What We Will Inaugurate

In a little over a week, Donald Trump will be inaugurated as President of the (dis)United States–an outcome that seemed unthinkable not that long ago. Among the reasons for that outcome was the refusal of millions of Americans to cast a ballot; if turnout had just held steady from 2020, Harris would have won. It’s hard to dismiss suspicion that racism and misogyny were more potent than a desire to keep a mentally-ill felon out of the Oval Office.

Some political supporters saw Trump as a path toward personal gain. As Josh Marshall wrote on Talking Points Memo, many Washington “players” saw Trump as a vehicle for their own ambitions. He wasn’t just old and increasingly worn out, but he also wasn’t particularly invested in what would happen once he was in the White House. His focus was on not going to jail and  exacting vengeance over his foes. As Marshall noted, that disinterest in actual governing leaves lots of openings for people who see an opportunity to direct–and benefit from– government policy. There’s little sign Trump cares. He’s already gotten what he wants.

We see evidence supporting Marshall’s thesis in what currently looks like the “co-Presidency” of Elon Musk. An article in Common Dreams introduced readers to the Mump regime:

Welcome to America’s “Mump regime,” governance of, by and for the oligarchs in which an erratic unelected white supremacist gazillionaire whose new hobby is buying presidents is cosplaying as shadow president to cash in – and fuck kids with cancer – alongside a senile grifter selling everything in sight: Bibles, sneakers, perfume, hotels, cabinet seats, diplomatic posts and democracy itself. Beware: Just to be clear, “We now have a criminal enterprise, not a government.”

The article notes that Trump has assembled a group of billionaires–13 so far–to staff his oligarchy, but notes that Musk is both the richest and most influential.

A likely illegal alien and white supremacist who grew up in apartheid South Africa, made a fortune from a car that kills twice as many people as the industry average, and though foreign-born found a way to power by giving a useful idiot $277 million to become his puppet master. A good investment: Since the election, Musk has made $170 billion, most from Tesla and SpaceX investors eager to see him end all those pesky safety and labor rules that cut into profits.

Buying Trump was so profitable Never-Elected Pres. Musk is already malevolently branching out. He’s threatening people in Congress, including “jackass” moderates of both parties, with unseating them by throwing money at potential primary opponents if they dare to disagree with him. Governing by threat, tweet and financial heft comes so easily to the guy who quickly turned Twitter into a bigot-invested haven for hate akin to “a Munich beer hall hall in 1933” that he’s even telling Germans how to vote – for Nazis. “Only the AFD can save Germany,” he posted in defense of anti-immigrant fascists who want to purify Europe by casting out people it considers lesser, if not subhuman. Weirdly, he did it on the same day 100 years ago Hitler was released from a Bavarian prison, and the New York Times declared him a “tamed…sadder and wiser man” than when he’d tried to overthrow the government.”

It’s difficult to predict how successful the Mump Administration will be in implementing its announced policies. Despite having “served” as President for a term, Trump has clearly learned little or nothing about governance, and Musk (who believes he knows everything) is equally ignorant of the way things actually work. The GOP’s majority in the House is narrow and it’s filled with culture warriors and White Nationalists more intent upon appearing on Fox News than governing. They’re adamantly opposed to anything approaching negotiation or compromise. If the country emerges relatively unscathed by the looney-tune administration taking shape, we will owe that escape to their massive dysfunctions.

Unfortunately, however, even incompetent clowns can do a lot of damage.

I keep thinking of that Mark Twain quote: Patriotism is supporting your country all the time, and your government when it deserves it.

On Inauguration Day, a number of Hoosiers who might be considered “Mark Twain patriots” will reaffirm our support for and love of our country and for what I have called “the American Idea”–the philosophy animating our constituent documents, and summarized by America’s first motto: e pluribus unum. 

Ours will be a simple message: in our America, government serves the common good, and everyone deserves a seat at the civic table. (You can find more information about that gathering here.)

Join us if you can.

