Public Policy and Governance – Page 43

A Truly Alternate Reality

You’d think that sweltering temperatures, raging fires, the pending collapse of ocean currents, and multiple other signs would convince the dubious holdouts who continue to deny the reality of climate change.

As Time Magazine recently reported, you’d be wrong. Instead, extreme weather is actually fueling the crazy Right.

Rather than climate extremes forcing skeptics of climate policy to “get with the program, “conservative backlash around the world to climate policy may have also reached a fever pitch.”

In the U.S., former President Donald Trump has turned electric vehicles into a major attack line targeting President Joe Biden. In a late June speech, he called Biden’s policies “environmental extremism” and claimed they were “heartless and disloyal and horrible for the American worker.’

As the article notes, it is abundantly clear that partisanship matters.

A 2020 paper in the journal Nature Climate Change pointed to a clear dividing line in the U.S. Extreme weather tends to reinforce the link between climate change and weather effects in Democratic and/or highly educated communities—and less so elsewhere.

This dynamic means that extreme weather may actually be creating an opportunity for conservatives to cater to their base. As heat waves or flooding raises the specter of climate change for certain groups, others can use it to raise the specter of the costs of climate policy to rally their most loyal supporters who are primed to oppose it anyway.

It’s relatively easy to dismiss Trump’s rantings on the subject (okay, on any subject), but for most rational individuals, it is simply inconceivable that political operatives would ignore the dangers of climate change in order to play on the ignorance of their supporters–a strategy they must know increases the very real threats to humanity. (Perhaps none of them have grandchildren…)

Inconceivable or not, according to a story in the Guardian, that strategy is deliberate.

An alliance of rightwing groups has crafted an extensive presidential proposal to bolster the planet-heating oil and gas industry and hamstring the energy transition, it has emerged. Against a backdrop of record-breaking heat and floods this year, the $22m endeavor, Project 2025, was convened by the notorious rightwing, climate-denying think-tank the Heritage Foundation, which has ties to fossil fuel billionaire Charles Koch.

Called the Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise, it is meant to guide the first 180 days of presidency for an incoming Republican president, writes Dharna Noor. Climate experts and advocates have criticized planning that would dismantle US climate policy. The guide’s chapter on the US Department of Energy proposes eliminating three agency offices that are crucial for the energy transition, and also calls to slash funding to the agency’s grid deployment office in an effort to stymie renewable energy deployment, E&E News reported this week.

The plan is nothing if not thorough; electing a Republican President who would implement it would be nothing short of suicidal.

The part of the plan dealing with the Department of Energy (which would also hugely expand gas infrastructure) was authored by Bernard McNamee, formerly a senior advisor to Ted Cruz. McNamee previously led the far-right Texas Public Policy Foundation, which fights environmental regulation.

Another chapter focuses on gutting the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and moving it away from its focus on the climate crisis. It proposes cutting the agency’s environmental justice and public engagement functions, while shrinking it as a whole by terminating new hires in “low-value programs”, E&E News reported. The proposal was written Mandy Gunasekara, who was the former chief of staff at the EPA under Trump.

Efforts to undermine existing environmental safeguards aren’t limited to Rightwing think-tanks. GOP members of the House continually attack federal climate funding in their spending bill proposals, putting numerous governmental functions at risk.

Earlier this month, the Clean Budget Coalition– – composed of more than 250 advocacy groups – warned that Republican representatives were slipping restrictions on climate spending into the government’s annual spending bills, bills that must be passed before current funding expires on 30 September to avoid a government shutdown. This week, the coalition found that House Republicans had added additional “poison pills” to spending bills, including ones that target environmental funding.

The ragtag group of Republicans running for President are echoing this insanity–none more enthusiastically than Indiana’s “gift” to the nation, Mr. Piety Pence.

Pence–a longtime climate-change denier who (fortunately) has about as much chance of being President as I do–recently unveiled an economic proposal that includes eliminating the Environmental Protection Agency and reversing President Biden’s efforts to curb the impacts of climate change.

