What Keeps Me Up Nights

I sure hope I make it to November–not because I’m old (although I am), but because I spend my days obsessively following politics–both national and local– and vacillating between hope and despair. Indiana is scary enough, but as I noted yesterday, the national election will pose an existential challenge: America will either go forward or far, far back.

The source of my angst about the Presidential election was recently summarized in one of Robert Hubbell’s daily Substack newsletters. As he wrote:

The election will be decided by hundreds of millions of Americans taking democracy seriously by voting in tens of thousands of elections at a moment in history when one party wants to deny women full citizenship and personhood, deny Black Americans the right to vote, deny LGBTQ Americans their dignity and equality, deny children safe schools, deny all Americans a future free of man-made climate catastrophes, deny workers of a living wage, and deny the peaceful transfer of power every four years.

When I look at the threat posed by that party–once (in a very different world) my own party–I fear for the futures of my grandchildren and the others of their generation. I get bitter when I think about a reversal of the social progress made by activists of my own and previous generations who worked hard to bring the American “body politic” closer to our founding aspirations of liberty and equality. 

But most of all, I mourn the death of my long-held belief that the great majority of my fellow Americans are sensible, good-hearted and fair-minded. Until very recently–actually, 2016–although I knew that there were angry, disturbed and hate-filled people “out there”–I estimated their percentage of the population at something between 10%-15%. I have been rudely disabused of that estimate, given the grim recognition that millions of my fellow-citizens continue to support a man who is defiantly ignorant, hateful and very obviously deeply mentally-ill–presumably, because he gives them permission to revel in and voice their own bigotries and grievances.

And then there’s the Electoral College, which scholars estimate gives Republicans a 3% advantage….

But then I get hopeful. (I have emotional whiplash..)

The Harris/Walz ticket is so normal, and the enthusiasm they’ve generated is so encouraging. Not only do the Democrats have better candidates, former Republicans–including very conservative ones like Liz Cheney– are coming out of the woodwork daily to endorse them. They’ve raised much more money, which–in addition to powering their campaign–is another sign of support and enthusiasm. They have a widespread “ground game” with far more field offices than the Republicans. New registrations are up, especially among groups that tilt Democratic, calling the “likely voter” screens employed by pollsters into question. 

In the wake of 2016, there has also been an explosion of grass-roots organizing. According to a 2019 report from the American Community Project, those post-2016 grassroots groups — sometimes labeled “Resistance” groups — have become an electoral force to be reckoned with.

Reporters and academics have established certain baseline facts: The new groups are disproportionately composed of middle-aged to retirement-age college-educated women.

They are especially prominent in America’s “suburbs.”

Their hands-on campaigning formed part of the “Blue Wave” that flipped suburban seats to the Democrats in November 2018.

Since 2019, those groups have continued to grow and multiply, in significant part thanks to Dobbs, the Supreme Court’s reversal of a constitutional right to reproductive liberty which continues to motivate voters, especially but not exclusively women voters. 

I can’t shake my belief that if Americans of good will and good sense turn out to vote, Democrats will not only win, but win big, that November could really be a “Blue Wave” election, a turning point that could revive my previous faith in the American public. 

MAGA is, after all, a reaction to the broad cultural changes in this country–changes that include widespread acceptance of the growing equality of women, LGBTQ+ Americans and people of color. Large numbers of families now include same-sex couples and/or religious and racial intermarriages. Fewer Americans report memberships in fundamentalist Churches. Workplaces are increasingly diverse, and Americans from a variety of backgrounds now work together and get to know each other. All of those cultural changes have lessened fears of the “Other” that were once more widespread.

I remained convinced that MAGA Republicanism is a panicked reaction to those cultural changes by people who feel threatened by them. Social change is destabilizing, especially for people who lack the personal or communal resources to adapt–but surely, that doesn’t describe a majority of Americans.

In November, we’ll see which of these contending analyses is correct, and we’ll know what kind of world my grandchildren will inhabit.

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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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Good News On Guns?

There is so much about the world I inhabit that I don’t understand.

I’ve repeatedly posted about my inability to get my head around support for an ignorant, obviously deeply mentally-ill candidate for president, for example. I mean, what in the world do people see in a self-engrossed buffoon given to bizarre, nonsensical rants that makes them want to give him control of the nuclear codes?

There are other aspects of American life that I find equally incomprehensible, and one of them is Americans’ gun fetish, which has given us repeated, horrific mass and school shootings.

In some ways, the problem with gun ownership is the thornier of the two: we can get rid of Trump by electing his sane and intellectually superior opponent, but even if we changed gun laws tomorrow–outlawing, for example, the personal ownership of assault weapons–we would still be faced with the fact that millions of Americans already own millions of weapons.

Many of those weapons, to be sure, are in the hands of responsible people–sportsmen, adults aware of and compliant with safety measures–but research suggests that a vastly disproportionate number are in the possession of far-Right conspiracy theorists and looneys styling themselves as “militia” members.

We are never going to be able to get rid of those millions of weapons. Even those of us who marvel at the current, clearly ahistorical acceptance of a dramatically-enlarged application of the Second Amendment nevertheless recognize that the Amendment would not allow broad confiscation of guns.

