A “Faith Based” Future?

I’m not sure when people–okay, mostly Christian people–began using the term “faith-based” to mean “religious,” but like so many other euphemisms being thrown around these days, the term is inaccurate. Many of the earth’s religions aren’t “faith-based,” they are works based, focused upon behavior rather than belief. The term “Judeo-Christian” is a similar contrivance, a term that Christianizes in what may–or may not–have originally been an effort to appear religiously inclusive.

Whatever the original motivation for these terms, Project 2025 makes it quite clear that the “faith” that makes one entitled to call oneself an American is Christianity, and that any lingering “Judeo” part of “Judeo-Christian” is irrelevant.

A report in The Guardian focuses upon that element of Project 2025, using a current discriminatory law in Tennessee as an example of the approach favored by that document. In Tennessee, a Jewish couple who wanted to foster a child were rejected by a Christian state-funded foster care placement agency that informed them it only provided adoption services to “prospective adoptive families that share our belief system”. 

Under First Amendment jurisprudence as it has existed thus far, taxpayer dollars cannot be used to favor some religions over others, or–for that matter–religion over non-religion. (Granted, Justice Alito is probably salivating at the prospect of overturning that long line of precedents…) If Trump is elected, however, and the agenda proposed in Project 2025 begins to be realized, Americans can kiss genuine religious liberty good-bye. 

The predicament facing the Rutan-Rams could become more common under a second Trump administration. Project 2025, a 900-plus page blueprint for the next Republican administration and the policy brainchild of the conservative Heritage Foundation, contains an explicitly sympathetic view toward “faith-based adoption agencies” like the one that rejected the Rutan-Rams, who are “under threat from lawsuits” because of the agencies’ religious beliefs.

Project 2025’s Adoption Reform section calls for the passage of legislation to ensure providers “cannot be subjected to discrimination for providing adoption and foster care services based on their beliefs about marriage”. It also calls for the repeal of an Obama-era regulation that prohibits discrimination against prospective parents and subsequent amendments made by the Biden administration.

According to a professor of theology and religious studies at Villanova University, quoted in the article, the image of family portrayed by Project 2025 is “blatantly exclusionary. The Christian nationalist plan rejects unmarried parents, single parents and LGBTQ+ families.”

Project 2025 is divided into four broad pillars, the first of which is to “restore the family as the centerpiece of American life and protect our children”. A conservative vision of family pervades the document, and the authors call on policymakers “to elevate family authority, formation, and cohesion as their top priority and even use government power, including through the tax code, to restore the American family”.

The plan envisions upholding “a biblically based, social science-reinforced definition of marriage and family”. It would remove nondiscrimination roadblocks governing faith-based grant recipients, such as the agency that denied the Rutan-Rams. The authors argue that “heterosexual, intact marriages” provide more stability for children than “all other family forms”. In addition to calling for the passage of the Child Welfare Provider Inclusion Act, which would allow adoption and foster care agencies to make placement decisions based on their “religious beliefs or moral convictions”, it also calls on Congress to ensure “religious employers” are exempt from nondiscrimination laws and free to make business decisions based on their religious beliefs.

That last paragraph sounds exactly like a speech by Indiana Congressman Jim Banks, currently running for U.S. Senate. Banks–and his clone Micah Beckwith, the Republican candidate for Lieutenant Governor–who represent the core of the MAGA effort to remake the United States into a White Christian theocracy.

Amanda Tyler, executive director of the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty and author of a book titled How to End Christian Nationalism, contends that the scale and reach of Project 2025 pose a far greater danger to democracy than a patchwork of state laws.

“What’s different about Project 2025 is the sweeping nature of its plan,” said Tyler. “It would really rewrite the federal government and change policies in so many different areas at once in a way that would hasten our journey down that road to authoritarian theocracy.”

Trump’s effort to distance himself from Project 2025 runs into several inconvenient facts: his choice of a Vice-Presidential candidate who wrote the document’s introduction, the number of cronies who participated in its drafting, and the GOP’s official platform, which echoes several of its themes.

When President Biden says that America’s constitutional democracy is on the ballot in November, he wasn’t engaging in hyperbole.

