The Best People

Among the many boasts we’ve become accustomed to hearing from Donald Trump is his repeated insistence that he hires “the best people.” I thought about that boast in the wake the Vice-Presidential choices made by Trump and Harris: JD Vance is one of the most disliked VP candidates of all times, while the selection of Tim Walz has been greeted with widespread enthusiasm.

When it comes to fitness for office, Vance has almost no experience in elective office, while Walz has served in Congress and as Governor of Minnesota. (Even Sarah Palin–to whom he is often compared–had more governing experience than Vance.)

Trump’s choice of an unsuitable running mate is not an aberration. As a recent article in The New Republic put it, the selection confirms that Trump picks the very worst people. The article reminded readers of the many “incompetent and corrupt” members of his administration:

Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price, who resigned after squandering hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars on private travel; Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt, who resigned “after being embroiled in one ethics controversy after the next,” as CNN put it; Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke, who “resigned under the weight of more than a dozen federal investigations into his actions,” according to The Washington Post (Zinke is back in Congress, of course, where he is speculating that the recent attempt on Trump’s life was part of a government “plot”); Mike Flynn, the national security adviser who lied to the FBI in the Russia probe and went to jail (Trump pardoned him); swamp thing and Trump campaign chief Paul Manafort, who went up the river for tax and bank fraud (Trump pardoned him too); alt-right guru Steve Bannon and trade troll Peter Navarro, who were convicted of contempt of Congress; would-be Batman villain Roger Stone, who was convicted of lying to Congress (Trump commuted his sentence before, ultimately, pardoning him too).

The list went on. And on. And Trump seems incapable of learning from his mistakes. (Of course, he is also incapable of admitting that he makes mistakes..)

Having run the administration with the highest turnover rate in history presumably gave Trump plenty of experience to avoid making the same mistakes, but it’s not like later-term personnel were much better than their predecessors in his own estimation. John Bolton, Trump’s third national security adviser, was a “dope” who “Never had a clue, was ostracized & happily dumped.” Mark Esper, Trump’s last confirmed defense secretary, was “weak and totally ineffective”; Attorney General Bill Barr, who parted ways with Trump only after belying his claims of widespread 2020 voter fraud and later said that Trump “shouldn’t be anywhere near the Oval Office,” was “Weak, Slow Moving, Lethargic, Gutless, and Lazy” (though once Barr endorsed him this year anyway, the magnanimous ex-president retracted the “Lethargic” label).

There is no love lost between Trump and those who entered and left through the revolving door that was his chaotic administration. CNN has identified twenty-four members of that administration who are warning voters against a repeat. Even Mike Pence–sycophant extraordinaire–has refused to endorse him.

His first secretary of defense, James Mattis: “Donald Trump is the first president in my lifetime who does not try to unite the American people – does not even pretend to try. Instead he tries to divide us.”

His second secretary of defense, Mark Esper: “I think he’s unfit for office. … He puts himself before country. His actions are all about him and not about the country. And then, of course, I believe he has integrity and character issues as well.”

His chairman of the joint chiefs, retired Gen. Mark Milley …. “We don’t take an oath to a wannabe dictator. We take an oath to the Constitution and we take an oath to the idea that is America – and we’re willing to die to protect it.”

 His first secretary of state, Rex Tillerson: “(Trump’s) understanding of global events, his understanding of global history, his understanding of US history was really limited. It’s really hard to have a conversation with someone who doesn’t even understand the concept for why we’re talking about this.”

His presidential transition vice-chairman, Chris Christie: “Someone who I would argue now is just out for himself.”

His second national security adviser, HR McMaster: “We saw the absence of leadership, really anti-leadership, and what that can do to our country.”

His third national security adviser, John Bolton: “I believe (foreign leaders) think he is a laughing fool.”

There are others quoted, but this sample is representative.

So much for the hope that this buffoon would be restrained by “adults in the room.

The adults have all run for the hills.

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Why Definitions Matter

You may have noticed that we Americans have trouble communicating. We may–or may not– talk to each other, but talking is not the same thing as communicating.

One of the reasons we are so polarized is that we not only occupy different realities, we use the same words to describe very different things.

I’ve previously pointed out that “conservative” does not accurately describe a radical MAGA movement filled with White “Christian” Nationalists. Labeling every social program, no matter how modest, as “socialist” confuses modern mixed economies with soviet-style, authoritarian regimes. But the problem goes beyond propaganda and intentional misdirection, because we can’t solve our problems if we can’t describe those problems accurately.

In an article awhile back Vox illustrated that problem. The first paragraph was eye-opening:

A person who is looking for a full-time job that pays a living wage — but who can’t find one — is unemployed. If you accept that definition, the true unemployment rate in the U.S. is a stunning 26.1%, according to an important new dataset shared exclusively with “Axios on HBO.”

