Natal Con

At a recent lunch discussion, my friend and sometimes co-author Morton Marcus asked me if I was aware of the “pro natalist” movement gathering steam on the right. I wasn’t.

I was aware of the emergence of the “trad wives”–women who, for whatever reason, are asserting their desire to retreat back to the kitchen and nursery. My superficial understanding of that particular “movement” suggests it’s part of White Christian Nationalism, with its reliance on biblical cherry-picking and–especially– fear of the hated modernity that allows those “others” to claim equal civic status with “Godly” folks. But I hadn’t heard of the natalists.

Morton subsequently sent me a transcript of an interview with a couple named Collins who were attending a convention of natalists. The interviewer began by reminding listeners that both JD Vance and Elon Musk are on record decrying reduced birthrates. Musk–with his 13+ children–has obviously been working against that trend. (Not that he bothers spending much time with most of his offspring, according to interviews with several of them. Evidently the quality of parenting is less important than the quantity…)

The podcast included a clip of comments made by one Charles Haywood at the first Natal Con. Haywood, who made his money as a shampoo magnate, was a sponsor this year. Haywood is heard in that clip saying that “generally, women should not have careers. They should be socially stigmatized if they have careers.” He blames declining birth rates on feminism and the overturning of what he sees as “natural hierarchies of gender and race.”

And there, my friends, you have it.

I have frequently posted my conviction that Trumpism is basically a revolt against equality–against the notion that there are no “natural hierarchies of gender and race.”

I understand why MAGA appeals to mediocre (or worse) White men who resent having to share the civic landscape with women and people of color. I admit to bafflement when it comes to the women who agree with Mrs. Collins that her role in life is to push out as many babies as possible. (I say that as a women who has “pushed out” three of my own–and as the daughter of a woman who insisted that women could–and should–live well-rounded lives that included whatever careers we desired.)

The irony is that the neo-natalists are aiming their criticisms at the wrong culprit. As the podcaster pointed out, the evidence for declining birthrates points not to women’s equality, but to a very different reason. Surveys show that most people continue to want children, but they are increasingly aware of what parenting requires- the ability to provide a stable home, sufficient income, and (usually) a partner.

When a society isn’t providing the social supports that make meeting those requirements possible, prudent people decide to have fewer children, if they have any at all. The lack of government funding for health care, the dearth of affordable housing, the lack of support for good public schools, the high cost and limited availability of child care–all are disincentives for parenthood.

My own grandchildren would add the threat of climate change and our lackluster efforts to address it.

The podcast quoted a scholar who studies this movement and explained its roots: the idea that “our society has become excessively effeminate, weak, compassionate. And what they want to do is breed or elevate an aristocratic class that’s going to be masculine, violent, not necessarily motivated by, let’s call it, empathy.”

The neo-natalists want to restore a “masculine” culture that requires rooting out feminism and multicultural democracy. “Women are to be subordinated to men, largely going to be responsible for managing the household, although with no real particular authority. And of course, they’re going to have an awful lot of children.” And of course, non-White men will be subordinated to their “natural” betters.

If we needed any evidence of how wrongheaded (okay, insane) this belief in a “natural hierarchy” of White men is, we need only look at the “superior” White guys in the Trump administration. It would be hard to assemble a more pathetic, clownish and ignorant group.

The neo-natalists interviewed in this very informative–if nauseating–podcast are enthusiastic Trumpers. They provide additional evidence–as if we needed it–that support for MAGA and Trumpism are today’s eruptions of the oldest American sins: the racism and misogyny of White men who are frantic at their loss of automatic dominance, and angry that they have to compete for status on the basis of actual merit.

I suppose I should thank Morton for the additional evidence of what is really at stake…

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About Those Tariffs

All Americans have been getting an education about economics, and specifically tariffs. Some Americans–those who voted for Trump or who didn’t bother to vote–are also getting a rude awakening. (It turns out that it really does matter who holds political office…)

I have not encountered a single reputable economist who doesn’t agree that tariffs are really taxes on the American public, or who believes that their imposition will revive American manufacturing and provide Americans with good jobs. The jobs promise is particularly obtuse; even if the tariffs did result in more factories being built in the U.S.–which is highly unlikely for a number of reasons–anyone who has been watching the manufacturing sector will confirm that its workers are being steadily replaced by automation.

