Category Archives: Public Policy and Governance

Political Anguish

For the length of my 83 years, I have been proud of being an American Jew.

My deep devotion to this country has been based upon its commitment to what I call “The American Idea,” the philosophy that permeates our foundational documents. The principles set out in the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights undergird creation of an open society–a society in which individuals have the right to live in accordance with their beliefs, so long as they do not harm others. In such a system, minorities thrive. Granted, slavery and various bigotries have challenged that goal of civic equality over our history, but the U.S. was the first country to aspire to a system where government power flows from the people rather than the other way around, and is structured to protect individual liberty.

And even though I’m an atheist, I am a very Jewish atheist, adhering to the values of a Jewish culture that admonishes us “Justice, justice shall thou pursue,” and counsels that–while we aren’t expected to perfect the world in one generation–we aren’t free not to try. The Jewish commitment to community has produced citizens who believe in social justice for everyone, not just the “elect” or chosen, and who feel an obligation to help achieve it.

Everyone who reads this blog knows what is occurring in today’s “Trumpified” America. And most know how far Netanyahu has deviated from the founding beliefs and Jewish values of the State of Israel.

Ezra Klein recently had a lengthy–and excellent–essay in the New York Times, in which he made two important points: many American Jews believe that Israel is committing war crimes in Gaza, and opposition by non-Jews to Israel’s actions is not anti-Semitism. (Granted, many anti-Semites have gleefully latched on to anti-Zionism, but the opinion that Netanyahu’s actions in Gaza are genocidal has been voiced by Israelis, including Jewish scholars of genocide.)

Klein notes that the American Jewish community is split, largely but not entirely on generational lines, with younger Jews more critical of Israel. I can certainly understand that. I still remember my mother crying as she read the Black Book–a compendium of Nazi atrocities. Like most Jewish families, we had a blue box where pennies and nickels were collected to plant trees in Israel, which was seen as the only place in the world where Jews could be safe. Older American Jews retain their devotion to the “Promised land,” and have enormous difficulty believing that it is behaving in a manner entirely contrary to the most central values of the Jewish religion.

Where do these twin disasters–the disintegration of American governmental structures and norms, and the unbelievable deviation of the Jewish state from the values on which it was founded– leave people who (like yours truly) have made allegiance to those norms and values central to their lives and behaviors?

I practiced law for several years. I spent six years as the Executive Director of Indiana’s ACLU. I spent two decades teaching students public policy through a constitutional lens, emphasizing the various ways in which our governmental structure and the protections of the Bill of Rights enable what Aristotle called “human flourishing.” (Not that it was perfect, nor all of its provisions adequate for all time.) Watching the destruction of the rule of law, and the cowardly obedience of what was once my political party to a demented manchild, has been agonizing.

Like most Jews, I felt a special kinship to Israel as it operated as a haven for my co-religionists all over the world. I took pride in the ability of its original settlers to create a vibrant and vital state from the desert, although I did disagree with certain aspects of its governance–especially the settlements policy. (Despite anti-Semetic slurs, that kinship was nothing like “dual loyalty,” any more than my Irish friends’ special fondness for Ireland constitutes dual loyalty.)

I encourage those of you reading this to click through and read Klein’s essay in its entirety; he captures the angst of both  Israel’s defenders and those of us who simply cannot see any honest way to justify what is occuring.

The two main pillars of my philosophical/intellectual life are being erased. I feel the way my friends who are real Christians feel as they watch their faith being appropriated by very unChristian Christian Nationalists.

To define this situation as “unpleasant” would be a gross understatement.

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A Timely Reminder

There’s a tendency to lose focus on past Trumpian insanities while fixating on the most recent ones–and insanities come daily from our mad would-be king. But as we approach the next arbitrarily-set date for the institution of his further, higher tariffs, it’s probably a good time to revisit the impacts of one of his biggest and most damaging misconceptions. In a recent column, Michael Hicks patiently explains why we citizens will pay for that misconception, and why the costs Americans will have to absorb due to Trump’s tariffs are worse than additional costs attributable to inflation.

As Hicks writes, “the average American family will pay about $2,500 more this year because of tariffs. But unlike inflation, your wages won’t rise to compensate. That’s because tariffs work differently than inflation.”

Inflation is a decline in the value of currency over time. It happens because there is too much currency in circulation. That extra money can enter the economy through a growing deficit, as happened after the 2020 CARES Act, the 2021 American Rescue Plan and—the most inflationary of these—President Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill. 

When certain tax and spending policies meet monetary growth ( a result of miscalculations by the Federal Reserve), the result is inflation. Inflation affects all goods and services, including wages. (During the last inflationary bout, wages actually grew more than prices for the average private sector worker.) Not so with tariffs.

Tariffs work very differently. Tariffs are taxes on imports and range from 10% to 55%, depending on the country of origin, the product in question and the president’s hormone level.

