A Lengthy Rerun

As I was scrolling through my past posts (admittedly, looking for something I could cannibalize during my recovery), I came across the “Last Lecture” I gave ten years ago. The Last Lecture is an annual address to the faculty by a member who is tasked with explaining the life experiences that shaped that member’s philosophy and perspective.

It occurred to me that readers of my daily rants are also entitled to understand how I’ve come to the conclusions I share each day.

This speech from ten years ago is long, and probably irrelevant to many of you, so feel free to skip the full linked version, but here are a couple of introductory paragraphs that help explain my development into the crotchety blogger you’ve come to know…

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I think I have always been a “political” person, in the sense that the question that has always fascinated me is: how should people live together? What sort of social and political arrangements are most likely to nourish our humanity and promote—in Aristotle’s term—human flourishing? If the old African proverb is right, if it “takes a village to raise a child,” what should that village look like, and how should its inhabitants behave? How do we build that kind of village? Is the human community headed in the right direction, or are we on the wrong road?  My conclusions have been shaped by my life experiences as much as by my scholarship, and for the last several years, some of them have been keeping me up at night.

Let me begin with an important caveat: unlike so many of you in this room, I am not a scholar in the traditional sense; in fact, I have been a lifelong dilettante. (I do prefer the term “generalist,” but as Popeye said, “I yam what I yam”…) I’ve done a lot of different things over the past 50+ years, and the result is that I know a little about a lot of things, but depth isn’t my strong suit. Over the years, however—probably as a defense mechanism—I’ve convinced myself that there is value in casting one’s intellectual net rather widely. In my case, at least, it has allowed me to connect some seemingly unconnected dots, even when my own mastery of the subjects involved is tenuous or superficial.

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What struck me as I scrolled through this ten-year-old speech was the extent to which our current dysfunctions were already emerging–the rejection of reason and science that was already laying the groundwork for today’s disasters.  For those of you willing to slog through the whole speech, I’ll be interested in your comments…..

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Shoot The Messenger

A quick status report: I am improving each day, but my guess is that this site will continue to experience glitches, probably attributable to my medicated status. Yesterday, the emails failed to send at the scheduled time–fortunately, my techie son intervened and was able to fix the issue. Every day, it seems, there’s something. (The day after my brief hospital stay, an uninsured driver t-boned our daughter’s car; fortunately, she and our granddaugher were just bruised, but the car was totalled. The next day, my husband pulled out a kitchen drawer and it–and he– collapsed. Again, fortunately, he’s fine, but I’m getting a bit leery.)

I really appreciate all the kind words, and your willingness to hang in there with me! This too will pass–and if we’re lucky, MAGA will pass too…

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Today’s will be a “quickie,” because I’m focusing on something you all already know (and I still can’t sit at the computer for long periods of time.)

This week’s job report was weak–shockingly weak. That wasn’t a surprise to anyone who passed Econ 101 (or to pretty much anyone who can read); we are just beginning to see the effects of Trump’s idiotic tariffs. But of course, the Mad King responded to the unfavorable data as is his wont: with anger and denial. How dare reality deviate from his imagined brilliance? So he fired the person in charge of analyzing and publishing the data.

As the folks at Lincoln Square noted,

One basic character of the politicization necessary to create an authoritarian regime is that public employees are reluctant to share information that displeases their political bosses. When those bosses can fire them, the incentives to suppress uncongenial information, or provide false information, become overwhelming.

Over time, life in these countries become bifurcated. Statistics become propaganda. There is an official reality, which many proclaim but few believe, and actual reality. And at some point actual reality catches up with the fantasy.

Reality, of course, is a place Trump has yet to visit.

Ever since Trump assumed office, civil servants have been reluctant to contradict the various moronic eruptions emanating from the Oval Office and from the assortment of clowns comprising what passes for a cabinet. So Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s anti-science beliefs about vaccines are rapidly degrading public health, and the fossil fuel tools at the EPA are pretending that there’s no such thing as climate change. Etc.

People who are unwilling to “go along to get along” are fired.

Those who survive will keep telling us that the Emperor’s new clothes are magnificent, and what’s left of America’s credibility will continue to tank.

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The Big Picture

Every day, we Americans awake to another assault on the foundations of our governing system. As we attend to each day’s news, each day’s effort to deconstruct constitutional government, we are in danger of losing the big picture, the scope of the losses we’re suffering.

I don’t know whether this “firehose” approach is a conscious strategy; Trump’s already substandard intellect and mental health are declining at such a rapid rate that restraints on his impulsiveness–never strong–are similarly declining. Intentional or not, however, it’s working to distract us.

We simply cannot allow the rapidity with which MAGA is dismantling American government to obscure the big picture, the overall damage. Recently, Heather Cox Richardson included that overview in one of her essential “Letters,” and her description is worth citing:

Six months into the second Trump administration, on the sixtieth anniversary of the law that symbolized the modern American state by establishing Medicare and Medicaid, it’s clear we are indeed in a revolution designed to destroy the government we have known in favor of the radical right-wing government envisioned by those who wrote Project 2025.