This Republican attack on sanity raises the stakes. Voting Blue is no longer “just” about fighting racism and homophobia, regaining women’s autonomy and protecting democracy.

It’s not hyperbole to say it’s about protecting life on Earth.

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A Comforting Analysis

I should preface today’s post by sharing a basic political premise that comforts me.

When I look around at the multiple examples of injustice, mean-spiritedness, racism and fear that characterize America’s current polarization and unrest, I think back to the 60s and other tumultuous periods in our history. Almost always, those upheavals subside and leave significant social improvements in their wake.

Not perfection. But improvement.

It can be hard to keep that in mind when every day brings new evidence of humankind’s reluctance to deal positively with the challenges we face. And blogs like this one, that tend to focus on those challenges, probably don’t help. But if we take the long view, human society really has seen substantial progress–it’s just a lot slower than most of us would like. And sometimes, because it is slow and incremental, we miss seeing that progress.

Which brings me to Persuasion’s fascinating analysis of the global far-Right.The crux of that analysis is in the introductory paragraphs:

It is hard to be hopeful about democracy today. We are bombarded with headlines proclaiming democracy’s “retreat,” “crisis,” and perhaps even “death.” In the United States, both Democrats and Republicans believe democracy faces serious threats and President Biden has addressed what he views as widespread sentiments that “democracy’s best days [are] behind us.” Across the Atlantic, meanwhile, recent electoral victories by the Brothers of Italy, the Sweden Democrats, and the French National Rally—parties with far-right, even neo-Nazi roots—led many to proclaim that “fascism was returning” and democracy in danger even in Western Europe, a region where it has long been taken for granted. That’s become the reflexive framing for many commentators addressing European politics. The Guardian, for instance, declared Spain’s election, held this past weekend with the right-wing Vox party potentially poised to enter a ruling coalition, “a key battle in the Europe-wide struggle against neofascism.”

This pervasive pessimism is not justified. Far from being a sign that democracy is imperiled in Western Europe, the evolution of the Brothers of Italy, the Sweden Democrats, and the French National Rally should make us cautiously optimistic. These parties have come to recognize that in order to win votes and political power they had to move away from their far-right roots, moderate their appeals and policy platforms, and pledge to play by the democratic rules of the game.

The article argues that, when democratic norms and institutions are weak, extremists lack the incentive to moderate–they can gain power without playing by the rules of the game.

But where democratic norms and institutions are strong—as they have been for decades in Western Europe—extremists tend to be forced to moderate because there is little constituency for explicitly anti-democratic, extremist appeals. And until they moderate, other political actors and institutions are able to keep them from power.

The article documents that moderation, tracing the trajectory of several far-Right European movements–Marine Le Pen in France, Sweden’s Democrats, Brothers of Italy and others.

The author argues that refusing to recognize that these parties have moderated has consequences: it fosters fear and polarization; calling them fascist often bolsters their narrative of being righteous “outsiders;” and calling parties fascist when they are not contributes to misunderstandings about the current state of democracy.

There has certainly been significant democratic backsliding among countries that made transitions to democracy during the late twentieth century. But this is not surprising: all previous democratic “waves”—such as those occurring in 1848 and after the First and Second World Wars—had significant undertows. Notwithstanding, many more democracies have survived the late twentieth century wave than did previous ones. And among established wealthy democracies only one—the United States—has experienced significant democratic decay.

The fact that these parties have moderated doesn’t mean they don’t continue to pose problems, of course. And what is particularly chilling is the author’s explicit recognition that America’s Republican Party has gone in the opposite direction from most of its Western European counterparts: “it has moved from being a center-right or conservative party to a far-right one.”

This reflects underlying weaknesses in American democracy and deep divisions in American society and shows that under such conditions even wealthy, long-established democracies can experience democratic decay.”

