Category Archives: Public Policy and Governance

The Real “Deep State”

Trump and the MAGA movement have used their conspiratorial belief in a “deep state” to suggest that all government workers engage in nefarious efforts to change “their” America into the hellscape pictured by Trump’s disordered brain.

A recent, lengthy essay in last Sunday’s Washington Post provides a good antidote to that alternate reality.

The article begins by explaining the genesis of a little-known award issued by the Partnership for Public Service.

Founded the year before by an entrepreneur named Samuel Heyman, it set out to attract talented and unusual people to the federal workforce. One big reason talented and unusual people did not gravitate to the government was that the government was often a miserable place for talented and unusual people to work. Civil servants who screwed up were dragged before Congress and into the news. Civil servants who did something great, no one said a word about. There was thus little incentive to do something great, and a lot of incentive to hide. The awards were meant to correct that problem. “There’s no culture of recognition in government,” said Max Stier, whom Heyman hired to run the Partnership. “We wanted to create a culture of recognition.”

The award got off to a slow start. Among the first recipients were two FBI agents who cracked the cold case of the 1963 bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham.

Another went to a doctor at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention who designed and ran a program that delivered a billion vaccinations and eradicated polio in India. A third was given to a man inside the Energy Department who had been sent to a massive nuclear waste dump outside Denver, containing enough radioactive gunk to fill 90 miles of railroad cars, and told to clean it up. He finished the project $30 billion under budget and 60 years ahead of schedule — and turned the dump into a park.

All these people had done astonishing things. None had much to say about them. The Partnership called the Colorado guy to see if he wanted to explain the miracle he’d performed. “I just managed the project,” he said. End of story. No story.

This year’s list included a woman at the Agriculture Department who reduced food waste by creating products from fruits and vegetables unsuitable for market, a 400 billion dollar problem; a man in the EPA who conceived and started a service called AIRNow that supplies Americans with the best air-quality forecasts in the world; and a special agent at the Drug Enforcement Administration who led a team that seized 919,088 capsules of especially lethal fentanyl.

The bulk of the article–and although it is fascinating, it is definitely “bulky”–focused on this year’s winner: a man named Christopher Mark, who led the development of “industry-wide standards and practices to prevent roof falls in underground mines, leading to the first ever year (2016) of no roof fall fatalities in the United States.”

Mark is identified as a former coal miner. That description is accurate, although incomplete: he earned a doctorate in engineering after rejecting college for a few years of mine work and political activism after high school. He has used his fixation with mine safety to solve problems previously thought to be insoluble, and in the process has saved many lives.

As Mark has noted, improvements in mine safety relied upon more than just his very significant breakthroughs. In response to a suggestion that his innovations had been the sole reason for the dramatic safety improvements, he clarified that two things had been necessary: new knowledge plus legislation enhancing enforcement. It took enforcement to ensure that mine owners would actually follow the rules and put the new knowledge into practice. “What actually happened was the regulators were finally empowered to regulate. Regulators needed to be able to enforce.”

The article is fascinating, not simply for Mark’s story, but for its rare–and refreshingly honest–look at government work.

When I joined the Indianapolis city administration back in 1977, I brought with me many of the widespread negative impressions of “government workers,” who were–I assumed–folks unable to get jobs in the private sector, people who worked relatively short hours, etc. It didn’t take long for me to discover how very wrong I was. There were certainly some duds, as there are in every workplace, but most of the people I worked with during my three-year stint as head of City Legal were whip smart and devoted to public service. Many worked long hours. Almost all of them cared deeply about what Mayor Bill Hudnut used to call “building a great city.”

They’re the real “deep state.” We’re fortunate to have them.

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A Heartbeat Away

Micah Beckwith and JD Vance share a number of characteristics. Both lack governing experience. Both are lightly tethered to reality. Both are Christian Nationalists. And both are running for positions that–should they win–would put them a heartbeat away from the power to do real and lasting damage.

Since I last enumerated the statements from the SnydeReport’s “Book of Beckwith,” that running list of Beckwith’s wack-a-doodle statements has grown. Among the recent additions: Beckwith has compared vaccinations to “what the Nazis did to the Jews,” and says vaccine mandates are “paramount to rape.” He’s provided “3 reasons why you should be a “Christian Nationalist” and insisted that the fact that Fishers (an Indianapolis bedroom community) had allowed a Pride parade proves his contention that the community has long been guilty of “sex grooming.”  Here’s the quote:

Sexually grooming children has been a part of the Fishers culture for a long time. From what’s happening in the Library to the schools and now this. It’s unfortunately par for the course.

If you think JD Vance is less of a looney, allow me to refer you to a recent column by E.J. Dionne in the Washington Post. (For those of you unfamiliar with Dionne, you should know that he is a deeply religious person, not a critic of religiosity.) His observations about Vance were part of a column suggesting ways that Kamala Harris might bring Americans together to support families and children.

