Building Back Better

There’s no avoiding the fact that U.S. citizens are currently experiencing a world of hurt. As one newsletter glumly reported, the federal government is now a subsidiary of Trump Inc. and the laws meant to prevent such a takeover go unenforced. There’s no investigation into Trump’s open corruption and self-dealing. The U.S. Supreme Court has elevated the president  above the law. Congress won’t even meet. 

No wonder Americans aren’t having policy debates.

The current lack of interest in the intricacies of policy may be entirely understandable, but–unless we are prepared to give in to Trumpian autocracy, we need to be thinking about how we go about rebuilding once the would-be king is gone and his MAGA racists have crawled back under their rocks.

According to a recent article in the American Prospect, a new think tank is doing precisely that. The organization is called Common Wealth. It is based in both Britain and the U.S., and it is focused not only on policy repair, but upon analysis of the policy failures that enabled Trump’s rise.

Common Wealth’s focus is on public ownership, public provision, and building state capacity. The first reason for this is simple reality: Despite the utter madness of what Trump is doing, the mess he’ll leave is going to have to be cleaned up. A future Democratic president, should there ever be one, will have no choice but to rebuild much of the entire administrative state from scratch—so they might as well build it back better, to coin a phrase. “We’re in a moment where things feel really perilous politically,” said Common Wealth’s U.S. program director Melanie Brusseler, “but also there’s a lot of hope in response.”

One important focus for Common Wealth is the affordability crisis. It has become obvious that neoliberal strategy didn’t work- belief in shipping jobs overseas to cut labor costs and keeping supply chain investment low finally collapsed during the pandemic, as supply shocks led to skyrocketing prices for goods and shipping. But it isn’t simply manufacturing; Common Wealth researchers point out that our current crisis of affordability is primarily driven by prices for things that can’t be offshored and/or imported– housing, education, health care, transportation. 

As a result, Common Wealth supports public provision, including Medicare for All and free college. As its researchers point out–and as this blog has frequently noted–America’s health care system is so plagued with hyper-complicated rent-seeking in which “uncountable private actors maneuver to swindle each other and/or the government and thereby claim a fat slice of America’s world-historical spending on health care, that the case for state coordination of providers as well as insurance practically makes itself.’

A primary focus of the new think tank is–understandably–climate change, and the policies necessary to ameliorate or slow it. Their researchers advocate “adaptations and asset development” –the creation of a huge number of publicly owned electrical generating assets that would be totally disconnected from volatile global markets for oil and gas.

Common Wealth claims affinity with previous efforts at what it terms “public provision.

Many Trump critics are focused on what he is doing to our basic democratic compact, and rightly so. But there’s a reason that all the presidents who led us through our worst previous crises also had an aggressive program of reform—and these also included public provision and ownership. Abraham Lincoln had greenbacks and land grant colleges; Franklin Roosevelt had Social Security, a massive public works program, the Tennessee Valley Authority, and much more. A core purpose of a democratic republic is to protect the welfare of the citizenry, and if a future government is to repair the damage inflicted by Trump and fight climate change as well, they will have to think even more ambitiously.

I will admit to significant reservations about some of the “public provisions” Common Wealth endorses, but we should all take comfort from the fact that there are institutions and individuals who are engaging with what will be a truly monumental task: rebuilding our governmental guardrails and ensuring the ability of those we elect to do their jobs. 

And speaking of “their jobs”–policy wonks need to start with a foundational inquiry: what is government’s job? What parts of our civic and economic life should government control, and what parts should be left to individuals and voluntary organizations? What aspects of our common lives must be approached collectively, and what parts must be protected against government overreach? 

That inquiry must be the framework within which we evaluate proposals to “build back better.”

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Civil Resistance

In a recent Substack, Paul Krugman shared a transcript of his interview/conversation with Erica Chenoweth, author of Civil Resistance: What Everyone Needs to Know. During Trump’s second term, Chenowith, a Harvard professor, has become well-known for her studies of resistance to autocracies across the globe–especially her conclusion that peaceful civil protest by 3.5% of a country’s population is usually effective in overcoming an autocratic regime.

Krugman’s first question is one most of us would ask: do protests like No Kings really matter? As Chenoweth noted, that question is slightly different from the question whether civil resistance matters.

On the protest side, just immediately speaking, there are a lot of papers about this. There are papers in my discipline (political science and sociology and econ) even about trying to understand the impacts of even a single day of protest and widespread participation, and a single day of protest on things like shifts in public opinion, changes in policy, shifts in election turnout for particular parties, the tendency for people to run for office, all kinds of reforms.

