Author Archives: Sheila

Shameful And Horrifying

Yesterday, the ignorant buffoon who occupies the Oval Office shamed America and made the world far less safe. Acting more like a mafioso than the chief executive of a powerful and legitimate country, Trump (and his pathetic mini-me Vance) showed the world that America is no longer a trustworthy ally.

In an exhibition that had clearly been planned in advance, America’s President disgraced the country, and dishonored the sacrifices of the thousands of American soldiers who died defending democracy and fighting autocratic regimes.

President Zelensky had come to a meeting prepared to knuckle under to what can only be called a shakedown: Trump’s demand that, if you want us to continue supporting Ukraine against Russian aggression, then hand over your valuable mineral rights. When Zelensky arrived, Trump accused him of expressing inadequate “gratitude.”

Let’s deconstruct that demand for “gratitude.” We have supplied Ukraine with weapons that were manufactured in the U.S.– Americans made money producing those weapons. Furthermore, support for Ukraine has been unequivocally in America’s interest, and in the interest of NATO–an organization immensely important to the U.S. and world peace that Trump clearly disdains.

It is possible, of course, that Trump’s behavior is simply attributable to his undeniable stupidity– clearly, he neither understands nor cares where America’s global interests lie. But it is more likely that–as various Russian defectors and intelligence agents have asserted–he is a bought-and-paid-for Russian asset. Either way, he is a traitor, destroying American government at home while betraying our allies abroad.

In either event, he is helping Putin win his war against America and the West without needing to fire a shot.

If there remains any doubt about Trump’s allegiance to Putin, it should have been erased when, during the press conference, Trump characterized himself and Putin as “co-victims” of the investigations into Trump’s ties with Russia, which he called the “Russia hoax.”  Trump actually said “Let me tell you, Putin went through a hell of a lot with me. He went through a phony witch hunt where they used him and Russia, Russia, Russia.”

In the wake of yesterday’s shameful performance, Robert Hubbell summed up the cconsequencees.

Hubbell quoted Ron Filipkowski, who posted that  “Trump and Vance needed to create an incident to provide a justification for their pre-planned abandonment of Ukraine now, then separation from NATO in the near future.” Hubbell then wrote

Let’s be clear about the significance of Trump’s brutish behavior toward Zelensky:

Everyone in the world is less safe today because Trump’s fragile ego and non-existent negotiating skills could not tolerate a world leader speaking the truth to the American media in Trump’s presence.

Trump has officially switched sides in Russia’s unprovoked war of aggression against the Ukrainian people, telling Ukraine that it is on its own in defending itself against Russia.

Putin is celebrating in the Kremlin because his puppet Donald Trump has finally delivered the “payoff” in the corrupt bargain they struck years ago. Former Russian President Medvedev summed up Moscow’s view of the exchange, saying, “The insolent pig [Zelensky] finally got a slap down in the Oval Office.”

The US no longer has any allies in the world. No ally can rationally trust any promise by any representative of the United States after Trump abandoned Ukraine over its refusal to capitulate to blackmail…

The metals exploitation deal was naked extortion: Trump had made clear before Friday’s meeting that Ukraine would lose US support in the Russian war of aggression if Ukraine did not grant the US hundreds of billions of dollars in mining rights as “repayment” for money and weapons granted to Ukraine without expectation of repayment.

Trump, as usual, was acting like a mafioso boss, extorting Ukraine (for the second time) by demanding a benefit to which the US was not entitled but which Trump believed he could extract by withholding future military support. (Trump used the same tactic in 2019 when he demanded that Ukraine fabricate evidence of Joe Biden’s non-existent wrongdoing.)

The appalling performance followed a first-ever vote in the United Nations in which the U.S. sided with Russia and China against its allies and fellow democracies.