The article then noted that the official unemployment rate excludes people who might be earning only a few dollars a week, along with people who have stopped looking for work for whatever reason–perhaps a lack of available jobs or child care. The definition of “unemployed” that we use affects our evaluation of the severity of the problem. As the 2020 article pointed out, that year, if we had identified as unemployed anyone over 16 years old who wasn’t earning a living wage, the overall rate would have been 54.6%. For Black Americans, it would have been 59.2%.

The Axios article gave the backstory of our current measurement metric:

The official definition of unemployment can be traced back to the 1870s, when a Massachusetts statistician named Carroll Wright diagnosed what he referred to as “industrial hypochondria”.

By restricting the “unemployed” label to men who “really want employment,” Wright managed to minimize the unemployment figure.

Wright went on to found the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and he brought his unemployment definition with him.
To this day, to be officially counted as unemployed you need to be earning no money at all, and you need to be actively looking for work.

More recently, Gene Ludwig, a former U.S. Comptroller of the Currency, founded the Ludwig Institute for Shared Economic Prosperity.  According to calculations by that institute, in January of 2020, when the official rate of unemployment was 3.6%, the true rate was seven times greater — 23.4%. Whether you agree with Ludwig that the higher number is the “true” unemployment rate is less significant than the fact that most Americans don’t understand what the official number measures.

What would be helpful–what would allow us to actually communicate about jobs and wages– would be a report that broke down the data into categories: these are people actively searching for jobs who don’t have one; these are people whose jobs don’t pay a living wage; etc. That sort of report would allow voters and policymakers to focus on the actual issues involved. As it is, a single number that excludes everyone who has any sort of employment–whether part-time or poorly paid–obscures reality.

We can’t fix a problem we can’t properly define.

Insufficient jobs and insufficient wages are two very different problems. The Biden administration has done an admirable job of creating new jobs, and various economic reports indicate that the administration has also presided over significant wage gains, but few of us have the time or ability to delve into the official data of the Bureau of Labor Statistics and to calculate what percentage of workers has escaped the “under-employed” category.

This problem of accurate–or at least agreed-upon–definition isn’t limited to employment figures. Some years ago, I was looking into arguments about the U.S. balance of trade, and realized that those official calculations only included tangible goods–not services or other intangibles. So if we were sending printed books (or cars or widgets) abroad, those got counted; but if Americans were selling publishing rights (or providing design services) to consumers in other countries, the value of those exports wasn’t included. (I don’t know whether that is still the case.)

What was that bible story about the Tower of Babel?

We live in a very complex society, and wide differences in culture, education and expertise add other complications to even the most sincere efforts at communication. But–assuming we elect people in November who are committed to running a functional government–we really need to look at the way official data is compiled and reported.

Using the same words to talk about the same things would be a start….

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Appalling..And Telling

Wow. Just…wow.

I have repeatedly attributed America’s polarization to my perception that MAGA folks occupy an alternate reality–an environment where Democrats drink kids’ blood in a pizza parlor’s (non-existent) basement and a mysterious figure known as “Q” will emerge to save the world from a nefarious (non-existent) “deep state.” But recently, the Guardian reported on an even more troubling refusal to confront a reality that is rapidly becoming too obvious for sane folks to ignore.

According to that report, nearly one in four members of Congress dismiss the reality of climate change. The paper identified a total of 123 elected federal representatives – 100 in the House of Representatives and 23 US senators – who continue to deny the existence of human-caused climate change.

You will not be surprised to learn that they are all Republicans. Every single one.

According to a Center for American Progress report, those climate-change-denying lawmakers have been rewarded with a combined $52m in lifetime campaign donations from the fossil fuel industry, so it is difficult to tell whether they are profoundly anti-science (and, arguably, intellectually unfit to hold elective office) or simply corrupt.(Ethically unfit.)

Meanwhile, rational folks–especially those with children and grandchildren who will have to navagate an increasingly hostile environment–want government to take measures to ameliorate the threat.

And that threat–despite GOP insanity–is very real. In the same issue of the Guardian that contained the report on Republican climate denial, there was a brief story about photos taken by British tourists at the same spot in the Swiss Alps. The photos were taken almost exactly 15 years apart and highlighted the speed with which global heating is melting glaciers.

i talk a lot about culture war on this blog. Because I’m a recovering lawyer and a past Executive Director of Indiana’s ACLU, those discussions have disproportionately focused on the threat culture warriors like Micah Beckwith and Jim Banks pose to civil liberties, especially (but certainly not exclusively) the threat that these American theocrats pose to genuine religious liberty. That threat is very real, but–as the Guardian report makes abundantly clear–adherence to a worldview that excludes empirical evidence isn’t just an affront to the Constitution. It’s suicidal.

