Tag Archives: research

There’s A Lesson Here

A recent Vox article focused on a question–perhaps the question–that consumes most sentient Americans these days, especially the seven million of us who turned out for the No Kings protest: can America recover, or have we lost representative government forever?

As the article began,

The president of the United States is deploying masked troops to the streets of blue cities, working to put friendly billionaires in charge of the media environment, and attempting to jail his personal enemies.

Can any democracy come back from this?

There is relevant research on that question, and the article cited two papers published earlier this year that seemingly came to opposite conclusions. In both, researchers examined what are called “democratic U-turns.” Those are situations in which  a country that begins as a democracy subsequently moves toward authoritarianism, but recovers in relatively short order. The first research team’s conclusions were optimistic. “They identified 102 U-turn cases since 1900 and found that, in 90 percent of them, the result was “restored or even improved levels of democracy.”

The second team, however, focused on 21 of the most recent cases and concluded that “nearly 90 percent” of alleged U-turns were “short-lived mirages.”

After contacting both teams of researchers, the author concluded that the seemingly opposed findings weren’t actually inconsistent —and that the implications for the United States are both hopeful and disturbing.

Both research teams used a “democracy score” that takes into account how free the press is, whether elections are free and fair, and other accepted markers of democratic societies. A U-turn is defined as the country’s democracy score rebounding after a recent decline — and the data suggests that such U-turns are very common, that over half of all countries that have experienced a slide toward autocracy have also experienced a U-turn. And the research found that those U-turns have typically been very successful.

Good news, right? But as we know from differences in poll results, results will vary depending upon who you ask and how you frame the question.

The second group of researchers focused their analysis on twenty-one cases of democratic U-turns that occurred post-1994.  The authors then looked to see how many of those countries maintained their higher, post U-turn democracy scores. Their analysis extended to the years following those that the first team analyzed–looking to see whether the gains of a country’s U-turn were sustained. The findings on that score give us little cause for optimism; “out of the 21 cases, 19 countries experienced another decline in their democracy score within five years of the seemingly successful U-turn.”

Both teams of researchers emphasized that their findings were not in tension. For one thing, modern autocratization differs from the historical pattern. “Before the 1990s, democracies tended to be toppled by coups or revolutions — unmistakable uses of force that ended the current regime and replaced it with naked authoritarian rule.”

Nowadays, thanks in large part to democracy’s increasingly dominant ideological position around the world, the threat tends to come in a more subtle and hidden form — what scholars call “democratic backsliding.” In these cases, a legitimately elected government changes the laws and rules of the political system to give itself increasingly unfair advantages in future elections. The ultimate aim is often to create a “competitive authoritarian” regime, where elections are not formally rigged but take place under such unfair conditions that they can’t truly be considered democratic. That’s what Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz party did in Hungary, and what PiS tried to do in Poland.

And–rather obviously–what Trump is trying to do in the U.S.

As the article notes, because elected authoritarians were elected, they often represent a real constituency–one that is often large enough to make it impossible for their opponents to defeat them permanently and democratically illegitimate for those opponents to outlaw them entirely. Just because you have a democracy doesn’t mean you have a stable democracy. As the article concludes:

Even if America experiences a U-turn upon Trump’s departure, the country may not be out of the woods. The forces that made Trump possible in the first place will still remain, open to exploitation by any political leader with the requisite savvy and shamelessness.

“There is a reason why Trump came to power, and there is a reason why he won those elections… If you don’t solve the underlying reasons, then of course democracy will still be at risk.”

I am increasingly convinced that the U.S. will oust Trump and his band of wildly incompetent White Christian Nationalists–that we will experience a U-turn. I am far less sanguine about our ability to address those “underlying reasons.”

Comments

What Can Be Repaired? What Can’t?

