Category Archives: Random Blogging

Hayek’s Warning

Among the many–many–frustrating elements of today’s political discourse is the media’s insistence on characterizing MAGA and the Trump administration as “conservative.” That consistent misuse of language is right up there with the persistent sanewashing of what any sentient American recognizes as insanity coming from he whom a friend recently called “that malignant moron.”

There are multiple ways in which today’s GOP is dramatically inconsistent with genuine conservatism. At the very least, people with a conservative philosophy are notable for wishing to conserve elements of society that have value. Indeed, one of the historic differences between conservatives and liberals has been the reluctance of conservatives to endorse social and institutional changes when the status quo has rather clearly outlived its usefulness.

Conservatives have also been believers in free trade–a belief endorsed by the Republican Party of the past.

True conservatives are thus appalled by the Trump/Musk radical destruction of America’s constitutional and legal framework–and by the incredible and destructive economic ignorance displayed by Trump’s fixation on tariffs.

One of the historical icons of genuine conservatism was Frederich Hayek; back when I was a Republican (and Republicans were largely conservatives, not ignorant racists), Hayek’s Road to Serfdom was required reading for conservative intellectuals, so I was interested to read a recent Bulwark column by Charlie Sykes, in which he noted that Hayek had addressed the reasons for the periodic emergence of Trump-like figures.

Sykes quoted Roger Kimball, for a 2016 essay titled “How Hayek Predicted Trump With His ‘Why the Worst Get on Top’.” (Sykes notes that Kimball has subsequently joined those who fawn over “Dear Leader.”)

The Austrian-born economist and classical liberal, who played such a central role in the emergence of American free market conservatism, had a keen understanding of the temptations of authoritarianism. That’s what makes his warnings seem so prescient. “’Emergencies’ have always been the pretext on which the safeguards of individual liberty have been eroded,” he wrote. Hayek’s chapter on “Why the Worst Get on Top” in his classic work, The Road to Serfdom, diagnosed the populist impulse that would lead to the demand for ceding power to a “man of action.” This is “the position which precedes the suppression of democratic institutions and the creation of a totalitarian regime.” At some point in a political or economic crisis, there “is the general demand for quick and determined government action that is the dominating element in the situation, dissatisfaction with the slow and cumbersome course of democratic procedure which makes action for action’s sake the goal. It is then the man or the party who seems strong and resolute enough ‘to get things done’ who exercises the greatest appeal….”

Hayek described several preconditions for the rise of a demagogic dictator, including a dumbed down populace, a gullible electorate, and scapegoats on which that demagogue can focus public enmity and anger.

Hayek thought that the more educated a society was, the more diverse members’ tastes and values would become, and the less likely they would be to agree on a particular hierarchy of values.  He observed that the desire to create a high degree of uniformity and similarity of outlook in society requires descending “to the regions of lower moral and intellectual standards where the more primitive and ‘common’ instincts and tastes prevail.”

But in a modern society, potential dictators might be able to rely on there being enough of “those whose uncomplicated and primitive instincts,” to support his efforts. As a result, Hayek said, he “will have to increase their numbers by converting more to the same simple creed.” Here is where propaganda comes into play. The “man of action,” Hayek wrote, “will be able to obtain the support of all the docile and gullible, who have no strong convictions of their own but are prepared to accept a ready-made system of values if it is only drummed into their ears sufficiently loudly and frequently.”

Hayek predicted MAGA in his description of the third and most important element of demagoguery: the need to identify an enemy. It is easier, he noted, “for people to agree on a negative programme, on the hatred of an enemy, on the envy of those better off, than on any positive task. The contrast between the “we” and the “they”, the common fight against those outside the group, seems to be an essential ingredient in any creed which will solidly knit together a group for common action.” If you want the “unreserved allegiance of huge masses” you must give them something to hate.

There are some things our “malignant moron” knows instinctively…

There are a number of labels we might apply to Trump’s supporters. “Conservative” isn’t one of them.

Comments

Telling It Like It Is

As Americans try to cope with the national lunacy being imposed on us by the cretins in charge of our federal government, two essential elements of our current disaster have become too obvious to ignore.

First, voters did this. Granted, not a majority–most voters cast their ballots for someone other than the cult leader, and a disgraceful number of American citizens didn’t even bother to vote. Trump’s “victory” was razor-thin–but it was a victory, and we are reaping the consequences of that disastrous civic failure.

Second, the overwhelming reason voters supported Trump was racism. Those voters didn’t cast ballots for the destruction of America’s global dominance, or for the evisceration of Medicaid and Social Security; most of them (if they followed actual news and knew what was going on) would oppose measures hobbling the IRS’ ability to audit our billionaire overlords. No–what they wanted, and what the administration is providing, is culture war, an effort to take the United States back to the social arrangements of the 1950s and before, a time when LGBT folks were closeted, no one had even heard the word “trans,” women were in the kitchen, and Black people “knew their place.”

