve come to call America’s civic deficit. The data we accumulated was depressing. The last time I looked at survey results, only 36 percent of Americans could name the three branches of government, and only 21% of high school seniors could list two privileges that United States citizens have that noncitizens don’t. Etc. Even bright graduate students came into my classes with little or no knowledge of American history, episodic or intellectual. Most had never heard of the Enlightenment or John Locke. They certainly hadn’t read Adam Smith. A truly depressing percentage of undergraduates couldn’t explain what a government is, and they had no idea how ours operates. Separation of powers? Checks and balances? The counter-majoritarian purpose of the Bill of Rights? Blank stares.

Given the Trump administration’s current attacks on the Constitution and media attention to those attacks, those percentages have undoubtedly improved, but civic ignorance is still obviously widespread. Do we really want to turn over the task of rewriting our Constitution to people who don’t understand the one we have?

Common Cause has looked at the unanswered questions implicit in these calls for a convention–questions that lay bare the dangers involved: How will delegates be chosen? Will there be any limits placed on the role of well-funded special interests in influencing the selection of delegates? How will votes be allocated amongst delegates? One person one vote? One vote per state? Something else? What kinds of changes would the convention consider? Will the Convention start with the U.S. Constitution or write an entirely new document?

The civically-ignorant and clinically-insane megalomaniac who occupies the Oval Office is currently being restrained only by the existing U.S. Constitution, which he has clearly neither read nor understood. The likely result of a constitutional convention would be to empower him.

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Consequences…

May 9, 2025

As the evidence of Trump’s mental illness gets stronger and more difficult to hide, and the resistance gets stronger, it’s possible to envision an end to MAGA’s horrific assault on America’s philosophy, norms and institutions and to engage in speculation about what comes next. Just how much of the damage being done is irrevocable? What can be fixed, and what harms lie beyond repair?

There is no denying the amount of damage done in just the first hundred days. It isn’t simply the “I’m king (or Pope) delusions–Trump and Musk have mostly resembled toddlers who somehow got control of the family’s technology, not understanding how it works or what the intended uses are–and are just gleefully smashing mechanisms they don’t begin to understand.

The rest of the world has looked on with a mix of horror and schadenfreude. (Our anguish has actually prompted some sanity elsewhere–both Canada and Australia have repudiated Trump-lite candidates in the past couple of weeks.) The Guardian recently reported that the United States has been added to the watchlist maintained by an international organization monitoring democratic progress and regression.

Civicus, an international non-profit organization dedicated to “strengthening citizen action and civil society around the world”, announced the inclusion of the US on the non-profit’s first watchlist of 2025 on Monday, alongside the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Italy, Pakistan and Serbia.

The watchlist is part of the Civicus Monitor, which tracks developments in civic freedoms across 198 countries. Other countries that have previously been featured on the watchlist in recent years include Zimbabwe, Argentina, El Salvador and the United Arab Emirates.

Not exactly the company we’re used to keeping….

The decision to add the US to the first 2025 watchlist was made in response to what the group described as the “Trump administration’s assault on democratic norms and global cooperation.”

In the news release announcing the US’s addition, the organization cited recent actions taken by the Trump administration that they argue will likely “severely impact constitutional freedoms of peaceful assembly, expression, and association.”

It’s instructive that the organization cited assaults in two separate domains: democratic norms that affect our internal governing behaviors, and the attacks targeting international cooperation, because my own reading of the daily damage being done reflects a similar division.

Assuming the success of what I have been calling the resistance, We the People will face the formidable–but ultimately “do-able”– task of reconstructing our federal governing apparatus. It won’t be easy, and a lot of Americans will be badly hurt before repairs can be made. Much like the occupants of a house destroyed by a hurricane, ordinary citizens will have lost a great deal–but they can also (to use Biden’s terminology) “build back better.” (Perhaps the threatened drastic cuts to Medicaid and other social welfare programs will finally prompt us to emulate the other Western countries where citizens have access to national health care systems. Etc.)

