Category Archives: Random Blogging

What We Can Do

Last week, I had separate lunches with two women I know, and the conversations in both revolved around anxieties produced by Trump’s coup.  Both of my companions focused on the same question: what can an individual do? Both women seemed to think that–because I’m a political policy blogger– I would have an answer, or at the very least, a suggestion.

If only!

I have a big problem–one that’s undoubtedly shared– with helplessness. Tell me there’s a problem to be solved, but I have to climb that mountain to solve it, and I’ll pull on hiking boots and make the attempt. Tell me there’s a problem, but there’s nothing I can do about it, and I’m beside myself.

I wasn’t able to share any brilliant (or even dumb) insights with my luncheon companions, but a recent Substack from Hoosiers4Democracy reminded me that we are not without the ability to mount effective protests.  We can and should continue our calls and emails to the elected cowards like Todd Young (and even to the moronic Christian Nationalists like Jim Banks). Posts to social media aren’t really a substitute for action, but even singing to the choir can probably be helpful, so we can continue those. When there is an in-person protest, we absolutely should turn out.

But as H4D reminded readers, economic “messages” are likely to be more effective. (As someone recently posted, money is the. only thing these jerks respect!)

We MUST command the attention of the corporations funding our representatives to make it clear that the policies of this administration are unpopular! We must do this in a way that is immediate, impactful, and sustainable. We are asking you to participate in several upcoming, nationally planned, economic boycott events that will remind our leaders and representatives that we have more power than they think and that they work for us. 70% of the U.S. economy is consumer driven. When money talks, they listen.

First up, join H4D on February 28, 2025 for the national Economic Blackout. This event originated with The People’s Union USA and is being promoted by organizations across the country. Absolutely NO SPENDING for 24 hours beginning at midnight on February 27th. If you must spend on essentials, please try to shop small, local stores and avoid using bank cards and credit cards.

We also ask that you maximize your impact by recruiting 3 friends or family members to participate and to ask them to recruit 3 people to participate, in the hopes of creating a snowball effect.

There is additional information on the Economic Blackout and other upcoming events, available at The People’s Union Economic Blackout.

News of the planned economic action has been spreading. So has debate about its likely efficacy. Nevertheless, if enough people participate, a day of severely diminished economic activity will send a clear message. (The threat of additional boycotts may also stiffen the spines of companies that have decided to “obey in advance” by scrapping their DEI programs and other equity efforts in order to curry favor with our bigoted would-be monarch.)

The genius of the protest on the 28th is that it offers those of us who’ve been feeling helpless a virtually painless way to be heard. It can be daunting to go out in freezing weather to physically protest (although thousands of our fellow Americans have done so). People who must work long hours cannot make personal visits to the offices of Congressmen and Senators. Even calls and emails require some positive effort. But the protest on the 28th requires us to do nothing. It’s a purposeful nothing that requires little in the way of effort or hardship. There are very few purchases that cannot be delayed–or advanced– a day, or better still, reconsidered.

There are more aggressive plans to follow up on the action planned for the 28th with more extensive actions– a number of grassroots groups have come together in a movement called Shutdown 315 to urge Americans to support a nationwide shutdown. Participants would  not only stop making purchases from major corporations, but would abstain from social media use and absent themselves from work on March 15th. This is a more ambitious effort, and if successful is likely to have a significant effect.

Participation in planned boycotts of the large companies that have “obeyed in advance” are also planned.

If enough Americans participate in these very peaceful protests, our voices will be heard. They represent a promising initial answer to the anguished question: what can I do?

Tell your friends and family. Spread the word. 

Fight back against the coup.

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Nazification

While Musk and his techno-nerds are busily dismantling agencies of the federal government that–among other things– keep planes in the air and food free from e coli, J.D. Vance is attacking America’s international alliances and giving aid and comfort to the neo-Nazis in Germany and elsewhere. 

Heather Cox Richardson (among several others) recently reported on Vance’s shameful performance.

At the conference on Friday, February 14, Vice President J.D. Vance launched what The Guardian’s Patrick Wintour called “a brutal ideological assault” against Europe, attacking the values the United States used to share with Europe but which Vance and the other members of the Trump administration are now working to destroy.

Vance and MAGA Christian nationalists reject the principles of secular democracy and instead align with leaders like Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán. They claim that the equal rights central to democracy undermine nations by treating women and racial, religious, and gender minorities as equal to white Christian men. They want to see an end to the immigration that they believe weakens a nation’s people, and for government to reinforce traditional religious and patriarchal values.

