The MAGA Vendetta Against Arts And Education

Well, I see where Ron DeSantis has petulantly stripped thirty-two million dollars of art funding from the Florida budget.

Ron DeSantis stripped more than $32m in arts and culture funding from Florida’s state budget over his hatred of a popular fringe festival that he accused of being “a sexual event”, critics of the rightwing governor say.

DeSantis justified his unprecedented, wide-ranging veto of grants to almost 700 groups and organizations by saying it was “inappropriate” for $7,369 of state money to be allocated to Tampa fringe, a 10-day festival that took place earlier this month with a strong message of inclusivity, and its sister event in Orlando.

I talk a lot about culture war on this blog. Usually, that term connotes the growing willingness of MAGA Republicans to publicly indulge their bigotries against Blacks, women, LBGTQ+ citizens and non-fundamentalist Christians, but DeSantis’ recent fit of pique should remind us that the war against anything “woke” extends to important aspects of the actual culture: the arts, certainly, but also public education. (The GOP proclivity for “projection”–accusing others of their own behaviors–is obvious in their hysterical ranting about public education “indoctrination.”)

The most successful effort to replace American public education with religious indoctrination, of course, has come in the guise of “parental choice,” or vouchers, which allow public monies to be siphoned from the public schools and sent  disproportionately to religious schools. I have posted repeatedly about that effort, which has not only failed to improve test scores but has increased civic divisiveness and re-segregated the schools in several places.

I forget who first popularized the phrase “you ain’t seen nothin’ yet,” but if Trump should win in November, Project 2025 has outlined policies that would dramatically escalate the attack on public education.

Here are some of the elements of what I can only describe as an assault on steroids:

  • Title I, the $18 billion federal fund that supports low-income students, would disappear in a decade.
  • Federal special education funds would flow to school districts as block grants with no strings attached, or even to savings accounts for parents to use on private school or other education expenses.
  • The U.S. Department of Education would be eliminated.
  • The federal government’s ability to enforce civil rights laws in schools would be scaled back.

The proposals are contained in a comprehensive policy agenda that’s part of a Heritage Foundation-led initiative called Project 2025: Presidential Transition Project, which includes nearly 900 pages of detailed plans for virtually every corner of the federal government and a database of potential staffers for a conservative administration. It will also feature a playbook for the first 180 days of a new term.

Project 2025 was devised by several former Trump administration officials and allies, working with dozens of aligned advocacy organizations (misnamed “think tanks.”) including Moms for Liberty. You will recall that Moms for Liberty is the organization that fought school boards over COVID-19 safety protocols, advocates for censorship of books in school libraries, and endorses far-right school board candidates.

Trump has said that parents should elect school principals. He advocates the abolition of teacher tenure, has promised to cut federal funding to schools pushing “progressive” social ideas, and pledges to establish universal school choice.

Under the Project 2025 agenda, states would be able to opt out of federal education programs, whose “regulatory burden far exceeds the federal government’s less than 10 percent financing share of K–12 education,” the document asserts.

States would also have full authority to decide how to spend Title I funds, which currently go to schools with large populations of low-income students.

Under the Project 2025 plan, those funds would first flow to states as “no-strings-attached” block grants before they’re phased out in a decade. Parents of students attending Title I schools could even have access to the federal funds in “micro-education savings accounts” to pay for private education or supplemental services for their kids. The plan outlines similar ambitions for funds distributed under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, the nation’s special education law, though it doesn’t propose phasing them out.

The assault on public education has displayed the fundamental disconnect between the civic purposes of education and citizens who see education as just another private, consumer good–skills to be acquired (by those who can afford it) in order to enhance the ability of one’s children to succeed in the marketplace.

Access to the arts and a common base of educational knowledge both facilitate civic conversation and cohesion. Both enlarge our understanding of the world we inhabit–its complexity and, yes, its diversity. The arts and liberal education are the antithesis of rigid ideology and group-think.

I assume that’s why MAGA cannot tolerate either.

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A Way Out Of The Doom-Loop?

I recently re-connected with an old friend who had moved out of state many years ago. Like so many of us “back in the day,” she was heavily involved in Republican politics, and like virtually all of us in that cohort, she is appalled by today’s GOP. Because she is politically sophisticated, she also understands that the takeover of that party and its successes at the polls have been enabled by manipulation of structural factors: gerrymandering, the Electoral College, the two-party system, etc.

Her question to me–which I was unable to answer–was: what avenues exist to modify/replace the structures that are obsolete, and/or might make it harder to misuse the others? What changes to our electoral systems could we work toward that might re-invigorate moderation and genuine, small-d democratic outcomes?

