Buying Political Office

Americans are about to experience the political results of our new Gilded Age. After some forty plus years of growing financial inequality–where the gap between the rich and the rest has steadily grown–we have inaugurated a government by and for the obscenely rich.

As Heather Cox Richardson recently noted, Elon Musk is expected to have an office in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building. Musk–who benefits from government contracts worth billions of dollars–will be in an office adjacent to the White House. (Whatever happened to that old-fashioned notion about the necessity of avoiding conflicts of interest?)

It isn’t just Musk. Other members of the world’s richest men’s club flanked Musk on the dais at Trump’s inauguration. They reportedly included Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, and Meta chief executive officer Mark Zuckerberg, who are worth almost a trillion dollars combined, were joined by other obscenely rich panderers: the CEO of OpenAI, Sam Altman; the CEO of the social media platform TikTok, Shou Zi Chew; and the CEO of Google, Sundar Pichai.

During his confirmation hearing, the billionaire nominee Trump has chosen for Treasury Secretary, Scott Bessent, outlined his plans to enrich the rich (and screw over the poor) during his confirmation hearing before the Senate Banking Committee, telling committee members that extending Trump’s tax cuts for the rich would be his highest priority.

Trump has assembled a cabinet notable for the wealth of his nominees (and equally notable for their lack of relevant knowledge and experience), but as the Brookings Institution has recently pointed out, American governance by the rich rather than the competent has grown significantly at all levels.

The linked study documented three major conclusions, of which only the last is at all comforting:

Altogether, across four election cycles from 2018 to 2024 there were 183 candidates who contributed more than $1 million of personal money to their campaigns.

Republicans constituted 68% of all candidates contributing more than a million to their campaigns.

Most rich people who spend personal money on campaigns lose.

The study’s introductory paragraph asked the pertinent question.

The richest man in the world now sits close to the President elect and uses his powerful social media platform, X, to opine on everything from daylight savings time to visas for skilled workers. As the new administration takes shape, the number of multi-millionaires and billionaires moving to Washington grows. While this is good for Washington area real estate agents, is it good for democracy? Will someone who earns $14 million per day be able to appreciate how important $1,976.00 (the average monthly social security payment) is to millions of Americans?

The obvious answer to the question posed by that last sentence is no. The Brookings article cited a previous study that looked at the political priorities of the rich.

In 2013, three political scientists studied the political views of over 100 rich Americans, whose median wealth was $7,500,000.00. They found large differences between the policy preferences of the rich compared to average Americans. 

Ya think?

Every so often, I cite a musical lyric that seems (at least to me) to illuminate a current political issue. Here’s one: the flower girl in My Fair Lady sings that all she wants is a “room somewhere, far away from the cold night air”–somewhere where she can have “warm hands, warm face, warm feet.” There are far too many Americans who fall into that category–people struggling every day to find lodging or keep the heat on and the car running and the baby fed.

I’ll go out on a limb here and suggest that Elon Musk and his fellow billionaires have absolutely no understanding of those struggles, no comprehension of the choices facing millions of America’s working poor–and rather clearly, no sympathy for them.

There are certainly wealthy individuals who do understand that their own ability to thrive depends upon a government that supports an economically stable middle class–who understand that job creation depends upon the existence of a public with enough disposable income to buy their widgets, rather than on the whim of an “entrepreneur” waving a magic wand. Those individuals didn’t share the dias with the fat-cat, self-satisfied billionaires who will have effective control of America’s government and who are interested only in amassing greater wealth and power. Trump’s billionaire toadies have evidenced zero understanding of the purpose of government and no interest whatsoever in the notion of the common good. 

President Eisenhower warned us about the military-industrial complex, and he was right. President Biden warned us about the coming oligarchy, and he was also right.

Between the White Christian Nationalists and the oligarchs, the next few years will be…challenging. To say the least. 