A recent essay from Jennifer Rubin in The Contrarian examined the language MAGA employs in an effort to veil that obvious effort. Prominent, of course, is the administration’s war against “DEI.” (It’s so much nicer to rail against letters of the alphabet than to use the N word…)

As with “CRT,” the MAGA censors, thought police (aimed at rooting out “improper ideology”), Great Replacement paranoids, and outright bigots cannot tell us precisely what “DEI” is—they merely know they are dead set against it. Teaching children to hate America. Making whites feel guilty. Quotas. None of that resembles the “DEI” practices utilized by universities, employers, researchers, and government entities—but that’s irrelevant to them.

Nuanced concepts (e.g., outreach to recruit Americans of all backgrounds, medical trials to ensure women’s physiology is taken into account) do not appeal to people who think Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick epitomize “merit.”

Increasingly “DEI” in the MAGA dictionary has come to mean “Blacks” or “women” or “a convenient scapegoat who represents the ‘other.’” A plane goes down? DEI. A museum pays tribute to the greatness of Jackie Robinson? DEI.

Increasingly, the anti-DEI mission has become an explicit attempt to blame or erase non-whites, females, and other disenfranchised groups. Remember when they used to oppose “canceling” people and policing speech? MAGA ideologues no longer hide their core belief: that white men are inherently qualified, the “true” history of America has been made by white males, and non-white men are to blame for all calamities.

What Rubin correctly calls a “ham-handed effort to bolster white advantage” doesn’t conceal the obvious. The goal is to resegregate America, to return the country to what White Christian Nationalists believe is the proper, “Godly” order of things: dominance of White Christian Males over everyone else. As Rubin notes, if we had any doubts of that goal, Trump’s repeal of LBJ’s Executive Order 11375 gives the game away.

LBJ’s Executive Order “gave the Secretary of Labor the authority to ensure equal opportunity for people of color and women in federal contractors’ recruitment, hiring, training and other employment practices,” The point was simple; if the federal government was contracting with private firms, it had the right to demand that those firms refrain from discriminating. If the composition of the relevant workforce was markedly different from local demographics, that didn’t necessarily preclude contracting, but the business would need to show that it had taken affirmative steps to recruit a more representative workforce.

In other words, the government wasn’t going to use our tax dollars to reward intentional discrimination.

As Rubin points out,

The anti-DEI crusade seems aimed to repeal the fundamental statutory and constitutional protections that prohibit discrimination and give meaning to “All men are created equal.” After all, if the MAGA crowd really wanted to root out unfairness and promote merit they would insist we reject unqualified white appointees and dump legacy admissions at colleges and universities schools. Instead, the anti-DEI crusade aims to bolster white entitlement and eradicate any sense of obligation to right society’s wrongs.

The war against “DEI” and the effort to make “woke” an epithet are intended to cloak MAGA’S racism, misogyny and anti-Semitism with neutral language, to pretend that efforts to address systemic inequalities are the problem, not the inequalities themselves.

Ironically, in voting their fears and bigotries, MAGA folks voted to retreat from the foundational principles that really did make America great.

Comments

Natal Con

At a recent lunch discussion, my friend and sometimes co-author Morton Marcus asked me if I was aware of the “pro natalist” movement gathering steam on the right. I wasn’t.

I was aware of the emergence of the “trad wives”–women who, for whatever reason, are asserting their desire to retreat back to the kitchen and nursery. My superficial understanding of that particular “movement” suggests it’s part of White Christian Nationalism, with its reliance on biblical cherry-picking and–especially– fear of the hated modernity that allows those “others” to claim equal civic status with “Godly” folks. But I hadn’t heard of the natalists.

Morton subsequently sent me a transcript of an interview with a couple named Collins who were attending a convention of natalists. The interviewer began by reminding listeners that both JD Vance and Elon Musk are on record decrying reduced birthrates. Musk–with his 13+ children–has obviously been working against that trend. (Not that he bothers spending much time with most of his offspring, according to interviews with several of them. Evidently the quality of parenting is less important than the quantity…)

The podcast included a clip of comments made by one Charles Haywood at the first Natal Con. Haywood, who made his money as a shampoo magnate, was a sponsor this year. Haywood is heard in that clip saying that “generally, women should not have careers. They should be socially stigmatized if they have careers.” He blames declining birth rates on feminism and the overturning of what he sees as “natural hierarchies of gender and race.”

And there, my friends, you have it.

I have frequently posted my conviction that Trumpism is basically a revolt against equality–against the notion that there are no “natural hierarchies of gender and race.”