Rather unintentionally, JD Vance has created an opportunity for her to do this. Trump’s running mate is the perfect foil for Harris to show that being pro-family and pro-children requires bringing our warring political tribes together.

Vance has had quite a time of it, trying to explain away his misogynistic language. It’s not just his comments about “childless cat ladies” or his claim that teachers who don’t have kids of their own are a problem for education. (That one took this student of the Sisters of St. Joseph and Benedictine monks aback.) Especially revealing was his dismissal of “women who think that, truly, the liberationist path is to spend 90 hours a week working in a cubicle at McKinsey instead of starting a family and having children.”

He later added: “They’re all fundamentally atheist or agnostic. They have no real value system.” With God out of the picture, they seek meaning in movements for “racial or gender equity.”

I won’t even mention Vance’s assertions that immigrants from Haiti are eating their neighbors’ cats and dogs…..

Most folks who are politically active agree with Mike Braun when he dismisses his running-mate’s bizarre and deeply unpopular opinions by pointing out that voters don’t base their votes on who’s running for Lieutenant Governor. Candidates for Vice-President almost never matter either.

In this particular election, however, voters should rethink their importance.

I’m not the only person noting that MAGA Mike Braun is 70, and that– while he seems healthy– actuarial tables suggest the odds of “something happening” aren’t insignificant. Having a culture warrior Lieutenant Governor who knows little or nothing about agriculture or tourism–the tasks assigned to the office–is troubling enough. The thought of a Governor Beckwith who might have to deal with a public health crisis or uphold the Constitutional separation of church and state is another matter entirely.

At least Braun seems currently healthy. The odds favoring JD Vance’s ascension to the Presidency in the event Trump wins are much, much higher. Trump’s mental and physical deterioration has become too obvious to ignore, even by our “sane washing” media. Granted, he has always displayed significant signs of mental incapacity, but it has gotten steadily worse. As one Facebook meme notes, if your grandpa “went off” on sharks and electric cars and Hannibal Lecter, you’d take him in for evaluation. You certainly wouldn’t put him in charge of anything.

Furthermore, if Braun’s age of 70 is a legitimate concern, what can we say about Trump, who is 78–an age when even sane people begin to decline.  The odds of Trump making it through a four year term without dying (or hiding under a desk babbling nonsense) are miniscule. America would then get President Vance, whose weirdness has been on continual display and whose entire experience with government has been 18 months as a Senator.

Neither Beckwith nor Vance could be elected to those posts, but both would have better-than-even odds of ascending to them.

In a normal year, with two normal political parties and second-tier candidates with normal qualifications, we’d be justified in ignoring those odds. This year, we aren’t.

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Christian Nationalism And The Election

The Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) has published a report titled American Values Atlas, summarizing research into support for Christian Nationalism in all 50 states. The report also examined how religion, party, education, race, and other factors intersect with Christian Nationalist views.

Here are a few of their findings.

  • Roughly three in ten Americans qualify as Christian nationalism Adherents or Sympathizers.
  • Residents of red states are significantly more likely than those in blue states to hold Christian nationalist beliefs.
  • Nearly four in ten residents of red states are Christian nationalists (14% Adherents and 24% Sympathizers); nearly twice the proportion of blue state residents. (Forty percent of Hoosiers!)
  • Support for Christian nationalism is strongly correlated with voting for Trump in the 2020 election.
  • At the national level, Christian nationalism is strongly linked to Republican party affiliation and holding favorable views of Trump.
  • Republicans (55%) are more than twice as likely as independents (25%) and three times as likely as Democrats (16%) to hold Christian nationalist views.
  • Christian nationalists are more likely than other Americans to see political struggles through the apocalyptic lens of revolution and to support political violence.

The full report enumerates the beliefs of Christian Nationalists, and I encourage you to click through, but perhaps a more forceful explanation of the movement was expressed in an article by Rick Perlstein in the American Prospect about one Right-wing apostate.

Matthew Sheffield was once a rising star in the conservative movement. As Perlstein notes, however, his career as a formidable “persuader” on the Right was doomed “because he cared about the truth.”

His damnable allergy to propaganda had already shown out by the time he came up with an idea for a study during a stint at Virginia Commonwealth University. It asked: Where Do Columnists Come From? “And my general thesis was that newspaper columnists who are on the right come out of political operations, and ones from the left come out of—journalism.” That is to say, they carry with them journalistic values of fairness and accuracy, by which conservative columnists remain blessedly unburdened.

The lengthy column traces Sheffield’s efforts on the Right and his eventual move to a reality-based Left. What finally led to his exit from the movement was his recognition of a central element of Christian Nationalism: a fundamentalism incompatible with reality.