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White Sheets And Red Hats

There is no longer any way to pretend that the MAGA movement is not all about racism. The only difference between Trump and a Grand Dragon is that the white sheet has been exchanged for a red hat. (KKK members at least understood that they should hide their faces; MAGA’s racists are “out and proud.”)

Spineless fellow-travelers in the GOP can no longer pretend that clear signs of bigotry are being “misinterpreted”– that Nazi salutes are just signs of exuberance. Trump has removed any ambiguity those quislings might hide behind.

Trump’s Executive orders attacked diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs, ordered the Justice Department to stop civil rights prosecutions already in progress and to cease any investigations of racist discrimination currently underway. As part of that purge of diversity programs, he ordered federal workers to report colleagues who keep such programs alive and  threatened those who don’t comply. In a related order, Trump revoked a 60-year-old rule banning discrimination at federal contractors.

Even his assault on the Department of Education is motivated by the fact that it investigates civil rights complaints at K-12 schools and higher education institutions.

Robert Hubbell has noted a particularly heartless coda to Trump’s effort to make bigotry great again:

Trump expanded “DEI” to include an “A” (for “accessibility”)—apparently indicating an attempt to root out efforts to expand the representation of disabled individuals protected by the Americans with Disability Act (ADA). See Mother Jones, Trump Shuts Down Diversity Programs Across Government.

The New York Times has reported that Trump’s Justice Department has not only halted new civil rights investigations, but has also signaled that it might back out of agreements with local police departments to address misconduct–sending a clear message that police officers accused of unnecessary violence against minority citizens are unlikely to face any penalties.

Hubbell also reported the contents of chilling internal memos:

Internal memos at federal agencies announced the immediate abolition of “DEIA” in ominous language that suggested a police state. The memos said,

The Department [AGENCY” NAME] is taking steps to close all agency DEIA offices and end all DEIA-related contracts in accordance with President Trump’s executive orders titled Ending Radical and Wasteful Government DEI Programs and Preferencing and Initial Rescissions of Harmful Executive Orders and Actions.

These programs divided Americans by race, wasted taxpayer dollars, and resulted in shameful discrimination.

We are aware of efforts by some in government to disguise these programs by using coded or imprecise language. If you are aware of a change in any contract description or personnel position description since November 5, 2024, to obscure the connection between the contract and DEIA or similar ideologies, please report all facts and circumstances to [omitted email address] within 10 days.

There will be no adverse consequences for timely reporting this information. However, failure to report this information within 10 days may result in adverse consequences.

Worse, the email threatens federal employees with punishment if they fail to “snitch” on other federal workers who fail to comply with vague, retrospective regulations designed to sniff out alleged “underground efforts” to promote diversity. The analog to Nazi Germany is direct. No similes or metaphors are needed. The memo is a complete one-to-one mapping onto the tactics of Hitler’s SS.

Republican assaults on the very concept of fairness and non-discrimination aren’t limited to the federal government. Here in deep-Red Indiana (former headquarters of the KKK), a bill working its way through the General Assembly would ban diversity, equity and inclusion in state agencies, educational institutions and any organization that receives money from the state.

Under SB 235, DEI’s definition includes social justice, systemic oppression and antiracism. And it bans taking positions on those issues. It also limits training related to race, sex, color, ethnicity, gender identity or sexual orientation. And it bans “influencing the composition” of employees related to race, sex, color or ethnicity.

Give the GOP credit for “coming out.” MAGA has always been racist and White Christian Nationalist to the core– an effort to reclaim social and legal dominance for straight White Christian males. Pundits who attribute Trump’s (slim) electoral victory to Democratic messaging or Biden policies simply refuse to see the GOP elephant in the room: Kamala Harris was defeated by the deeply-rooted racism and misogyny of far too many American voters.

There is no longer any intellectually honest way to avoid recognizing and naming what really motivates these people. And no way for those of us who don’t share those hatreds to escape the clear moral imperative to resist, speak truth to power, and call MAGA what it so obviously is. 