The article ends by recommending more democracy– but there’s a caveat:

As long as right-wing populists continue to respect laws, constitutions, and the democratic rules of the game, this is the best way forward: trying to lure voters away from these parties with better ideas.

Large numbers of MAGA world denizens, unfortunately, do not “continue to respect laws, constitutions and democratic rules of the game.”

But then, neither did the Weathermen...

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Kinds of Inequality

I sometimes listen to a podcast called Persuasion, in which Yascha Mounk interviews prominent writers and thinkers on a variety of subjects relevant to government and policy. I was particularly intrigued by a recent conversation he had with philosopher Michael Walzer.

Walzer is a noted communitarian, and as someone of a more libertarian bent, I have disagreed with several of his positions. (My issues with communitarianism are for another day…) In this interview, however, he makes some fascinating and persuasive points about the nature–and the varieties–of inequality.

Walzer begins by distinguishing between equality and sameness, and between power and resources.

If you think about the political system we have, we have a mechanism called elections for reducing inequality—radical inequality. Some people win, some people lose. Some people have a lot of power, some people have far less, and many of us are just watching. And yet, in the distributive system—if the elections are free and fair, and if the right of opposition is safeguarded—the resulting inequality is okay. The distribution of medical care should go to the people who are sick or most sick. That seems a natural way of distributing medical care, even though it means that some people get more if they need it, and some people get less if they don’t.

The most important caveat in the foregoing paragraph is this one: “if the elections are free and fair, and if the right of opposition is safeguarded.”

Walzer then considers the role of equality in achieving justice.

What makes for injustice is not inequality in political power or inequality in the distribution of health care or welfare or education. It is when these distributions don’t take place for the right reasons and through the right procedures. It’s when you get more health care than I do because you have more money than I do. You have taken success in the market and you have bought health care, or elite positions for your children in the country’s universities, or political influence. So it’s the use of one social good which may be rightly possessed to claim many other social goods that ought to be distributed differently. It’s an argument that depends on what the special goods we distribute mean to the people who make them and share them. And those meanings may be different in different societies.

In other words–as I used to tell my students–it depends. And it’s complicated.

Mounk responds to Walzer’s observations by referencing current criticisms of American capitalism, especially the dominance (not simply the possession) of money. As he says, it is one thing to buy yourself a nicer watch or car than your neighbor can afford. It is another thing entirely when your greater fiscal resources buy you “better healthcare, better access to education, better access to opportunities for your children, higher likelihood of winning political office.” That is when we are rightfully concerned.

As Walzer puts it,

It doesn’t bother me if you can collect rare books and I can’t, or if you can take a month’s vacation and I just get two weeks. That doesn’t bother me. It’s when your wealth matters in every other sphere of activity—and right now, crucially, in politics. It’s when your wealth can buy a senator or a judge, or a law, or an exemption from a law—all of that I want to rule out. I don’t think it’s crucial to a socialist or social democratic society, that someone who has an economic green thumb or some entrepreneur who invents some machine that people enjoy using, that they make more money than I make. It’s what they can do with the money that matters.

The interview contains a number of very interesting exchanges, including Walzer’s description of himself as a liberal communitarian, and his criticism of the illiberal Left. I encourage you to click through and read it in its entirety–but I’ll end by highlighting Walzer’s observations on the “education wars” I often write about.

Walzer notes that, when it comes to conflicts between religious doctrines and public education, we’ve gone quite a long way in the direction of accommodating religion. As he says, we’ve allowed religious communities to create parochial schools. We’ve allowed the Amish to take their kids out of school before the established legal age. We’ve allowed the Haredim in Kiryas Joel to run a public school system. But these children are going to grow up to vote in our elections, and that fact gives citizens of the democratic state an important interest in their education. That interest leaves considerable room for parental decision-making, but–as Walzer says– it is too important to abandon.

A thought-provoking conversation.

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Jim Banks–Hoosier Embarrassment

In November of 2024, Hoosiers will elect a U.S. Senator to fill a seat left open by the current occupant, who is running for Governor. The almost-certain GOP candidate will be current Congressperson and noted crackpot Jim Banks.