From the beginning, the administration declared war on the words that protected equal rights for all Americans, fired women and racial minorities from leadership positions, and attacked transgender Americans. It worked to replace civil servants with loyalists who embraced the tenets of Project 2025, putting people like former Fox News host Pete Hegseth at the head of government agencies. Yesterday Greg Jaffe and Maggie Haberman of the New York Times reported that in a break with past practices, Hegseth, now secretary of defense, is requiring nominees for four-star general positions in the U.S. military to meet personally with Trump.

It worked to dismantle the government by refusing to release the money Congress had appropriated to fund the existing government. Thanks to billionaire Elon Musk at the “Department of Government Efficiency” and Russell Vought—another author of Project 2025—at the Office of Management and Budget, the administration illegally impounded funds, slashing through funding for foreign aid, cancer research, veterans’ benefits, air traffic control staffing, and so on, claiming to be eliminating “waste, fraud, and abuse.” That fight is ongoing.

Richardson proceeded to enumerate the extent to which MAGA is implementing Project 2025–shrinking or abolishing  government programs that serve ordinary people while further enriching the wealthy. The party of “limited government” is dramatically expanding government’s power.

The administration set out to purge the country of what extremists claimed was “leftist” influence in law firms, media, and universities. It illegally blocked lawyers from law firms that represented Democrats from access to federal buildings, making it impossible for them to represent their clients. It sued media outlets for alleged bias, and it withheld congressionally appropriated funds for universities.

There’s much more, as we all know– that daily firehose of assaults on the government of We the People, assaults aimed at replacing the America we thought we knew. substituting cronies for civil servants so that “royal court” can invite bribery and engage in open corruption with impunity.

We the People need to keep that big picture in mind. We need to ignore the self-engrossed pundits mucking around in the weeds, criticising various Democrats and focusing on perceived past errors. We have one job. ONE JOB. We need to take Congress back from the GOP invertebrates who will go down in history either as complicit fascists or disgraceful quislings.

ONE JOB. Saving America.

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Why Texas Gerrymandering Matters

Okay–better late than never…

Media has reported on the effort being mounted in Texas to re-gerrymander that state’s already-extreme gerrymander, in an effort to add five Republican seats, and potentially save the House for the GOP.

One of the things that national polling misses is the fact that a political party can win the national vote by millions, but thanks to our structure–elements like the Senate’s disproportionate representation and the Electoral College–the party garnering a minority of the vote can win control of Congress and the Presidency.

I’ve written a lot over the years about the pernicious effects of gerrymandering, and lest memories of those diatribes have faded, I’m going all the way back to 2001. This is what I wrote on May 1st of that year.

The Indiana General Assembly is preparing to embark upon what individual legislators call redistricting, and what the rest of us call gerrymandering. It will be an intensely partisan endeavor.
The goal of this exercise is to draw as many “safe” seats as possible—more for the party in charge, of course, but also for the minority party, because in order to retain control, the majority needs to cram as many of the minority into as few districts as possible. While gerrymandering is nothing new, the advent of computers has made the process efficient beyond the wildest dreams of Elbridge Gerry, the former Vice-President for whom it is named.
In gerrymandering, neighborhoods, cities, towns, townships—even precincts—are broken up to meet the political needs of mapmakers. Numbers are what drive the results—not compactness of districts, not communities of interest, and certainly not competitiveness.
Safe districts undermine the democratic process.
  • If one is guaranteed victory, it is easy to become lazy and arrogant, safe to scuttle popular measures without fear of retribution.
  • Lack of competitiveness can make it impossible to trace campaign contributions. When the folks with “Family Friendly Libraries” send a check to Representative Censor, who is unopposed, he then sends it to Senator MeToo, who is in a hot race.  Senator MeToo’s campaign report shows only a contribution from Rep. Censor.
  • Lack of competitiveness breeds voter apathy. Why get involved when the result is foreordained?  Why donate to a sure loser? For that matter, unless you are trying to buy political influence, why donate to a sure winner? Why volunteer or vote, when those efforts won’t affect the results?  It’s not only voters who lack incentives for participation, either; it’s not easy to recruit credible candidates to run on the “sure loser” ticket. The result is that in many of these races, voters have a choice between the anointed and the annoying—marginal candidates who offer no new ideas, no energy, and no challenge. Pundits describe voter apathy as if it were a moral deficiency; I suggest it is instead a rational response to noncompetitive politics. (Watch those “apathetic” folks fight an unpopular rezoning!)  Reasonable people save their efforts for places where those efforts matter. Thanks to the proliferation of safe seats, those places may not include the voting booth.
  • Gerrymandering exacerbates political polarization and gridlock. In competitive districts, nominees know they have to run to the middle to win in the fall. When the primary is, in effect, the general election, the battle takes place among the party faithful, who tend to be much more ideological.  Republican incumbents will be challenged from the Right and Democratic incumbents from the Left. Even where those challenges fail, they are a powerful incentive for the incumbent to protect his flank. So we elect nominees beholden to the political extremes, who are unwilling or unable to compromise.
Of the 150 members of our current legislature, 73 were unopposed in 1998. Most of the others had only token opposition.
Is this any way to run a representative democracy?
The assault on democracy has been going on for longer than we recognize. And it isn’t just Texas.

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