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One Zip Code At A Time

In yesterday’s post, I shared my stunned reaction to the people described in Tim Alberta’s book, “The Kingdom, the Power and the Glory.”

I have always known that there are people who–for one reason or another– are emotionally or mentally unable to cope with the world they actually inhabit. I’ve also recognized that conspiracy theories and flat-out lunacy have increased significantly over the past few years. (QAnon, Jewish space lasers, etc., etc.) But I’m willing to wager that those of us who go about our daily affairs without interacting with the millions of “bible believers” Alberta describes simply haven’t grasped the degree to which these angry and fearful folks have rejected contact with reality.

Their bizarre beliefs explain Trump’s narrow win.

So much for an explanation. We are left with the question: what do sane folks do when the inmates are running the asylum? Granted, we must resist the efforts of a federal administration to pander to MAGA dysfunctions, but–as the Brookings Institution has recently counseled–there are other steps we can and should take.

At the national level, bipartisan collaboration to identify the systemic sources of our economic and social distress will be a long time coming. In the meantime, voters still want someone to address the chronic challenges they see in front of them in the places where they live and work.

In short, the rise of the digital world means that in the real world, we have more work to do than ever to solve problems. The good news is that in the remaining places where people mix and encounter those they don’t already know—whether that’s their neighborhood Main Street or downtown—the seeds of solutions already exist. At this hyperlocal level, individuals and institutions avoid ideological arguments, build trust, and do the on-the-ground work—often starting with public spaces—across the civic, nonprofit, private, and public sectors.

The authors remind us that neighborhood quality of life has been shown to be a key determinant of both personal well-being and voter satisfaction, and argues that–contrary to the argument that hyperlocal efforts are somehow a form of secession– they are actually the opposite: a way to keep people and places engaged.

The article traced former actions of people the authors call “local champions—sometimes residents, other times businesses or local civic entities”—who have previously taken action focused on the local public realm, creating business improvement districts, parks conservancies, creative “placemaking” groups, community gardens, public markets, and community development corporations. As the article noted, these hyper-local efforts stimulated place-based vibrancy and culture, and rebuilt social and civic infrastructure.

In recent years, some of these entities have expanded to co-managing and programming a major new category of public space in partnership with transportation advocates: streets and sidewalks (and plazas created on them). At the same time, some of the most promising experiments in addressing specific issues such as homelessness, crime, education, health, and small business support have focused on a place-centered approach, integrating an array of public, private, nonprofit, and philanthropic players at the place level.

The “moral of the story” is obvious: in the face of coming dysfunction at the national level, Americans can lean into and improve the place-based partnerships that build community, trust, health, and wealth at the hyperlocal, zip-code level.

Such efforts should start with research into past successes and failures.

How can we learn from—and improve upon—the last 50 years’ of place-based partnerships that played a key role in reversing urban decline? Who has succeeded in building and sustaining strong places? What are the legal, regulatory, governance, and management mechanisms that link those players with government at the hyperlocal level and incentivize their working together for the common good? Which bureaucratic barriers hold them back? What are the financial mechanisms that sustain place-centered institutions? Where are these place-centered partnerships not happening and why not?

I think this is sound advice. Focusing on local improvements encourages and facilitates participation by citizens who feel powerless to affect national policy. While we certainly should continue to do what we can to resist dangerous and damaging federal actions (emailing our representatives, attending protests, funding resistance organizations), an individual’s ability to effect change is far greater at the local level. And citizens who participate in local successes are much more likely to take an interest in all policy issues and to vote.

Even some of the rabid “believers” Alberta described might be induced to visit reality, however briefly, if reality visits their zip codes.

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Christian MAGA

A Northwest Indiana newspaper recently reported that Micah Beckwith, Indiana’s incoming Lieutenant Governor, is telling people to refuse to comply with hospital requirements to wear masks when visiting to avoid spreading respiratory illnesses. Beckwith, you will (not) be pleased to know, speaks to God, who evidently doesn’t want us to mask up…

Those of us who find people like Beckwith difficult–okay, impossible–to understand or take seriously, need to read Tim Alberta’s book, “The Kingdom, the Power and the Glory.” It’s eye-opening. And sleep-disturbing.