Over the past few years, we’ve read headlines like this one from the Telegraph: “Congressman says God will save us from climate change.” (At least he admitted that climate change exists, so I suppose that’s a point in his favor…)

A Republican congressman who believes that global warming is not a threat because God has promised not to destroy the Earth has put himself forward as chairman of a powerful committee that deals with energy policy and its effect on the environment.

John Shimkus, an evangelical Christian representing Illinois, quoted the Bible in a congressional hearing last year on a proposed “cap and trade” legislation designed to limit carbon emissions…

Shimkus isn’t the only Republican culture warrior who relies on God to fix those pesky climate problems. That reliancee is nothing new, either–in 2017, Time Magazine reported

A Republican congressman told his constituents that he believes God will “take care of” climate change if it proves to be a “real problem.”

Michigan Rep. Tim Walberg said during a town hall in Coldwater, Mich., on Friday that while he believes climate change is real, it is not something for humans to solve.

Subsequent evidence of intensifying bad weather hasn’t challenged Walberg’s belief that God will take care of the problem, so mankind need not bother. Not long after then-President Trump withdrew the U.S. from the Paris Agreement, Walberg told his constituents that if it turned into a “real” problem, God would “take care of” climate change.

So here we are, with an entire political party that rejects science and empirical evidence  (including the evidence of their own “lying eyes”) in favor of fundamentalist religious dogma. (It should go without saying that such dogma is hotly contested by more rational religious figures–the Pope, for one, has issued an Encyclical urging action on climate change.) 

This rejection of evidence–this wholesale dismissal of science and logic and expertise– is an underappreciated threat posed by MAGA culture warriors. Fully one-fourth of currently-serving American legislators have opted to live in–and defend–an alternate reality. These people shouldn’t be in government. To a significant extent, they owe their elections to Republican gerrymandering, but voter apathy has also been a contributor.

A Blue wave would sweep at least some of these people out of office, and would facilitate government action on the environment. By humans.

Another reason to vote Blue…..

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The Court’s Selective Originalism

Our current Supreme Court is dominated by regressive Justices who insist–as did the late Antonin Scalia–that they reach their conclusions by being “originalists.” Their definition of originalism differs rather substantially from mine–I’m firmly of the conviction that an authentic originalism requires fidelity to the values embraced by the Founders, while they insist that an originalist is bound by the constitutional text as it was understood at the time.

Permit me an example of why this is horse-pucky.

I used to ask my students what James Madison thought about porn on the internet. Obviously, Madison could not have conceived of the Internet–but he had very explicit beliefs about the value of free speech and the need to prevent government censorship. The current majority’s crabbed and dishonest “originalism”–if consistently pursued– would reserve free expression to communication methods in place during Madison’s time. A workable originalism protects speech from government censorship irrespective of the method of its transmission.

Of course, the majority doesn’t apply its version consistently, because it would be unworkable. Instead–as legal scholars have pointed out–they are selective in their application. (At least so far, they haven’t allowed government to censor radio, television, movies, and the internet–none of which the Founders could have envisioned.)

I thought about that very telling selectivity when I read an essay by Thom Hartmann about theocracy and the Dark Ages. I encourage you to read it in its entirety, but the part that struck me–and reminded me of the selectivity of Justices like Scalia, Thomas and especially Alito– were the sections detailing the Founders’ approach to Separation of Church and State.

Hartmann began by quoting extensively from John Adams. Adams was a practicing Christian, but was wary–to say the least– of government efforts to compel religiosity. Among the Adams quotes shared by Hartman was the following:

“Since the promulgation of Christianity, the two greatest systems of tyranny that have sprung from this original, are the canon and the feudal law. The desire of dominion, that great principle by which we have attempted to account for so much good and so much evil, is, when properly restrained, a very useful and noble movement in the human mind.

“But when such restraints are taken off, it becomes an encroaching, grasping, restless, and ungovernable power. Numberless have been the systems of iniquity contrived by the great for the gratification of this passion in themselves; but in none of them were they ever more successful than in the invention and establishment of the canon and the feudal law.”

Hartmann also quoted Jefferson, who wrote in his Notes on the State of Virginia:

“Reason and free enquiry are the only effectual agents against error. … Had not free enquiry been indulged, at the æra of the reformation, the corruptions of Christianity could not have been purged away.”

And he shared an often-cited Jefferson line: 

“The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others. But it does me no injury for my neighbour to say there are twenty gods, or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.”

Adams and Jefferson weren’t the only Founders who believed in separating church from state. As Hartmann notes,

George Washington refused to declare himself a Christian; Thomas Paine wrote an entire book embracing atheism; Ben Franklin famously fled Massachusetts as a teenager to escape the censorship and threats of imprisonment by religious leaders.