In other words, given sufficient time, Americans can repair the domestic damage. That is very unlikely to be the case with our international stature. Trump has demonstrated–vividly–that America cannot be trusted, that we are always just one election away from irrationality and chaos. We are already seeing the EU step up to fill the leadership gap in NATO. (We are also seeing China and Russia savor the moment–a more troubling development.)

America is in the process of learning an important lesson: it’s much too late to retreat from the global economy. Trump’s insane tariffs will hurt us badly, but the fallout will also demonstrate the folly of trying to retreat from an increasingly integrated world ecosystem. We can re-enter the global marketplace and economic reality, but I am convinced that the days of America’s overwhelming global dominance are over. Permanently.

And pardon me for my arguably unpatriotic reaction to that reality: it’s probably for the best. Our efforts to control the international order have too frequently been Machiavellian rather than noble. We have certainly done a great deal of good–which is why the assault on USAID is so horrific–but we’ve also flexed our international muscle in ways that were unwise and even shameful.

A global order in which we actively participate but don’t dominate–an international order in which no one country is able to call the shots–would be a step forward.

And while we’re not telling everyone else what to do and how to do it, we’ll have a civic house to rebuild.

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The War On Women Continues

May 8, 2025

One of the constants of Trumpism has been its war on women. Trump himself sees women only as sexual objects; the Christian Nationalists who support him see us as “feeders and breeders”– designed by God to submit to men and produce babies.

I was reminded of MAGA’s war on women when I read that Trump’s “big, beautiful budget” will defund Planned Parenthood, among other obscenities that will differentially hurt women.

During the first Trump administration, Trump blocked women’s access to health care through legislation, regulations, judicial appointments, and legal action, slashing funding for family planning, rolling back rules requiring employers to offer no-cost birth control coverage, and revoking multiple protections against sexual harassment, sexual assault and discrimination.

Trump II has been more of the same–and then some.

Trump has decimated boards that administer workplace anti-discrimination laws, rescinded prior Executive Orders against discrimination, reduced enforcement of the Pregnant Workers Act, and undercut civil rights and anti-discrimination laws across the government, with anti-DEI efforts front and center. The administration has cut funding for research on women’s health, erased vital information from federal websites, and eliminated the Gender Policy Council. It proposes huge cuts to Medicaid, SNAP and other programs disproportionately depended upon by women and children. (There’s much more at the link.)

All of these measures are part of the Right’s hysterical resistance to culture change.

A significant minority of Americans feel existentially threatened by the progress of women and minorities. That progress challenges their worldviews, their beliefs about the “proper” order of the world. Trump was elected by those hysterical people. Even those who recognized his personal repulsiveness supported him because he promised to reverse what most of us consider social progress– to turn back the cultural changes that so frighten and infuriate them.

I wondered what research tells us about whether government can reverse cultural changes, so I looked into it.

Studies tell us that such efforts face significant structural, social, and generational resistance. It turns out that entrenched social changes are really difficult to reverse. Shifts of attitudes about race, gender roles, sexuality, and religion occured over generations, and as a result, contemporary perspectives on individual autonomy and diversity are unlikely to be reversed.

History also tells us that government rollbacks of specific rights–restrictions of LGBTQ rights, abortion bans, curricular censorship and the like– may pass legislatively, but actually tend to increase public opposition to the restrictions. Legal scholars point to what is called the “backlash thesis” in which attempts to undo affirmative action or reproductive rights more often than not galvanize counter-movements and intensify support for formerly protected rights that people had come to take for granted.

In other words, research shows that the “wedge” issues that frequently help win elections by motivating turnout by unhappy voters rarely lead to lasting changes.

Research has also identified the media and universities as primary counterweights to efforts to reverse culture change, a finding that helps to explain the ferocity of Trump’s assault on those institutions–and highlights the importance of protecting them.

When I was looking for academic research on the success or failure of efforts to change the direction of a culture, I came across two former examples of previous attempts that should offer rational Americans some comfort: prohibition (rather than ending drinking and drunkenness, it fostered organized crime and spawned a counterculture) and McCarthyism (which ultimately led to stronger norms around civil liberties and free speech).

Granted, that historical comfort is longer-term than most of us would like. But it does point to the fact that the frantic efforts to reverse the hard-won gains in civic equality made by women and minorities are unlikely to succeed in the long term.