Vance attacked current European values and warned that the crisis for the region was not external actors like Russia or China, but rather “the threat from within.” He accused Europe of censoring free speech, but it was clear—especially coming from the representative of a regime that has erased great swaths of public knowledge because it objects to words like “gender”—that what he really objected to was restrictions on the speech of far-right ideologues.

Vance followed his speech by throwing his support behind the neo-Nazi AfD, breaking protocol by refusing to meet with the German chancellor, and breaking a longstanding taboo by accepting a meeting with the leader of AfD.

According to The New Republic, “the United States of America is becoming part of a global fascist network.” 

Trump called Vance’s speech “very brilliant.”

It’s time to call a Nazi a Nazi. 

Vance is most certainly not “going rogue.” Musk’s neo-Nazi proclivities were obvious even before his “heil Hitler” salute–he turned Twitter into a cesspool of fascist, racist and anti-Semitic hate that would have earned plaudits from Der Fuhrur, and he has assembled a group of techie apparachicks who share his political orientation–whenever journalists investigate the social media trail left by of one of his operatives, they find horrifying–and unambiguous–evidence. For example, Marko Elez, who had access to the Treasury Department’s central payments system, has consistently advocated racism and eugenics. Musk has encouraged right-wing political movements in at least 18 countries. 

Of course, racism has long been Trump’s defining feature.

Thanks primarily to America’s role in the Second World War, most of us are unaware that, historically, significant numbers of Americans have been Nazi sympathizers. (Our history classes–unlike those in Germany–have shied away from reporting accurately and completely about slavery, let alone the nation’s very substantial history of neo-Nazi ideology.)

Historians have reported on the significant “inspiration” that Hitler took from the United States. 

When the Nazis set out to legally disenfranchise and discriminate against Jewish citizens, they weren’t just coming up with ideas out of thin air. They closely studied the laws of another country. According to James Q. Whitman, author of Hitler’s American Model, that country was the United States.

“America in the early 20th century was the leading racist jurisdiction in the world,” says Whitman, who is a professor at Yale Law School. “Nazi lawyers, as a result, were interested in, looked very closely at, [and] were ultimately influenced by American race law.”

While Jim Crow was a primary example, Hitler’s administration took additional lessons from the nation’s designations of Native Americans, Filipinos and other groups as non-citizens–“othering” those populations even though they lived in the U.S. or its territories. These models influenced the citizenship portion of the Nuremberg Laws, which stripped Jewish Germans of  citizenship and re-classified them as “nationals.”

The Nazis adopted some parts of Jim Crow laws wholesale, especially America’s anti-miscegenation laws, which prohibited interracial marriages in 30 of 48 states. As the linked article notes, the desire to ban Jewish and Aryan intermarriages presented the Nazis with a dilemma: How would they tell who was Jewish and who was not?  So the Nazis looked to America, and American jurisprudence on how to classify who belonged to which “race.”

Numerous scholars and pundits have pointed to the parallels between Trump II and Germany in the 30s. Fewer have noted the unsavory aspects of our own population’s history that are emerging once again to facilitate a new–and even more expansive– “final solution.”

We ignore that history and those parallels at our peril.

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What MAGA Has Wrought

When Jennifer Rubin and Norman Eisen established The Contrarian, with the intent of keeping tabs on what was clearly going to be a rogue, anti-American administration, I immediately subscribed. (I know a lot of you really don’t want to know about the minutia of Trump/Musk’s assaults on the American Idea, but the publication is worthwhile–begin by just “skimming” if you can’t stomach the details.)

If you just want an overview, a recent article by Jennifer Rubin summed up the incredible amount of damage that these two ignoramuses–Trump and Musk–have done in just the first month of Trump II.

Rubin began by quoting Senator Maria Cantwell:

Senator Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.), the ranking member on the Senate Commerce Committee, called out the mindless slashing of vital government employees. “The FAA is already short 800 technicians and these firings inject unnecessary risk into the airspace—in the aftermath of four deadly crashes in the last month,” she said. Acting-president Elon Musk’s DOGE outfit cut 300 FAA employees.

Rubin proceeded to list just a few examples of the major damage being caused by indiscriminate firings undertaken by bozos who didn’t bother to figure out what tasks their targets actually performed or how essential those task might be.

  • Flying is arguably less safe and the risk of calamities is higher.
  • Food safety has degraded and the danger of food contamination is higher.
  • American predominance in science and medicine has been undercut, with the development of life-saving drugs slowed.
  • Farmers are losing income and market share, labs working on crop innovation are shutting down, and supply-chain businesses are facing layoffs. In short, American agriculture (not to mention our image and influence in the world) has become worse off.

As Rubin points out, these Muskovite cuts are not part of an actual reworking strategy.