Just a quick note before today’s post: my husband and I attended the No Kings protest in Indianapolis, and were blown away by the size, composition and positivity of the crowd. (I think my 93-year-old hubby may have been the oldest attendee, but there were lots of older folks–as well as younger and middle-aged ones.) The thousands of attendees were upbeat, entirely peaceful, and the numerous signs they carried weren’t just clever–they were patriotic in the best sense of the word.

_______________________________

When I try to find cause for optimism, I tell myself that–while the incredible destruction being wreaked by Trump and his merry band of morons, misfits and clowns is horrific–a lot of government systems had become calcified and overly bureaucratic, and that once this despicable crew has left, we can (to use Joe Biden’s term) “build back better.”

Unfortunately, reality then kicks in.

A while back, Thomas Edsall addressed that reality in a New York Times op-ed. The title was “What Can’t Trump Wreck?” and the column distinguished between the kind of damage that can be redressed relatively quickly and the damage that can’t.

Edsall began by reminding readers that Trump’s inhumane cuts to USAID are predicted to result in more than 14.05 million all-age deaths by 2030– a number that includes the death of 4.54 million children younger than age 5 years. Rather obviously,  lives lost remain lost.

We can count the dead. We can assess–at least approximately– the damage done by ICE’s thuggish behaviors– the human costs of its indiscriminate kidnapping, the social costs of its undermining of the rule of law, and the economic losses to farmers deprived of workers to pick their crops.

What we can’t quantify are the immense consequences that flow from a lack of institutional memory and expertise. Edsall quoted Sam Issacharoff, a law professor at N.Y.U., who wrote:

Government stretches the time frame for decision making. Long-term investments, collective needs like roads and defense, these are all matters that require long-term investment and expertise. Experience creates what the Swedish political scientist Bo Rothstein calls “knowledge realism,” the know-how created by experience and repeat efforts.

The dismissal of career experts, the dismantling of long-horizon science projects are examples of what cannot be recreated. What happens if tensions resurface between North and South Korea or between India and Pakistan? Who guides policy if the State and Defense Departments lose their experts? This is something where the next administration cannot simply reopen the spigot and recreate. Expertise is long to create and fast to destroy.

Ordinary citizens are likely to bear the brunt of the administration’s assaults on medical science and research, its destructive incursions into agencies like the National Institutes of Health and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the withholding of  billions of federal dollars that had been awarded to medical researchers.

 “Federal funding for biomedical research is central to health care innovation,” David Cutler and Edward Glaeser, economists at Harvard, wrote in “Cutting the N.I.H. — The $8 Trillion Health Care Catastrophe,” published in May in The Journal of the American Medical Association. “More than 99 percent of all new drugs approved from 2010 through 2019 had some antecedent research funded by the N.I.H.”

Another study documented the administration’s withholding of financing and undermining of government oversight in multiple areas, including long-term care, scientific research and vaccination policy. The administration’s budget proposals and “Big Beautiful Bill” include severe reductions in health care access, including the outright termination of services for immigrants and gender minorities. Its mass layoffs of scientific and regulatory specialists will be difficult to reverse.

William Galston, a prominent social scientist, weighed in, writing that there has been “irreparable damage” on both the home front and in foreign relations. He cited the “destruction of America’s reputation as the best place in the world for the most promising scientists and innovators of various kinds to conduct research. The evisceration of funding for basic research will be hard to reverse without restoring some bipartisan agreement about the importance of knowledge and expertise. I’m not holding my breath.”

Galston argued that irreparable harm has been done to America’s relations with the rest of the world. Trump hasn’t simply upended the longstanding system of multilateral trade relations that this country created, but he has destroyed the “trust the United States built up over decades as the guarantor of European security, of support for democracy and human rights and provider of global public goods such as freedom of the seas.”

Edsall’s op-ed enumerates a number of areas where rebuilding will be difficult, if it can be done at all, very much including Trump’s assaults on the civil service–from the firing of thousands of workers (many of whom had irreplaceable expertise)  and turning thousands more into “at will” employees, to efforts to politicise the federal workforce in continued defiance of the Hatch Act.

A Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution called the Trump administration “the political-societal equivalent of a neutron bomb, and predicted that, even if Democrats take over, it will take far more than the next four years to rebuild it.

He isn’t wrong.

Comments

The War On Knowledge

When citizens are subjected to a “flooding of the zone”–daily assaults on a wide variety of systems, beliefs and values that have long been an accepted part of our governing environment–we can be forgiven for a lack of focus. It’s hard enough just to keep track of what is happening, let alone to decide which attacks are most worrisome. But Adam Serwer makes a good case for putting the war on knowledge at the top of the list.

In The New Dark Age, Serwer writes

The warlords who sacked Rome did not intend to doom Western Europe to centuries of ignorance. It was not a foreseeable consequence of their actions. The same cannot be said of the sweeping attack on human knowledge and progress that the Trump administration is now undertaking—a deliberate destruction of education, science, and history, conducted with a fanaticism that recalls the Dark Ages that followed Rome’s fall.

Serwer enumerates the Trump assaults: threats to withhold funding from colleges and universities that don’t submit to MAGA demands. Sustained attacks on the engines of American scientific inquiry– the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health–and on repositories of America’s history, including the Smithsonian.  Arts organizations and libraries are losing funding. Large numbers of government scientists have lost  their jobs and remaining researchers prevented from broaching forbidden subjects. “Entire databases of public-health information collected over decades are at risk of vanishing. Any facts that contradict the gospel of Trumpism are treated as heretical.”

These various initiatives and policy changes are often regarded as discrete problems, but they comprise a unified assault. The Trump administration has launched a comprehensive attack on knowledge itself, a war against culture, history, and science. If this assault is successful, it will undermine Americans’ ability to comprehend the world around us. Like the inquisitors of old, who persecuted Galileo for daring to notice that the sun did not, in fact, revolve around the Earth, they believe that truth-seeking imperils their hold on power.

Serwer describes the attacks on universities. He uses the example of West Point, and the administration’s purge of forbidden texts to reveal what MAGA’s “ideal university” might look like.

West Point initiated a schoolwide push to remove any readings that focused on race, gender or the darker moments of American history.” A professor who “leads a course on genocide was instructed not to mention atrocities committed against Native Americans, according to several academy officials. The English department purged works by well-known Black authors, such as Toni Morrison, James Baldwin and Ta-Nehisi Coates.

The Trump administration’s attack on knowledge is broad-based; it isn’t limited to academia. The administration has also singled out and fired government employees involved in research of multiple kinds.

These are people who do the crucial work of informing Americans about and protecting them from diseases, natural disasters, and other threats to their health. Thousands of employees at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have been let go, including most of those whose job it is to maintain workplace safety standards. Experts at the Food and Drug Administration including, according to the Times, “lab scientists who tested food and drugs for contaminants or deadly bacteria; veterinary division specialists investigating bird flu transmission; and researchers who monitored televised ads for false claims about prescription drugs” have been purged. Workers in the Department of Agriculture’s U.S. Forest Service research team, who develop “tools to model fire risk, markets, forest restoration and water,” have been targeted for layoffs. The Environmental Protection Agency’s entire research arm is being “eliminated.” The administration has made “deep cuts” to the Department of Education’s research division.

Serwer enumerates the nature of the cuts and their foreseeable consequences, especially for public health. As he notes, modern agriculture and medicine, and advances in information technology like the internet and GPS were built on the foundation of federally funded research.

For the past century, state-funded advances have been the rule rather than the exception. Private-sector innovation can take off after an invention becomes profitable, but the research that leads to that invention tends to be a costly gamble—for this reason, the government often takes on the initial risk that private firms cannot. Commercial flight, radar, microchips, spaceflight, advanced prosthetics, lactose-free milk, MRI machines—the list of government-supported research triumphs is practically endless.