I think the general answer is that, on a number of dimensions, even a single day of protests with very widespread participation can often lead to shifts and those different outcomes, even if there’s sometimes modest shifts in places like the United States where a modest shift in voter turnout can actually be quite decisive because of the nature of our voting rules. “First past the post,” that means elections can be completely changed by small margins. So it’s easy to overstate the impact that a single day of protest can have. But it’s also easy to underestimate it, given where the scholarship is on this topic.

Chenoweth then turned to the “slightly different” question of civic resistance, which she explained is a broader phenomenon than protest, involving more sustained levels of nonviolent mobilization and organization. It extends beyond protests to other methods of non-cooperation like strikes and boycotts.

Chenoweth noted that, in the 20th century,  these tactics initiated democratic breakthroughs in Poland, the Philippines,  Serbia, Brazil, and Argentina, and prompted the Arab awakenings of the early 2010.

Krugman and Chenoweth returned to the impact of the recent No Kings protests; Krugman observed that those events weren’t simply peaceful–they were joyful, and the festive atmosphere arguably attracted more participants, while the act of participating encouraged a belief in the possibility of change.

Chenoweth agreed, citing studies on the impact of participation in the civil rights movement on those who participated. Engagement in those protests gave rise to a belief that the situation could be changed–not only that each individual should do something to effectuate that change, but more importantly, that individuals could do something to change it. Once that recognition dawns, “there’s no going back to the previous status quo where it felt like the situation was permanent, only going to get worse, and there’s nothing we can do about it.”

The No Kings mass resistance also accompanied other defections: Chenoweth cited incidents of prominent people resigning– or refusing to resign and forcing the administration to fire them; the archbishop of Chicago releasing a statement calling the  administration’s policy toward immigrants intolerable;  the Chamber of Commerce suing the Trump administration over its H-1b policy (on the basis of it being unconstitutional, not just on the basis of it being harmful for their industries); the multiple airports refusing to run Kristi Noem’s TSA commercial. These are all examples of non-cooperation. Krugman added the example of universities refusing to sign the administration’s “compact.”

The preparation that went into the No Kings protests–preparation that worked to ensure that they would be non-violent–was important. As Chenoweth put it,

The more representative the crowd is of the general population, the more likely it is to have non-escalatory impacts with police or with bystanders or anything else. Part of that is just because it’s very clear to all who are observing it, that these are folks from every walk of life, regardless of what the GOP wants to say about these people, they’re plainly peaceful protesters, some of them engaging for the first time in a political protest in their life…That’s the needle that civil resistance campaigns thread, which is to say they’re able to convey a political threat without threatening people and property around them.

Chenoweth says we are experiencing something new to the U.S.–authoritarianism has captured federal power. We the People must strengthen the civil society response, uphold the institutions that need upholding, and “renew and improve the institutions that need renewal and improvement without bloodshed. I truly believe that we have the capacity to do that.”

I hope she’s right.

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Ignoring The Obvious

America’s “legacy media” continues to downplay–or ignore–two of the most obvious sources of our current democratic crisis: Trump’s manifest mental disorders, and the undeniable corruption of the Supreme Court’s current majority. Our “papers of record”–the New York Times and the Washington Post–continue to normalize behaviors that are decidedly abnormal; they are aided and abetted by network news reports that carefully avoid even the implication that Trump’s behavior is “unusual” or that the Supreme Court’s majority is laying waste to its own jurisprudence.

There are, of course, independent newsletters and Internet sites that point to these realities, but those information sources are largely singing to the choir–Americans have long since sorted ourselves into audiences for “information” that panders to our preferred worldviews. As a result, MAGA folks are highly unlikely to have encountered the multiple psychiatric evaluations of Donald Trump–and equally unlikely to understand the radical extremism of the high Court’s majority.

One of my cousins is a cardiologist with a longstanding interest in psychiatry. He recently shared with me a column he’d written for his local newspapers, in which he reported on published psychiatric diagnoses of our demented President. I was especially interested in one published warning titled “Donald Trump, Like Hitler, is a Psychopath.”

Dodes warns that “this constitutes the most dangerous of all mental disorders, since it is the only psychological condition in which behaving in a morally reprehensible way is an essential part of its nature.” Manifestations of this disorder include the intentional creation of harm to others without guilt or remorse, for personal gain or self-gratification, which includes the sadistic pleasure of wreaking revenge against imagined enemies. Psychopaths cannot be reasoned out of their beliefs or their behavior, because they are unable to comprehend that others have value, or the concept of questioning themselves. The fact that Donald Trump has the most dangerous form of this disorder has two long-term consequences: It means that he is never going to stop intentionally harming others for his personal benefit, and it means that he will become worse over time. 