We are either on the side of Episcopal Bishop Budde or the Red Hats. There is no middle ground.

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House Bill 1136

The assault on democracy and rationality isn’t just at the federal level.

At the start of every session, the culture warriors in Indiana’s terrible legislature introduce all kinds of wacky and extreme bills. Some of them are so wacky and so extreme that they go no farther. They don’t even get committee hearings.

Of course, lots of perfectly reasonable measures–even obviously excellent ones, if sponsored by Democrats–also go to the  bill graveyard.

Media folks who cover the statehouse have learned not to take bills seriously until there are indications that they have some chance of actually passing. That should be our reaction to House Bill 1136, which has received a good deal of publicity and generated significant anguished pushback. H.B. 1136 provides that, if more than 50% of students who live within a school corporation’s boundaries are enrolled in a school that isn’t operated by that school corporation, “the school corporation must be dissolved and all public schools of the school corporation must be transitioned to operating as charter schools.” The bill establishes a new governing board and procedures for dissolving and reorganizing the school corporation.

I tend to lump this bit of legislative nastiness (it’s clearly aimed at urban schools that serve minority and low-income kids) in with the other looney-tune measures that will go to the big bill cemetery in the sky, but it does trigger several of my pet peeves, the most “peevish” of which is lawmakers’ persistent war on public education.

Before I focus on recent evidence bolstering my argument that vouchers are simply a way to evade the First Amendment and allow legislators to send tax dollars to religious schools, I need to focus on a preliminary pet peeve: the public discourse that makes no distinction between charter schools and the private schools that accept vouchers. 

Charter schools are public schools. They operate under restrictions that don’t apply to private schools (like the Constitution). Overall–depending upon their sponsorship and management–their performance has been positive. That’s overall, but–just as with traditional public schools–there are exceptions. (Most of the problems, according to what I’ve read, have come from charters managed by private, for-profit companies.)

Voucher-accepting private schools are another matter entirely, as I have repeatedly documented.

Pro Publica recently added to the huge volume of data on that subject.

In an article titled “On a Mission From God: Inside the Movement to Redirect Billions of Taxpayer Dollars to Private Religious Schools,” the report focused on the religious underpinnings–and successes–of the voucher movement. The article highlighted three conclusions.

The Ohio Model: Rarely seen letters show how the voucher movement started in the 1990s as a concealed effort to finance urban parochial schools and expanded to a much broader push.

Helping the Affluent: An initiative promoted as a civil rights cause — helping poor kids — is increasingly funneling money to families who already easily afford private school tuition.

The Voucher Deficit: Expanding programs threaten funding for public schools and put pressure on state budgets, as many religious-based schools enjoy new largesse.

I really urge you to click through and read the entire hair-raising report, which documents the real purposes of educational vouchers: they are tools meant to enrich religious institutions and the well-to-do, and undermine separation of church and state.

The risks of universal vouchers are quickly coming to light. An initiative that was promoted for years as a civil ­rights cause — helping poor kids in troubled schools — is threatening to become a nationwide money grab. Many private schools are raising tuition rates to take advantage of the new funding, and new schools are being founded to capitalize on it. With private schools urging all their students’ families to apply, the money is flowing mostly to parents who are already able to afford tuition and to kids who are already enrolled in private schools. When vouchers do draw students away from public districts, they threaten to exacerbate declining enrollment, forcing underpopulated schools to close. More immediately, the cost of the programs is soaring, putting pressure on public school finances even as private schools prosper. In Arizona, voucher expenditures are hundreds of millions of dollars more than predicted, leaving an enormous shortfall in the state budget. States that provide funds to families for homeschooling or education-related expenses are contending with reports that the money is being used to cover such unusual purchases as kayaks, video game consoles and horseback-­riding lessons.