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Trust

Back in 2009, I published Distrust, American Style: Diversity and the Crisis of Public Confidence. The book was largely written as a rebuttal to Robert Putnam’s argument that America’s diversity was the cause of diminished levels of public trust. That trust levels were (and remain) troublingly low was incontrovertible, but I argued that the culprit wasn’t diversity, but a pervasive loss of faith in a wide variety of American institutions–especially government. I wrote then and believe now that the remedy lies in policy reforms that would make American government (and businesses, nonprofits and religious institutions) worthy of public trust.

Rather than attempting to limit diversity through divisive measures such as building a wall between the United States and Mexico or imposing stricter immigration quotas, I emphasized the need to begin with government reforms: elimination of gerrymandering, electoral wins that reflect the popular vote, and proper functioning of checks and balances. (And this was before the horrifying decisions rendered by a Supreme Court dominated by Trump appointees.)

Research confirms the importance of public trust. Trump’s nasty, gutter-level approach to politics is only possible because we have seen a precipitous erosion of that foundation–the loss of a widespread belief that most people in government and the political class have the public interest at heart and are ethically and intellectually competent.

Because I spent so much time immersed in the literature documenting the importance of trust, I was interested to come across an article from the Guardian about Denmark, and how it became the world’s most trusting country. As the sub-head read, “There are real benefits to a society where people feel safe enough to leave their babies and bikes on the street. How have the Danes achieved this level of faith in their fellow citizens?”

Over the years, Denmark has emerged as the good faith capital of the world. Nearly 74% of Danes believe “most people can be trusted” – more than any other nationality. On wider metrics, such as social trust (trusting a stranger) and civic trust (trusting authority), Denmark also scores highest in the world, with the other Nordic countries close behind.

The article details the various ways Denmark’s trust manifests itself, but the effect is summarized in a statement by one young person:“You have the feeling that people have goodwill. I think it’s a top-down reaction. We have a system that supports, and that creates the baseline for our trust in each other.”

Exactly. It’s the integrity of the system.

America’s White Supremicists attribute Nordic public trust to the relative homogeneity of the population, but research suggests a different source: the welfare state.

 “That was founded very much on mutual trust,” Rosenkilde says. Denmark has a universal model of welfare, which holds that all citizens have the right to certain fundamental benefits and services. In the UK and the US, we have a “residual model”: bare minimum benefits for the poorest and skeleton services for everyone but the richest. “I think the whole idea of people being as equal as possible is very much underpinning this trust,” Rosenkilde continues. “We have this connectedness because you don’t have a lot of people that are very poor or very rich.” Equality, Rosenkilde says, has decreased over the past three decades, as Denmark is caught up in the neoliberal drag of the globe: its Gini coefficient has crept up, but by that measure it’s still the sixth most equal country in the OECD.“

A nation is an imagined community,” Korsgaard says. “What does that mean? It means I’m able to think of myself as part of a community with someone I don’t know. And in order to do that, they have to look more or less like me. They cannot be super-different when it comes to class.” (Emphasis mine.)

Researchers admit that Denmark struggled as immigration made the population more diverse, but they emphasize the importance of class homogeneity–the absence of huge gaps in income–as a major reason the country has been able to cope with other kinds of heterogeneity. As one scholar put it, diversity required renegotiation. “OK, you can be part of this community, even though you’re not white, even though your birth language is not Danish,’ and luckily, I think that is more or less settled.”

As the article concludes, “This really is the most unbelievably equal country, and while trust is a constantly negotiated state, that appears to be a good place to start.”

In November, if we are very lucky, perhaps the U.S. will once again have a functioning government that can address income inequality and begin to restore both the rule of law and public trust.

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An Excellent Reminder

A recent column by one of my “go to” pundits, Jennifer Rubin, reminded me once again why political communication is so difficult. Terms like “liberal” and “progressive” have been redefined by ideologues to facilitate their use as labels, rather than as explanatory terms. Perhaps the saddest example is misuse of the word “conservative,” which the media continues to apply to MAGA politicians, despite the fact that they embrace positions and arguments that are far–far–from traditional conservatism.

Rubin has tackled yet another term that is widely misunderstood: centrism. As she writes,

Centrism isn’t a mushy tendency to compromise. It isn’t a brain-dead fondness for style over substance. Above all, it is not to be confused with “moderation” — the futile and frankly foolish attempt to carve out a space halfway between the extremes of MAGA authoritarianism on the right and rabid nihilism from the left.

If climate change is a fact, to take one example, then splitting the difference with climate deniers is nonsensical. And if the MAGA movement assaults truth, then telling half of the truth or telling the truth half the time isn’t centrism. It’s absurdism, and a sure path to meaninglessness and nihilism.