Lest you quibble with my “crackpot” designation, allow me to share a recent example, reported by Howey Political Report (paywall).

Indiana U.S. Reps. Jim Banks and Erin Houchin joined 68 fellow Republicans in voting to end U.S. military aid to Ukraine during debate on the FY23 National Defense Authorization Act. They offered the following amendment (one of dozens offered by hard-Right Republicans): “Notwithstanding any provision of this or any other Act, no federal funds may be made available to provide security assistance to Ukraine.”

It was defeated by a 358-70 margin, with all Democrats and a majority of Republicans (including U.S.Reps. Jim Baird, Larry Bucshon, Greg Pence, Victoria Spartz and Rudy Yakym) opposing the measure.

The misnamed Freedom Caucus believes that the United States should ignore Russia’s unprovoked invasion of another country and its subsequent commission of multiple war crimes. Why?

Well, according to Banks, we can’t afford it.

“I don’t believe there was ever a parallel in American history where we’ve seen America decline as much as it has in two years with Joe Biden in the White House. So we’ve got to push the Biden administration to focus on our domestic weaknesses and the crisis in our own country before we grant billions and billions, $40 billion in this case to send to Ukraine. I looked through this bill and it was easy for me to vote against it. This bill gives every single person in Ukraine a ticket to come to the United States of America. That would be OK if we could afford it. To invite 44 million people to come here with no limits, we can’t afford it. Unlike Afghanistan, Ukraine is a wealthier country. We have to take that into account.”

Banks is one of the reliably hateful fringe that now controls the grievance cult that used to be a political party. The fact that so demonstrably delusional a character represents an Indiana Congressional district is bad enough–allowing him to become a Senator would be immeasurably worse.

And as political strategists will affirm, if he becomes the incumbent –especially with an R next to his name in Red Indiana–he’ll be incredibly difficult to dislodge.

One reason Republicans do well in Indiana is because Democrats have essentially thrown in the towel. They approach each race with the attitude: “what can we do? Indiana’s a lost cause.” But even in the most rural precincts of Indiana, I find it hard to believe that majorities of Hoosiers find Banks–a certified wing-nut and Trump lover who is pro-gun, anti-woman, and anti-LGBTQ–appealing.

A friend and I recently had lunch with Marc Carmichael, the former state legislator who very recently decided to run for the Democratic nomination, after evaluating the political landscape. As he said, it’s rare in Indiana that Democrats face so promising a set of circumstances.

This is an open seat. Banks won’t have the advantages of incumbency.
It’s JimBanks–who is far, far to the Right of even very conservative Hoosiers.
Democrats are on the side of the majority of Hoosiers on the issues, especially women’s rights and assault weapons.

Democrats have a candidate with political and legislative experience and the ability to run full-time. Carmichael has hit the ground running, and is in the process of putting together his website, social media strategy and fundraising plan.

What will defeat him–or another first-rate candidate, Jennifer McCormick, who is running for Governor– is the defeatist attitude of far too many progressive Hoosiers–an attitude that depresses both fundraising and turnout.

If Carmichael raises enough money to get his message out, he can win.

According to a Pew survey, 42% of Hoosiers are or lean Republican, 37% are or lean Democrat, and 20% report no lean. A poll (commissioned by Indiana Republicans!) found 63-percent of Hoosier voters are pro-choice. Another poll, this one from EveryTown for Gun Safety, found the overwhelming majority of Hoosiers support stronger gun laws: 56 percent of Hoosiers think gun laws should be made stronger, compared to just 8 percent who want weaker gun laws. (Support for individual gun safety laws was even higher.)

I wasn’t able to find polling on Hoosiers’ support for Ukraine, but I can’t imagine that many Indiana citizens think it’s “too expensive” to support a democratic ally–or who agree with TFG (and evidently Banks) that Vladimir Putin–currently trying to starve the world-– is a good guy.