I understand why MAGA appeals to mediocre (or worse) White men who resent having to share the civic landscape with women and people of color. I admit to bafflement when it comes to the women who agree with Mrs. Collins that her role in life is to push out as many babies as possible. (I say that as a women who has “pushed out” three of my own–and as the daughter of a woman who insisted that women could–and should–live well-rounded lives that included whatever careers we desired.)

The irony is that the neo-natalists are aiming their criticisms at the wrong culprit. As the podcaster pointed out, the evidence for declining birthrates points not to women’s equality, but to a very different reason. Surveys show that most people continue to want children, but they are increasingly aware of what parenting requires- the ability to provide a stable home, sufficient income, and (usually) a partner.

When a society isn’t providing the social supports that make meeting those requirements possible, prudent people decide to have fewer children, if they have any at all. The lack of government funding for health care, the dearth of affordable housing, the lack of support for good public schools, the high cost and limited availability of child care–all are disincentives for parenthood.

My own grandchildren would add the threat of climate change and our lackluster efforts to address it.

The podcast quoted a scholar who studies this movement and explained its roots: the idea that “our society has become excessively effeminate, weak, compassionate. And what they want to do is breed or elevate an aristocratic class that’s going to be masculine, violent, not necessarily motivated by, let’s call it, empathy.”

The neo-natalists want to restore a “masculine” culture that requires rooting out feminism and multicultural democracy. “Women are to be subordinated to men, largely going to be responsible for managing the household, although with no real particular authority. And of course, they’re going to have an awful lot of children.” And of course, non-White men will be subordinated to their “natural” betters.

If we needed any evidence of how wrongheaded (okay, insane) this belief in a “natural hierarchy” of White men is, we need only look at the “superior” White guys in the Trump administration. It would be hard to assemble a more pathetic, clownish and ignorant group.

The neo-natalists interviewed in this very informative–if nauseating–podcast are enthusiastic Trumpers. They provide additional evidence–as if we needed it–that support for MAGA and Trumpism are today’s eruptions of the oldest American sins: the racism and misogyny of White men who are frantic at their loss of automatic dominance, and angry that they have to compete for status on the basis of actual merit.

I suppose I should thank Morton for the additional evidence of what is really at stake…

Comments

Will Obvious Insanity Be A Turning Point?

By now, it should be obvious that Trump is not simply stupid and ignorant (two different conditions), although he is both. He is severely mentally ill. He has not simply pursued mistaken policies, he has pursued petty vengeance–when he isn’t pursuing personally profitable grifts.

The clown show Trump calls a “cabinet” has already inflicted major damage on critical aspects of governance: public health, civil liberties, Social Security and more. Now–with the advent of his insane tariffs–he has begun the tanking of an economy that economists agreed was the best in the world at the end of the Biden Administration.

Even before the announcement of the scale of these unbelievably stupid and damaging tariffs, Paul Krugman wrote what any halfway sentient observer already knew: their imposition is a declaration of an all-out trade war that America will lose.

As I said, I don’t know exactly what will be announced later today. One safe prediction, however, is that over the next few days we’ll see many news analyses purporting to explain the thinking behind this radical change in U.S. policy.

Such analyses will be a waste of time, because there’s nothing to explain. I’m not saying that the Trump team’s thinking is unsound. I don’t see any thinking at all.

Krugman focused on two major internal contradictions in Trump’s intended justification.

Here’s the story: Trumpers are claiming that tariffs

1. Won’t increase prices, because foreign producers will absorb the cost

2. Will cause a large shift in U.S. demand away from imports to domestic production

3. Will raise huge amounts of revenue

If you think about it for a minute, you realize that (1) is inconsistent with (2): If prices of imports don’t rise, why would consumers switch to domestically produced goods? At the same time, (2) is inconsistent with (3): If imports drop a lot, tariffs won’t raise a lot of money, because there won’t be much to tax.

So the public story about tariffs doesn’t make any sense. And Trump’s rants about tariffs go beyond nonsense..

Does he really believe that Canada is a major source of fentanyl? Worse, does he believe that fentanyl smugglers pay tariffs?

But is it all a cover for the real, probably sinister agenda of Trump’s tariff push?

No. There isn’t any secret agenda, devised by people who know that the public story is nonsense. How do I know that? Because who, exactly, do you think is devising this secret agenda?

As he goes on to note, today’s Democrats and Republicans get their policy advice from very different sources: Democrats engage people with credentials and expertise. They still may be wrong, but they’re drawn from pools of folks having recognized expertise. Republicans these days prefer “experts” who are pure hacks–people who can be counted on to support whatever the party says.

Krugman was writing before Trump’s unveiling of his insane tariffs. In the wake of that announcement, former Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers posted that “The best estimate of the loss from tariff policy is now [close] to $30 trillion or $300,000 per family of four.”  Former Vice-President (and Trump toady) Mike Pence was quoted as saying that “The Trump Tariff Tax is the largest peacetime tax hike in U.S. history.” Dow futures lost 1200 points. A coalition of 12 countries officially moved to abandon the dollar in favor of local currencies for cross-border trade.

