Category Archives: Random Blogging

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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We’re Not In Kansas Anymore, Toto…

Apologies for inundating your inboxes yesterday. The extra post was sent in error.

A large number of older Americans (I’m one) reached adulthood before what I like to call the “digital age.” Unlike our grandchildren, use of email, texting and instant access to a universe of information was not–and is not–intuitive to us. Most of us have learned to “make do”–we have our smartphones, use our computers, increasingly rely upon google–but I think we can be forgiven for not recognizing how dramatically technology is constantly changing the world we inhabit.

Or the ways that technology can be–and is being– employed to threaten the very foundations of our individual liberties.

Donald Trump doesn’t understand that process–but Elon Musk does. Trump is merely an ignorant and self-engrossed buffoon; Musk comes from that “intuitive” generation, and despite his clear mental and moral defects, does understand the various ways our emerging information environment can be employed–weaponized, to use a phrase popular these days–to amass power at the expense of us “little people.”

I’ve previously posted on the hugely negative effects of Trump’s erasures of factual information from government websites, but that is only one aspect of the threat we face.

In a recent “Letter from an American,” Heather Cox Richardson illuminated that threat. In her closing paragraphs, she described how technology was used to skew the 2016 election.

The story of how Cambridge Analytica used information harvested from about 87 million Facebook users to target political ads in 2016 is well known, but the misuse of data was back in the news earlier this month when Corey G. Johnson and Byard Duncan of ProPublica reported that the gun industry also shared data with Cambridge Analytica to influence the 2016 election.

Johnson and Duncan reported that after a spate of gun violence, including the attempted assassination of then-representative Gabrielle Giffords of Arizona and the mass shootings at Fort Hood in Texas, a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado, and the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, had increased public pressure for commonsense gun safety legislation, the gun industry’s chief lobbying group, the National Shooting Sports Foundation, worked with gun makers and retailers to collect data on gun owners without their knowledge or consent. That data included names, ages, addresses, income, debts, religious affiliations, and even details like which charities people supported, shopping habits, and “whether they liked the work of the painter Thomas Kinkade and whether the underwear women had purchased was plus size or petite.”

Analysts ran that information through an algorithm that created a psychological profile of an individual to enable precise targeting of potential voters. Ads based on these profiles reached almost 378 million views on social media and sent more than 60 million visitors to the National Shooting Sports Foundation website. When Trump won in 2016, the NSSF took partial credit for the results. Not only was Trump in office, it reported, but also, “thanks in part to our efforts, there is a pro-gun majority in the U.S. House and Senate.”

That was ten years ago–before the “flowering” of AI. As I write this, Musk’s techie nerds are gaining access to the private information of millions of Americans, and anyone who thinks they’re looking for “fraud and waste” is smoking something.

Checks and balances were designed to prevent any one branch of government from wielding unbounded power. They should prevent the Executive Branch from employing the ever-increasing sophistication of digital technology to target/mislead unsuspecting citizens or punish those who are unwilling to bend the knee. But right now, one branch–Congress–has been neutered. Thanks to the nation-wide gerrymandering that the GOP perfected with RedMap in 2010, the House has devolved into a clown show of radicals, ignoramuses, Christian Nationalists and performative egomaniacs. Vote suppression, civic ignorance and digitally-sophisticated targeting have allowed MAGA to gain (slim) control of the Senate.

Thus far, the courts are doing their duty, but there are increasing signs that our would-be monarchs will simply defy them. The so-called “legacy media” warns that such defiance “would be” a constitutional crisis, ignoring the fact that we are already experiencing a constitutional crisis.

As empowering as having a lot of money has been (and still is), possession of information is even more so. Just as computerization allowed gerrymandering to become ever more precise, ever-expanding digital tools can enable those with access to citizens’ information to gain–and keep–unprecedented control over huge segments of the population.