Jim Banks is Indiana’s version of Margery Taylor Green. It’s bad enough that he continually embarrasses us in the House. We sure don’t need him in the Senate.

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Diagnosis And Prescription

In a recent opinion piece for the New York Times, David French shared his theory that the recent, astonishing number of sign-ups to Meta’s Threads occurred–at least in part– “because Elon Musk did to Twitter what Donald Trump did to America.”

Not that Twitter was so great before Musk acquired it–as French quite accurately notes, understanding what Musk did to Twitter doesn’t require an exaggeration of Twitter’s virtues before Musk, “any more than we should exaggerate the health of our body politic before Trump.”

Even before Musk, Twitter had become a toxic force in American culture, so toxic that I wrote last year it might be beyond repair. The site lurched from outrage to outrage, and the constant drumbeat of anger and crisis was bad for the soul.
So, yes, when Musk purchased Twitter, it needed help. Instead, he made it worse. Much worse.

For all of Twitter’s many flaws, it was still by far the best social media app for following breaking news, especially if you knew which accounts to follow. It was also the best app for seeing the thoughts of journalists, politicians and scholars in real time, sometimes to our detriment. It wasn’t the American town square — there are still many places where we talk to one another — but it was one of our town squares. Twitter mattered.

French enumerates the numerous decisions that have made the platform much worse–decisions that rather clearly rested on Musk’s flawed understanding of its strengths and weaknesses.

French’s essay makes a point that is applicable not just to the marketing of a social media platform, but to policy–and for that matter, human decision-making–more generally. As he says,

The new right’s theory of culture and power is fundamentally flawed, and both Trump and Musk are now cautionary tales for any conservatives who are willing to learn.

According to French,

The new right’s theory of power is based on a model of domination and imposition, and it just doesn’t work. In the new right’s telling, the story of contemporary American culture is the story of progressive elite capture of the nation’s most important institutions — from the academy to big business to pop culture to the “deep state” — followed by its remorseless use of that institutional power to warp and distort American values.

And what’s the new right’s response to its theory of the left’s use of power? Fight fire with fire. Take over institutions. They tried to cancel us? Cancel them. They bullied us? Bully them.

The “cautionary tale” to which French alludes is actually pretty simple: in order to fix a problem, you need to diagnose it properly. Medical personnel understand that–duh!– if the disease being treated isn’t the disease from which you’re suffering, you won’t be cured. If a social dysfunction is rooted in X and policymakers insist upon addressing it by attacking Y, the likely result will just be additional dysfunction.

That axiom is simple, but of course, its application can be complicated. The actual roots of many social problems are complex. That said, a significant cause of America’s political divisions can be found in the wildly different diagnoses of the country’s problems offered by the GOP cult and by more thoughtful Americans.

The cult is convinced that America’s problems are rooted in a modernity that has discarded “tradition,” by which they mean the dominance of White Christian males. The cult’s frantic efforts to outlaw abortion and its attacks on efforts to increase diversity, inclusion and equity grow out of that diagnosis. The most recent example: House amendments to the bill funding the military– funding that passed only after the far Right attached provisions limiting abortion rights, gender transition procedures and diversity training in the armed forces.

When a diagnosis–an explanation of causation–is rooted in fantasy, the medicine prescribed is likely to make the condition worse. Gun violence won’t be ameliorated by making more guns available to “good guys;” the working poor won’t be helped by reducing taxes on presumed “job creators;” history won’t disappear if we pass laws against teaching it…

What happens when a sizable portion of the polity misdiagnoses reality–when the “medicine” imposed by people in power is exactly the wrong prescription? We’ve seen the result. As French put it, a government that needed reform “encountered a politician who broke far more than he built. A social media platform that needed repair was purchased by its most prominent troll. The results were predictable.”

We inhabit a complicated world. It isn’t always easy to locate the roots of our problems–but government by people whose diagnoses and prescriptions are reliably simple and just as reliably wrong won’t cure what ails us.

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