Centrism, rather, is a mind-set. It’s more than humility, tolerance and restraint, although all of those are necessary elements. Above all, it’s an approach to governance, and not a list of specific policy prescriptions. It can be bold, pragmatic and popular.

Rubin defines centrism as a willingness to admit that all wisdom does not reside on one side of the political or ideological  spectrum. It “recognizes that capitalism and regulation, individual merit and social justice, and diversity and cohesion not only can coexist but must operate in tandem within a healthy, balanced society. Centrism, in short, stands for the proposition that ideological tensions are best resolved when we incorporate elements from conflicting perspectives.”

The essay proceeds to show how Biden’s immensely successful Presidency has benefitted from a (properly understood) centrist approach to undeniably progressive goals, and how centrism (again, properly understood) has won elections around the globe. As Rubin reminds us, centrism rejects Manichaeism, and respects coequal branches of government. As she also observes, ideologically extreme courts that abandon that measured, centrist approach lose legitimacy. (Someone should tell John Roberts…)

As she concludes:

We can attribute democracy’s woes around the world to failure to spread economic prosperity, demographic change and the decline of civics education, as well as religious fundamentalism, information bubbles and globalism. Some combination of these factors inevitably leads to support for strongmen who vow to fix intractable problems that “messy” democracy cannot solve. But we are looking in the wrong places for our answers.

We can address all those challenges provided the spirit of centrism prevails. Centrism can accommodate diversity, secure democratic norms, and preserve a credible and independent judiciary, all essential and foundational to liberal democracy.

I agree with all of the points Rubin makes, especially her definition of centrism. But that definition prompts another observation. Centrism–understood as Rubin defines it–looks an awful lot like another quality in short supply in our political class: maturity.

Mature individuals are reflective. They exhibit self-awareness. They embrace civility. Maturity includes the ability to consider all sides of a debate, the ability to embrace persuasive elements from different perspectives. If there is any evidence that any segment of the MAGA movement is mature, I’ve missed it.

It isn’t simply the childish and increasingly nasty response to Kamala Harris’ candidacy. Trump’s entire vocabulary (which apparently stopped expanding in third grade) is that of a playground bully. He doesn’t try to communicate–he merely spews insults. (He is guilty of many things, but civility is certainly not one of them.) His MAGA supporters happily emulate his crude and childish behavior. The trolls that occasionally post here underscore that observation–they simply insult, evidently unable to make anything remotely like rational arguments for considered positions.

Rational arguments. Considered positions. Those are markers for Rubin’s “centrism” and for what I define as maturity–and far too many of our contemporary political figures lack both. The GOP is currently the party of Donald Trump and Marjorie Taylor Green, and it would be hard to find more immature, unreflective (or more embarrassingly ignorant) standard-bearers.

I applaud Rubin’s effort at actual communication, but that effort fails to take into account the fact that today’s MAGA Republicans aren’t just incapable of actual communication, but disinterested in it. They remind me most of monkeys in the zoo throwing feces.

We need to start electing people who display a modicum of self-awareness, and are actually interested in communicating and governing. That apparently excludes MAGA.

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Project 2025, Public Education And The Public Good

Today’s post is a bit longer than usual, so consider yourself forewarned.

As we’ve learned more about the various elements of “Plan 2025,” it looks increasingly like an all-out attack on the America most of us believe in. There’s the assault on women (the effort to take us back to what those nice White “Christian” men consider our proper role as breeders and housemaids); the fight to remove any and all elements of a social safety net (who needs health insurance or Social Security?); the multiple provisions favoring the wealthy over the middle-class; and a full-scale attack on public education.

Time Magazine, among others, has reported on the education portion of the White Nationalists’ plan.

Project 2025, the policy agenda for Former President Trump’s potential first year back in the White House published by the far right conservative think tank the Heritage Foundation, has been making waves recently. Some of the many destructive proposals within the agenda include the elimination of the U.S. Department of Education—along with federal education funding and any civil rights protections—and the diversion of public money to private school voucher programs instead.

Make no mistake: The goal is to end public education. 

As the article goes on to detail, the measures in Project 2025 are a continuation of the same efforts we’ve seen the past several decades– efforts to turn education into a consumer good available to those who can afford such luxuries. 