Those of us who are beginning to understand the dimensions of the threat we face need to take to the streets. Peacefully, but in huge numbers.

We aren’t in Kansas anymore.

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What We Can Do

Last week, I had separate lunches with two women I know, and the conversations in both revolved around anxieties produced by Trump’s coup.  Both of my companions focused on the same question: what can an individual do? Both women seemed to think that–because I’m a political policy blogger– I would have an answer, or at the very least, a suggestion.

If only!

I have a big problem–one that’s undoubtedly shared– with helplessness. Tell me there’s a problem to be solved, but I have to climb that mountain to solve it, and I’ll pull on hiking boots and make the attempt. Tell me there’s a problem, but there’s nothing I can do about it, and I’m beside myself.

I wasn’t able to share any brilliant (or even dumb) insights with my luncheon companions, but a recent Substack from Hoosiers4Democracy reminded me that we are not without the ability to mount effective protests.  We can and should continue our calls and emails to the elected cowards like Todd Young (and even to the moronic Christian Nationalists like Jim Banks). Posts to social media aren’t really a substitute for action, but even singing to the choir can probably be helpful, so we can continue those. When there is an in-person protest, we absolutely should turn out.

But as H4D reminded readers, economic “messages” are likely to be more effective. (As someone recently posted, money is the. only thing these jerks respect!)

We MUST command the attention of the corporations funding our representatives to make it clear that the policies of this administration are unpopular! We must do this in a way that is immediate, impactful, and sustainable. We are asking you to participate in several upcoming, nationally planned, economic boycott events that will remind our leaders and representatives that we have more power than they think and that they work for us. 70% of the U.S. economy is consumer driven. When money talks, they listen.

First up, join H4D on February 28, 2025 for the national Economic Blackout. This event originated with The People’s Union USA and is being promoted by organizations across the country. Absolutely NO SPENDING for 24 hours beginning at midnight on February 27th. If you must spend on essentials, please try to shop small, local stores and avoid using bank cards and credit cards.

We also ask that you maximize your impact by recruiting 3 friends or family members to participate and to ask them to recruit 3 people to participate, in the hopes of creating a snowball effect.

There is additional information on the Economic Blackout and other upcoming events, available at The People’s Union Economic Blackout.

News of the planned economic action has been spreading. So has debate about its likely efficacy. Nevertheless, if enough people participate, a day of severely diminished economic activity will send a clear message. (The threat of additional boycotts may also stiffen the spines of companies that have decided to “obey in advance” by scrapping their DEI programs and other equity efforts in order to curry favor with our bigoted would-be monarch.)

The genius of the protest on the 28th is that it offers those of us who’ve been feeling helpless a virtually painless way to be heard. It can be daunting to go out in freezing weather to physically protest (although thousands of our fellow Americans have done so). People who must work long hours cannot make personal visits to the offices of Congressmen and Senators. Even calls and emails require some positive effort. But the protest on the 28th requires us to do nothing. It’s a purposeful nothing that requires little in the way of effort or hardship. There are very few purchases that cannot be delayed–or advanced– a day, or better still, reconsidered.

There are more aggressive plans to follow up on the action planned for the 28th with more extensive actions– a number of grassroots groups have come together in a movement called Shutdown 315 to urge Americans to support a nationwide shutdown. Participants would  not only stop making purchases from major corporations, but would abstain from social media use and absent themselves from work on March 15th. This is a more ambitious effort, and if successful is likely to have a significant effect.

Participation in planned boycotts of the large companies that have “obeyed in advance” are also planned.

If enough Americans participate in these very peaceful protests, our voices will be heard. They represent a promising initial answer to the anguished question: what can I do?

Tell your friends and family. Spread the word. 

Fight back against the coup.

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Nazification

While Musk and his techno-nerds are busily dismantling agencies of the federal government that–among other things– keep planes in the air and food free from e coli, J.D. Vance is attacking America’s international alliances and giving aid and comfort to the neo-Nazis in Germany and elsewhere. 