It is a thorny problem, and as with so many difficult issues, progress will inevitably be incremental. That said, there are encouraging signs that at least some progress is being made. Back in April, Daily Kos reported on the woes of the NRA.

Early this year, Wayne LaPierre resigned ahead of a trial over his flagrant misuse of the organization’s funds to “treat himself to yacht trips, African safaris, and regular use of a private jet.’

In the wake of LaPierre’s resignation, the organization has reportedly descended into infighting. Finding a new leader has proven so difficult that not even Donald Trump Jr., who spent years talking himself up as the NRA’s next leader, is willing to take the job. Or at least, he says he wouldn’t, though no one has actually asked him to step in.

Leadership aside, the NRA now has only a fraction of the funds they had to sling around in past election seasons. They’ve declined from the $50 million they put into races in 2016 to only $11 million in their PAC and SuperPAC combined as of the last filing. Membership is also down by over a million, to around five million, which is half the goal LaPierre set for 2023 a decade ago.

And that’s not all that’s declined. So have gun sales. So what does that mean for the gun lobby?

The financial troubles (and thus the waning influence) of the NRA is very good news, because that organization was able to block reasonable firearms policies. As the article notes, other gun organizations aren’t able to exert the lobbying heft of the NRA.

With the NRA fading, there are other gun lobby groups working to gain more influence. However, none of them seem to have the level of influence, extensive finances, and highly effective lobbyists that the NRA had a few years ago. Those other organizations haven’t spent decades nurturing relationships with both politicians and deep-pocketed donors. The decline of the NRA seems like a genuine moment of weakness in the pro-gun lobby.

The article concludes with the hopeful proposition that–despite “stupid state laws”– “America may have passed ‘peak gun.” That’s probably too optimistic. On the other hand, it implicitly recognizes the importance of culture–and culture change– when dealing with issues that can seem intractable.

The reason the culture wars have flared so intensely these last few years is that frightened people have recognized the overwhelming threat to White Christian male dominance posed by the changes they are seeing in public opinion. America’s culture warriors are desperately trying to stop the growth of newly inclusive attitudes, evidenced by acceptance of women and gay folks and people of color, and the rejection of rules based solely upon the doctrines of favored religious denominations.

Those frightened “warriors” are the ones clinging to their “Second Amendment right” to own an AR-15. As their numbers diminish, so will the public safety danger posed by angry men (almost all mass killers are male) who want to stop the spinning of a world that is changing in ways that they believe disempower them.

It’s far from a perfect solution, but at least the culture change on guns seems to be heading in the right direction.

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The Evidence Continues To Mount

Inequality.org recently took an in-depth look at the Right-wing’s increasingly successful effort to destroy public education. In an article titled “Private Fortunes Vs. Public Education,” the article began

The United States essentially invented public education. Back in the 1780s, notes the Center on Education Policy, federal legislation “granted federal lands to new states and set aside a portion of those lands to be used to fund public schools.” By the 18th century’s close, most Americans had embraced the notion of “using public funds to support public schooling for the common good.”

In the mid-20th century, amid growing levels of economic equality, that public financial support for public schools would expand mightily. The results would be impressive. By 1970, graduation rates from American high schools — institutions, notes historian Claudia Goldin, themselves “rooted in egalitarianism” — had quadrupled over 1920 levels.

But that era of growing equality and expanding public education would start fading in the 1970s. Over recent years, a new U.S. Senate report makes clear, that fade has only intensified.

The article went on to report that, during the last decade, funding for the nation’s public schools has “barely increased,” while  “state spending on tax breaks and subsidies for private schools has skyrocketed by 408 percent.”

A report from the Brookings Institution found that universal voucher programs “are unwinding two centuries of tradition in U.S. public education” and that the programs “violate basic traditions of church-state separation, anti-discrimination, and public accountability.” As the researcher concluded, even if the courts -ignoring over fifty years of precedents–rule that these voucher programs are constitutionally permissible, “we should assess them against our principles as a nation.”

Indiana is a prime example. For severa years, the Hoosier state has had the nation’s largest voucher program. It was originally justified as a way to allow poor children to escape “failing public schools,” there were income limits for families taking advantage of the program, and vouchers use was limited to children who had first attended a public school. Those restrictions were steadily eased, and a few days ago, the Indianapolis Star confirmed what I have repeatedly pointed out on this blog: costs have exploded and Indiana’s voucher program has become a subsidy for parochial schools and the well-to-do.

The Star article began with the story of a father who had been paying his daughter’s tuition at a private religious school in Mishawaka, Indiana. The school informed him that Hoosier taxpayers stood ready to assume most of the nearly $10,000 annual cost.

Garcia applied and his daughter joined more than 600 other students ― or about 90% of Marian’s enrollment ― utilizing the state grants to pay for their schooling 2023-24. The tax-funded payments generated $4.3 million for the private school…

A three-month investigation by University of Notre Dame students in the Gallivan Program for Journalism, Ethics, and Democracy found that a majority of the families in the Indiana voucher program today were previously paying for private school on their own, just like Garcia. Yet the state stepped in to offer a financial subsidy to parents who didn’t need it ― a costly decision critics say is hurting public schools, which educate more than 90% of the approximately one million K-12 students in Indiana.