Bottom line: retrograde and autocratic governments can slow, shape, or symbolically resist cultural change, but there are sound reasons long-term reversals are so rare. Cultures evolve in response to economic, demographic and technological changes–not from top-down political interventions. For example, as Morton Marcus and I detailed in “From Property to Partner,” once economic and technological changes made employment more dependant on brains than brawn, women entered the workforce in greater numbers.

In the long term, Trump’s misogyny is highly unlikely to remake America’s women into willing “tradwives.”

In the short term, we need to fight like hell.

ChatGPT can make mistakes. Check important info.

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Three Cheers For The Indiana Bar!

May 7, 2025

It’s easy to be critical of Indiana, and especially of the collection of ideologues, MAGA wanna-bes and invertebrates who dominate our state legislature, so it is especially gratifying when an Indiana organization speaks up for democratic governance and the rule of law.

That organization–hopefully, one among many to come–is the Indiana Bar, the organization that represents the legal profession in Indiana. A few days ago, the president of the Bar association released the following statement. In normal times, this statement would be anodyne–a “this is who we are” reminder to citizens who may not appreciate the role of law and lawyers in maintaining stability and civic fairness. But in the Age of Trump and MAGA, it is a heartfelt and incredibly important reaffirmation of the importance of the rule of law and the determination of lawyers to protect it.

Here is that letter.

Each year on May 1, Law Day offers a moment to reflect on the foundational principles that shape our democracy. Chief among them is the Rule of Law, a concept that not only guides our profession but ensures a just and orderly society.

But what exactly is the Rule of Law? And why does it matter?

At its core, the Rule of Law means that no one is above the law and that laws are applied fairly and consistently. It guarantees that our rights and liberties are protected through transparent legal processes. The Rule of Law empowers a parent to challenge a school policy, enables a small business owner to enforce a contract, and protects a citizen who questions government actions. It ensures that power is exercised within bounds, and that all individuals are held accountable under the same legal standards.

The Rule of Law also depends on an impartial and independent judiciary. It is enshrined in both our U.S. and Indiana Constitutions and has long served as a safeguard against tyranny and injustice. Further, under our system of justice, everyone has a right to representation. Lawyers must be free to represent clients without fear of retribution, and clients must be free to choose their counsel without worry of sanction. Our country’s founders, having lived through systems of unchecked authority, built our country rooted in the idea that the rule of law must govern.

Speaking during the first National Law Day in 1958, President Dwight D. Eisenhower said: “The clearest way to show what the Rule of Law means to us in everyday life is to be reminded of what happens when there is no Rule of Law.” He saw this firsthand during World War II while battling Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan. His words remain relevant as we consider the global and domestic challenges that test the strength of our institutions today.

Respect for the Rule of Law is not a given; it must be valued and actively upheld by each generation. One of the greatest threats today is a growing misunderstanding of the Rule of Law. We see its benefits in every trial and every instance of due process. As legal professionals, we have a duty not only to follow the law, but to promote it. That means defending judicial independence, the ability of attorneys to zealously represent clients, and protecting the right of all people to be heard.

President Ronald Reagan put it succinctly: “True peace rests on the pillars of individual freedom, human rights, national self-determination, and respect for the Rule of Law.”

President John F. Kennedy likewise offered this reminder: “Only a respect for the law makes it possible for free people to dwell together in peace and progress… Certain other countries may respect the rule of force. We respect the Rule of Law.”

These ideals are not partisan. They are foundational.

The Indiana State Bar Association stands firm in this commitment. We believe that the Rule of Law is more than a professional ideal, it is the bedrock of our civic life. And we call on every Hoosier attorney, judge, legal professional, and citizen to join us in protecting and promoting it. If the Rule of Law suffers, we all suffer. If the Rule of Law is threatened, we are all threatened. By deeply understanding its significance, honoring its principles, and vigorously defending it, we ensure that the Rule of Law, America’s foundation, endures undiminished.

Let this Law Day be not only a commemoration, but a recommitment.

Michael Jasaitis

ISBA President

Kudos to the Indiana Bar Association!!

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