Category Archives: Random Blogging

Why Yesterday Mattered

Yesterday was the third NO KINGS protest, and at the Indiana Statehouse, turnout was huge. I don’t know how attendance will be calculated– this one went from noon to five, and people were constantly coming and going. While we were there, the crowd was huge and the signs were great (albeit tending toward the profane…). As we walked back to our apartment around 2:00 (we’re old, and we were with my oldest son who had major surgery ten days ago but insisted on going) we passed dozens of people with signs who were just heading to the protest.

The size of the crowd was especially gratifying since–unlike previous No Kings events–there were several others in and around Indianapolis that I’d assumed would peel off suburban folks who didn’t want to try to park downtown. Even more amazing, there were sixty protests in Indiana, several in very small and traditionally Red communities.

Nay-sayers pooh-pooh such protests and deny their utility. But just before yesterday’s No Kings rallies, my friend Phil Gulley–a Quaker pastor– posted a rebuttal on his Substack, Plain Speech, listing seven reasons why he finds such participation  important and meaningful, and he has allowed me to share them.

Phil wrote:

  1. I protest to remind myself that I am moral human being. I will not remain silent when vulnerable people are targeted and harmed by powerful and unprincipled elites. Tyranny disgusts me, so when I see it, I will speak up. Silence and indifference are not options for moral human beings.

2. I protest to remind myself that I am not alone. Because I live in a red state, it is easy to think I am alone in my disgust for the Trump regime. Standing in solidarity with my fellow Hoosiers reminds me I am not a lone voice in the wilderness. Tens of thousands of Hoosiers of every age and station stand with me. I may drive to the protest feeling powerless and disheartened, but I drive home feeling empowered and encouraged.

3. I protest so Donald Trump and those who cheer him on will know there is a different America than the one they inhabit. What they do is not American. It is not patriotic. It is not clever, nor is it just. It is cruel, juvenile, and reprehensible, and merits our full-throated rejection.

4. I protest for the same reason I vote and pay taxes, to remind myself that democracy is not a spectator sport. It requires something of us. What it demands of us in this moment is our dedication to the Constitution, which is daily being degraded by Trump and his collaborators. There are no bleachers in a democracy. It requires our full participation to thrive—our time, our attention, our money. Democracy isn’t a cheap bauble; it is a costly jewel.

5. I protest so my children and grandchildren will know I served when my country needed me. I am a pacifist, so will not kill on behalf of my nation. But I am also a patriot, so will resist, with every fiber of my being, any genuine threat to our nation, foreign or domestic. I will not leave it to Donald Trump or Steven Miller to name those threats, given their tendency to “other-ize” those who don’t look like them, believe like them, or talk like them. I have a brain. I know who poses a threat to our nation, and who does not. I will come to my country’s aid against authentic threats, not fictitious ones.

6. I protest because I am a Christian, and know what it means to be a Christian. I will not let Donald Trump and his coterie of Evangelical Christians pollute the faith I have served my entire life. They, not Islam nor atheism, are the true threats to the Christian faith. I know heresy when I see it. I know when religion has been co-opted by nefarious people for personal and political gain. Some may be fooled, but I am not.

7. I protest because I want my life to mean something. I want to spend it in nobility, not villainy. I want to be on the right side of history. If I were hung for treason, I would want to die knowing I did the good and noble thing. My dream is to be publicly disparaged by Donald Trump. I would wear his criticism as a badge of honor. I want no one to wonder where I stand. This is a fence I will not straddle. Nor will I seek an accommodating middle-ground. I know what constitutes right and wrong, and am determined never to confuse the two.

Yesterday, millions of people who shared some or all of these reasons joined together to send our senile, insane would-be King a message: This is our country–not yours.

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GOP Chutzpah

Sometimes, there really isn’t an English word as useful as a Yiddish one. That’s the case with the word “chutzpah,” which –as I’ve previously explained– is a word that encompasses “nerve” “gall” “insolence” and several others. (A standard example of chutzpah is the guy who kills his mother and father and then throws himself on the mercy of the court because he’s an orphan.)

And that brings me to the GOP’s recent effort to pass a poll tax–otherwise known as the SAVE Act.

I haven’t written anything about the SAVE Act because it wasn’t going to pass, despite our demented President’s threats to the Republican crazies and invertebrates in the Senate. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that the mere fact that the GOP in the House narrowly passed it, and that leadership in the Senate was willing to bring this abomination to the floor makes it worth considering, because even an unsuccessful effort to pass a bill aimed at the heart of American democracy tells us something important about what the GOP has become.

