I’ll Just Leave This Here…

Just in case you haven’t been following the chaos at Health and Human Services–or haven’t recognized the probable effects of placing a demented conspiracy theorist at its head– nine former CDC Directors published a joint op-ed in the New York Times, titled “We Ran The CDC: Kennedy Is Endangering Every American’s Health.”

An excerpt will convey their concerns, which are informed by that hated thing called expertise. (You know that in this administration, it’s disqualifying to actually know what you are talking about..)

Mr. Kennedy has fired thousands of federal health workers and severely weakened programs designed to protect Americans from cancer, heart attacks, strokes, lead poisoning, injury, violence and more. Amid the largest measles outbreak in the United States in a generation, he’s focused on unproven treatments while downplaying vaccines. He canceled investments in promising medical research that will leave us ill prepared for future health emergencies. He replacedexperts on federal health advisory committees with unqualified individuals who share his dangerous and unscientific views. He announced the end of U.S. support for global vaccination programs that protect millions of children and keep Americans safe, citing flawed research and making inaccurate statements. And he championedfederal legislation that will cause millions of people with health insurance through Medicaid to lose their coverage. Firing Dr. Monarez — which led to the resignations of top C.D.C. officials — adds considerable fuel to this raging fire.

We are worried about the wide-ranging impact that all these decisions will have on America’s health security. Residents of rural communities and people with disabilities will have even more limited access to health care. Families with low incomes who rely most heavily on community health clinics and support from state and local health departments will have fewer resources available to them. Children risk losing access to lifesaving vaccines because of the cost.

This is unacceptable, and it should alarm every American, regardless of political leanings.

It is really difficult to get one’s head around the extent of the damage–not to mention havoc– being wrought daily by the proudly ignorant, intellectually-limited and thoroughly repulsive creature who inexplicably occupies the Oval Office. America’s stature in the world has cratered; domestically, we are slipping into fascism; economically we’re heading toward recession; and the cretins Trump has put in charge of our governing agencies are waging war against science, knowledge and expertise. (And history, culture, art and architecture, education…)

It’s not much comfort to recognize that the health of the racist, know-nothing MAGA base will decline with that of the rest of us.

I keep thinking about a meme making the rounds on social media: our best hope is that Trump is getting his medical advice from Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

If the online speculation about his health caused by the sudden non-appearance of our publicity-hound President turns out to be accurate, perhaps there’s something to that…

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No More Dog Whistles

What has surprised me the most about America’s pell-mell plunge into autocracy and chaos under MAGA and Trump has been the rapidity with which the veil of civility has been discarded–how quickly a depressingly-large segment of our population has abandoned pretense and “dog whistles” and proudly paraded their racism. Even the pretense that DEI and “woke-ism” were really efforts at “reverse discrimination” has been so ludicrous it might as well have been delivered with a wink and a sneer.

We live in an ugly time–a time that has favored the emergence of some particularly ugly people. In a recent post, Charlie Sykes profiled one of them, an “out and proud” Nazi named Nick Fuentes. As he writes, “I confess, I still find it amazing — and deeply disturbing — that a Hitler-praising, crypto-Nazi troll has amassed a following in a movement already packed with cranks, bigots, and loons.”

Sykes quotes liberally from an Atlantic article that quite accurately notes, “Fuentes is not your garden variety racist — he serves it up in all its vile purity.”

Earlier this year, in yet another stream, Fuentes described Chicago as “n*gger hell.” He then laughed and added: “I just came up with that, just now. Isn’t that good?” Fuentes has also said that Hitler was “really fucking cool” and posited that “we need to go back to burning women alive.” (Fuentes did not respond to multiple requests for an interview.)

As Sykes observes, “this is shocking rhetoric even in 2025, when the far right has embraced race science and the federal government could be mistaken for pursuing the aims of the Proud Boys.”

And he quotes the Atlantic article for the observation that– in the deeply racist MAGA media ecosystem– “it’s working.”

Fuentes is among the most popular streamers on Rumble, a right-wing platform similar to YouTube; his videos regularly rack up hundreds of thousands of views. He’s gained more than 100,000 new followers on X since late June. The White House now posts on X in a gleefully cruel style that seems inspired by Fuentes’s followers, who call themselves “Groypers”—in fact, at the end of May, Trump posted a meme of himself that was first posted by a Groyper account. At least one Fuentes supporter, Paul Ingrassia, works in the administration as a liaison to the Department of Homeland Security. Ingrassia, who didn’t respond to an interview request, has also been nominated to lead the U.S. Office of Special Counsel. No matter how far Fuentes pushes his bigotry, his influence continues to rise.