When it comes to conservatism, “the one thing that non-Republicans don’t understand is that almost all of them are bizarre religious fundamentalists. Even the ones who don’t present that to you.” And that’s how they learn to reason: as fundamentalists. Sheffield saw it over and over again on the job…

The last straw was when Sheffield learned about a lawsuit evangelicals filed against a liberal church in North Carolina, before the Supreme Court’s gay marriage ruling, that was blessing gay unions. “I was just horrified at all the awful things they were saying, and how anti-American they were, how they literally don’t believe in freedom of religion,” he said. The conservatives’ argument was: “Unless you’re historically rooted in your doctrines, you don’t have religious freedoms.”

As Perlstein notes,

Liberals tend to maintain a lingering sentimental attachment to the idea that people calling themselves “Christians” are, well, Christian as the word is commonly understood outside the evangelical world. Faith, hope, and charity, turning the other cheek, that sort of thing. The people who most clearly understand and articulate their imperialist designs for the rest of us tend to be apostates like Sheffield, Matt Sitman, and Frank Schaeffer.

Sheffield was asked to explain to liberals how someone can be interested in the profession we call “public service” and not be interested in serving the public, and he replied “The core American reactionary motivation is that they want to force the public to obey their principles.”

The conservative movement, he says, is “100 percent controlled by extremists. And they are very, very wealthy. So they can afford to push a politics that almost no one believes in. We’re not to that point yet, but let’s just say that at some point in the future the Republican Party is not getting even 15 percent in elections. They’re rich enough, fanatical enough, that they wouldn’t change. They would just keep trying to push the same things. And it might get more extreme. It will get more extreme. They have no relationship to the political marketplace.”

Who needs mere votes when you’re in direct touch with God?

If PPRI’s research is correct, a third of the American public either fully endorses those beliefs or is sympathetic to them.

The last thing we need in this country are elections that empower the Micah Beckwiths among us–at any level. 

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The Depressing Truth

Yesterday, I wrote about my swings between optimism and pessimism as we approach November. I’ve now read a depressing article suggesting that even a “best-case” election result will not erase America’s Trumpist plague.

An article from The Bulwark began with the following quote from Philip Bump:

The Trump era is about Trump in the way that the War of 1812 was about 1812: a critically important component and a useful touchstone but not all-encompassing. Turning the page on the era requires more than Trump failing to get an electoral vote majority.

Perhaps a more accurate time span to consider is something like 15 years. The election of Barack Obama as president in 2008 was hailed as a signal moment in the evolution of American politics and demography, but it also triggered a remarkable backlash. Ostensibly rooted in concerns about government spending, it was largely centered on the disruption of the economic crisis (which triggered an increase in spending) and that overlapping awareness of how America was changing.

The author went on to agree. As he recounted, he’d originally viewed Trump as an aberration–after all, he’d gotten through the Republican primaries with pluralities, not majorities, of Republican votes, and he’d underperformed his poll numbers in virtually every primary. Large numbers of Republican voters hated him. He trailed Hillary Clinton in all of the polling. All of these data points led him to conclude that Trump would lose the 2016 general election, that in the wake of that loss the GOP establishment would take measures against those who’d supported him, and the Party would go back to being the Party  of Mitt Romney, Paul Ryan, and Marco Rubio.

As the author candidly admits, he was wrong on all counts.

My first mistake was not understanding that Trump had turned the mild tilt of the Electoral College into an enduring 3-point advantage.

By trading suburban, college-educated voters for rural, high-school educated voters, Trump maximized the GOP’s Electoral College efficiency. This trade turned the GOP into a permanent minority party, making it extraordinarily difficult for it to win a national popular majority. But it tilted the Electoral College system to Republicans by a minimum of 3 points in every election.

This was a true innovation. Prior to Trump, no one had viewed minority rule as a viable electoral strategy.

His second mistake was his belief that party elders would expel or neuter those who had supported Trump. As he now recognizes, that mistake wasn’t simply because Trump won. “It was wrong because the real war was not the general election, but a Republican civil war between traditional Republicans and those who wanted “grievance-based political violence.”

The grievance aspect was important because it meant that Trump could deliver to his voters even if he lost. Trump understood that Republican voters now existed in a post-policy space in which they viewed politics as a lifestyle brand. And this lifestyle brand did not require holding electoral office…

So no, there were never going to be recriminations against conservatives and Republicans who had collaborated with Trump. The recriminations would run in the opposite direction: The forces of Trumpism would continue to own the Republican party and anti-Trumpers would continue to be driven out. (Unless they chose to convert.)

That led to a third mistake: believing that the Republican Party would revert to its previous identity as a normal, center-Right political party. He now believes there is no going back.