Alberta himself is a devout Evangelical Christian. His father was a Southern Baptist preacher, and it is very clear from the book that Alberta has not only remained wedded to that tradition, but is in possession of deep biblical knowledge. He is also, however, sane, and inhabits an America with which most of us are familiar.

He appears to be one of the declining number of deeply religious Christians who refuse to cherry-pick biblical passages in order to bolster very unChristian bigotries.

In the wake of his father’s death and the 2016 election, Alberta tried to get his head around a question that has stumped many of us: how could so many ostentatiously devout Christians be in thrall to a figure like Donald Trump? (In 2020, Trump’s share of the White Evangelical vote was a whopping 84 percent.) Alberta took a year and a half to visit numerous Evangelical congregations to try to understand what motivated them.

His book was the product of those visits. I found it terrifying.

As one review noted,

This phenomenon, Alberta says, cannot simply be a matter of evangelicals mobilizing against abortion access and trying to save lives; after all, they have kept remarkably quiet when it comes to showing compassion for refugees or curbing gun violence, which is now, as Alberta notes, the leading cause of death for children in the United States.

What he finds instead is that under the veneer of Christian modesty simmers an explosive rage, propelling Americans who piously declare their fealty to Jesus to act as though their highest calling is to own the libs.

The book demonstrates that the “veneer” has pretty much peeled off. Alberta interviews some of the “usual suspects”– con-artist preachers of the Religious Right–and those interviews amply confirm what we “libs” have already concluded. Far more revealing were his interactions with members of the “flocks,” the congregants, a great many of whom had left churches where the pastors had declined to substitute MAGA politics for biblical sermonizing, and most of whom occupy an alternate, imaginary  and unrecognizable America.

Two things about those reports especially dumbfounded me: the sheer number of people who embrace what Alberta calls “blood-and-soil Christian nationalism;” and the widespread rejection of logic, fact, science and basic humanity among those thousands of “biblical literalists”. As the linked review noted,

“The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory” charts a transformation in evangelicalism, from a midcentury moment when white American Christians were such a dominant force in the country that many could “afford to forget politics” to a time when many more feel, as one prominent pastor puts it, “under siege.” Alberta suggests that this panic has less to do with any existential threat to American Christianity than a rattled presumption of privilege. “Humility doesn’t come easy to the American evangelical,” he writes. “We are an immodest and excessively indulged people.”

A majority of these congregants have turned religion into politics, and substituted (their version of) the “real” America for God. In one sanctuary, Alberta sees “a lot of American flags” but not a single cross.” He found belligerent culture warriors who never spoke about helping immigrants or the poor, and noted that “bashing the left tends to stimulate conservative passions more reliably than trying to teach Jesus’ example of good deeds and turning the other cheek.”

A booth at the Faith and Freedom Coalition was selling T-shirts with “Let’s Go Brandon,” the conservative chant that stands  for an expletive directed at Joe Biden. In case the expletive was unclear, the T-shirts included a hashtag #FJB. When Alberta questioned the propriety of such merchandise at a Christian event, the proprietor responded that he was protesting the “fact” that “we’ve taken God out of America.”

Shutdowns during the pandemic particularly incensed many of these culture warriors, and Alberta recounts multiple conversations with people who sound a lot like Indiana’s Micah Beckwith. COVID, they insist, was a liberal assault on Christianity and the church. (One woman insisted that Dr. Fauci had “invented” it.) Masks and vaccines are a liberal plot.

These are the people who elected Donald Trump.

The book is chilling. Read it.

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Meta Goes Vichy

The term “Vichy” refers to the shameful, collaborationist government in World War II France, during that country’s Nazi occupation. In the run-up to the Trump/MAGA occupation of the United States, Mark Zuckerberg just announced Vichy Meta.

