Author Archives: Sheila

As I’ve Been Saying…

During a recent discussion with my two nephews–who, while living on opposite coasts, have somehow, shockingly, become middle-aged adults–one of them offered an observation that built on and combined two aspects of the MAGA movement that I have (separately) noted on this platform: racism and victimhood.

My nephew agreed with a recent quote by Sherrilyn Ifill, a law professor at Howard University, who opined that MAGA “is fueled by white supremacist ideology. That is the seductive messaging through which so many have been lured into participating in this national betrayal.” But he also attributed Trump’s appeal to the grievances of people whose lives haven’t met their desires or expectations, and who–rather than taking responsibility for that failure–prefer to see themselves as victims of nefarious “others.” 

The characteristics of those two groups are–rather obviously– closely allied, so the Trump administration’s efforts to roll back efforts to promote civic equality panders to both. It shouldn’t come as a surprise that, as Trump’s approval ratings have continued to tank, those efforts have accelerated.

Recently, Talking Points Memo described the methods the administration is employing to resegregate the workforce.The report began by citing the data: when Trump took office in January 2025, unemployment was at 4 percent overall, and at 5.3 percent for Black workers. In November, the total unemployment rate was 4.6 percent, and the Black unemployment rate had soared to 8.3 percent.

One contributing factor is Trump’s mass firings of federal employees. Black people disproportionately work in the public sector, representing nearly 19 percent of the federal workforce compared to 13 percent of the civilian workforce. And they have been disproportionately impacted by Trump’s purges: Analyses by ProPublica and The New York Times found that the administration conducted its steepest staff cuts at the agencies with the most nonwhite and women workers, like the Department of Education and the U.S. Agency for International Development.

But the federal layoffs offer only a partial explanation. What the data is beginning to reveal is the devastating cumulative effects of the Trump administration’s policies for workers of color.

The article goes on to make explicit a connection that even my graduate students tended to miss: the very real–and often immediate– impact of government’s largely unnoticed structural and regulatory changes on the day-to-day prospects of citizens.

Among other things, changes in seemingly arcane rules can change the racial composition of the workforce.

For example, among Trump’s blizzard of Executive Orders are several that  characterize longstanding, Johnson-era affirmative action mandates as “illegal DEI”  (his administration’s disfavored diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives). Instead of requiring companies to affirm that their employment policies are non-discriminatory, and that they have taken “affirmative action” to eliminate bias from their recruitment efforts, Trump is requiring them to certify that they are not “promoting DEI.” The administration didn’t bother to define the term, “effectively discouraging companies that want to keep their government contracts from engaging in any activity that could conceivably be characterized as DEI. For reference, to date, the things the administration has decried as DEI include the Calibri font and indoor plumbing in Black neighborhoods.”

As I reported a few days ago, the Trump administration continues to dismantle longstanding legal doctrines that allow people to challenge discrimination in the workplace. As I explained, disparate impact allowed courts to recognize the reality that even policies that are neutral on their face can have a discriminatory impact, and that intentional discrimination is often hard to prove. For some 50 years, litigants have been able to prevail in discrimination lawsuits by demonstrating the real-world disproportionate effects of a particular rule or practice that doesn’t serve a necessary purpose. 

The numerous structural changes intended to shield discriminatory motives and actions haven’t been confined to doctrinal matters. The administration has also pulled back the enforcement of anti-domestic-terrorism projects–efforts that had largely focused on the White nationalist and neo-Nazi groups responsible for the majority of domestic terrorism assaults. 

The Guardian reports that the FBI has openly rerouted resources away from investigations of far-right extremists, including one called “the Base” which recruits through a Russian email and is now apparently free to pursue its “stated objective of fomenting an armed insurgency against the US government.”

As Talking Points Memo notes, these policies and several others work in tandem, making it is harder for people of color to enter the workforce and harder for them to remain there. If they are victimized by illegal discrimination, it’s now harder for them to do anything about it. 

On the other hand, it’s much easier to be a neo-Nazi terrorist.

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A Lunatic Goes To Venezuela

Where to start?