These are not steps of a brilliant plan to modernize and improve performance. Mindlessly slashing government agencies impinges on the health and safety of all Americans, while the layoffs weaken our economy. (Government workers, of course, live and work throughout America, not just in D.C.) Moreover, Musk-Trump personnel cuts add to the unemployment rolls. Unless fired employees can instantaneously find comparable work, some will seek public assistance, while others will pay less in taxes, reduce purchases, and/or go further into debt….

I doubt many voted for Trump (none for Musk, certainly) because they wanted to increase aircraft accidents and food poisonings while holding back medical science—let alone because they wanted to increase unemployment and shrink the economy. But that is what they are getting—it’s what we’re all getting.

The GOP White House and the spineless Republican senators who confirmed unfit nominees, as well as House Republicans who have ceded the power of the purse to an unelected South African billionaire, own the results of their demolition of government.

This particular article preceded the unconscionable treason of Trump’s betrayal of Ukraine and his undermining of NATO.

In one short month, the administration installed by MAGA cultists has given Putin a victory he could never have won on a battlefield–he is winning a war with the United States without firing a shot.

The MAGA Americans who installed and support this neo-Nazi regime are motivated by one primary–and primal–emotion: racism. It’s past time to call it for what it is.

Trump voters who offer economic or other excuses for their votes are simply unwilling to admit that what really motivates their support is fear of losing White Christian privilege. They were willing to install this clown car of petty incompetents and grifters in return for promises to attack DEI programs and trans children.

If real Americans–those of us who value liberty and equality and the Constitution–fail to rise up, fail to reverse the carnage– future history books will record that America’s precipitous collapse was caused by the persistence of “racial grievance,” the bigotries that study after study have identified as central to the MAGA cult.

As Rubin notes, the “Pottery Barn rule” applies here: you broke it, you own it.

In the case of Musk, Trump, and the AWOL Republicans in Congress, they are responsible for the hopes, aspirations, problems, well-being, and lives of roughly 347M Americans. They may relish breaking government; they may revel in the nihilism. But all of this comes with a steep price. The Contrarian is unafraid to point out that wildly slashing government means Republicans own the airplane disasters, the E. Coli outbreaks, the cancelled medical trials, the excess unemployment, and the consequent damage done when competent people performing critical tasks are fired.

They will also own a world in which the United States has become a minor and unreliable global player.

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Let’s Talk About “Merit”

I don’t think anything has pissed me off more than Donald Trump’s insistence that DEI programs are just an effort to privilege “those people” (insert the object of your bias) over meritorious White guys. As a meme I’ve seen points out, that has it exactly backwards: DEI is an effort to level a very tilted playing field–an effort to combat the longstanding automatic preference given to White guys over more qualified women and minorities.

Study after study confirms that when identical resumes are sent to prospective employers by fictitious applicants–differing only in use of “white sounding” or “black sounding” names–the white sounding applicants get over twice as many interviews.

His pious defense of merit is especially ironic (to put it mildly)  when it is accompanied by Trump’s own incredibly unqualified nominees–a collection of cranks, clowns, conspiracy theorists and sycophants the likes of which no previous President has ever tried to elevate to positions of responsibility. As a friend has noted, in what was a massive understatement, “I’ve seen better cabinets at IKEA.”

For generations, American White guys–more accurately, straight White Christian males–have enjoyed a raft of entirely unmerited advantages.

I will grant that many of the DEI programs have proven to be less than effective, and some have suffered from a surfeit of what we used to call “political correctness.” But they aren’t being attacked for dubious efficacy. If there was any lingering doubt about the profound racism of Trump and MAGA, Trump’s immediate attacks on DEI efforts, and his race to scrub government websites of anything remotely “woke,” should erase it. (No one could ever accuse MAGA folks of being woke–a term that simply means that one has awakened to the existence of structural impediments to civic and economic fairness. They aren’t interested in being fair, or to rewarding individual merit found in women or members of minorities.)

The idea of an actual meritocracy is appealing. But a lot of what we attribute to “merit” is really a leg up, rooted in racial, religious or financial privilege.

The problems with America’s approach to meritocracy implicate–yet again–my two favorite admonitions: “it depends” and “it’s more complicated than that.” We are gradually and reluctantly coming to see, for example, that our definition of what constitutes merit in a given area is often too constricted, and our devices for measuring and determining what constitutes relevant merit may be inadequate.

When I was still teaching, I used to cite the example of an old rule (I’ve long since forgotten which southern state it was from) that restricted entry into local carpenters’ unions to high school graduates who weighed at least 180 pounds. Those requirements kept most Black and female applicants out–in that place at that time, few Blacks graduated from high school, and few women weighed over 180 pounds. The purported justification for the rule was that carpenters needed to be able to read construction plans and needed to be able to pick up at least X number of pounds of materials on the worksite.