We are on the brink of a new wave of public school closures, another step in the decades-long project to divest and dismantle the institution of public school. Disguised as “school choice,” federal, state, local, and private actors have prioritized paying for  private and charter schools, hoarding educational resources for the haves and depleting resources for the have-nots.

The policies that Project 2025 plans to prioritize—government payments to families sending their children to private school and creation of new charter schools that are run like businesses—have expanded in the last few years, starving public school districts that serve all students of already insufficient resources. In the 2023-24 school year, at least 70 school districts, including in San Antonio, Texas, Jackson, Mississippi, and Wichita, Kansas, announced permanent closures of public schools, impacting millions of students. These districts are resorting to the harmful, discriminatory, and ineffective so-called ‘solution’ of closing schools in Black and Latine communities, stripping those communities of their local public schools.

The schools already being closed are (not so coincidentally) those in the poorer areas of cities–the schools that serve low-income and minority students, and that have historically been underfunded– depriving the communities around them of “community resources like adult education, polling locations, a place to hold community meetings, and access to democratic community control through school board elections.”

Despite the original rhetoric about opening access to “better” schools for underprivileged kids, voucher programs now primarily benefit upper-middle class parents, many of whom were previously paying to send their children to private and parochial schools.

What is ironic about this effort to deny educational opportunities to those with the fewest resources is how costly it is.

Pro Publica reports that the voucher program in Arizona has “blown a hole” in that state’s budget.

Arizona, the model for voucher programs across the country, has spent so much money paying private schoolers’ tuition that it’s now facing hundreds of millions in budget cuts to critical state programs and projects.

Two years ago, Arizona passed the largest school voucher program in the history of education. The program was generous: “any parent in the state, no matter how affluent, could get a taxpayer-funded voucher worth up to tens of thousands of dollars to spend on private school tuition, extracurricular programs or homeschooling supplies.”

In just the past two years, nearly a dozen states have enacted sweeping voucher programs similar to Arizona’s Empowerment Scholarship Account system, with many using it as a model.

Indiana was one of those states.

Yet in a lesson for these other states, Arizona’s voucher experiment has since precipitated a budget meltdown. The state this year faced a $1.4 billion budget shortfall, much of which was a result of the new voucher spending, according to the Grand Canyon Institute, a local nonpartisan fiscal and economic policy think tank. Last fiscal year alone, the price tag of universal vouchers in Arizona skyrocketed from an original official estimate of just under $65 million to roughly $332 million.

As a result, Arizona has cut $333 million out of water infrastructure projects (as the article pointed out, this in a state where water scarcity is a huge issue). It cut tens of millions of dollars for highway repairs, and $54 million from Arizona’s community colleges, among other cuts.

In Indiana, voucher program costs have ballooned to $439 million, some 40 percent higher than in 2022–2023.

Despite the enormous costs– vouchers haven’t improved educational outcomes. 

In the Public Interest recently noted that the assault on public education is part of a larger attack on the very notion of a “public good.”

We define public goods as the things we all need to survive and thrive–the big things: public health, mobility, knowledge, democracy, shelter, clean air and water, the ability to communicate with each other (including, lately, broadband access). Public goods include things we need everyone to have. Those are things that we can only do if we do them together. It is part of our responsibility to each other, and it forms the basis of our society. And for a very long time in the United States, there was a consensus that we need every child, not just one’s own children, to get a high-quality education.

It seems beyond the imagination of many conservatives that people might—or should—care about and feel any responsibility regarding the plight of someone who is not within their own personal sphere or realm of identity. (It also seems of a piece with the way former Ohio Senator Rob Portman became receptive to gay rights only after his own son came out to him.)

Margaret Thatcher once said of society “There is no such thing! There are individual men and women and there are families.”

Such a narrow and individual approach to public policy is at the root of the notion of “school choice,” a catchy name for programs like vouchers that essentially move public money from public schools to private schools. It holds that K-12 education is best offered as a function of the marketplace, something with which only school age children and their parents should be concerned. It doesn’t view education as the necessary component of a functioning democracy, nor does it value the social cohesion that universal public education can foster…

The reality of “school choice individualism” is that schools that receive public money that comes from all of us via vouchers want to be able to exclude some of us.  They don’t have to follow the rules of public schools—they can pick and choose students, and they can–and do–discriminate against anyone they choose: those with disabilities, families who are part of the LGBTQ community, and religious affiliations they deem unacceptable.

The article concluded with a dig at JD Vance’s oft-expressed disdain for public goods and “childless cat ladies.”