MAGA’s racist fight against “wokeness” requires destroying huge swaths of scholarship and research, and distorting any American history that undercuts the administration’s goal: destroying the “ability to discover, accumulate, or present any knowledge that could be used to oppose Trumpism.”

You really need to click through and read the entire essay–and weep.

Welcome to a new Dark Ages.

Comments

The War On Medical Knowledge

This administration is waging a war on all sorts of research, scholarship and expertise.

MAGA Republicanism has long been an enemy of that hated “elitist” devotion to knowledge and empiricism (remember Scott Walker’s attacks on the University of Wisconsin and the “Wisconsin Idea”? He wanted to change the description of the University’s purpose from “basic to every purpose of the (University of Wisconsin) system is the search for truth” to “meet[ing] the state’s workforce needs.” )

If there remains any doubt about MAGA’s animus toward scholarship and the search for truth, one need only look at Trump’s all-out attacks on Universities and the judiciary. The universities’ commitment to empirical fact and the courts’ commitment to “fact-based” analysis are incompatible with the madman’s desire to impose his own prejudices on the American public.

Perhaps the clearest–and most horrifying– example of Trump’s assault on knowledge and expertise has been his enthusiastic facilitation of RFK Jr.’s assault on medical research, including but not limited to cancer research.

As The Washington Post recently reported,

A federal judge might have paused President Donald Trump’s attempt to slash about $4 billion for biomedical research funding through the National Institutes of Health, but the uncertainty created by the administration is already taking an immense toll on science.

Many schools and institutions have preemptively implemented cost-cutting measures in anticipation of losing funding down the line. This will, of course, curtail all sorts of crucial research happening now on disease treatments and preventions. But it will also have reverberations for years to come — potentially affecting an entire generation of future scientists.
 
The NIH has announced cancellation of its prestigious internship program–a program that gave more than 1,000 college students the opportunity to work at the agency each summer–and the National Science Foundation has downsized its research program for undergraduates. Countless doctors and medical scientists owe their careers to these programs.
 
 
Johns Hopkins University said Thursday it had begun laying off more than 2,000 workers across the globe after the institution lost $800 million in federal grants cut by the Trump administration.

As the administration has slashed funding for the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), perhaps no institution of higher education has been hit harder than Johns Hopkins. Among the programs targeted were a $50 million project to treat HIV while experimenting with machine learning in India and a $200 million grant to treat one of the world’s most deadly diseases in thousands of children.
 
Several other media outlets have reported on Trump Administration’s cuts to cancer and Alzheimer’s research funding, including the termination of a $5 million grant to the Herbert Irving Comprehensive Cancer Center at Columbia University. DOGE has listed that amount among DOGE’s “savings.” The vicious cuts to medical research have included pediatric cancer research funding.
 
 
The Trump administration’s effort to reshape the federal government through Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) is raising fears among public health experts, researchers and advocacy groups of a massive brain drain and dire impacts to public health. 
 
Termination letters hit the inboxes of thousands of workers across health agencies in just the past week as the administration took a sledgehammer to the federal government.  

The employees worked on projects including studying infectious diseases, medical device safety, food safety, lowering health costs and improving maternal health outcomes. All of them are now out of a job.  

“The federal government has a huge footprint. [These layoffs] will interrupt all fields of research. Every phase of our scientific endeavor has been interrupted, including that research that is essential for our national security,” said Georges Benjamin, executive director of the American Public Health Association.  

MAGA’s Christian Nationalists evidently want to take us back to the days when “good Christians” like Cotton Mather understood diseases like smallpox to be evidence of God’s displeasure….

To believe the Trump/Musk assault is on “fraud and waste” would require us to re-define those terms. “Waste” in Musk jargon is defined as any program with which he disagrees. The fact that Congress chose to establish a program or pursue a goal is entirely beside the point, as is that pesky Constitutional provision vesting Congress–not DOGE– with exclusive authority over fiscal matters.