The essay points out that today’s White Christian Nationalist movement is both ahistoric and anti-American–a conclusion with which credible scholars entirely agree.

So here’s my question, aimed especially at Justice Alito (Thomas is simply corrupt, but Alito seems to be a true theocrat.) If you are really an originalist, bound by that doctrine to decide constitutional debates as the Founders would have understood them, why are you ignoring both the Constitutional text and the substantial contemporaneous evidence of their belief in the importance of Separation of Church and State?  

Hartmann’s essay focused on the Dark Ages, a thousand-year period introduced and maintained by virtue of the close alliance of church and government. He ends with a question:

Will we go down a nationalist religious road similar to that now being followed by Modi in India and Netanyahu in Israel? Could we end up as bad as Iran, Afghanistan, or 17th century New England? Will Republicans trigger a new Dark Age?

Or will we re-embrace the Renaissance and Enlightenment values and ideals of the Founders of this nation and hold to a secular democratic republic?

If the pseudo-originalists on today’s Court prevail, we won’t like the answer to that question.

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History Is Rhyming…

Note: yesterday’s “extra” post was an accident. Sorry for the assault on your inboxes!

Like many readers of this blog, I subscribe to Heather Cox Richardson’s daily “Letters from an American.” Having come through an education system notoriously light on comprehensive history, I find her daily expositions of America’s past very enlightening–especially when I learn about the details of past events that bear an uncanny resemblance to our current quandaries.

A recent Letter made me think of the quip attributed to Mark Twain, to the effect that while history doesn’t necessarily repeat itself, it frequently rhymes.

Richardson was comparing our current divisions with those that triggered the founding of the Republican Party–and the Civil War. The GOP, ironically, was formed to fight slavery and uphold the premise of the Declaration that “all men are created equal.” In the years since the Civil War, we’ve seen the parties change places–the Democrats have become the party defending human equality, while today’s GOP looks very much like the combination of racists and plutocrats that characterized the old Democratic Party.

What really struck me was the sense that we’ve returned to that age-old fight. The parties may have switched sides, but the nature of the battle remains depressingly familiar.

After providing details of the events leading up to the demise of the Whigs and the formation of a new Republican Party–a party formed to combat the notion that some humans are superior to and entitled to rule over others by virtue of their skin color– Richardson compared that era to our own.

When voters elected Lincoln president, the fledgling Republican Party turned away from a government that catered to an oligarchy trying to overturn democracy and instead reinvented the American government to create a new, active government that guaranteed to poorer men the right to be treated equally before the law, the right to a say in their government, and access to resources that had previously been monopolized by the wealthy.

The present looks much like that earlier moment when people of all different political backgrounds came together to defend the principles of the United States. In today’s moment, when someone like J.D. Vance backer billionaire Peter Thiel says, “Democracy, whatever that means, is exhausted,” and the Republicans’ Project 2025 calls for replacing democracy with Christian nationalism, it makes sense for all people who care about our history and our democratic heritage to pull together.

Richardson noted that there are some in the GOP who recognize the threat posed by a MAGA party that looks a lot like the Confederacy.  She quoted Olivia Troye, who served in the Trump White House, and who is now working with Republicans for Harris. Troye has called upon Mike Pence to endorse Harris, and is quoted as saying that

“[W]hat is happening here with the Republican Party… is dangerous and extreme. And I think we need to get back to the values of…observing the rule of law, of standing with our international allies and actually providing true leadership to the world, which is something that Kamala Harris has exhibited during the Biden Administration.”

(As an aside, I’d be shocked if Pence had the spine to endorse Harris…I’m pretty sure that his one moment of integrity in refusing to go along with Trump’s coup exhausted his ability to do the right thing. I hope I’m wrong, but I think his four years of utter, embarrassing sycophancy are more consistent with his character than that one example of moral courage…)

Richardson’s comparison of that pre-civil war era with our own is apt. There are differences, of course, but the choices Americans face today certainly “rhyme” with the choices that confronted Americans then. Once again, We the People are facing a frontal challenge to the most basic premises of our founding documents–premises that we have admittedly never quite lived up to, but that we have (mostly) continued to pursue.

There’s a lot wrong with American society today, but most of it is fixable–if we elect public servants who are honorable and who–in the words of Olivia Troye–are committed to the rule of law, to standing with our international allies, and capable of providing what has been called servant leadership.

Richardson reminds us that we’ve been here before, and the good guys prevailed. If we want to preserve the country they saved–if we want to turn back the White Supremacists and plutocrats of today’s GOP–we’ll vote Blue in sufficient numbers to drive the lesson home. A Blue wave would–ideally– lead to the disintegration of MAGA and a return of the GOP to normalcy.

Or perhaps, as with the Whigs, the creation of a new, saner political party.

I can live with either result.

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