While many conservatives don’t seem to regard public education as a public good but rather as an expression of a shopping preference for families, the vast majority of Americans do see education as a public good. And that includes those who have school-age children, those with children who are now adults, those who have never had children, and even, we’re sure, quite a few cat ladies.

Meow…

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A Factual Rebuttal

In the wake of Joe Biden’s decision to withdraw from the Presidential campaign, media attention turned from the just-concluded Republican convention to the Democratic ticket. While that’s understandable, it’s also important to revisit the fantasies promulgated at that GOP lie-fest. I particularly liked one of those reviews, penned by David French in the New York Times, because French is a conservative former Republican, whose analysis cannot fairly be attributed to progressive ideology.

French-who was a Mitt Romney delegate at the 2012 Republican convention– noted that this year’s event “was the first that revolved entirely around a fundamentally false premise: that in our troubled time, Donald Trump would be a source of order and stability.” As he noted, if past performance is any indication, a second Trump term would be as chaotic as the first.

To bolster their case, Republicans misled America. Speaker after speaker repeated the claim that America was safer and the world was more secure when Trump was president. But we can look at Trump’s record and see the truth. America was more dangerous and the world was quite chaotic during Trump’s term. Our enemies were not intimidated by Trump. In fact, Russia improved its strategic position during his time in office.

Convention speakers emphasized the same themes that Hoosiers saw in the GOP’s primary fight–especially ominous warnings about crime and crime rates. These arguments reek of what Yiddish speakers call “chutzpah,” because acceptance of GOP arguments about public safety requires swallowing a Republican “alternate reality.”

As French notes,

The most egregious example of Republican deception centered around crime. The theme of the second night of the convention was “Make America Safe Again.” Yet the public mustn’t forget that the murder rate skyrocketed under Trump. According to the Pew Research Center, “The year-over-year increase in the U.S. murder rate in 2020 was the largest since at least 1905 — and possibly ever.”…

It’s particularly rich for Trump to claim to be the candidate of order when the crime rate rose during his presidency and is plunging during Joe Biden’s. In 2023, there was a record decrease in the murder rate, and violent crime, ABC News reported, “plummeted to one of the lowest levels in 50 years.”

French also reminded readers of Trump’s utterly unAmerican approach to international relations, which consisted of dumping on the country’s longtime allies and cozying up to autocrats and dictators–especially Putin.

Trump’s argument about foreign policy is also fundamentally deceptive. Throughout the convention, we heard variations of the same theme: Russia didn’t invade any other country under Trump, and Iran was broke and powerless. But again, this is misleading. Far from being frightened and intimidated by Trump, both Russia and Iran directly attacked American troops when he was president.

In 2018, Russian mercenaries and their Syrian allies assaulted an American position in northern Syria, leading to a four-hour battle during which American forces deployed artillery and airstrikes to beat back the attack. In 2020, Iran fired a volley of ballistic missiles at American troops in retaliation for our strike against Qassim Suleimani and injured more than 100 American service members.

In both instances, our forces handled themselves with courage, professionalism and skill, but if Russia and Iran were so frightened of Trump, why did they attack Americans?

Trump enabled Iran to restart its nuclear program, and ordered a precipitous withdrawal from northern Syria that abandoned our Kurdish allies, creating an opening for Russia. (Russians filmed themselves occupying an abandoned American base.)

Trump’s obvious disrespect for our allies harmed American interests then, and if he wins they’ll harm American interests again. At the end of Trump’s term, Russia was stronger, Iran was unbowed, and America’s relationship with our key allies was more tenuous. Trump had even threatened to yank the United States out of NATO, our most important alliance, an act that would fulfill one of Putin’s fondest hopes.

As French concludes, Trump wants voters to empty their minds of the past so that he can fill it with his own “alternative facts.”

The Republican National Convention was one long exercise in creating memories of a Trump term that never existed. The real Trump term was chaotic and dangerous from start to finish, and if Americans’ memories don’t improve soon, the voters who seek peace and stability will instead bring us violence and tears.

The problem is, for the MAGA cult, reality is irrelevant. Climate change is a hoax, NATO isn’t worth supporting, Brown immigrants are all criminals…the list goes on, and at its base is the real glue holding the cult together–White Christian Nationalism and nostalgia for a (largely non-existent) past in which White men dominated the government and the culture.

A Republicans vote is a vote for the Confederacy.

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