Strategists behind this effort started with targeted programs that placed needy kids in parochial schools. Then they fought to expand the benefits to far richer families — “a decadeslong effort by a network of politicians, church officials and activists, all united by a conviction that the separation of church and state is illegitimate.” 

So much for that pesky Constitution…

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Loud And Clear

There was no missing the chilling messages delivered by Trump and his supporters at his Inauguration and immediately after, through his Executive Orders.

There’s obviously a great deal that could be said about most of those vindictive and mean-spirited Executive Orders, several of which were of dubious legality. (Overturning Biden’s order reducing the cost of insulin for those on Medicare or Medicaid seemed particularly egregious–surely many of the beneficiaries of that measure are among his voters. But making Big Pharma happy evidently took precedence over Trump’s non-existent concern for the “little people.”)

I will leave discussion of most of these acts of petulance for others to discuss, because most of them were unrelated to the major message conveyed by Elon Musk’s “heil Hitler” salute and Trump’s pardon of the January 6th insurrectionists. The incoming administration is no longer bothering to hide what most of us already knew was the motivating force behind MAGA–racism and general hatred of the Other. After all, the movement has no policy agenda, no coherent ideology–it’s all racism and White Christian nationalism.

The pathetic efforts to excuse Musk’s Nazi salutes (note the “s”–he gave it not once but twice) brought to mind Timothy Snyder’s warning in his book On Tyranny about people who acquiesce to tyrants in advance. I’ve never considered the Anti-Defamation League a particularly effective organization, but the feeble attempt by its spokespersons to suggest that the gesture was somehow an excess of “enthusiasm” should tell us just how feckless it really is. That pathetic effort to ingratiate the organization with the coming administration rang hollow to anyone who saw the videos of Musk rendering that salute (not to mention anyone who has watched him turn Twitter into a Nazi-apologetic site, or noted his recent endorsement of the German far-right.)

Of course, the salute itself pales before the message sent by Trump’s pardons and commutations of the criminals who participated in the January 6th insurrection. As my youngest son said, it was a loud and clear call to Trump’s Brownshirts, a promise that–no matter what they do on his behalf, no matter what heads they crack, what laws they break, what American principles they deficate on–he’ll have their back. Like Trump himself, they will evade any real accountability.

These “patriots” destroyed government property. They assaulted–and killed–law enforcement officers. Those in prison had been found guilty of sedition by judges and by juries of their peers. A significant number had pled guilty, admitting to the charges of serious lawbreaking.

Pardoning people who were willing to jettison their country’s principles and the rule of law for their “dear leader” gives the whole game away.

There were plenty of related messages sent via those Executive Orders. The assault on the Department of Justice, for example, was notable. But none of those other moves was as obvious and horrifying as the explicit approval of violence if it was committed on Trump’s behalf.

Anyone who actually listened to what Trump was preaching to the MAGA mobs already understood that the movement was all–and only–about “recapturing” America for straight White “Christian” men. It was–and is–about fear and hatred of the Other: brown and Black people, Jews, Muslims, Asians, Gays…the vicious anti-immigrant sentiment that Trump rode to the White House has always focused solely on dark-skinned immigrants. Efforts to paint Trump supporters as folks angry about inflation or the economy deliberately ignore the hysteria over “woke-ism” and DEI (Diversity, Equity and Inclusion). It isn’t just coincidental that another of those Executive Orders erased diversity training and all governmental DEI programs.

There is no way to put lipstick on this particular pig. There’s also nothing to be gained by “playing nice” with the people who are just fine–indeed, ecstatic– with all of this. The rest of us need to face up to the fact that America has just installed an “out and proud” fascist government, filled with people who no longer find it necessary to pretend otherwise.

It not only can happen here…it is happening. And the worst thing we can do is emulate the “good Germans” who turned their heads and pretended not to see.

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And So It Begins…

During Inauguration events, Elon Musk gave Trump the Nazi salute. There’s no evading the reality of what we face.