Perhaps the most concise and convincing case against the stupidity–the insanity– of Trump’s tanking of an economy that was the envy of the globe was this brief talk by Fareed Zakaria. 

Rather than indulge in my usual prolonged rant, I am urging you to click on the link and listen to a calm and convincing explanation of why the world of hurt we are all experiencing isn’t temporary and won’t–can’t–lead to Trump’s imaginary rosy future.

If one of our occasional MAGA trolls happens to be reading this, and discounts Zakaria, who is, after all, not just a member of the hated media, but eminently sane and reasonable (qualities anathema to MAGA), how about listening to Ronald Reagan on the subject?

So much winning…

My own rants will resume tomorrow…..

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Process And Progress

At a recent Town Hall in Indiana, Congresswoman Victoria Spartz responded to a citizen’s question/challenge by asserting that “people who break the law aren’t entitled to due process.” Spartz has a long history of ignorance and bizarre behaviors, but this particular example–while undoubtedly endearing her to an unconstitutional administration–reflected her incredible unfitness for public office.

Why is due process an essential component of the rule of law?

David French recently addressed that question in a New York Times essay,

The defense of civil liberties is hard even under the best of circumstances. Thousands of years of human history tell us that we are not naturally inclined to protect the rights of our opponents, much less the rights of people we believe to be violent and dangerous.

That’s why the defense of the Bill of Rights requires both practical and moral arguments. The practical defense is often the most effective: Protect the rights of others that you would like to exercise yourself. After all, one day you might not be in control.

In other words, poison gas is a great weapon until the wind shifts…

French goes on to argue that the best arguments for due process transcend self-interest–that due process guarantees protect “the inherent dignity and worth of every human being.” 

Americans have provided due process even to the nation’s wartime enemies. French quoted a federal judge for the travesty that Nazis had been given better treatment under the Alien Enemies Act than people suspected of being members of a Venezuelan gang.

Numerous media outlets have reported on the arrest and rendition of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who was accused of gang membership and sent to prison in El Salvador. Abrego Garcia was in the U.S. legally, and in 2019 a court had barred the government from deporting him to El Salvador. An official of ICE admitted, under oath, that he’d been deported due to “administrative error,” but claimed the government couldn’t get him back “because he is no longer in U.S. jurisdiction.”

The judge found that “there were no legal grounds whatsoever for his arrest, detention, or removal…. [H]is detention appears wholly lawless” and “a clear constitutional violation.” 

If the government can simply assert–without the need to provide even flimsy evidence–that anyone they consider offensive or inconvenient is a “criminal,” then no one is safe.

America’s darker history is instructive: those most aware of the danger posed by lack of due process are the people who remember Jim Crow, when Black Americans in the South received less protection than the Nazis referenced by the judge. 

A guest essay in the New York Times made that point graphically. 

There’s something about this moment that is shocking to many in my orbit. Watching a security camera video of a graduate student — from Tufts, my alma mater — who is legally in the country being picked up in broad daylight by masked government agents and hustled into an unmarked car. Witnessing people lose their jobs with no warning or justification. The presumption underlying these attacks on diversity, equity and inclusion programs that somehow only white men are qualified to do many jobs. Denying lawyers access to federal buildings so they can’t represent their clients properly. Seeing communities from Cincinnati to El Paso live in a state of fear from the police and bands of vigilantes.

“How can this be happening in America?” these people ask. “This is not the country I know, the country of rights and laws and due process.”

Needless to say, these people are almost all white and liberal and are not used to feeling this fear of arbitrary, brutal state authority. But this moment, the one that was explicitly promised by Project 2025 and Donald Trump when he was a candidate, looks a lot like what my grandmother experienced every day for much of her life.