Basically, the psychiatric community has concluded that “Trump lacks the ability to listen to reason and draw conclusions from facts.” (As a frame of reference, the average score for psychopathy for someone in the general population is 5; the average for felons in a maximum-security prison is 22. Experts give Trump an average score of 34.) Add to that the fact that Trump is manifesting numerous, unmistakable and increasing signs of dementia, and the danger becomes too obvious to ignore–unless, of course, you are a member of the traditional news media.

If we had a properly functioning Supreme Court, Trump’s ability to destroy our government might be slowed. But we don’t have such a Court, a fact that Josh Marshall–the eminently moderate and reasonable editor of Talking Points Memo–recently addressed in a column titled “There is no Democratic Future without Supreme Court Reform.”

Marshall noted that–in the absence of Court reform– even a Democratic trifecta taking control and passing laws supportive of democracy, separation of powers and the rule of law wouldn’t be sufficient to solve the underlying problem, which is that a substantial minority of Americans really do favor autocracy. (What he didn’t say–and I will–is that what they favor is a White Christian autocracy.)

Any repairs would be at risk the moment Republicans were once again in control.

The simple truth is that none of the laws that are essential for reinforcing the federal system against Trumpist attack would survive the scrutiny of the current Republican court majority as soon as there is another Republican president. Most would be overruled much sooner because they would, like an anti-gerrymandering law, place limits on Republican states. You cannot consider the last three to four years and doubt any of this. And what follows from that is that no plan to recover from or even seriously battle with Trumpism can have any chance of success unless reforming the Supreme Court is the first order of business. The dire corruption of the Republican majority governs everything.

I agree. But the people who really need to understand what the mental health experts and constitutional scholars are telling us are unlikely to encounter discussion of these issues unless traditional mass media sources address them. The consolidation of media ownership by America’s plutocrats makes it very unlikely that we will see those sources engage in the journalism we need–a journalism that reports the obvious.

Talk about your perfect storm….

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This Is How You Keep ‘Em Down On The Farm…

Republicans in Indiana are currently struggling to find enough votes to engage in a mid-cycle gerrymander that they believe would send one or two more Republicans to Congress.

If enough members of Indiana’s GOP legislative supermajority cave to Trump and pass his desired gerrymander –and if that legislation survives a legal challenge (not a given, since it would run afoul of the state constitution)–and if the sheer effrontery of the act doesn’t drive turnout that reduces, rather than adds Republican seats–Indiana will presumably send to Congress the same sort of Republicans who keep trying to turn Indiana into Mississippi.

I have posted several times about the sheer knuckle-headedness of Indiana’s legislature, especially (but certainly not exclusively) when it comes to education policy. Not only have religious fundamentalists and Christian nationalists managed to squander huge amounts of our tax dollars on vouchers–starving public education while sending those dollars to private, overwhelmingly religious schools– virtually all of their interventions in education reflect their utter lack of understanding of what education is–they apparently confuse it with job training.

Not surprisingly, Indiana’s Department of Education reflects that legislative blind spot.

Michael Hicks–a Ball State University economist–recently published an essay criticizing a dangerously misguided policy change from DOE.

In crafting Indiana’s new high school diploma requirements, the state Department of Education identified only one of the two deep challenges to education in Indiana.

The new diploma might, and I stress might, help the smaller of the two problems. At the same time, it risks making the larger problem worse.

Indiana’s largest, and growing, problem is that we send too few young Hoosiers to college. The decade-long decline has been so bad, and so sustained, that we are now graduating and keeping young people beneath the replacement rate of our already dismal educational attainment.

This ensures we will slide toward the bottom of the nation in our share of college graduates by mid-century. That matters for our economy because over the past half-century more than 100% of economic growth accrued to places in the top half of educational attainment. So, if you wish to grow the place where you live — whether it’s a county, city or state — it needs to have better than average educational attainment.

The second problem Hicks identifies is a lack of entry-level job skills among the “excess supply of young Hoosiers” who don’t go to college. The state’s large employers complain about that lack, but as Hicks notes, employers who need college graduates or employees with advanced degrees don’t complain to the legislature–they simply recruit elsewhere.

DOE’s new policy charges schools with finding additional internships for more “hands-on” learning. Sounds good–but as Hicks quite correctly points out, the changes come at a steep cost. That’s because, in order to accommodate work outside the classroom, academic requirements have been reduced across the board.

Under the new rules, it is now possible to get a high school diploma with mathematics courses that are mostly taught in middle school and have been since the 1920s. Math, science, literacy, history and writing requirements have all been reduced. These are the lowest diploma standards in modern state history.