If there is one thing that distinguishes MAGA and its White Christian Nationalists from the rest of us, it is a seething resentment of those who differ, and especially those they consider “elitists”–defined not as people with money, (they  worship oligarchs, no matter how obviously ignorant) but people with knowledge and expertise. 

They’re thrilled with Trump’s destruction of our government, and they evidently don’t worry that they’ll get cancer…or measles.

 
 
Comments

Why Research Matters

When I joined the faculty of Indiana University after decidedly non-academic stints as a lawyer, real estate developer and  ACLU executive director, non-university friends would often question the institutional obligation to devote considerable time and effort to research. They questioned the reason so many institutions of higher education pursue a “publish or perish” criterion for  tenure (and a number didn’t understand why we had tenure, either).

I’ll leave my fairly robust defense of tenure for another time, but in the face of Trump’s unprecedented assault on universities, the New York Times recently ran an editorial explaining the critical importance of scholarly research.

The editorial began by explaining that what we are seeing is typical of authoritarianism:

When a political leader wants to move a democracy toward a more authoritarian form of government, he often sets out to undermine independent sources of information and accountability. The leader tries to delegitimize judges, sideline autonomous government agencies and muzzle the media.

One of those “independent sources of information” is, rather obviously, scholarship. As the editorial points out, academic researchers pursue the truth–empirical facts– and that can present a threat to those in authority. Putin and Erdogan have closed universities, Modi’s government has arrested dissident scholars, and Orban has appointed loyal foundations to run universities.

Mr. Trump’s multifaceted campaign against higher education is core to this effort to weaken institutions that do not parrot his version of reality. Above all, he is enacting or considering major cuts to universities’ resources. The Trump administration has announced sharp reductions in the federal payments that cover the overhead costs of scientific research, such as laboratory rent, electricity and hazardous waste disposal. (A federal judge has issued a temporary restraining order against those cuts.) Vice President JD Vance and other Republicans have urged a steep increase of a university endowment tax that Mr. Trump signed during his first term. Together, these two policies could reduce the annual budgets at some research universities by more than 10 percent.

There is public dissatisfaction with the very real problems of America’s universities, and the editorial goes into considerable detail about the current deficiencies and problems of those institutions. But as it also notes, just as with Trump’s approach to trade, government waste, and immigration, the administration’s “solutions” won’t ameliorate or address the real problems. It will make things much worse.

The American higher education system, for all its flaws, is the envy of the world, and it now faces a financial squeeze that threatens its many strengths — strengths that benefit all Americans.

Chief among them is its global leadership in medical care and scientific research. American professors still dominate the Nobel Prizes. When wealthy and powerful people in other countries face a medical crisis, they often use their connections to get an appointment at an American academic hospital. For that matter, some of the same Republicans targeting universities with budget cuts seek out its top medical specialists when they or their relatives are ill.

American leadership in medical and scientific research depends on federal money. Private companies, even large ones, typically do not conduct much of the basic research that leads to breakthroughs because it is too uncertain; even successful experiments may not lead to profitable products for decades. Mr. Trump’s planned funding cuts are large enough to force universities to do less of this research. The list of potential forgone progress is long, including against cancer, heart disease, viruses, obesity, dementia and drug overdoses. And there will be costs beyond the medical sector. There is a reason that Silicon Valley sprang up next to a research university.

The Times is right to say that we need to speak–loudly and publicly– about why universities matter, to point to the many ways in which higher education and research promote public health, economic growth and national security. It’s also important to recognize that universities are the largest employers in some regions. And for many Americans, universities have been “an unmatched, if imperfect, engine of upward mobility that can alter the trajectory of entire families.”

Thus far, too many academic officials have been timid and quiet in the face of this assault. That needs to change.

College presidents do not need to become pundits. But they do need to defend the core mission of their institutions when it is under attack. University leaders would help themselves, and the country, by emerging from their defensive crouches and making a forthright case for inquiry, research, science and knowledge.

This administration is waging war on science and knowledge. It’s a war we cannot let them win.

Comments