Those of us who live in a very different world–a world where we recognize that humans come in assorted sizes and colors, a world where the mere fact of difference doesn’t translate to “existential threat”–can only be disheartened and baffled by these numbers. Yes, there have always been deeply disturbed individuals clinging to hateful ideologies that reassure them that they are blameless victims of one or another “Other.” But we are now seeing evidence that their numbers are far greater than most of us could have imagined.

When we look at the horrific damage being done to American government every day, when we see the corruption and self-dealing and kowtowing to the wealthy, it’s tempting to blame America’s plutocrats–the all-too-sleazy billionaires who surround our Mad King. And they certainly are not blameless. But their weapon–the appeal that allows MAGA to win elections and exercise power–is the viciousness and extent of racism and other assorted bigotries.

The public emergence and popularity of figures like Nick Fuentes is a sign of a deep social illness. I have no idea how to cure that illness, but I do know that we dismiss its significance at our peril. There are obviously millions of damaged, unhappy, resentful Americans–people who are desperate for someone to blame for their problems, desperate to identify some “Other” whose perfidy explains why their lives haven’t gone the way they wanted.

They are MAGA–and their version of a “great” America is terrifying.

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What If?

A couple of years ago–even before the new “Dark Ages” we are experiencing under the Trump Administration–I posted about a question that has obsessed me much of my adult life: what is the common good? What would a truly good society look like, and why does it matter?

I came across that post a couple of days ago, and decided that–if anything–those questions have become even more pertinent today.

As I wrote then, maybe it’s advancing age, or–even more likely– my growing concern that I may be watching human civilization disintegrate around me, but I increasingly find myself mulling over what i call the “fundamental questions.” How should humans live together? What sorts of institutional and governmental arrangements are fairest? What sort of society is most likely to facilitate human flourishing? What sort of economic system might ensure the subsistence of all members of a society without depressing innovation and productivity?

These aren’t new questions. But for those of us with grandchildren who will have to navigate this increasingly chaotic and angry world, they are critical.

Aristotle described the good society as one that encouraged and facilitated human flourishing. It’s been awhile, so I no longer recall how–or whether–he defined “flourishing,” but I can’t imagine people flourishing (however defined) under a system that ignored the requisites of what we call the common good.

I favor John Rawls’ approach to questions of the common good. Rawls–the pre-eminent political philosopher of the 20th Century–begins by insisting upon a “veil of ignorance.” The veil of ignorance is a scenario in which  individuals are placed behind a metaphorical veil that strips them of knowledge about who they will be and where they will live; they cannot know whether they’ll be rich or poor, talented or not, brilliant or mentally disabled, healthy or sickly, etc. From behind that veil of ignorance, the individual must design a society that they  would consider to be a just one no matter where they landed and no matter what their personal attributes.

The goal of the veil device, rather obviously, is to encourage respondents to think deeply about the structure of society, and to ignore to the extent possible the influence of his/her actual attributes and situation.

If Rawls is a bit too theoretical for you, several years ago my friend Morton Marcus penned a more accessible but no less important set of questions. Morton distilled the study of economics and economic systems into the question “Who Gets What?” In that essay, he pointed out that social and material goods are allocated in a more complicated fashion than most of us recognize. Depending upon the good being accessed, it might be allocated on a “first come, first served basis” or via the force/authority exerted by one’s government or family. The allocation might or might not be tied to merit–or at least, what society at a given time regards as merit.

Morton’s exposition was lengthy, but its major contribution consists of the reminder that “who gets what?” is a question that permeates our social and legal relationships and involves multiple decisions by government and the private sector.

Humans have a habit of thinking that the culture into which they’ve been socialized is “natural”–it’s “the way things are.” When “the way things are” is challenged– by technology, displacement, social change, whatever–most people will dig in, defending our world-views and beliefs about the way things should be. Typically, we believe they should be the way we think they’ve always been–the familiar cultural touchstones to which we’ve become accustomed and with which we’re comfortable.

What if we used these scary, unsettled times to consider what human flourishing entails, and to think about the kinds of systematic and social supports that would encourage individual flourishing?