The Act itself is an abomination. It rests on a transparent lie–the accusation that noncitizens are casting thousands of ballots. Study after study has confirmed that noncitizen voting is vanishingly rare, but MAGA partisans need some justification to explain support for a bill that would essentially nationalize our elections while massively suppressing the vote.

The Act would require voters to prove their citizenship. That may sound simple; it isn’t. It has been described as both a massive hurdle and a major poll tax. The Act would require all registered voters to go to a voting registrar in person to re-register, while providing that registar with proof of citizenship. In some 45 states, a Real ID will not do. Instead, voters would need a passport, passport card, or a certified birth certificate (not a copy). And of course, the Act would make it especially difficult for women, who disproportionately vote Democratic. The Act takes special aim at married women who have changed their names, requiring them to present a marriage certificate and other types of evidence in order to prove the legitimacy of their current name.

The New Republic has explained the enormity of the effect should the measure pass.

Half of Americans do not have passports; getting one costs at least $165, plus photos, and requires … a birth certificate or certificate of naturalization. A passport card, with the same requirements, costs $65 plus photos. Marco Rubio’s State Department has cut the passport office in half and removed the ability of people to submit applications for a passport to local libraries, meaning they would have to physically go to an official office, which for many would mean traveling hundreds of miles.

Many millions of Americans have no idea where their birth certificates are or have one that will not suffice under this bill; getting an official one, which is not always easy, can cost up to $100.

Rather obviously, the Act would hit poorer Americans the hardest–and minority voters are disproportionately poor. There’s a reason it has been dubbed a poll tax.

All that is horrifying enough, but the Act would do even more damage. All states would be required to turn over their voter rolls to the Department of Homeland Security. The states would also be required to use a voter purge system created by DOGE, a system using data that has been shown to be both unreliable and biased, with an error rate estimated at 14 percent. Use of this program would result in the disenfranchisement of millions of legitimate voters.

Although the measure would also hit a lot of MAGA voters, the clear intent of the SAVE Act is the suppression of Democratic votes. (Trump, incapable of subtlety, has publicly confirmed that intent.)

The Twenty-Fourth Amendment–passed in 1964–outlawed poll taxes. In any other administration, any other Congress, a measure so obviously and flatly unconstitutional would never have been brought to a vote, but–as we know–the guardrails of American democracy have become degraded. The proponents of this effort at massive vote suppression evidently believe that the measure–if it passed–would have supporters among the corrupt majority Justices of the Supreme Court, and thus an outside chance of passing muster.

Which brings us to the unbelievable chutzpah of today’s Republican Party–a Party willing to offer an overt, public, “in your face” effort to rig elections and terminate American democracy for everyone to see.

No Senator who votes for this abomination should be returned to office. I think it was Maya Angelou who said ” When someone shows you who they are, believe them.”

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Identity And Politics

Apologies in advance for a trip into philosophical musing, rather than current events…

As part of my effort to understand our current disaster of a government, and especially my understanding of the people who continue to support it, I’ve been re-reading an old classic: Eric Hoffer’s “The True Believer,” which I hadn’t read since college. (A long time ago!) Hoffer addressed the phenomenon of mass movements, and the reasons for their appeal and emergence. Basically, he argued that attachment to such movements is due to a personal emptiness and an accompanying need to feel a part of something larger than the self.

As I read, I highlighted observations that seemed particularly relevant to our current time (somewhat challenging in a Kindle!), and especially relevant to the appeal of MAGA and White “Christian” nationalism.

Hoffer wrote that “the less justified a man is in claiming excellence for his own self, the more ready is he to claim all excellence for his nation, his religion, his race or his holy cause.” In “The True Believer,” he frequently notes the religious character of mass movements and revolutions–writing that the hammer and sickle and the swastika “are in a class with the cross.”

Hoffer argued that people join mass movements to escape individual responsibility–that membership in a mass movement offers frustrated and/or unhappy folks a refuge from “the anxieties, barrenness and meaninglessness of an individual existence.”  Belonging allows one to escape an “intolerable individual separateness” by immersion in and identification with a tribe of some sort.

Hoffer’s analysis points to one of the many ways we can “slice and dice” a population and explain otherwise mystifying political differences.

As regular readers of this blog know, I’m a “true believer” in civil liberties. I celebrate America’s Bill of Rights because it protects an individual autonomy I cherish–the right of each of us to live a life in accordance with our individual goals and beliefs, so long as we do not harm the person or property of others and so long as we recognize the equal rights of those who differ.

