Tag Archives: Trump

What Real Conservatives Understand

Bret Stephens is a conservative columnist for the New York Times. He recently penned an essay titled “Democracy Dies in Dumbness”–a take-off the Washington Post’s slogan “Democracy Dies in Darkness.” That essay made two points I’ve tried to convey here.

Genuine conservatives, like Stephens, are appalled by what is being done by the MAGA radicals who are routinely identified as conservative. MAGA, Trump and Musk are anything but, and to label them such is an affront to actual conservatives. The second point–and the one amply documented in Stephens’ essay– is that the most obvious element of this horrific administration is its profound stupidity.

A lot of people, especially well-meaning “libruls,” strain to find some nefarious logic to the disasters Trump is perpetrating in Washington–some evidence that he’s an “evil genius,” or at the very least operating with some sort of intent, misplaced though it may be. To this I say bullfeathers! He’s ignorant, very stupid and also very clearly mentally ill. (I leave it to each of you to decide what that says about those in his devoted MAGA base.)

Stephens detailed much of the ignorance:

It used to be common knowledge — not just among policymakers and economists but also high school students with a grasp of history — that tariffs are a terrible idea. The phrase “beggar thy neighbor” meant something to regular people, as did the names of Senator Reed Smoot and Representative Willis Hawley. Americans broadly understood how much their 1930 tariff, along with other protectionist and isolationist measures, did to turn a global economic crisis into another world war. Thirteen successive presidents all but vowed never to repeat those mistakes.

Until Donald Trump. Until him, no U.S. president had been so ignorant of the lessons of history. Until him, no U.S. president had been so incompetent in putting his own ideas into practice.

Stephens labels Trump “a willful, erratic and heedless president,” and says he’s prepared to risk both the U.S. and the global economy “to make his ideological point.” I disagree with him only on his evident belief that Trump has an “ideological point.”  I really doubt that Trump could spell ideological, let alone that he possess an articulable “point” he wants to make. He acts solely out of grievance, racism, anger and an insatiable desire for attention–as the inconsistency of his impulsive and damaging actions show, there is no coherent belief system motivating any of this.

Stephens does take on the obvious stupidity:

The Department of Government Efficiency won’t end well. It is neither a department nor efficient — and “government efficiency” is, by Madisonian design, an oxymoron. A gutted I.R.S. work force won’t lower your taxes; it will delay your refund. Mass firings of thousands of federal employees won’t result in a more productive work force; it will mean a decade of litigation and billions of dollars in legal fees. High-profile eliminations of wasteful spending (some real, others not) won’t make a dent in federal spending; they’ll mask the untouchable drivers of our $36 trillion debt: Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security and defense.

Just as you don’t cure cancer by shutting down cancer research, walking away from NATO won’t achieve greater security for anyone, including ourselves. What passes for Trumpian foreign policy has already done incalculable damage. His “policy”– centered on cozying up to Russia– is monumentally stupid; as Stephens notes, what Trump has achieved internationally is a Russia that sees even less reason to settle, a Europe that sees more reason to go its own way, a China that believes America will eventually fold, and a once-again betrayed Ukraine that will have even less reason to trust international guarantees of its security.

In his last paragraph, Stephens makes a point with which I entirely agree.

Trump’s critics are always quick to see the sinister sides of his actions and declarations. An even greater danger may lie in the shambolic nature of his policymaking. Democracy may die in darkness. It may die in despotism. Under Trump, it’s just as liable to die in dumbness.

I just hope that there will be a government to salvage when we finally eject Trump, Musk, the clown show they’ve assembled and the sorry bunch of Christian Nationalists and elected invertebrates who continue to enable them.

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The Real DEI

As Trump and Musk continue to destroy the government agencies that monitor or prevent the illegal activities that enrich them, they’ve pursued an ancillary effort that lays bare the source of Trump’s narrow electoral win: MAGA’s war on “wokism” in general and Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) programs in particular.

As I have previously noted, the animosity toward efforts to address social and legal discrimination are part and parcel of an unfortunate but persistent strain of American bigotry. To our shame, millions of Americans have defended slavery and Jim Crow, opposed votes for women, donned white sheets and marched with the Ku Klux Klan. Others–who were less virulent but no less bigoted–merely refrained from hiring or otherwise doing business with minority folks, and blackballed Blacks and Jews from their country clubs and other venues.

The current assaults, ironically, are evidence of the nation’s historic protection of straight White Christian males from the uncomfortable reality that they are not a superior breed. It turns out that intellect, character and ability–and absences thereof– are pretty equally distributed among all races, religions and genders.

For confirmation of that fact, we need look no farther than the collection of clowns, incompetents and sycophants Trump has installed in important positions, and compare them to the credentialed and competent “DEI hires” he ejected from those same positions. If we ever needed evidence that White skin is no guarantee of intelligence, integrity or competence, virtually all of Trump’s appointees provide that evidence.