Hicks reminds readers that American consumers pay tariffs–not the countries producing the goods, despite Trump’s insistence that tariffs are a fiscal punishment for the countries exporting the merchandise. 

Thus far, consumers haven’t really seen the higher prices that Trump’s tariffs will produce. That’s because, as Hicks explains, imports spiked in February, March and April as American businesses bought nearly five extra months’ worth of goods. That was in order to beat the tariff deadlines and avoid the extra tax. The surge meant that “many of the goods now on store shelves and being assembled into cars, computers and washing machines were bought before the tariffs, keeping price increases relatively low.”

The consumer price index—the main measure of inflation—rose 0.3% in the latest reading. That’s modest, but it came as the Federal Reserve was successfully reducing inflation. Prices have stopped falling and are rising again.

These higher prices are solely due to Trump tariffs. They are poised to worsen substantially as the stockpile of pre-tariff goods are sold by retailers or put onto cars, RVs and other American-made products. The cost of goods sold later this summer, and until tariffs are eliminated, will continue to rise.

This increase in prices and the consumer price index will look, feel and taste just like inflation. Journalists and even economists will call it inflation, but it’s not inflation. If it was inflation, we’d eventually see wages rising as well. But higher tariff costs don’t lead to higher wages; in fact, the opposite may occur.

The tariffs took the U.S. from 2.4% growth in the fourth quarter of 2024 to -0.5% in the first quarter this year. The economy continues contracting, which will reduce wage growth and maybe even reverse it. So, as prices go up, wages will decline for the average worker.

Trump keeps insisting that his tariffs will cause businesses to increase domestic production–to build factories in the U.S. There are a number of false assumptions underlying that prediction, and we are already seeing a drop, not an increase, in factory employment. Hicks notes that the two months of data that became available since Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariffs were announced show that the U.S. lost 14,000 factory jobs.

As he also points out, the slowdown in the economy this year follows a pattern that virtually all economists have identified as an outcome of tariffs–one reason for the global decline in their incidence. He also tells us that price increases due to the imposition of tariffs is not–at least technically–inflation. 

The technical name for rising prices during a weak economy is stagflation. And Hicks reminds us that stagflation is “what made the 1970s so miserable.”

Despite MAGA world’s constant dishonest attacks on Joe Biden, he presided over America’s robust economic recovery; he left Trump an economy that was globally envied. But then, Biden had assets Trump lacks–decency, a working brain, and a firm connection to reality. 

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That Pesky Thing Called Reality

There’s an old adage that counsels us to be careful what we wish for.

Before our mad king’s ascension to a second term, lots of Americans held negative views of immigrants. Political pundits attributed a good deal of Trump’s support to his promise to rid the country of these terrible people, the majority of whom (he asserted) were criminals and rapists.

That’s one promise the Trump administration is trying to keep, unlike its promises to curb inflation and cut out government “waste and fraud.” ICE has sent masked, armed enforcers after those nefarious lawbreakers–well, really, after everyone who “looks” undocumented (basically, engaging in racial profiling, yet another Trump administration unconstitutional practice).

So, how much has the keeping of that promise– the delivery of a result that MAGA folks ardently wished for–increased support for the administration? Strangely enough, it turns out that reality has punctured the always dishonest portrayals of America’s undocumented immigrants.

Gallup polling has charted that unanticipated turnaround:

Just months after President Donald Trump returned to office amid a wave of anti-immigration sentiment, the share of U.S. adults saying immigration is a “good thing” for the country has jumped substantially — including among Republicans, according to new Gallup polling.

About 8 in 10 Americans, 79%, say immigration is “a good thing” for the country today, an increase from 64% a year ago and a high point in the nearly 25-year trend. Only about 2 in 10 U.S. adults say immigration is a bad thing right now, down from 32% last year.

What has caused the shift? 

Well, first of all, despite Trump’s dishonest descriptions of an “invasion” of undocumented criminals, it turns out that there really aren’t many criminals out there. Experts have calculated that there may be–at most– only around 78,000 undocumented immigrants with any sort of  criminal record, and of that number, only 14,000 have been convicted of violent crimes. Given Stephen Miller’s demand that ICE arrest 3,000 people a day, ICE has turned its attention to farm workers and day laborers.

For example, multiple media sources have confirmed that the great majority of detainees held at Alligator Alcatraz, the immigration detention center (concentration camp) built in the Florida Everglades, do not have criminal records or charges pending against them in the U.S. — despite Donald Trump claiming the facility would hold “the most vicious people on the planet.”

For that matter, in the case of immigrants who do have records, most of those records are for immigration violations, which are technically civil offenses.