What Indiana’s civically-illiterate Congresswoman fails to understand is that due process for people accused of criminal activities is a foundational concept in the U.S. Constitution. It is a principle of fundamental fairness–a requirement that  government  demonstrate an accused’s guilt with probative evidence before imposing punishment.

Adherence to due process for everyone is what makes social progress possible. It is what protects Americans against the would-be autocrats who want to run roughshod over the individual liberties of those who oppose them. 

Due Process is mentioned twice in the Constitution — in the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments, both of which prohibit government officials from depriving an individual of “life, liberty, or property without due process of law.” 

Free speech and due process stand in the way of Project 2025. We need to defend them from MAGA’s ignorance and malevolence. 

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About Those Executive Orders…

I spent 21 years teaching college students about law and public policy–about the limits that a country’s legal framework imposes on the policies that legislators can legitimately consider. For a significant portion of those years, I was also an annoying scold, ranting about the undeniable fact that most Americans were uninterested in and unaware of the provisions of the constitutional framework that constrain what American government can legally do.

We are now reaping the consequences of that massive constitutional ignorance.

A would-be dictator has taken residence in the Oval Office, and has proceeded to ignore the legal restraints on presidential power. Given his intellectual deficits and manifest ignorance, it is very likely that he is as unaware of those restraints as he is of the American Idea–the underlying philosophy of the Constitution–and of the basic operations of government. (I doubt he could even spell philosophy, given his third-grade vocabulary.)

I have previously cited the constitutional provisions vesting Congress with exclusive authority over many of the areas Trump purports to “rule” with his firehouse of Executive Orders. Such orders have a limited provenance; as  Josh Marshall explained on Talking Points Memo a while back explained more clearly than I have.

Most people, including a lot of journalists, don’t understand what an executive order even is. It’s not a law or even a quasi-law. An executive order is really just a memo from the president to his staff (in this sense, his staff of two million civil servants) to take certain actions. Do this and don’t do that. Enforce this law in that way. Those can be actions the Constitution empowers him to take or ones Congress specifically assigns to him through laws. I interpret the law this way, so take this action, etc. In areas where presidents have a lot of power — say, in border and immigration enforcement, for instance — executive orders are a big deal. Courts can say: no, the law or the Constitution doesn’t empower you or allow you to do those things. But executives act and courts mostly react. So in this area of broad executive power, they’re a big deal. That’s also where you get into the territory of genuine constitutional crises and potential presidential dictatorship, because the outer limits of some of those powers aren’t clearly charted.

In other areas–very much including election administration–an Executive Order is flat-out unconstitutional.

But presidents have little to no power over election administration. States administer American elections, for state and federal office. Congress is empowered to create certain baseline rules for how states administer elections, in addition to those enumerated in the Constitution. But that’s the federal role — a critical fact under present circumstances, as I noted a week ago. The president has very little power beyond having the Justice Department bring lawsuits over claimed constitutional infractions or failure to follow federal law. In other words, an executive order on election administration is mostly meaningless — and this is the case for multiple reasons…. Elections are administered by state officials and they are part of a separate, untethered sovereignty. The U.S. president can’t fire a governor or a mayor, ever. Federal law is supreme over state law. That makes states subordinate to but still not at the command of the president. They’re separate sovereignties. It is as though the tendons or draw-wires that connect a head of state down to local government in a unitary state have simply been severed in a federal one. He doesn’t just lack the authority. He lacks the power. As I explained Monday, the real issue is going to come when the president tries to use his unauthorized power to extort compliance by withholding money.

As Marshall notes, it’s one thing when most Americans don’t understand this; it’s close to unforgivable when most journalists don’t–when they cannot even offer clear descriptions of how the mechanics of government are actually supposed to work.

We are, as he says, “ten years in,” and yet Trump is still able to project an authority he very clearly does not possess. His ability to do so is a direct consequence of civic illiteracy–not just the public’s lack, but that of a worrisome percentage of the media. And when cowardly Republican office-holders are joined by cowardly law firms and universities that have bent to financial extortion, and by plutocrats willing to trade the stable governance that made their riches possible for an autocrat’s promise of special treatment…constitutional limits evaporate.