Yesterday, I participated in a rally to kick off local resistance to an administration I would once have considered unthinkable. The rally was organized by Hoosiers4Democracy, and cosponsored by ACLU Indiana, ReCenter Indiana, Common Cause Indiana, Women4Change Indiana, AAUW Indiana, and the League of Women Voters Indiana. It was enthusiastically supported by several local media organizations, including the Indiana Citizen.

The purpose of the event was to offer people an alternative to television coverage of the Inauguration, and to allow dispirited citizens an opportunity to interact with other Hoosiers who share their determination to protect the America we love and support from the coming fascist onslaughts, both state and national.

I had hoped that a hundred or so determined souls would turn out, but approximately 500 people filled the sanctuary at Indianapolis’ Broadway United Methodist Church (even the Mayor attended). There was wonderful, uplifting music. There were inspiring speeches. There was a feeling of community and resolve. It was great.

I was honored to deliver a few preliminary remarks. I’m sharing them below. (And speaking of sharing, if anyone reading this was in attendance, I’d welcome your reactions.)

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America’s original motto was e pluribus unum: out of the many, one. It’s a motto many of us embrace, but it also raises a question that Doctor King addressed: what is the nature of unity in a radically diverse society?  What defines the community we aspire to join?  How do dramatically different people live peacefully and productively together? How do we build an overarching community that welcomes everyone while still honoring and respecting our differences?

I think the answer lies in what has been called America’s “civic religion”—our allegiance to the overarching principles embodied in America’s constituent documents—values that are absolutely central to what I call the American Idea. Those values are what motivate the cosponsors of this event, and numerous other organizations—like the aptly named “Indiana Citizen”—that are now preparing to defend them. Those values will be under attack by an administration that one pundit has described as “an affront to the very idea of America.”

In 2004, I wrote a column in which I listed what I saw as the values that define us as Americans– principles that infuse the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights and that are absolutely central to the America most of us inhabit. We are here today to honor and reclaim those principles and values, at a time when too many voters and political figures have abandoned them.

What are they? What do “real” Americans believe?

Americans believe in justice and civil liberties—in equal treatment and fair play for all citizens, whether or not we agree with them or like them or approve of their life choices.

We believe that no one is above the law—and that includes those who run our government.

We believe that dissent can be the highest form of patriotism. Mark Twain once wrote that patriots always support their country– and support their government when it deserves it. People who care about America enough to speak out against policies they believe to be wrong or anti-American or corrupt aren’t just exercising their rights as citizens, they are discharging a sacred civic responsibility.

We believe that “wedge issues”– playing to people’s fears and prejudices and marginalizing or demonizing any minority in the pursuit of political advantage– is un-American and immoral.

We believe passionately in what one pundit has called “critical intelligence, tolerance, respect for evidence, and a regard for science.”

We believe, to use the language of the nation’s Founders, in “a decent respect for the opinions of mankind” (even non-American mankind).

We believe in the true heartland of this country, which is anywhere where people struggle to provide for their families, dig deep into their pockets to help the less fortunate, and understand their religions to require goodwill and loving kindness rather than cruelty, nastiness or cultural dominance.

And we really do believe that the way you play the game is more important, in the end, than whether you win or lose. If the Bill of Rights stands for anything, it stands for the proposition that the ends don’t justify the means.

Today we honor Martin Luther King, who reminded us that—despite the fact that we have too often failed to live up to those aspirations—it is fidelity to those values that REALLY makes America great.

Those of us who are here today intend to reclaim those values and rededicate ourselves to their realization. We are here to pledge our efforts to rebuild an America that works to embody and protect the American Idea. And we are also here to send a message to those who ignore and dishonor the American Idea: we will resist your assaults with every fiber of our beings.

Thank you all for coming to pledge allegiance to the American Idea on this cold January day, and please help me welcome the wonderful clergy who are joining us today: Quaker Pastor Phil Gulley; Rabbi Aaron Spiegel; and Reverend David Greene.

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