Category Archives: Public Policy and Governance

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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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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Justifying Bigotry

Given the profoundly anti-intellectual posture of the MAGA movement, with its rejection of science and empirical fact, It seems positively counter-intuitive to speak about MAGA “intellectuals.” But a December New York Times book review profiled the men (and so far as I can tell, they’re all White men) who have mounted “scholarly” defenses of the bigotries that animate the movement.

The book is “Furious Minds: The Making of the MAGA New Right” by political theorist Laura Field, who has written broadly about the movement. She divides her “Furious Minds” into three main groups. “Claremonters,” are clustered around California’s Claremont Institute;  the “Postliberals,” want to curb individual rights in favor of collectivism, which they label  “the common good”; and “National Conservatives,” who “endorse a homogenous nation-state and often embrace elements of Christian nationalism.” She labels another, less cohesive group the “Hard Right Underbelly,” and tells readers that figures in that group adopt “aggressively silly nicknames like “Raw Egg Nationalist” (who has a Ph.D. from Oxford) and “Bronze Age Pervert” (who has a Ph.D. from Yale).” That latter cohort is extremely online, promoting what she describes as a “hyper-masculinist aesthetic.” Several are openly racist and fascist.

What all these groups share is a hatred of liberalism — defined not as a partisan political ideology that is left-wing (though they hate that too), but as a system of government that values individualism and pluralism. Postliberals like Patrick Deneen, a political theorist whom Field credits with “the most palatable, sanitized version of Trumpy populism that one is likely to encounter,” started out by criticizing a liberal establishment composed of mainstream centrists in both parties.

I read one of Deneen’s books–“Why Liberalism Fails”– a few years ago, and was repelled by his thoroughgoing rejection of America’s founding philosophy in favor of a theocratic state rooted in (his version of) Christianity. His dissatisfaction with pluralism and civic equality appear to characterize the other figures she profiles, who she suggests suffer from an “apocalyptic despair, replacing the hard work of thinking and reflecting on the world — in all of its pluralism and plenitude — with a reflexive embrace of coercive political power.”

In her book, Field also examines the fevered misogyny of the New Right, noting that terms like “gynocracy” and “the longhouse” have become “overwrought MAGA epithets for an unbearably feminized and pluralist society.” She doesn’t shy away from admitting the deficits of liberal rationalism, but she also reminds the New Right’s intellectual critics that they are able to indulge their fantasies of authoritarianism thanks to the “freedom and security afforded by the liberal democracy they loathe.”

In the societies they want to emulate, dissent from the preferred ideology of the regime isn’t tolerated. But of course, they seem convinced that the autocracy they favor would be founded on their preferred beliefs…

These “intellectuals” are trying to provide philosophical coherence and theoretical grounding for what is actually an emotional and irrational MAGA movement founded on revulsion for modernism and the social changes that they believe are eroding the dominance of White Christian males–hence their efforts to provide “principled” defenses of racism and misogyny, and the necessity of White Christian control.

As the Times’ book review concludes,

In a memorable passage, Field breaks the fourth wall and addresses the men whose cramped extremism has become so familiar to her. “You take the liberal world for granted, too,” she writes. “This has allowed you to don the language of grievance and oppression far too lightly, without having given enough thought to what oppression actually means — the kind of oppression that doesn’t let you love who you want to, or vote in free elections or not be disappeared.”

Field detects a strain of decadence underlying the fanaticism, with soft, comfortable men mistaking cruel titillation for insight and trying their mightiest to look tough: “It is unseemly, and it is unmanly, and some of you will miss your liberalism when it’s gone.”

We the People need to protect and defend the liberal democratic society that gives these ungrateful “cramped extremists” the freedom to defend the morally indefensible.

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Another Year Is Gone…

It’s New Year’s Eve. Another year is over.

And what a year! Not only did America not make progress, we woke every day to the rantings and transgressions of a profoundly ignorant, senile, mentally-ill maniac who–to our everlasting national shame–occupies the Oval Office.

The good news is that the Resistance grew stronger throughout the year. Seven million genuine patriots turned out for No Kings Day, and smaller protests around the country have continued weekly. The lower federal courts have continued to block the unconstitutional efforts to turn America into a fascist state. Jimmy Kimmel is still on the air, thanks to the millions of Americans who expressed their displeasure by dropping their Disney subscriptions. Democrats over-performed dramatically in virtually every election held in 2025, from school boards to governors. Law firms that “bent the knee” lost partners and clients to those that refused to do so. Even Rightwing pollsters show Trump’s approval far, far underwater–and continuing to decline. And the MAGA movement’s bigots are fighting each other.

All of that is good.

If we can hang on, minimize the ongoing, daily damage being done by this inept, lawless administration (and avoid a “wag the dog” war with Venezuela) maybe we can make it to the midterms and a big Blue wave. As we enter 2026, I’ve got my fingers crossed, hoping for an even more robust resistance. (Not just my fingers; I bought a voodoo doll…)

In what I think is a good sign, the Chattering Classes are beginning to focus on the “after”–on the reforms that will be necessary when this period of insanity is over. I think it’s another good sign that the conversation isn’t about returning to an admittedly non-ideal status quo. After all, if America hadn’t had genuine problems with our governance, if we hadn’t closed our collective eyes to the glaring evidence of economic unfairness, if we hadn’t ignored the growing lack of civic literacy and engagement, it’s unlikely that Trump would ever have been elected.

If we are very fortunate, and we emerge from the current nightmare having learned some valuable civics lessons, there will inevitably be arguments about what the necessary reforms should be. There is some uniformity on the structural side–guaranteeing the right to vote, overturning Citizens United, and getting rid of gerrymandering, the filibuster and the Electoral College, for starts.

And perhaps–just perhaps–we will have been sufficiently chastened by this current, profoundly embarrassing interregnum to admit to ourselves that America is far from “Number One” in social policy, and that we could learn a lot from those “high tax” countries whose citizens regularly rank as far happier than we are.

A resident of one of the Scandinavian countries was recently quoted pointing out something I’ve frequently noted: our fixation on “low taxes” ignores what he called the “real life” tax. As he said, when you add what we pay in taxes to what we pay for health insurance (and copays), college tuition and daycare (all of which are “free” in his country, in the sense that they are benefits paid for through their taxes), Americans not only end up paying considerably more than the citizens of those “high tax” countries, but our access to medical care, college and daycare is unequal. (When it comes to health care, our fragmented system also loses the substantial economies of scale–which is why we pay far more for far less than any other first-world country.)

Right now, of course, Americans aren’t debating policies, governmental or social. Right now, we’re just hoping to emerge from this cold civil war with enough of our constitutional infrastructure intact to make reform possible. So here’s my wish for the coming year: that the resistance continues to grow, that there is a huge Blue wave in November, and that an re-invigorated House and Senate discharge their constitutional duties of oversight and impeachment.

(Meanwhile, witch that I am, I’ll keep sticking pins in that voodoo doll…)

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