What if we responded to the uncertainty and chaos in Washington, D.C. and around the globe by purposefully retreating behind Rawls’ veil of ignorance, and trying to envision the outlines of a better, more just society?

What if we didn’t respond to uncertainty and fear by clinging more tightly to what we know, to our fears and prejudices and ideas about what constitutes merit, and instead pictured different ways of allocating goods, of answering the question “Who gets what?”

What if?

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The Long Game

Historians and scholars have pointed out that the current, previously unthinkable assault on America’s Constitution–especially on Separation of Church and State–and the accompanying war on science and education aren’t sudden eruptions. Recent documentaries like “Bad Faith” have focused on those I think of as the “anti-Founders,” the men who began their theocratic and plutocratic efforts more than fifty years ago, willing to play the long game.

A game that is now bearing (rotten) fruit.

I was intrigued to come across a description of one strand of that long game, written in 2023 for Inside Higher Educatiion by Linda Stamato. Linda is an unusually perceptive scholar with whom I’ve become a sometime-email-correspondent, and her analysis focused on a much-discussed memorandum written by former Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell–a memorandum “credited” with triggering the long corporate war against the nation’s universities and public education.

There is significant recognition of the way Powell’s memo jump-started the war on public education via the so-called “privatization” of the nation’s public schools through the vouchers that send our tax dollars to private, overwhelmingly religious, schools. In this essay, Stamato focuses on the less widely recognized influence of that memo on the current, ferocious assault on higher education. 

As she wrote,

The “war” on higher education in the U.S.—and the status it once held as a public good—has been going on for decades. This war no doubt has many points of origin. One can be found in a once-obscure, intended-to-be-confidential document, written for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce in 1971 by Lewis F. Powell Jr., shortly before he ascended to the nation’s highest court.

Decidedly conservative, and dead set against the academy, the Powell memo, titled “Attack on American Free Enterprise System,” placed higher education in its crosshairs.

Powell’s manifesto—the focus of this essay—laid the groundwork for much of what we now see in the efforts to undermine tenure, to prohibit faculty from appearing as expert witnesses to share their professional knowledge in legal proceedings and to undermine the autonomy of institutional governing boards, not to mention the explosion of bills and laws emanating from state legislatures that would dictate what is to be taught in college and university classrooms.

Powell’s memo began with the thesis that “the American economic system is under broad attack,” and he outlined what Stamato described as “a comprehensive, coordinated counteroffensive on the part of the American business community in response.” That response singled out “the Campus” as a source of those attacks.

Powell saw “bright young men,” from campuses across the country,” who were seeking “opportunities to change a system which they have been taught to distrust … if not, indeed, despise.” They sought these opportunities to challenge free market ideology through employment in “the centers of the real power and influence in our country”—namely the news media; in government, as staff and consultants; in elective politics; as lecturers and writers; and on the faculties of educational institutions.

Stamato describes Powell’s prescriptions for battling what we might now call a “woke” ideology–measures that we can now see in a variety Red state efforts to “balance” faculty ideologies and monitor what can be taught in America’s academic institutions. 

As Stamato reports, Powell’s memo prompted corporate interests to take up the challenge, and college campuses have been targets ever since. 

Richard Vedder, writing in Forbes, lays out the conservative campus movement—and it is that—as taking “at least four forms: entire schools where conservative or traditional values dominate campus life, national organizations promoting conservative ideas, foundations which support conservative or libertarian enclaves on campus, and non-university think tanks and research centers which provide conservative analysis of the world outside the traditional Ivory Tower.”

The article describes the ways in which the rise of conservative think tanks have influenced not just educational institutions, but the courts–and their success in creating language that obscures their ideological intent. Terms such as “intellectual freedom” and “viewpoint diversity” are used to justify restricting intellectual freedom and viewpoint diversity. (One thinks of Humpty Dumpty from Alice in Wonderland: “When I use a word, it means what I say it means…”)

The article is well worth your time to click through and read in its entirety.

The Powell memo, along with racism and fundamentalist hysteria over the growing secularization of society, spawned the current resistance to “elitism”–i.e., knowledge and expertise.  America’s current dysfunctions and the elevation of dangerous and embarrassing ignoramuses to positions of authority are rooted in efforts that began a long time ago. 

You really need to read the whole essay.