Civic ignorance has consequences, and we’re experiencing them.

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Who Will Die?

Among the travesties being committed by a lawless and determinedly stupid administration, its assault on science–and particularly medical science– is among the acts most likely to affect all Americans negatively. Ironically, the administration’s anti-science, anti-expertise tantrum has already proved to hit devoted MAGA Neanderthals the hardest.

While there have always been medical skeptics, this expanded retreat from sound medical advice began in earnest during the pandemic, when the “give me liberty” MAGA cult refused to wear masks, continued to sponsor and attend public gatherings, and–especially– refused to get vaccinated. They died of Covid in disproportionate numbers.

In the wake of the 2020 election, there was some speculation that–at least in some deep Red congressional districts–a fall-off in Republican votes was due to that disproportionate death rate. (I’ve been unable to find confirmatory data for that speculation, but the fact that unvaccinated folks were much more likely to suffer and die has been repeatedly documented.)

The designation of MAGA folks as a cult has become widespread, and the evidence for that continues to mount. During the pandemic, followers of their massively ignorant cult leader obediently ingested bleach and Ivermectin, a medication intended for horses; today, RNK, Jr.–he of the brain worm and an assortment of bizarre conspiracy theories–is busily substituting those theories for medical science. His cuts at HHS are already imperilling public health, and are likely to make it more difficult for sane Americans to receive the vaccines that protect us from a wide variety of diseases.

The dramatic politicization of health care is likely to affect us all, but–again, ironically–it is much more likely to affect the cult’s true believers. I recently came across an article describing how the choice of a doctor has become partisan. Research published in the British Journal of Political Science finds that Americans’ trust in their personal physicians—an area that the study notes “was once a rare nonpartisan sanctuary”—has become increasingly divided along political lines, with potentially serious implications for public health.

Here–in a nutshell–is what the study found.

Trust reversal: While Republicans were slightly more trusting of their doctors a decade ago, Democrats are now 12 percentage points more likely to express “a great deal” of trust in their physicians.

Political preferences matter: Both Republicans and Democrats strongly prefer doctors who share their political affiliation, sometimes placing as much importance on political alignment as on shared race or gender.

Health implications: With Trump voters over 50 being 11 percentage points less likely to closely follow their doctor’s advice, this partisan divide could affect health outcomes and potentially widen existing mortality gaps between Republican and Democratic counties.

It hasn’t always been this way.

In 2013, Republicans actually reported slightly higher trust in their personal doctors than Democrats. By 2022, the tables had turned dramatically, with Democrats approximately 12 percentage points more likely than Republicans to report “a great deal” of trust in their physicians.

The study noted that the General Social Survey–a research instrument that tracks American attitudes– found diminished “confidence in the scientific community, education, the press, and many other institutions had already polarized along partisan lines by 2010. Medicine, however, remained stubbornly nonpartisan until 2021.”

The COVID-19 pandemic thrust public health officials into the spotlight, where they quickly became lightning rods for partisan conflict. The study found strong evidence that as medical authorities like Dr. Anthony Fauci became political targets, the distrust spilled over into Americans’ relationships with their own personal doctors….

Between 2001 and 2019, researchers observed a growing gap in death rates between Republican and Democratic counties, with people in Democratic counties living longer. If partisan divides continue to influence healthcare decisions, this gap may widen further, creating a feedback loop where political identity affects health outcomes, which then reinforce political divisions.

As the linked article concludes, if this polarization continues or increases, and Americans increasingly make critical life choices based on political identity, those choices could mean the difference between early diagnosis and late-stage disease. That makes the stakes of this particular aspect of our deepening political divisions literally matters of life and death.

If the results of the stupidity were confined to those applauding it, that would be one thing. (Admittedly, still a bad thing, but–hey, I’m not a nice human–somewhat fitting.) But we’re all likely to inhabit a far less protective world. Cuts to the FDA alone will mean slower approval of new medications, fewer food safety inspections, and lapses in new medical products. Other cuts have decimated research into diseases like HIV, Parkinsons and Alzheimers.

The cult’s dominance threatens us all.

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