As Hubbell wrote,

Hundreds of thousands of Americans sacrificed their lives to earn the trust that Trump and JD Vance squandered in 45 minutes in the Oval Office by berating the heroic leader of a brave people whose fight against Russia promotes the peace and security of the United States and its (now) former allies.

If we had a functioning Congress, this shameful and hugely damaging performance would be grounds for immediate impeachment. But of course, we don’t have a functioning Congress.

We the People need to take our country back. Somehow.

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The Real Problem

Bingo!

That was my reaction when I read the title of this opinion essay in the Washington Post: “Can we find common ground without a shared reality?” The author, Kate Cohen, identified the fallacy at the heart of multiple liberal admonitions to “listen to” and “try to understand” the grievances motivating MAGA Trump supporters. She began by reporting on one such well-meaning example, in a recent book, Kurt Gray’s “Outraged: Why We Fight About Morality and Politics and How to Find Common Ground.”

According to Gray,

Liberals and conservatives arrive at different moral conclusions because we weigh harms differently based on whom we believe to be vulnerable. Take the issue of abortion: I am more concerned for the pregnant person; a pro-lifer is more concerned for the fetus. But we both want to prevent harm.
 
Gray calls harm “the master key of morality”; it unlocks our understanding of moral judgments. “When someone has an opinion we find immoral, we can ask ourselves, ‘What harm do they see?’”

Cohen says she can try to understand that her neighbor isn’t purposely voting to harm her gay son and teenage daughter, but rather to prevent harms that the neighbor believes are posed by acceptance of LGBTQ+ folks and a woman’s right to make her own reproductive decisions. But then she asks the “bingo” question: “what if the harm she sees … isn’t real?”

Thus Gray points out that antigay crusader Anita Bryant “saw gay rights as a threat to her children” — he’s not saying she was right, just that she was acting from sincere concern. His research similarly refrains from privileging what I would call “fact.” One study he designed flip-flopped gun control statistics to see if people were worse at math when they didn’t like the answer; another, measuring how online outrage is built, included tweets about “the dangers of critical race theory.” It’s the perception of harm that matters…

I think we’re in this mess because one side’s perception of harm is increasingly disconnected from reality. I’d happily live in a world where my neighbor and I could discuss which harms concerned us more: the suffering of refugee children or the burdens on border-town citizens. The livelihood of coal miners or the warming of the globe. But in the world we live in — the world that reelected President Donald Trump — there’s a strong chance she believes that immigrants are eating pets and that climate change is a hoax.

And that –the refusal of millions of people to accept facts, evidence and demonstrable reality and opting to reside in a fantasy universe–is the crux of our current problem. 

On this blog, I have repeatedly argued that the information environment we inhabit enables a large percentage of the population to indulge in confirmation bias. Granted, there have always been sources of disinformation, but never before in history has it been so easy to access “evidence” that confirms one’s desired beliefs and prejudices.

Has your life failed to unfold as you hoped? Are you convinced that some “other” is to blame for your disappointments? There are literally hundreds–probably thousands–of websites that explain that the Black person or woman got the promotion because of “wokism,” and why the elevation of that non-Christian is evidence that “DEI hires” have replaced merit.

Is your livelihood or comfort level connected to the prospects of fossil fuels? There are plenty of “sources” that will confirm the perfidy of scientists who are “in on” the “global warming hoax.” 

Are you suspicious of all science–especially when it is based on empirical data that conflicts with your “biblical” understandings? “Bible-believing” websites will explain why the doctors trying to explain why abortion bans threaten women’s health and lives are just anti-religious liberals intent on killing babies and allowing women to ignore their God-ordained submissive roles.

Are you uncomfortable around gay folks? Lots of “religious” sites will confirm that they are “ungodly groomers,” (and that all those mainstream media reports implicating youth pastors and other pious church folks are exaggerated).

I could go on. And on.

We live in a world where technology–and yes, free speech–facilitates the construction of fantasy realities. And as Cohen accurately notes, finding “common ground” with folks who live in alternate universes simply isn’t possible.