And that was just on day one.

MAGA cultists may not recognize the likely economic devastation, but a majority of American businesspeople do. So do the “profit over patriotism” lawyers who have bent the knee rather than stand up for the rule of law. And so do the economists and related scholars who work for the universities that have cowered and complied in order to retain federal grants.

In barely three months in office, an ignorant and petty madman has done incalculable damage to the rule of law, to the social safety net, to public health, to America’s alliances abroad– and now to a once-flourishing economy.

Increasing numbers of citizens are coming to understand the gravity of these actions. Call me Pollyanna, but I think the tariffs will provide a wake-up call to the cynical plutocrats who have been willing to go along with the mad king–ignoring the incredible damage being done to average Americans– in hopes of profiting from further tax cuts.

There’s an old political adage to the effect that matters have to “hit bottom” before spineless officials will take action. There’s an excellent case to be made that–thanks to our obviously insane Chief Executive–we’re there.

Comments

Welcome To The Gulag

A friend of mine recently called to tell me a chilling story. He has a family member who teaches middle-schoolers in our city’s public school system. The students come from a relatively poor area, and are largely Hispanic ten and eleven-year-olds.

And for the past few weeks, his classroom has been visited, sporadically, by ICE.

The ICE officers who come to his classroom have a standard routine; they take a student–a ten or eleven-year-old–out of the classroom and the school for “questioning” of some sort. Sometimes, that student is returned; sometimes–presumably, if it is determined that he or she is undocumented–that student never returns. In the latter case, according to what my friend’s relative has been told, the student, along with his or her parents, has been summarily deported.

My friend was appalled. His relative, the teacher, is infuriated, but helpless.

We don’t know anything more about this invasion of a public school classroom. We don’t know whether the child or the parents are afforded any sort of due process, or whether they have the services of legal counsel. (According to a recent article, routine denial of due process in immigration cases is an intentional part of Trump’s effort to undermine the rule of law.) We don’t know whether they are simply taken, like the widely-reported case of the Massachusetts graduate student with a valid visa who was accosted by plain-clothes ICE officials on a city street, arrested and flown to Louisiana for the “crime” of writing an op-ed with which our current dictator disagreed.

Undocumented immigrants have, by definition, broken the law. They’ve come to the United States without submitting themselves to our incredibly complicated and lengthy legal immigration process. In most cases, that is the only law they’ve broken. The middle-schoolers who are being “disappeared” from the classroom of my friend’s relative are innocent of any intentional lawbreaking, as are the thousands of DACA kids who were brought here as small children.

It is one thing to agree with the administration that undocumented immigrants who have been convicted of crimes while on our soil should be deported; it is another thing entirely to stand by and watch hard-working and otherwise law-abiding people–and their children–being summarily snatched from their lives and their classrooms and taken…where? How?

All my friend really knows is what his teacher/relative is experiencing. His relative doesn’t know any more than the fact that ICE periodically appears in his classroom, takes a child away, and sometimes brings that child back.

And sometimes, doesn’t.

But thanks to the media, we do know about the graduate students (lovingly referred to as “lunatics” by Marco Rubio, our new and especially despicable Secretary of State) who are being rounded up and stripped of their entirely legal residency for the “crime” of expressing opinions with which that our madman President disagrees. Despite assertions to the effect that these students have assisted Hamas and other terrorist organizations, none of them has been credibly accused–indeed, accused at all– of any such activity. No evidence of terrorist support has even been offered. It has become abundantly clear that the only “aid and comfort” offered has come in the form of opinions–the expression of which, at least until the advent of our current fascist regime, has been constitutionally protected.

Is it possible that my friend, his relative, and yours truly are jumping to unwarranted conclusions? All we know, as I’ve said, is that ICE is routinely visiting a largely Hispanic public school classroom, taking individual students out for interrogation, and returning some but not all of them. Perhaps the fact that this is occuring during a time when we are seeing reports of unconstitutional behaviors nationally is making us more suspicious than we would otherwise be.

Perhaps.

Since I have only the information I have shared above, I’m asking any of my readers who might have additional information to share it. (I doubt any ICE personnel read this blog, but if there is such a reader, I would especially welcome a comment correcting any erroneous suppositions. I would be extremely happy to have those suppositions corrected–and the picture I’ve formed of terrified ten-year-olds expunged.)

If, however, the conclusions we’ve reached, based upon what we do know, turn out to be accurate, that would suggest that Trump has taken the U.S. much farther down the path to a fascist autocracy than most of us have thus far recognized.

I hope to see a lot of you at tomorrow’s protest….

Comments