Business owners–especially landscape companies, construction companies and restaurant/hotel owners–have lost significant segments of their workforces, as ICE has rounded up workers who may have been undocumented but who were anything but dangerous criminals. Grocers (and their customers) are dealing with increased prices, as farmers have lost numerous undocumented workers who picked their crops.

And as ICE has moved to deport their friends and neighbors, many more Americans have come to recognize the indiscriminate cruelty of these sweeps. It turns out that abstract promises about ridding the country of undocumented criminals is conflicting with the reality of these roundups.

Masked ICE agents have refused to show ID as they continue to engage in a variety of offensive and unconstitutional behaviors, sparking outrage.

Not only have ICE “enforcers” engaged in racial profiling, “immigration enforcement” is increasingly being used as a barely-veiled cover for efforts to chill the exercise of free speech. Columbia University student, Mahmoud Khalil, was detained by ICE, his student visa revoked, and he was threatened with deportation– not for criminal activity, but for involvement in pro-Palestinian protests. His arrest was widely–and accurately– seen as a part of Trump administration efforts to crack down on student activism. Another widely reported example was the arrest of Rümeysa Öztürk, a 30-year-old Tufts University student. She was taken off the street by masked ICE agents near her home. A court subsequently determined that her arrest had been prompted by her co-authorship of an article about the ongoing war in Gaza. 

There’s much more.

The bottom line is that there is a difference between fantasy and reality. When political promises are based on “alternate realities,” the effort to fulfill them can become an (unintentional) educational exercise. 

It turns out that the American economy is heavily dependant on immigrants, both documented and “illegal.” It turns out that constitutional guarantees for everyone are weakened when an administration decides that some people aren’t entitled to them.

It turns out that immigration enforcement is “more complicated than that,” and that pesky realities are significantly different from the racist fantasies that spawned them.

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Texas Again

Texas really should serve as the primo example of a thoroughly UnAmerican state, a first-place spot that has been occupied until now by Florida. Granted, Florida won’t give up its win without a fight, and DeSantis’ success in turning Florida into a quasi-fascist state is impressive in a horrifying sort of way. But Texas is a worthy competitor.

We’ve all seen the death and destruction that accompanied the recent floods, and while Trump’s inept administration contributed significantly to the tragedy, the refusal to provide adequate warning mechanisms was a state and local decision. That bit of bad governance shouldn’t have come as a surprise; the administration of Governor Abbott–an administration that includes the state’s slimy Attorney General Ken Paxton and a GOP-dominated legislature–has diligently followed the MAGA (and Florida) playbook.

A few examples:

As enthusiastic participants in MAGA’s war on education, Texas has passed laws restricting expressive conduct on public campuses—banning protests and reassigning governance authority from faculty to politically appointed boards.

In its zealous war on immigration, Operation Lone Star has used razor wire and troop deployments, and engaged in mass busing of migrants to so-called “sanctuary cities.” The state also created state-level crimes for illegal entry and empower state judges to deport migrants–measures even the very conservative Fifth Circuit ruled unconstitutional.

Texas has enthusiastically fought the culture war: banning abortion, banning gender-affirming treatment for minors, and threatening medical professionals with license revocation.

Texas Republicans have eliminated Diversity, Equity & Inclusion efforts wherever possible, and removed such offices from public universities.

The state passed a law restricting content moderation on social media (an effort that has been temporarily blocked).

Because cities have a tendency to vote Blue, Texas passed what has been dubbed a “Death Star” law, restricting the powers of municipal governments to pass progressive policies. (A Travis County judge struck it down as unconstitutional interference in local self-governance.)

The Texas GOP’s Christian Nationalists won passage of a senate bill 10 requiring display of the Ten Commandments in public school classrooms.

Given the fact that many of these efforts have been stymied by courts noting their inconsistency with that pesky constitution, Abbott is emulating Trump; The Houston Chronicle recently accused Abbott of judicial appointments intended to reshape the Texas Supreme Court in his image.

It isn’t just the Texas Supreme Court. The Lever recently published an expose of a new kind of “court packing” in the great state of Texas.

On Sept. 1, Texas is slated to open its new business courts, a brand-new legal system backed by Big Oil — and several of the court’s main judges have in the past represented fossil fuel companies as lawyers, The Lever has found.

The judges were hand-picked over the last two months by Texas Republican Gov. Greg Abbott, a major recipient of oil industry cash — and many can be quickly replaced if they hand down decisions he opposes, a judicial design that he championed.

The courts consist of 11 regional business courts and a new statewide court of appeals to hear appellate litigation, which are expected to have immediate impacts on environmental cases in the state. As Public Health Watch, an independent investigative news organization, reported last month, a suite of cases involving state environmental authorities will now be transferred from a generally liberal appeals court to the state’s new Fifteenth Court of Appeals, created to oversee the business courts.

There, these cases will be decided by a panel of conservative judges historically friendly to industry — particularly oil and gas interests, a powerful force in Texas.