Thanks to well-meaning liberals trying to reach that “common ground,” we are now inhabiting a country that–as Paul Krugman recently wrote– is being ruled by a mad king living in an alternate reality and a erratic, ketamine-fueled oligarch — and it’s not clear which is the other’s sidekick.

Finding “common ground” with madmen is suicidal.

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A Rising Resistance

It isn’t just the courts–including, at least provisionally, the Supreme Court, which refused to lift a restraining order on a Trump firing. Other elements of the resistance are also emerging.

Critics of Trump’s claim to a “mandate” point out that more people voted for someone else than voted for Trump. Now, declining polls offer further evidence that his coup is massively unpopular. He took office with the lowest approval ratings of any President since polling began, and he has continued to decline.

As Heather Cox Richardson, among others, recently reported:

Only 45% approve of the “the way Donald Trump is handling his job as president,” while 53% disapprove. Forty-three percent of Americans say they support what Trump has done since he took office; 48% oppose his actions. The number of people who strongly support his actions sits at 27%; the number who strongly oppose them is twelve points higher, at 39%. Fifty-seven percent of Americans think Trump has gone beyond his authority as president.

Opinions on his “signature” actions are even more negative.

Americans especially dislike his attempts to end USAID, his tariffs on goods from Mexico and Canada, and his firing of large numbers of government workers. Even Trump’s signature issue of deporting undocumented immigrants receives 51% approval only if respondents think those deported are “criminals.” Fifty-seven percent opposed deporting those who are not accused of crimes, 70% oppose deporting those brought to the U.S. as children, and 66% oppose deporting those who have children who are U.S. citizens. Eighty-three percent of Americans oppose Trump’s pardon of the violent offenders convicted for their behavior during the attack on the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021. Even those who identify as Republican-leaning oppose those pardons 70 to 27 percent.

Opinions are one thing; actions are another. The media continues to report that phone calls are swamping congressional switchboards, while citizens are descending in mass on town halls, demanding that their representatives take a stand against Musk’s unconstitutional slashing of the federal government and illegal access to Americans’ personal data. In one Oregon district that Trump won by 68%, constituents shouted at their Representative, calling on Congress to “tax Elon,” “tax the wealthy,” and “tax the billionaires.” Similar protests have been reported in other deep-Red districts.

Perhaps the most positive signs have come from elected officials. Illinois governor J.B. Pritzker was eloquent in his State of the State address, reminding listeners that America doesn’t have kings, and itemizing the idiocies:

“it’s in fashion at the federal level right now to just indiscriminately slash school funding, healthcare coverage, support for farmers, and veterans’ services. They say they’re doing it to eliminate inefficiencies. But only an idiot would think we should eliminate emergency response in a natural disaster, education and healthcare for disabled children, gang crime investigations, clean air and water programs, monitoring of nursing home abuse, nuclear reactor regulation, and cancer research.”

Pritzker also reminded listeners that it had taken the Nazis “one month, three weeks, two days, eight hours and 40 minutes to dismantle a constitutional republic. All I’m saying is when the five-alarm fire starts to burn, every good person better be ready to man a post with a bucket of water if you want to stop it from raging out of control.”

And Maine’s Governor faced off with Trump personally, in a meeting between our would-be monarch and the nation’s governors. As Richardson reported,

Today, Maine governor Janet Mills took the fight against Trump’s overreach directly to him. At a meeting of the nation’s governors, in a rambling speech in which he was wandering through his false campaign stories about transgender athletes, Trump turned to his notes and suddenly appeared to remember his executive order banning transgender student athletes from playing on girls sports teams.

The body that governs sports in Maine, the Maine Principals’ Association, ruled that it would continue to allow transgender students to compete despite Trump’s executive order because the Maine state Human Rights Law prohibits discrimination on the grounds of gender identity.