Heather Cox Richardson (among several others) recently reported on Vance’s shameful performance.

At the conference on Friday, February 14, Vice President J.D. Vance launched what The Guardian’s Patrick Wintour called “a brutal ideological assault” against Europe, attacking the values the United States used to share with Europe but which Vance and the other members of the Trump administration are now working to destroy.

Vance and MAGA Christian nationalists reject the principles of secular democracy and instead align with leaders like Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán. They claim that the equal rights central to democracy undermine nations by treating women and racial, religious, and gender minorities as equal to white Christian men. They want to see an end to the immigration that they believe weakens a nation’s people, and for government to reinforce traditional religious and patriarchal values.

Vance attacked current European values and warned that the crisis for the region was not external actors like Russia or China, but rather “the threat from within.” He accused Europe of censoring free speech, but it was clear—especially coming from the representative of a regime that has erased great swaths of public knowledge because it objects to words like “gender”—that what he really objected to was restrictions on the speech of far-right ideologues.

Vance followed his speech by throwing his support behind the neo-Nazi AfD, breaking protocol by refusing to meet with the German chancellor, and breaking a longstanding taboo by accepting a meeting with the leader of AfD.

According to The New Republic, “the United States of America is becoming part of a global fascist network.” 

Trump called Vance’s speech “very brilliant.”

It’s time to call a Nazi a Nazi. 

Vance is most certainly not “going rogue.” Musk’s neo-Nazi proclivities were obvious even before his “heil Hitler” salute–he turned Twitter into a cesspool of fascist, racist and anti-Semitic hate that would have earned plaudits from Der Fuhrur, and he has assembled a group of techie apparachicks who share his political orientation–whenever journalists investigate the social media trail left by of one of his operatives, they find horrifying–and unambiguous–evidence. For example, Marko Elez, who had access to the Treasury Department’s central payments system, has consistently advocated racism and eugenics. Musk has encouraged right-wing political movements in at least 18 countries. 

Of course, racism has long been Trump’s defining feature.

Thanks primarily to America’s role in the Second World War, most of us are unaware that, historically, significant numbers of Americans have been Nazi sympathizers. (Our history classes–unlike those in Germany–have shied away from reporting accurately and completely about slavery, let alone the nation’s very substantial history of neo-Nazi ideology.)

Historians have reported on the significant “inspiration” that Hitler took from the United States. 

When the Nazis set out to legally disenfranchise and discriminate against Jewish citizens, they weren’t just coming up with ideas out of thin air. They closely studied the laws of another country. According to James Q. Whitman, author of Hitler’s American Model, that country was the United States.

“America in the early 20th century was the leading racist jurisdiction in the world,” says Whitman, who is a professor at Yale Law School. “Nazi lawyers, as a result, were interested in, looked very closely at, [and] were ultimately influenced by American race law.”

While Jim Crow was a primary example, Hitler’s administration took additional lessons from the nation’s designations of Native Americans, Filipinos and other groups as non-citizens–“othering” those populations even though they lived in the U.S. or its territories. These models influenced the citizenship portion of the Nuremberg Laws, which stripped Jewish Germans of  citizenship and re-classified them as “nationals.”

The Nazis adopted some parts of Jim Crow laws wholesale, especially America’s anti-miscegenation laws, which prohibited interracial marriages in 30 of 48 states. As the linked article notes, the desire to ban Jewish and Aryan intermarriages presented the Nazis with a dilemma: How would they tell who was Jewish and who was not?  So the Nazis looked to America, and American jurisprudence on how to classify who belonged to which “race.”

Numerous scholars and pundits have pointed to the parallels between Trump II and Germany in the 30s. Fewer have noted the unsavory aspects of our own population’s history that are emerging once again to facilitate a new–and even more expansive– “final solution.”

We ignore that history and those parallels at our peril.

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