It took me a long time to recognize that for some people individual liberty and autonomy are terrifying, and recognizing the equal rights of those who are different is heresy.

When I was at the ACLU, I sometimes debated the folks–mostly academics– who argued against “too much” liberty and championed a point of view called “communitarianism.” Communitarians argued that social cohesion was more important than liberal individualism and the emphasis on civil liberties and civic equality that were an outgrowth of Enlightenment philosophy. Their position was that, since individuals are necessarily “embedded” in various groups and institutions, they need to conform to the overarching values of those groups in order to find meaning in their lives.

Obviously, there’s a mean between extremes–too much liberty is anarchy and too much community is communism. The Greeks were right to advocate a “golden mean.” (It is also obvious that what constitutes “too much” is a matter of opinion…)

How does this very abstract debate operate in American society?

Civil libertarians understand that some people disapprove of others, but we take the position that “If you don’t like gays, or Jews, or Muslims, or whoever, fine. Don’t hang out with them. Don’t invite them over for dinner. But don’t try to take away their rights. Live and let live is the American creed. Those who are intent upon elevating the beliefs of their religions or cultures–their “tribes”– will advocate for rules that impose their tribal beliefs on society at large, disadvantaging or even outlawing people of whom they disapprove.

If there is a middle ground, I’m having trouble envisioning it.

If Hoffer and others are right–if people who are frustrated with their lives and terrified of freedom and personal responsibility are prime targets for membership in intolerant mass movements–we need public officials who understand the need to address the causes of that frustration to the extent possible. We live in a time of dramatic, complex and unsettling technological and environmental change, much of which is beyond the ability of even a wise and competent government to ameliorate–and right now, we don’t have a wise or even minimally competent government.

But diverting public monies from wars of choice to measures improving the quality of life and a rational social safety net would be a start…

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Simon Says

One of the (far-too-many) daily newsletters I receive is Simon Rosenberg’s Hopium Chronicles. Rosenberg is a longtime Democratic pollster, and provides nerds like yours truly with results of the latest survey research, in-depth descriptions of candidates around the country, and other “inside baseball” data. Recently, however, in the middle of an encouraging report about Trump’s dismal and declining approval ratings, he provided a summary of where this mad, intellectually-challenged, would-be king has taken our country.

Here are the two paragraphs that “tell it like it is.”

He promised no forever wars and launched a forever war. He promised lower prices and he raised them. He promised a strong economy and we are getting job loss. He promised to drain the swamp and has ushered in an age of unprecedented corruption. He promised to make us strong and respected in the world and instead he is making China and Russia great again and us a laughing stock. This week rather than fixing all the messes he has created he is creating a new one – more humiliation by the Senate’s rejection of his rancid “make sure no one can vote any more” bill. As I wrote a few weeks ago the real State of the Union is that everyone is tired of all his bullshit.

Those little cracks we’ve seen in recent months are becoming very, very big ones and today it just feels like he and the regime are cracking open and coming apart. His madness has led him and our nation to ruin and it is no longer possible to pretend otherwise. A dam is breaking. A straw is breaking the camel’s back. The curtain is being drawn from the Wizard, and yes, we are all seeing that that orange emperor isn’t wearing any clothes (sorry for that image peeps).

As Simon noted elsewhere in the newsletter, Trump’s Iran incursion was an impulsive effort intended to distract from the drip, drip, drip of Epstein disclosures–not to mention from a faltering economy, ICE’s terror campaign, and the multiple other administration FUBARS that have been producing Democratic over-performances in election after election. But impulsive is the operative word–it has become abundantly clear that the attacks were not preceded by anything remotely resembling an evidence-based evaluation of the likely pros and (considerable) cons of such an assault. That shouldn’t surprise us: anyone demonstrating competence or expertise had already departed–or been ejected from– this administration. 

Instead of a quick and impressive display of American might, what we got was further evidence of Trump’s incompetence–as Simon says, instead of bragging rights, we got “a global fiasco, global humiliation, and an American economy already weakened due to his batshit crazy domestic agenda now hurdling towards recession and a new inflation spiral.” 

It is really difficult to get one’s head around the amount of damage Trump has been able to inflict on this country in just over one year. The Iran fiasco is simply the most recent–and arguably the most damaging.

As Jonathan Last recently wrote in The Bulwark, in a post titled “Our Low-IQ President did an Oopsie,”

Someday military academies will teach Trump’s Glorious Iran War as a case study in armed incompetence. Every consideration—from the strategic, to the economic, to the logistical, to the political—was cocked up from the start in the most obvious and stupid ways imaginable. Your average Warhammer nerd could have managed the operation more competently.