Not long after that conversation, I came across an interesting article in The New Republic, authored by two experienced political actors, one Republican, one Democrat, outlining one such possible change: fusion voting. (In the 1980s and 1990s, one had worked for Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush; the other had worked in Jesse Jackson’s presidential campaigns and co-founded a progressive third party.)

If America survives November, I think their approach offers hope…

The thesis of the article is fairly simple: while minor-party candidates are a waste of time, minor parties that can cross-endorse major-party candidates can make a huge difference.

What unites us is the understanding that our government is failing because politics is failing. At the heart of that political failure is a two-party system that pushes the citizenry into two hyper-polarized camps and discourages the coalitions and compromises essential to public problem-solving…

Substantial majorities tell pollsters that they want a way out of the “two-party doom loop.” But the solution is not a third party or independent presidential candidate: That always fails. At best they get a flurry of attention before fading into obscurity. A few are remembered, but only because they are seen, rightly or wrongly, as having played the role of a “spoiler.”

Still, the predictable failure of third-party candidates should not distract us from the need to solve the structural problems of the two-party system. The incentives baked into our system are in no small part responsible for bringing us to the precipice of authoritarianism.

The authors stress that this doesn’t require the invention of something new. Instead, they want to revive fusion voting, which was once commonplace in America. Fusion voting is the practice of a third party “cross-nominating” a candidate of one of the major parties. “This candidate appears on the ballot under two different labels, with the votes tallied separately but then added together—fused—to determine their total.”

I remember when New York’s Conservative Party still engaged in that “fusing,” typically endorsing a Republican candidate for Mayor or Governor in return for certain policy commitments. As the authors of the article explain,

In a fusion system, minor parties are both independent and relevant. They retain a “threat of exit” should neither major party nominate an acceptable candidate. More commonly, fusion parties will push or prod a major-party candidate to be better on a few key issues, and in return will nominate them. This is more constructive for the polity and more satisfying to the voter than a spoiler or wasted vote. “Vote for the candidate you prefer,” says the fusion party organizer, “under the party label closest to your values.

Fundamentally, fusion voting produces more choices for the voter—but it’s more parties, not more candidates. The path out of the two-party doom loop runs not through eliminating or weakening parties but rather through a system that encourages and rewards coalitions between parties.

Fusion allows minority parties to demonstrate that they have meaningful support among voters, support that allows them to negotiate with a major-party ally.

No doubt the major parties disliked having to bargain with minor-party partners, but bargaining is essential in politics. The Whigs were mushy on slavery, and Free Soilers spined them up. Democrats were nervous about taking on the trusts, but the Populists insisted that they stand up for debtors and farmers. Fusion creates incentives for compromise between groups that do not agree on everything but do agree on enough to get things done.

The two major parties managed to get fusion voting outlawed in most states, but reinstating it would work to re-energize the multitude of voters who shrink from extremism of either Left or Right and are unwilling to identify wholly with either party. 

It’s certainly worth a try.

 
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A Bonus Post Because I Can’t Help Myself

When I was a member of a very different Republican Party, it was easy to laugh at the way Democrats tended to self-destruct. Now, with American democracy and the rule of law teetering on the brink, it’s far less amusing.

It is hard for me to believe number of people who should know better who are undermining the party’s chances of winning in November by clutching their pearls and indulging in pious, handwringing pleas for Joe Biden to withdraw. Talk about “virtue signaling” while giving talking points to the Trumpers.

It’s one thing for people like those who comment here–most of whom are unfamiliar with political calendars and the arcane legal constraints on campaigns. It’s another to see presumably knowledgable pundits display their total ignorance of what is even possible.

Permit me to take you on a visit the real world: any effort to “swap out” candidates would have to take place at the upcoming Democratic convention on August 19th. While all states don’t have early voting, many do–in Indiana, early voting starts October 8th.

Even if the delegates could quickly agree on a replacement candidate–highly unlikely–there would be no time for that candidate to mount anything approaching a campaign, which requires money and messaging and field offices staffed with workers devoted to and knowledgable about the candidate. But of course, there is no single alternative acceptable to the entire party. The obvious choice would be Kamala, as Vice-President, but thanks to racism and misogyny–not to mention Republican and intra-party efforts to paint her as a floundering “diversity choice”–she couldn’t win either the delegates or the election. Of course, passing over a Black Vice-President would immediately jeopardize the essential Black vote (not to mention a significant part of the female vote.)

A two-month campaign with a divisive candidate is only part of it. The substantial funds Biden has raised couldn’t easily or rapidly be transferred to the new candidate (if at all). And much as I believe polling is badly broken, most polls do show that the only person who can defeat Donald Trump–and yes, save democracy–is Joe Biden.