If anything, the dynamics inside the party—the self-selection making the party whiter, more rural, and less-educated; the desire for minority rule; the eagerness for political violence; the disinterest in governing—seem likely to push the party further away from what it was.

We can’t control the future. And we can’t control the Republican party. All we can control is ourselves.

Which starts with being clear-eyed about reality and the work ahead.

The essay confirmed my reluctant realization that far more of the American electorate falls into that “grievance-based” category than I want to believe. Americans aren’t simply engaged in a Presidential campaign, but a much longer, more protracted struggle for the soul of the nation.

Even if Kamala Harris and Tim Walz win in November, those of us who define patriotism as allegiance to the philosophy of our founding principles will have to contend with the White “Christian” Nationalists who want to abandon those principles in favor of an autocratic, theocratic vision that accords them social and cultural dominance. (If you don’t believe me about that “vision,” take a look at Project 2025. Or–if you live in Indiana– read statements from Micah Beckwith or Jim Banks.)

November is just Round One. That said, winning it decisively is an absolutely essential first step.

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Project 2025 And Health Care

As we all know, the United States is the only first-world country without a national health-care program. While the approaches differ, most advanced countries consider access to healthcare a human right–not a consumer product. Here in the US, efforts to extend that access–Medicare, Medicaid, and more recently the Affordable Care Act–have been met with hysterical claims that such programs are “socialism” and incompatible with freedom.

I’m not the first person to note that these critics don’t seem nearly as upset by programs that can accurately be labeled “socialism for the rich.” Increasingly, American economic policy, with its generous tax advantages and outright subsidies, seems to be socialism for the rich and brutal capitalism for the poor. But a dissertation on that topic is for another day.

The scolds who resent any effort to make health insurance more affordable or accessible are among those who have produced the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, so we shouldn’t be surprised by the Project’s health care proposals. Neither should we con ourselves into believing that Project 2025 isn’t an outline that Trump will follow if elected–there is ample evidence to the contrary.

So–what health policies would another Trump Administration pursue?

A doctor writing in Time Magazine has recently explained why voters need to understand that agenda–especially when it comes to healthcare– and take it seriously.

Sponsored by the right-wing think tank, the Heritage Foundation, the Project 2025 policy agenda was written by more than 400 conservative experts and published in a book titled Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise. While Trump has publicly disavowed the initiative, he has endorsed (and even tried to implement) many of its core proposals, several of which were penned by his former staffers.

The Biden Administration’s Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) has made life-saving drugs like insulin more affordable. Project 2025 calls for its repeal.

The Inflation Reduction Act (IRA)—signed into law by President Biden two years ago—capped insulin costs at $35 per month for people on Medicare. The data show that this cap increased the number of insulin prescriptions that were filled, ensuring more patients with diabetes got what they needed to stay healthy. The IRA will also cap annual out-of-pocket spending on prescription drugs (not just insulin) for seniors starting next year. And despite aggressive lobbying and legal challenges from drugmakers, the law empowered Medicare to negotiate prices with Big Pharma for the first time in history, achieving significant discounts and saving billions. These are just a few of the many reasons more than 500 health professionals recently signed an open letter to protect the IRA.

Other provisions of Project 2025 would reduce access to Medicaid. Currently, more than 70 million low-income Americans rely on Medicaid for health care. The Project proposes lifetime caps on benefits and the addition of work requirements as a condition for coverage, among other onerous changes.

Unsurprisingly, Project 2025 would not only restrict abortion at the national level, it would also eliminate no-cost coverage for some contraception. (Those Right-wingers really want women to breed….) Of course, once children have been produced, concern for their welfare vanishes.

Project 2025 takes particular aim at the well-being of children. The authors seek to prevent public health agencies from requiring vaccination in school children, which could cause more outbreaks of preventable diseases like measles. They also propose invalidating state laws intended to stem gun violence, a leading cause of death for children in the U.S. Project 2025 would even eliminate Head Start, a critical program for early childhood development, especially in low-income and rural communities.

As the doctor writes, implementation of even a few of these proposed policies would set back decades of progress in medicine and public health.

The Harris/Walz ticket has used the slogan “We Won’t Go Back.” The usual interpretation of that phrase is that it refers to women’s reproductive liberty, but it actually–and accurately– describes what is really at stake in November’s election. MAGA is a movement entirely focused on taking America back–back to a time when women were property, Black and Brown people second-class citizens, LGBTQ+ people closeted, and adequate medical care a consumer good available only to those who could afford it.

I don’t know when opposition to vaccination and common-sense public health measures became part of the ideology of the Right. I don’t know why MAGA folks think the working poor aren’t entitled to health care. I don’t understand their evident belief that government should cater to White Christian males to the exclusion of other citizens.

But I do know they’re stuck in a past that I don’t want to return to. When people say this election poses an existential choice, they aren’t engaging in hyperbole.

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