Started in 2011 under former Gov. Mitch Daniels as an avenue to help low-income students escape failing public schools, the voucher program has changed dramatically in the last decade. While it has helped thousands of families choose their preferred school, the cost is projected to grow 263 percent in just five years. This expansion is predicted to force public school districts to either make severe cuts or ask taxpayers for more money through public referendums.

The Indiana legislature has turned the program into “a subsidy for predominantly wealthy, white suburban families”. The Star  found that–far from helping poor minority children– the program’s “average recipient is a white female who has never attended public school, from a family earning more than $99,000 a year.”

That cushy subsidy for the well-to-do has cost Indiana’s public schools an estimated $600 million this year.

In 2011, in order for a family of four to qualify for a voucher, the family could make up to $40,000 a year. Today, the same family can qualify while making $222,000 a year.  A program that initially cost Indiana taxpayers $15.5 million per year cost more than $300 million last year, and is projected to top $600 million this year. 

Meanwhile, a mountain of research confirms that educational outcomes have not improved–and in some places and some subjects, have declined.

Researchers have also identified the “dark money” behind the attack on public education, and Project 2025 acknowledges that the goal is to replace public schools with private and parochial ones.

In Indiana, where gerrymandering has given the GOP carte blanche to do their worst, they’re already working on it.

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More About Those “Rutabaga” Districts..

A few days ago, I wrote about the problem posed by what I called “rutabaga” voters--Hoosiers who would elect a vegetable if it had an “R” next to its name on the ballot. In that post, I focused on District 88, but I’ve received an email from a very politically-savvy friend about another district that is eminently winnable if the sane candidate has sufficient resources to get his message out. My friend has long been negative about Indiana voters and Democratic chances in the state, so his belief that this district is winnable is consequential.

Here’s that email in its entirety.

Friends,

I have had multiple discussions with people regarding how to make a meaningful and impactful impact on elections here in Indiana. That is genuinely a challenge these days. After chatting with knowledgeable people, the most meaningful thing we can do is to try to help the Democrats win enough seats to end the Republican supermajority in the Indiana legislature.

If we are going to be successful in doing so, the most challenging seat to flip will be in IndianaHouse District 24. If we win this district, however, we impact the Republican’s ability to keep their uncontested grip on Indiana governance.

Indiana House District 24 encompasses Westfield (54%), Carmel (33%), Sheridan (7%), and portions of Zionsville (7%). It is a lean Republican District with much new suburban growth since 2020. Joe Biden received 45.7 percent in 2020. Since 2020, registrations have increased by 70% inWestfield. These registrations bode well for Democrats, as new voters are mostly under fifty and tend to lean Democrat. House District 24 is an open seat.

The Democrat candidate is Josh Lowery. Josh and his family live in Westfield. Josh ran for the state senate in 2022. His wife Alexis ran for Westfield City Council in 2023 and lost to a well-funded Patrick Tamm by thirty votes. So, the Lowry name identification is better than average, particularly in the population center of Westfield. Josh is an attorney. Josh and Alexis are well-known in the community beyond their political participation. They are foster parents and have fostered twelve children, five of whom they have adopted.

Hunter Smith is a former Indianapolis Colts punter who lives in the Zionsville portion of House District 24. Hunter Smith is a disciple of Republican Lt. Governor candidate Micah Beckwith and his extreme Christian nationalist agenda and the most extreme elements of the Republican party. He supports Beckwith’s positions, including those he took as a member of the Hamilton East Public Library when he voted for a book-banning policy that put Hamilton County in the national news.

Smith won a contested GOP primary where he ran to the right. He is pro-life without exceptions, pro-parents’ rights in school, pro-school choice, and anti-LGBTIQQ, particularly emphasizing he wants to ban Pride Month because it promotes the “wickedness of the LGBT agenda.”

House District 24 is winnable and a key district in House Democrats’ push to flip four seats to break the Indiana House Republican’s supermajority in the House. While it is a lean Republican District, Josh Lowry is more aligned with the district than the far-right extremist Hunter Smith. Lowry’s hopes are enhanced by the top of the ticket, where both Kamala Harris and Democratic Gubernatorial nominee Jennifer McCormack are currently polling above expectations in that district.

This race is winnable if Josh can raise the necessary funds to inform voters that Hunter Smith is one of the most extreme candidates in the state on the Republican ticket this fall.

I am not holding a fundraiser or going to pressure anyone to donate. Still, I wanted to share this information if you are inclined to do something that could make a material difference for Indiana. It takes relatively little money to make a meaningful difference in a legislative district, and winning this district could have an oversized impact on the Indiana government. If you are inclined, you can learn more about Josh and donate online at www.lowryforindiana.com.

That’s the end of the email.

I have sent a contribution to Lowry, and I hope many of you reading this will join me. The last thing we need in this state is a pro-censorship, anti-choice clone of theocrat Micah Beckwith buttressing a GOP super-majority in Indiana’s already-terrible, culture-war legislature.

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