Biden has been an excellent, even transformational, President. His cabinet is composed of talented, knowledgable, traditional public servants, and his Vice President is far more accomplished and adept than the nay-sayers paint her. If Biden had the oratorical skills of an Obama, we wouldn’t even be having this discussion, but as a FaceBook friend noted–under a photo of Hitler addressing a rapt crowd–deciding who to support on the basis of oratory isn’t necessarily a great idea.

But even if Biden were as senile as his detractors claim, he would be monumentally preferable to the alternative.

The job of patriotic Americans in the four months between this post and the election is to defeat Donald Trump and the MAGA fascist movement.  Nothing else matters. A Biden victory will allow us to deal with a corrupt Supreme Court and protect reproductive choice; a defeat–made more likely by the know-nothing naysayers–will facilitate remaking the nation in the form the authors of Project 2025 have mapped out.

There is no choice. This is our civil war, and we have to win it.

If Biden is truly impaired, he can step down after the election. Yes, that would give us a Black female President, and that would once again motivate the haters who crawled out from under their rocks after Obama was elected.

Right now, our marching orders are simple: defeat MAGA up and down the ballot, or lose America.

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So Long, America–It Was Nice Knowing You…

The New York Times summarized the rogue Supreme Court’s immunity ruling in a sentence: “the Supreme Court has extended sweeping legal protections to presidents that apply to no one else in the country.”

In other words, in the most recent of a string of appalling and unprecedented rulings, this disgraceful Court has eviscerated the essence of the rule of law: that no one is above the law. Sources close to the Rightwing extremists behind Project 2025 immediately began planning how to use the Court’s decision to help them implement their unAmerican policy agenda, and Trump immediately called for jailing his political opponents.

The Court has demonstrated the naiveté of those Republican voters who justified sticking with Trump because “there are guardrails–laws that will keep him from doing the craziest shit.” Not anymore, there aren’t.

Toto, we aren’t in Kansas anymore.

I have never been so afraid for my country. Lest you think I am over-reacting, I will turn the rest of this post over to the considered reactions of people I respect.

There were the pundits, of course, many of whom bring solid legal credentials to the discussion. I can sum up their reactions by citing to Washington Post columnist Ruth Marcus, whose opinion piece was titled “God Save Us from this Dishonorable Court” and was subtitled “An egregious, unconscionable ruling on presidential immunity from the Supreme Court.”

But the most incisive and horrified analyses came from the scholars. 

Historian Heather Cox Richardson wrote:

This is a profound change to our fundamental law—an amendment to the Constitution, as historian David Blight noted. Writing for the majority, Chief Justice John Roberts said that a president needs such immunity to make sure the president is willing to take “bold and unhesitating action” and make unpopular decisions, although no previous president has ever asserted that he is above the law or that he needed such immunity to fulfill his role. Roberts’s decision didn’t focus at all on the interest of the American people in guaranteeing that presidents carry out their duties within the guardrails of the law….

There is no historical or legal precedent for this decision. The Declaration of Independence was a litany of complaints against King George III designed to explain why the colonists were declaring themselves free of kings; the Constitution did not provide immunity for the president, although it did for members of Congress in certain conditions, and it provided for the removal of the president for “high crimes and misdemeanors”—what would those be if a president is immune from prosecution for his official acts? The framers worried about politicians’ overreach and carefully provided for oversight of leaders; the Supreme Court today smashed through that key guardrail…

Today, observers illustrated what Trump’s newly declared immunity could mean. Political scientist Norm Ornstein pointed out that Trump could “order his handpicked FBI Director to arrest and jail his political opponents. He can order the IRS to put liens on the property of media companies who criticize him and jail reporters and editors.” Legal analyst Joyce White Vance noted that a president with such broad immunity could order the assassination of Supreme Court justices, and retired military leader Mark Hertling wrote that he was “trying to figure out how a commander can refuse an illegal order from someone who is issuing it as an official act.” 

Lawyer and legal scholar Robert Hubbell minced no words:

Today, the Supreme Court overthrew the American Revolution and anointed the US president as a modern-day king. Their betrayal of the American revolutionaries, Founders, and Framers is all the worse because they did so to promote the most corrupt, dangerous, depraved person to disgrace the office of the presidency…

Trump v. United States will be overruled. The decision is so bad it will not stand. Like Dred Scott (holding that enslaved people are not citizens entitled to judicial protections), Plessy v. Ferguson (upholding segregation), Koramatsu v US (upholding the Japanese internment camps), today’s decision will be overturned by the acclamation of history in due course. It will be remembered as a mark of shame for the Roberts Court just as Dred Scott tarnishes Chief Justice Taney’s legacy to this day.