Once again, Indiana is ignoring the needs of poor and rural children. As Hicks says, affluent, college educated parents will ignore the minimum standards. Children from those families may even be better off, because “smart kids in rural and poor school corporations will be funneled into less exacting academic programs” weakening competition for college slots.

The new diploma offers some nice soundbites, but it’s an engine of unequal opportunity and a near guarantee that we’ll send fewer kids to college, and that we’ll send them there less prepared. That will be a panacea for businesses looking to hire folks for $15 an hour jobs, but will do nothing to promote prosperity in Indiana.

Of course, none of these concerns appeared in the briefing slides or implementation guidance of the new diploma. State officials simply didn’t do their homework, which is a damning observation for folks involved in education.

Hicks also notes the lack of homework evident in what the new policy calls the “military option.”

Students can obtain a “military diploma” in one of three ways–appointment to a service academy (which would require far more academic preparation than the new standards call for), enrollment in a college ROTC program (which requires that the student be in college–again, requiring more academic preparation than the standards contemplate), or enlistment in the armed forces before high school graduation.

Can we spell embarrassing?

Just what Congress needs–more GOP representatives from Indiana’s version of Mississippi…

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MAGA’s Defender Of Christianity

Trump’s base is disproportionately composed of Christian nationalists–people who tell you they support him because he is a defender of (their version of) the Christian faith. The notion that Trump has ever encountered Christianity–or any faith tradition–is ludicrous, but then, so is the pretense that Christian nationalists represent any variety of authentic Christianity.

The other day, I was reading Heather Cox Richardson’s daily Letter, and after reading the following passages, I wanted to find a self-identified Christian nationalist (Micah Beckwith? Jim Banks?) and ask “Do you really think this is what Jesus would do?”

Here’s what Richardson wrote:

Yesterday the Trump administration said it would not use any of the approximately $6 billion the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) holds in reserve to fund the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). The government shutdown means that states have run out of funds to distribute to the more than 42 million Americans who rely on SNAP to put food on the table.

Roll Call’s Olivia M. Bridges notes that this position contradicts the shutdown plan the USDA released in late September. Then, it said: “Congressional intent is evident that SNAP’s operations should continue since the program has been provided with multi-year contingency funds that can be used for State Administrative Expenses to ensure that the State can also continue operations during a Federal Government shutdown. These multi-year contingency funds are also available to fund participant benefits in the event that a lapse occurs in the middle of the fiscal year.”

Yesterday’s USDA memo also says that any states that tap their own resources to provide food benefits will not be reimbursed.

That last paragraph especially infuriated me, because it makes the fact that the cruelty is intentional too obvious to miss.

The Trump administration is not only withholding food from families and children. It clearly recognizes that–as food banks have been warning–nonprofit agencies will be unable to make up the deficit. This “let them eat cake” administration is well aware that a stoppage of SNAP means that millions of Americans (disproportionately children and the elderly) will not have enough to eat. And just in case some potentially “woke” Blue state government might be tempted to step in to ameliorate the situation, the administration is sneering that they’d better not expect reimbursements.

I guess those states will join the other “suckers and losers” who put themselves at risk to help their fellow Americans…

I’m not a Christian, but I cannot imagine this cruelty being consistent with the genuine teachings of Jesus. For that matter, I cannot conceive of any religion or religious tradition that teaches adherents that it’s fine to deny basic sustenance to millions of people in order to score political points. Or, for that matter, deny disaster relief to people who have the misfortune to live in Blue states, as the administration is also doing.

These and multiple other travesties are consistent with Trump’s war on “woke-ism”–and with MAGA’s belief that kindness, civility and concern for our fellow-Americans is evidence of a wimpy, “librul” unAmericanism.

At the No Kings rally I attended, a number of signs went beyond anger aimed at Trump and the incompetent clowns in his cabinet. Those signs were rebuttals to the utter inhumanity of this administration–the masked ICE goons, the effort to portray all immigrants as criminals, the constant, vicious assaults on concepts like equity and fair play.

When I was young, I could not have conceived of a President willing to portray himself as a King showering the citizens of his country with excrement–with shit. I could not have imagined a senile occupant of the Oval Office posting incoherent, misspelled diatribes on social media, or a President turning the Justice Department into a weapon of personal, petty vengeance. I absolutely would not have believed that a President of these United States would be willing to deny food to children in order to satisfy a political pique.

But this is where we are. Trump is the Jim Jones of a MAGA cult that is willing to shut the government down rather than restore the subsidies that make health insurance affordable to millions of Americans.

If these are the behaviors of a defender of Christianity, I’ll eat my hat.

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