Meta won’t be even a small part of the resistance.

Zuckerberg has announced that Facebook will end its longstanding fact-checking program. Third-party fact-checking was originally instituted to curtail the spread of misinformation on Facebook and Meta’s other social media apps.

The change was the latest sign of how companies owned by multi-zillionaires are “repositioning” (aka groveling) in preparation for the Trump presidency.

The Bulwark headlined the move “Mark Zuckerberg is a Surrender Monkey,” pointing out that he’d recently named Joel Kaplan as the company’s head of public policy. Kaplan isn’t just a Republican in good standing, he’s a close friend of Brett Kavanaugh, and–according to the article– “somewhere between friendly-toward and horny-for Trumpism.” He also appointed Dana White, manager of something called Ultimate Fighting Championship to Meta’s board of directors. That background is arguably  irrelevant to Meta’s business, but his usefulness rather clearly isn’t in any expertise he possesses; instead, his “value” clearly lies in being one of Donald Trump’s closest friends and top endorsers. 

Add to that Zuckerberg’s one million dollar donation to Trump’s Inaugural fund.

Kaplan went on Fox & Friends (of course) to explain that Facebook is killing its fact-checking program in order to make its content moderation strategy more like Elon Musk’s Twitter/X regime.  

As all sentient Americans are aware, when Musk purchased Twitter (which he awkwardly re-named X), he promised unfettered free speech. He then proceeded to invite back users who had previously been banned for bad behavior. He then fired content moderation teams, and replaced them with crowdsourced “community notes” below disputed content. That is the model Meta is adopting.

So–how are things going at X?

Numerous studies have documented the enormous amounts of false and hateful content now on X. Antisemitic, racist and misogynistic posts rose sharply immediately after Musk’s takeover, and have continued to proliferate. It hasn’t only been the bigotry. Disinformation about issues like climate change and migration has exploded, and users are spending greater amounts of time liking and reposting items from authoritarian governments and terrorist groups like the Islamic State and Hamas. 

There’s a reason so many advertisers have fled and former users of the platform have decamped for Bluesky.

The Bulwark reproduced Zuckerberg’s tweets announcing the change, including one jaw-dropping post explaining that the company would move its “trust and safety and content moderation teams” out of California and send them to Texas, to allay concerns about content-moderation bias. (If just being located in a Blue state creates bias, what sort of bias can we expect from people located in and influenced by Greg Abbott’s Red, retrograde Texas?)

All this to pander to an incoming autocrat whose continuing mental decline becomes more obvious every day. In his most recent press conference, Trump once again threatened to invade Greenland–owned by our ally Denmark– and to recapture the Panama Canal (which he inexplicably explained was necessary to counter China.) He also announced his intention to make Canada part of the U.S., and to rename the Gulf of Mexico.

Well, I’m sure those measures will bring down the price of eggs….

This is the buffoon who will soon occupy the Oval Office. The fact that a (slim) majority of Americans voted for this mentally-ill ignoramus is depressing enough, but recognizing that we have large numbers of citizens who vote their White Christian Nationalism is one thing; the fact that people who clearly know better are willing to surrender their integrity in advance in order to stay in the good graces of the lunatic-in-charge is appalling. 

Facebook has already morphed from a useful platform allowing us to interact with family and friends into a site where advertisements vastly outnumber real posts. Its content moderators were already bending over backwards to accommodate Rightwing worldviews. How many users have the time or energy–or interest–to rebut blatant falsehoods and conspiracy theories? For that matter, in a platform increasingly occupied by “bubbles”–where we interact mostly with people who already agree with us–will we even see the sorts of misinformation and disinformation that will be posted and enthusiastically shared by people who desperately want to believe that vaccines are a liberal plot and Jews have space lasers?

As Timothy Snyder wrote in “On Tyranny,” this is how democracies die: by surrendering in advance.