As a leader of the state’s Public Citizen organization put it, Abbot has created a “boutique court for corporations where he, not the voters, gets to pick the judges.” The article goes into some detail about the judges who have been appointed–details unlikely to comfort litigants who might be hoping for dispassionate judicial conduct.

For the past several years, pundits have predicted a revolt by Texas voters sufficient to turn the state purple, if not Blue. Extreme gerrymandering has forestalled that revolt, if indeed it was imminent, and as I posted a few days ago, Abbott has now called for a mid-cycle redistricting–a move urged by Trump as a means to maintain GOP control of the House of Representatives.

Political experts are dubious about the tactic. As Politico has explained,

The thoroughness of Texas’ gerrymander during the last round of redistricting in 2021 leaves no room for Republicans to grow their 25-member majority among the state’s 38 seats in the House of Representatives. Any alteration of the map will only hurt the GOP’s sitting incumbents and comes with a risk of backfiring.

We can only hope.

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It’s All About Bigotry

When Trump was elected in 2016, I was regularly reprimanded for insisting that MAGA was all about racism. People kinder than me (and that’s a lot of people) wanted to see MAGA voters as folks voting pocketbook issues, not as a re-emergence of the Confederacy or KKK.

The political science research that just keeps coming, however, supports my much less polite analysis. 

Let’s face it: we are fighting a new version of the Civil War. This time, the people who stand to benefit most from defending  bigotry aren’t the owners of plantations–they are the plutocrats and grifters dismantling the American system for profit–but like those plantation owners, our contemporary would-be overlords are using racism to enlist the support of a population desperate to believe that their religion and/or skin color makes them superior.

The evidence is overwhelming. There are the efforts to erase that hated DEI, the constant war on “woke-ism,” and the very unsubtle movement to substitute nationalist mythology for accurate history.

A recent example: An administration that has hollowed out the ranks of rangers who tend our national parks is now insisting that those who remain scrub park gift shops of “corrosive ideology.”

Remaining staff members have been ordered to report the presence of any retail item that “inappropriately disparages Americans past or living” or that includes in its description “matters unrelated to beauty, abundance or grandeur.” (It will be interesting to see how park leaders follow the administration’s directive in parks established to pursue an individual mission–for example, parks created to inform the public about the civil war, Indigenous history, slavery or other topics the Trump administration considers “defamatory” of historical Americans.) 

Hardly less obvious is the scorn and contempt constantly heaped by MAGA on urban America. As Paul Krugman has recently–and accurately–noted, these ugly assaults on the nation’s cities are both vile and dishonest–and all about bigotry. What really bothers MAGA about urban life is the idea that non-white people are exercising political power.

After Mamdani won New York’s Democratic primary, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent declared that New York is about to turn into “Caracas on the Hudson.” As Krugman observed,

Bessent isn’t really deeply worried about Mamdani’s economic ideas. But he feels free, maybe even obliged, to slander a foreign-born Muslim with language he would never use about a white Christian politician, even if that politician were (like some of his colleagues in the Trump administration) a total crackpot.

Krugman points to the resurgence of raw racism emanating from the Trump administration. That racism is apparent in the cuts at the National Institutes of Health, which are

so tilted against racial minorities that a federal judge — one appointed by Ronald Reagan! — declared he’d never seen a record where racial discrimination was so palpable. You can see it in the renaming of military bases after Confederate generals — that is, traitors who fought for slavery. You can even see it in a change in the military’s shaving policy that is clearly custom-designed to drive Black men — who account for around a quarter of the Army’s new recruits — out of the service.

One problem with bigotry is that it feeds on itself. The definition of “my tribe” contracts. We saw it in Nazi Germany, where–as Martin Niemoller famously wrote, eventually there is no one left to “speak out for me.” As Krugman writes,

Now, maybe you imagine that you yourself won’t suffer from this new reign of bigotry and imagine that everyone you care about is similarly safe. But if that’s what you think, you’re likely to face a rude awakening.

I personally don’t have any illusions of safety. Yes, I’m a native-born white citizen. But my wife and her family are Black, and some of my friends and relatives are foreign-born U.S. citizens.

Furthermore, I’m Jewish, and anyone who knows their history realizes that whenever right-wing bigotry is on the ascendant, we’re always next in line. Are there really people out there naïve enough to believe MAGA’s claims to be against antisemitism, who can’t see the transparent cynicism and dishonesty?

The fact is that the Trump administration already contains a number of figures with strong ties to antisemitic extremists. The Great Replacement Theory, which has de facto become part of MAGA’s ideology, doesn’t just say that there’s a conspiracy to replace whites with people of color; it says that it’s a Jewish conspiracy.

There really is no “middle ground” between White Christian Nationalism and the American Idea.  Which of those will prevail is what this iteration of the Civil War is all about.

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