Trump’s defenses of the assault on Venezuela have been as incoherent as most of his actions. Granted, Maduro was a very bad man–but if being a very bad man justified his kidnapping by a foreign power, leaders of other countries might justifiably kidnap Trump.

More to the point, if there were sound reasons to take these actions, those reasons should have been shared with Congress, and Congress–not our would-be king–should have authorized them. Instead, as several members of that body have attested, the administration did not consult them. Worse, it out-and-out lied, assuring the appropriate committees that the administration’s previous actions (including bombings of small boats) were not in pursuit of regime change.

Indeed, the administration defended those illegal bombings, which were clearly war crimes, as part of an effort to halt drug shipments and deter “narco-terrorists.” Trump’s pardon of a major narcotics kingpin–who had been tried and found guilty of transporting massive amounts of drugs into the U.S. and sentenced to 45 years for those crimes–illustrated the extent to which that excuse was a hypocritical lie.

Call me naive, but I see very little difference between Trump’s invasion of Venezuela and Putin’s invasion of Ukraine–especially in light of Trump’s announcement that America will now “run” Venezuela, a country that (I’m sure co-incidentally) has the world’s largest reserves of oil. (That “coincidentally” was snark…) Trump is on record saying America should have appropriated Iraq’s oil when we launched an unjustified war on that country (you will recall that it was Saudis who brought down the twin towers). On Saturday, NBC reported that the U.S. will tap Venezuela’s oil reserves, and The Hill reported Trump’s assertion that we will be “very strongly involved’ in Venezuelan oil. A video posted to Instagram showed Trump announcing that he is sending American oil companies to Venezuela to “help them” upgrade their facilities…

The announcement that America will be “managing” Venezuela smacks of colonialism, which fits MAGA’s clear preference for returning us to the 18th Century. Colonial powers claimed a right—and duty—to govern others because those others were less competent–or “civilized” (i.e. White).

The international implications of this Wag the Dog effort are likely to be profound. The administration has arguably violated the United Nations Charter, which prohibits the use of force against sovereign states without Security Council authorization or a clear self-defense rationale. The Secretary-General of the U.N., António Guterres, has warned that the action sets a “dangerous precedent” for future use of force, and further weakens important post-World War II norms. Rather obviously, if the U.S. can act with impunity and without any obvious justification, other major powers like China or Russia become more likely to cite those actions to justify their own uses of force (e.g., around Taiwan or Eastern Europe), further undermining the already tenuous  international legal order.

It is highly unlikely that the incompetents in Trump’s government understand–or are prepared for– potential negative consequences of this lawless act–including escalation of civil unrest by loyalists within Venezuela and/or regional destabilization due to spillover into neighboring countries. Renewed fighting could also spur another surge in migration from Venezuela, exacerbating humanitarian and border pressures on neighboring states like Colombia and Brazil.

Needless to say, this latest example of Trump’s erratic, impulsive and unilateral behavior–not to mention the corresponding lack of legislative restraints– has deepened the already well-founded concerns of our allies, whose confidence in America’s stability and reliability has taken a huge hit since Trump’s election. That loss of confidence and respect have demonstrably weaken­ed our ability to rely on diplomatic cooperation.

In an embarrassing speech on Saturday (I mention the day so that you will know which speech I’m citing, because all Trump’s speeches are embarrassing), Trump stuck for once to the teleprompter, engaging in a halting, low-energy reading of words he clearly had neither written nor reviewed, and several of which he obviously didn’t understand. Among those was his invocation of the Monroe Doctrine, which he’s evidently been told justifies American dominance of Latin America. Trump evidently believes the doctrine is sufficient to turn intervention into “stewardship” and colonialism into security policy.

It will be interesting to see how this latest dangerous buffoonery plays with the public. A quick-and-dirty poll found 17% approving of the invasion (but only 11% agreeing that Trump could take this action without Congressional approval). MAGA folks who had been attracted by his promises of isolationism and “taking America out of wars” are furious.

That said, the political strategy was transparent–for the past couple of days, no one’s been talking about the Epstein files…

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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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