It may take a few years or decades to overturn Trump v. US, but the American people are the ultimate power under the Constitution. Majorities in the House and Senate can pass a bill to expand the Supreme Court, and a Democratic president can sign it. The reactionary majority can be overwhelmed by the appointment of four new justices, although expanding the Court by eight or more would be appropriate given the nearly hundred-fold growth in the US population since six justices were appointed in 1789.

The problem is, if Donald Trump wins in November–or if MAGA neo-fascists control either the House or Senate– there won’t be a United States in which the judicial process can self-correct. 

America as we’ve known it will be gone.

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The New McCarthyism

Americans have long demonstrated a distrust of bureaucracy–generally seeing the growth of that managerial cohort as exclusively governmental, although it is typical of any large corporation or organization. More recently, MAGA Republicans have deepened the hostility to government workers by accusing civil servants of being a malevolent “deep state.”

That “deep state” of MAGA imagining is a cabal of anti-American “woke-ism,” dedicated to helping “those people” and restricting the God-given rights of the good White Christian men who are the only “real Americans.” Any government officials with the temerity to block one of Trump’s fever dreams is clearly a member of that “deep state.”

And according to Project 2025, the denizens of the “deep state” must be removed.

The public is gradually becoming aware of Project 2025, the detailed, thousand-page “transition plan” produced by a consortium of far-Right think tanks led by the Heritage Foundation. These culture warriors have (accurately) determined that their Presidential candidate– profoundly ignorant of government and rapidly losing touch with reality–would, if re-elected, be even more incapable of ushering in their desired changes than he was during his first term, so they have come together to provide a road-map.

That road map is filled with horrifying policy positions, a large number of which are (currently) unconstitutional. One of them, as described in the linked report from Talking Points Memo, takes aim at that hated “deep state.” (When I read it, it triggered a vision of Joseph McCarthy waving a paper and claiming he had the names of multiple Commies working for the government…)

The Heritage Foundation is funding the creation of a blacklist of federal government workers who MAGA loyalists claim might obstruct the Trump II agenda, the Associated Press reported Monday.

The work of compiling the list of names of some 100 government employees is being done by a Kentucky fellow named Tom Jones and his American Accountability Foundation. The work is being financed with the help of a $100,000 “Heritage Innovation Prize” from the Heritage Foundation, long a bastion of Reagan conservatism in DC but now fully in MAGA mode. Heritage announced the prize winner back in May, referring to “the presence of anti-American bad actors burrowed into the administrative state.”

In announcing the prize, Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts touted it as effort to expose the “Deep State”:

“The weaponization of the federal government under President Joe Biden is only possible because of the deep state of entrenched Leftist bureaucrats in the White House and its agencies. I am proud to support the outstanding work of AAF in their fight to hold our government accountable and drain it of bad actors determined to undermine our constitutional republic and weaponize government against the American people, our economy, and our institutions.”

Notably, the plan is to publish the list online. A doxxing in the public square as it were, with all the obvious historical echoes, as the AP rightly notes:

The public list-making conjures for some the era of Joseph McCarthy, the senator who conducted grueling hearings into suspected communist sympathizers during the Cold War. The hearings were orchestrated by a top staffer, Roy Cohn, who became a confidant of a younger Trump.

As for the criteria used to determine who makes the list and how those criteria are applied, the AP provides this chilling methodology: “They’re relying in part on tips from his network of conservative contacts, including workers.”

Civil service protections are only one of the many, many elements of American government that would be jettisoned by Project 2025. If even a small number of the desired changes were to become law, America would be a profoundly different place–and far less hospitable to women, non-fundamentalist Christians and minorities.

As Congressman Jared Huffman explained,when he announced the creation of a Stop Project 2025 Task Force:

“Project 2025 is more than an idea, it’s a dystopian plot that’s already in motion to dismantle our democratic institutions, abolish checks and balances, chip away at church-state separation, and impose a far-right agenda that infringes on basic liberties and violates public will.

Project 2025 advocates placing all government workers– including employees of independent agencies like the Department of Justice– under direct presidential control, allowing the president to “efficiently” implement policies in a number of areas. Civil service employees would be replaced by “loyal” political appointees.

In other words, Separation of Powers would be replaced with a “streamlined” dictatorship.

So much for those silly Founders, and their devotion to “checks and balances”…Meanwhile, people upset with Biden’s debate performance want to replace him, a mere ten weeks before early voting starts.  They are mimicking Nero, who–you will recall– fiddled while Rome burned.

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