But–rather obviously–the best way to determine whether applicants should be admitted to the carpentry trade would be to test them on their ability to read and understand plans and drawings, and to have them demonstrate that they could pick up the necessary weight.

The bottom line is that even seemingly neutral criteria can be–and frequently have been–manipulated so that they are not really neutral.

Those of us who’ve served on university admissions committees know that an applicant’s GPA and test results are necessary but incomplete indicators of whether that applicant will do the academic work required.  We also look for evidence of motivation and discipline.

The definition of merit in a given situation can be complicated. What skills are relevant? What evidence is probative?

One thing has already become obvious: Donald Trump’s criterion for “merit”– being a straight White Christian Nationalist loyal to Donald J. Trump–is inconsistent with the demands of the positions to be filled.

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It’s More Complicated Than That

The MAGA movement is anything but conservative–and that assertion is supported by the number of genuine conservatives who identify as “Never Trumpers.” 

One of my favorites in that group is David French, whom I often cite on this blog. French self-identfies as an Evangelical Christian; he is also a lawyer who respects the rule of law, who understands that policy is complicated, and who recognizes that simplistic answers are almost always counterproductive.

French recently had a lengthy column in the New York Times on populism, in which he made a number of trenchant, important observations. I encourage you to click through and read the whole essay, but I particularly want to focus on a few key points. 

French began by rebutting a comment by the odious Steve Bannon to the effect that Americans really haven’t examined Trump’s populism. French finds that laughable; as he says, there have been countless focus groups of Trump voters, numerous “man-on-the-street” interviews and interviews with supporters at Trump rallies. Anyone who follows politics has read books, watched documentaries and listened to podcasts. “And if you live in Trump country, as I do, you’ll find that Trump voters are very eager to explain themselves. This is not a quiet movement. They don’t exactly hide their interests and passions.”

French warns that “Regardless of how a populist movement starts, it virtually always devolves into a cesspool of corruption and spite. And that’s exactly where we are today.”

Populism is never separate from this “voice of passion.” That is its defining characteristic. It begins in deep grievance. Some of those grievances can be quite real and consequential — such as when modern populist anger is rooted in fury over the Great Recession, long wars in the Middle East or shuttered factories in the Midwest.

Some of the problems, however, that motivate populists aren’t problems at all, and populist anger is rooted in something else entirely. Segregationist zeal fueled Southern populism for generations, for example. Xenophobia has always created fertile ground for populist demagogues.

But regardless of whether the grievances are justified, the real energy of populism is in its emotion — in its raw, unmitigated anger. It’s that passion that makes populist movements so vulnerable to charlatans and demagogues.

As French says, there’s a reason for that vulnerability– actually solving legitimate grievances with good policy is hard; inflaming passion is much easier.
 

There was no easy way to crawl back from the 2008 financial crisis. There are no easy answers in the Middle East, despite Trump’s faith in coastal real estate development in Gaza. The reasons for the loss of Midwest manufacturing jobs go far beyond the trade deals that “they” inflicted on “us.”

So populist politicians lean on the passion, reflecting populist anger back at the public. “The shared emotional connection delivers a singular message: I am your champion, and you are my legions.”

Populism may not place a high premium on honesty, but it is all about authenticity. Virtually every Trump voter I know loves that he speaks his mind and says what other people are thinking but are too afraid to say. 

The most effective populist tactics, or course, are deflection and racism: anything that goes wrong is “their” fault.

When the elected populists don’t fix everything (because they can’t), they lean back on their shared emotional bond to avoid accountability or consequences. After all, in the never-ending battle of us versus them, one can always blame the other side for every failure and frustration. At least for a while.

We’ve seen this clearly with Republican devotion to Donald Trump. He inherited a growing economy and maintained its growth for the first three years of his term. While he deserves a degree of credit for that continued economic success, Trump’s messaging was relentless — he had created the strongest economy in the world.

But what of the failures of Trump’s first term? Well, that’s a “they” problem.

The soaring murder rate in 2020 wasn’t Trump’s fault. That was all about B.L.M. and the left.

The confusion, incompetence and deception that marked Trump’s response to the pandemic were forgotten. The left was the real villain of the pandemic, with its school closings and mask mandates….So when America ended Trump’s first term deeply divided, with lower life expectancy, more murder, less economic growth, more deadly overdoses and higher unemployment than when he entered the Oval Office, none of that was his fault. All of it was due to circumstances beyond his control.

French reminds us that defeating populism doesn’t require defending the status quo. It does, however, require a polity that isn’t so consumed with hatred of “those people” that nothing else matters.

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