Trump asked the governor of Maine whether she would comply with his order.  “I’m complying with state and federal laws,” she said. Trump then threatened to punish Maine by withholding “all funding” from the state; the Governor responded “We’ll see you in court.”

The aftermath of Trump’s takeover of the Kennedy Center has been especially gratifying. Multiple artists have resigned from the staff and/or cancelled scheduled programs. The president’s takeover of the Kennedy Center is a pathetic effort to seize control of a respected cultural institution whose honorees have shunned him in the past. Real artists are having none of it.

The resistance is growing.

Don’t forget to stop all economic activity from midnight tonight through midnight tomorrow.

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Fascinating…And Complicated

One of the problems of living through the Trump/Musk attack on the rule of law is that their firehose of assaults distract us from considering longer-term issues. I know that I have neglected reading the meaty academic studies that used to help me understand our social and economic environment. I just don’t have enough energy to dive into a lengthy “think piece” after a day of hysteria over the latest illegal and unconstitutional Trumpian eruptions.

But every once in a while, I encounter a really compelling analysis that offers a new way of understanding American culture. And that is certainly the case with Yoni Applebaum’s cover story for the March Atlantic.  Applebaum’s article–“Stuck in Place”–considers the drastic reduction in American mobility that has occurred since the mid-twentieth century.

When I was young (late Ice Age), it was a given that lots of Americans moved each year.  I never considered the social consequences of that fact of American life until reading the essay in which Applebaum asserts that diminished mobility constitutes “the single most important social change of the past half century.” Mobility, he says, was key to the American character.

Entrepreneurship, innovation, growth, social equality—the most appealing features of the young republic all traced back to this single, foundational fact: Americans were always looking ahead to their next beginning, always seeking to move up by moving on. But over the past 50 years, this engine of American opportunity has stopped working. Americans have become less likely to move from one state to another, or to move within a state, or even to switch residences within a city. In the 1960s, about one out of every five Americans moved in any given year—down from one in three in the 19th century, but a frenetic rate nonetheless. In 2023, however, only one in 13 Americans moved.”

I was particularly struck by the connection Applebaum drew between mobility and acceptance of diversity.

These ceaseless migrations shaped a new way of thinking. “When the mobility of population was always so great,” the historian Carl Becker observed, “the strange face, the odd speech, the curious custom of dress, and the unaccustomed religious faith ceased to be a matter of comment or concern.” And as diverse peoples learned to live alongside one another, the possibilities of pluralism opened. The term stranger, in other lands synonymous with enemy, instead, Becker wrote, became “a common form of friendly salutation.” In a nation where people are forever arriving and departing, a newcomer can seem less like a threat than a welcome addition: Howdy, stranger.

The essay grapples with the reasons why Americans have abandoned our former itch to move, and largely blames the progressives whose insistence on preservation–historic and otherwise–has led, in his analysis at least, to NIMBYism, and a “defense of communities in their current form against those who might wish to join them. Mobility is what made this country prosperous and pluralistic, diverse and dynamic. Now progressives are destroying the very force that produced the values they claim to cherish.”

If this assertion is true–if the efforts to preserve and celebrate existing structures and places have morphed into resistance to a wide variety of changes we once embraced– it would seem that we are experiencing yet another lesson in unintended consequences.

Appelbaum argues that we should make an effort to restore the bygone mobility that led people to move for better jobs, less expensive homes, a better quality of life, and/or just a desire to try new things. He advocates for what he calls “three simple principles.” One is consistency; he says that rules applied uniformly across a city will tend to produce neighborhoods with diverse populations and uses. Another is tolerance; he notes that organic growth is messy and unpredictable, but the places that thrive over the long term are those that empower people to make their own decisions, and to build and adapt structures to suit their needs. The third is abundance; he argues that the best way to solve our current housing supply crunch is to add supply, especially in places that are attractive and growing, so that housing becomes a springboard.