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Taking Credit

What do scolds like yours truly mean when we bemoan low levels of civic literacy ? Rather obviously, it’s an accusation of  lack of knowledge of America’s legal/philosophical framework–the Constitution and Bill of Rights, an understanding of what is meant by the “rule of law.” But it’s also, increasingly, a reference to citizens’ lack of historical knowledge and worrisome ignorance of the realities of the governing and economic environment they inhabit.

Civic ignorance isn’t all the fault of individuals who simply don’t care or don’t pay attention. For many years, high schools have neglected civics instruction and whitewashed America’s history. And the fragmented nature of our information environment positively encourages misunderstanding –or often, offers politically-motivated mythology–about the performance of Presidential administrations.

We’ve just emerged from an election in which Trump benefited handsomely from that latter ignorance, as voters blamed Biden for an inflation that was worldwide, even though, under his administration, the U.S. brought it under control far more quickly than other nations managed to do.

Trump’s narrow win points to a major problem posed by Americans’ low levels of civic literacy–the erroneous assignment of credit and blame.

Simon Rosenberg recently considered that problem.

Joe Biden and Kamala Harris inherited one of the worst first days an American Presidential Administration in our history. Trump left us a dadly bungled pandemic response that caused hundreds of thousands of Americans to die unnecessarily, an economy in deep recession and a global economy teetering, a Capital City and our democracy that had just been attacked by Trump and his mobs. What Joe Biden and Kamala Harris walked into on January 20th was without doubt one of the worst first days an American Administration has ever faced.

Trump and Vance will inherit one of the best. The Biden-Harris job market has been the best since the 1960s. Wage growth, new business formation and the # of job openings per unemployed persons have been at historically elevated levels. Inflation has been beaten, gas prices are low, interest rates are coming down and our recovery from COVID has been the best of any advanced nation in the world. The dollar is strong. GDP growth has hovered around 3% for all four years of Biden’s Presidency and the stock market keeps booming. The uninsured rate is the lowest on record. Through historic levels of domestic production of renewables, oil and gas America is more energy independent today than we’ve been in decades. Crime, overdose rates, the flows to the border and the deficit have come way down. Biden’s big three investment bills are creating jobs and opportunities for American workers today and will keep doing so for decades if Trump doesn’t gut them. We’ve begun stripping away the requirement of a four year college degree for government employment and other jobs too. We’ve lowered the price of prescription drugs, capped insulin at $35 and this year all seniors will enjoy a $2,000 Rx price cap. The Iranian-Russian-Hezbollah-Hamas axis in the Middle East has been deeply degraded. The Western alliance has been rejuvenated…..

Rosenberg morosely itemizes what we know is coming: Trump will take credit for Biden’s accomplishments. If he doesn’t manage to tank the stock market, its health will be due to him.

The economy will be strong due to him. Crime will be down due to him. Seniors will have their prescriptions capped at $2,000 due to him. Bridges will be built due to him. Record domestic gas and oil production will happen due to him. Gas prices will be low due to him. Iran and Russia will be weakened in the Middle East due to him…….

Rosenberg writes that Americans need to engage in a “long and deep conversation” about why the story of the Biden-Harris administration failed to resonate with the public–why so many Americans simply failed to understand its really remarkable performance–and dramatically mis-remembered the chaos and ineptitude of the prior Trump administration. As Rosenberg writes,

There has been one big story in American politics since 1989 when the Berlin Wall fell – Democrats have made things better for the American people, Republicans have made them worse. We’ve repeatedly brought growth, lower deficits, rising wages, American progress. Republicans have brought 3 recessions in a row, higher deficits, American decline and now unfathomable MAGA ugliness and extremism.

Americans’ confusion of celebrity with actual accomplishment is responsible for some of the phenomena I lump under “civic illiteracy.” If Joe Biden had the glamour and oratorical skills of a Barack Obama, perhaps the successes of his administration would have been more widely understood.

Trump will take credit for Biden’s accomplishments. Those of us who know better need to be loud and persistent truth tellers.

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