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Soft Secession

I recently came across a lengthy Substack post from The Existential Republic, titled “It’s Time for Americans to Start Talking About ‘Soft Secession.”  It was fascinating–and (assuming the accuracy of the reporting) immensely comforting. If even half of the sub-rosa efforts reportedly underway really are underway, the resistance is far more robust than I had imagined.

Evidently, Blue state leaders have been “war-gaming” a variety of scenarios.

For many state Attorney Generals and Governors, the legal briefs are already drafted. The strategy sessions have been running since December. “We saw this coming, even though we hoped it wouldn’t,” former Oregon Attorney General Ellen Rosenblum told The 19th days after Trump’s inauguration.

This is what American federalism looks like in 2025: Democratic governors holding emergency sessions on encrypted apps, attorneys general filing lawsuits within hours of executive orders, and state legislatures quietly passing laws that amount to nullification of federal mandates. Oregon is stockpiling abortion medication in secret warehouses. Illinois is exploring digital sovereignty. California has $76 billion in reserves and is deciding how to deploy it. Three sources on those daily Zoom calls between Democratic AGs say the same phrase keeps coming up, though nobody wants to say it publicly: soft secession.

Soft, because we aren’t looking at secession Civil War style. This time around–again, according to the post–Blue states are building parallel systems and withholding cooperation. They are creating “facts on the ground that render federal authority meaningless within their borders.”

The infrastructure for this resistance already exists. Twenty-three Democratic attorneys general now gather on near-daily Zoom calls at 8 AM Pacific, which means the East Coast officials are already on their third coffee. They divide responsibilities and share templates for lawsuits they’ve been drafting since last spring.

Yale Law Professor Heather Gerken calls this “uncooperative federalism,” an approach that doesn’t require states to actively resist, merely refuse to help. And as the article points out, without state cooperation, much of the federal government’s agenda becomes unenforceable.

Eight states have already enacted State Voting Rights Acts that exceed federal protections. Twenty-two states have implemented automatic voter registration. Colorado has created what election security experts call the gold standard: risk-limiting audits with paper ballot requirements.

New York Attorney General Letitia James, who successfully sued Trump during his first term, promised she’s “ready to fight back again.” During Trump’s first term, Democratic attorneys general led more than 130 multistate lawsuits against the administration and won 83 percent of them…

Pritzker has his staff exploring how to force Apple and Google to disable location tracking for anyone crossing into Illinois for medical procedures, preventing any digital trail that could be subpoenaed. Multiple governors are studying whether they can legally deny federal agents access to state databases, airports, and even highways for immigration enforcement. The discussions, according to sources, have gone as far as evaluating state authority to close airspace to federal deportation flights. States are creating pharmaceutical stockpiles, climate agreements, immigration policies. The National Popular Vote Interstate Compact has secured 209 electoral votes. The Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative’s 11 states have reduced emissions by 50% while the federal government rolled back climate regulations. The U.S. Climate Alliance’s 24 governors represent 60% of the American economy.

California doesn’t wait for Washington anymore. Neither does New York. Or Illinois. They’re building functioning governmental systems that operate independently of federal authority.

I strongly encourage you to click through and read the rest of the lengthy post, which has multiple examples of the ways in which “the same constitutional structure that allows red states to ban abortion permits blue states to stockpile abortion pills. The same Tenth Amendment that lets Texas deploy its National Guard to the border prevents Trump from commandeering state police for deportations.”

Of course, as we repeatedly see, constitutional restrictions mean nothing to our Mad King, and our rogue Supreme Court has signaled a willingness to overrule many of the eminently correct decisions of the lower federal courts. Nevertheless, I found the extent of the coordinated activities of America’s Blue states to be immensely hopeful, especially since the majority of Americans live in those states–and since (as the article also documents) the country’s Red states are economically dependant on Blue state taxpayers.

As the post concludes:

The phrase “soft secession” makes Democrats nervous. They prefer “resistance” or “federalism” or any other euphemism that doesn’t acknowledge what’s happening. But when democracy fails, when fair elections become impossible in certain states, when federal funds are withheld as political punishment, states don’t have many options left.

The infrastructure is built. The legal precedents are established. The money is there. Blue states have spent two years sharpening these tools…

As blue states prepare to deny federal agents access to their databases, their highways, maybe even their airspace, the soft secession isn’t coming. It’s here.

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