I certainly agree with the argument that we need to build more housing; I’d have to think long and hard about the other two–but then, I’m undoubtedly one of those “progressives” that values historic districts and the zoning laws that prevent your friendly liquor store from locating next to my house. Surely there is a middle ground…

That said, arguments that tie mobility to entrepreneurship and acceptance of diversity echo similar concerns about the end of frontiers. They’re reasonable and persuasive.

It’s complicated.

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Time Travel

I found these opening paragraphs from an essay on Zadie Smith and optimism to be comforting:

All the goodness and the heroisms will rise up again, then be cut down again and rise up,” John Steinbeck wrote to his best friend at the peak of WWII. “It isn’t that the evil thing wins — it never will — but that it doesn’t die.”

Caught in the maelstrom of the moment, we forget this cyclical nature of history — history being merely the rosary of moments the future strings of its pasts. We forget that the present always looks different from the inside than it does from the outside — something James Baldwin knew when, in considering why Shakespeare endures, he observed: “It is said that his time was easier than ours, but I doubt it — no time can be easy if one is living through it.” We forget that our particular moment, with all its tribulations and triumphs, is not neatly islanded in the river of time but swept afloat by massive cultural currents that have raged long before it and will rage long after.

It is easy to be depressed and disheartened–as discussions on this site have illustrated–by evidence that what most of us believed was progress toward a kinder and gentler world is being intentionally dismantled by MAGA’s cult leader. The Steinbeck quote is apt; it reminds us that there have always been, and always will be, people whose moral and emotional defects drive them to do evil. The unspoken element of that observation is that there are always good people, too, and the “long arc of history” teaches that the good guys eventually prevail.

Not, granted, without a lot of suffering and losses…

In a speech delivered in the wake of the 2016 election, Smith offered an example of “overcoming” that is particularly pertinent when considering MAGA’s racist, homophobic and anti-Semitic White Christian Nationalists.

My best friend during my youth — now my husband — is himself from Northern Ireland, an area where people who look absolutely identical to each other, eat the same food, pray to the same God, read the same holy book, wear the same clothes and celebrate the same holidays have yet spent four hundred years at war over a relatively minor doctrinal difference they later allowed to morph into an all-encompassing argument over land, government and national identity. Racial homogeneity is no guarantor of peace, any more than racial heterogeneity is fated to fail…

I find these days that a wistful form of time travel has become a persistent political theme, both on the right and on the left. On 10 November The New York Times reported that nearly seven in ten Republicans prefer America as it was in the fifties, a nostalgia of course entirely unavailable to a person like me, for in that period I could not vote, marry my husband, have my children, work in the university I work in, or live in my neighborhood. Time travel is a discretionary art: a pleasure trip for some and a horror story for others. Meanwhile some on the left have time-travel fancies of their own, imagining that the same rigid ideological principles once applied to the matters of workers’ rights, welfare and trade can be applied unchanged to a globalized world of fluid capital.

In her speech, Smith reminded us that one must be willfully blind to ignore the fact that the history of human existence is a history of pain: “of brutality, murder, mass extinction, every form of venality and cyclical horror” and that no tribe is entirely innocent of it.

But there is still this redeeming matter of incremental progress. It might look small to those with apocalyptic perspectives, but to she who not so long ago could not vote, or drink from the same water fountain as her fellow citizens, or marry the person she chose, or live in a certain neighborhood, such incremental change feels enormous.

You really should click through and read her remarks–and those of the essayist–in their entirety. The essay serves to place our own very dark time in context, to remind us not just that “this too shall pass,” but that we have a moral obligation to make it pass.

I have always loved a maxim attributed to Native Americans (I’ve forgotten which tribe). It frames morality as our response to two wolves who are fighting within us. One wolf is evil and one is good. The one that wins is the one we choose to feed.

As we face the current cyclical eruption of evil, we need to cling to the lessons of history–and keep feeding our good wolves.

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