Then again, Americans watched Trump’s handling of COVID—“if we didn’t do any testing, we would have very few cases”—and still decided to give him control of the country again. So what else did they expect?

Monocle recently published an interview with Michael Wolfe, Trump’s former ghostwriter and a current chronicler of his Presidency, who has probably followed him as closely as anyone.  In this exchange, Wolfe corroborates what Simon says.

The question was: Is Donald Trump an intelligent man? Wolfe’s answer:

No. He’s a fucking moron. It’s extraordinary. He clearly has some street savvy but in terms of information and thinking about things in any coherent way, zippo. Steve Bannon once said that Trump’s whole life was a battle against information. He didn’t want to know things because that meant people would tell him things and he instinctively rebelled against that. So nobody tells him anything – not least because he never stops talking.

As I’ve previously noted–and as Simon says– elect a clown, expect a circus…..

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A Common Frame Of Reference

I was scanning a run-of-the-mill report on product advertising when I came across a single sentence that explains far, far more about the current problems we face than just the marketing challenges that were the subject of the article. And when I say “we”,  I’m talking about humanity, not just the American people.

The article in the Washington Post  used a recent ad by a McDonald’s executive to explore–and bemoan–the challenges contemporary advertisers face as a result of the splintered information environment. When there were only three major television networks, for example, product advertisements mainly succeeded through “ceaseless repetition.” You would see the same ads during multiple commercial breaks, repeated night after night. Successful ones would spawn late-night jokes and parodies. Co-workers would hum  jingles that you would immediately recognize, and–as the article noted–lines from widely seen commercials would turn into catchphrases.

The marketing messages that became ubiquitous did so because Americans inhabited a common entertainment and information environment. We had–as the article noted in passing–a common frame of reference.

We’ve lost that common frame of reference–a frame that enabled a shared view of reality.

Dozens of streaming television channels compete for our attention. There really is no “mass media” anymore–as I have often noted, thanks to the Internet, we live in an environment that encourages us to “curate” our preferred social and political realities, an enormous expansion of choice that allows us to construct both entertainment and information “bubbles” that confirm our pre-existing biases. The growth of remote work has reduced (and sometimes even eliminated) our interactions with co-workers–it has been decades since office folks gathered around the water fountain to discuss the most recent episode of “I Love Lucy.” (Even recalling that once-common experience seems impossibly quaint.) We are increasingly splintered.

Today, it isn’t simply advertising that suffers from our fragmented and inconsistent media environment. The realities of that fragmentation have enabled and encouraged our political polarization.

We live in a world where the realities we share are steadily diminishing, and the informational and entertainment and political environments we choose to inhabit are not only different, but frequently incompatible. If you are–like me–an older person, you increasingly encounter references to celebrities and “huge stars” of stage and screen that you’ve never heard of, and you’ve had younger people give you a blank look when you reference major events of a history you’ve lived through.

The technologies that allow us to access immense amounts of information with an amazing immediacy have also allowed us–or more accurately, forced us— to construct our own realities, facilitating our separate and increasingly inconsistent understandings of the world we inhabit.

This blog is an example. When I began these daily explorations, I viewed them as extensions of my classroom teaching. I would read something–perhaps scholarly, perhaps newsworthy–and share that information. Since I rather clearly have a point of view, perhaps I would be able to persuade a few others of the correctness of policy approach A or the dangers of pursuing policy B. Instead, this daily exercise has become an example of “preaching to the choir.” At best, I offer extra data to readers who already share most of my biases–readers with whom I share a frame of reference.

I have become steadily more convinced that the fragmentation of our information environment is at the root of our inability to fashion a working politics. When different groups of people occupy dramatically different realities, when person A hears about the disasters we are experiencing thanks to Trump’s insane war on Iran, while person B hears only some version of the rantings the mad would-be King posts on Truth Social, there is no middle ground. We can’t come together to solve a common problem because we don’t see a common problem.

The most confounding part of this dilemma is the absence of any obvious solution.

The First Amendment was grounded in belief in a marketplace of ideas–the conviction that We the People could bring our discrete and disparate views to a common intellectual “marketplace” where those views would be aired and would contend with each other, and the strengths and weaknesses of those arguments would become apparent. The Founders and philosophers who championed that clash of ideas did not– could not– have envisioned a time when no common marketplace existed.

I’m not sure democracy can exist in the absence of a common frame of reference. I guess we’ll find out….

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