Trump’s base undoubtedly approves of the ferocity with which the administration has pursued its assault on anti-discrimination efforts, but it turns out that Americans in general have moved on from the days when your police chief was a disciple of Sheriff James Clark and your friendly banker or dentist was a Grand Dragon of the KKK.

A recent article in the Atlantic looked at the survey research, and concluded that the extreme positions—and appointments—of the Trump administration are wildly at odds with the views of most Americans.

The extreme positions—and appointments—of the Trump administration are self-evidently at odds with Americans’ views in the main. Recently, Trump appointed Darren Beattie to a senior diplomatic position at the State Department. Beattie is notorious for making arguments such as “Competent white men must be in charge if you want things to work. Unfortunately, our entire national ideology is predicated on coddling the feelings of women and minorities, and demoralizing competent white men.” I don’t need to look at survey data to argue that this is a fringe position.

Earlier in the article, the author did look at survey data, and shared evidence of Americans’ views on DEI efforts in general.

Given the way this administration has targeted DEI and “woke” policies, you’d be forgiven for assuming that Americans were completely on board. Yet according to a Pew Research Center poll conducted right before the election, just one-fifth of employed adults think that focusing on DEI at work is “a bad thing.” Even among workers who are Republican or lean Republican, a minority (42 percent) say that focusing on DEI is “a bad thing.” In a January poll from Harris/Axios, a majority of Americans said DEI initiatives had no impact on their career; more respondents among nearly every demographic polled (including white people, men, and Republicans) said they believed it had benefited their careers more than it had hindered them. (The sole, amusing exception being Gen X.) A June 2024 poll from The Washington Post and Ipsos found that six in 10 Americans believed DEI programs were “a good thing.” And all of this was before any backlash to Trump’s presidency had time to set in.

An early signal that the administration is overreaching comes from a Washington Post poll on early Trump-administration actions, which found that voters oppose ending DEI programs in the federal government (49–46) and banning trans people from the military (53–42). When asked about one of Trump’s signature issues, deportation, the poll showed that, by a nearly 20-point margin, Americans do not want people to be deported if they “have not broken laws in the United States except for immigration laws.” It’s hard to imagine that those same Americans approve of sending a man to Gitmo for riding his bike on the wrong side of the street, or of calling a city’s administrator for homelessness services a “DEI hire” because she’s a white woman.

If there’s one thing Trump excels at, it’s demonstrating that White Christian men are not universally superior–and that those who most resent DEI tend to be both unintelligent and dangerously inept.

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Who Do You Distrust?

In 2009, I wrote a book titled “Distrust, American Style.” The publisher’s blurb summed up its theme: “When people wake up every morning to a system that doesn’t respond to their efforts or accomodate their most basic needs, it should not be surprising that they don’t face the day with an abundance of trust.”

Declining trust has ominous implications for something that sociologists call social capital--the relationships among members of society that facilitate individual and/or collective action. The term refers to networks of human relationships that are characterized by reciprocity and trust. As one scholarly paper has put it, social capital is the lubricant that facilitates getting things done, that allows people to work together and benefit from social relationships. It is absolutely essential to the internal coherence of society– the “glue” that facilitates social and economic functioning.

It isn’t really necessary to understand the functioning and varieties of social capital to understand the importance of trust. Think about your daily activities: you drop your favorite sweater off at the cleaners, trusting that it will be returned–clean. You deposit your paycheck in your bank, trusting that the funds will be credited to your account and available to spend. You  pick up a prescription, trusting that the medication has been properly prepared and is safe. At the grocery, you trust that food you buy is safe to eat. You board a plane, trusting that it will not crash into another mid-air.

You get the picture. In the absence of trust, society and the economy cannot function. And an enormous amount of that trust is based upon effective and competent government regulation of banks, food processors and air traffic (among other things).

In my book, I examined the decline of social trust, and the theories being offered for that decline. Robert Putnam suggested that growing diversity had eroded interpersonal trust; my own research pointed to a different culprit: the prominent failures of religious,  business and governmental institutions. When I wrote the book, America was in the midst of widely-reported scandals: Enron and other major companies engaging in illegal activities, sports figures taking performance-enhancing drugs, the Catholic Church covering up priestly child molestation, and several others. We were just emerging from an Iraq war widely understood to have been waged on specious grounds.

My conclusion was that fish rot from the head–that when a citizenry is no longer able to trust its economic and governing and religious institutions–especially its governing institutions– that lack of trust threatens essential elements of social functioning.

In the years since, our entire environment has become rife with distrust. White Christian Nationalists suspect and reject most elements of modernity; we’re faced with the enormous gap between the rich and the rest (and evidence that not all the rich amassed those fortunes ethically or legally); we have a rogue judiciary, a castrated Congress, and most recently a federal coup by mentally-ill autocrats intent upon destroying the government agencies that have been most effective at earning citizens’ trust.

A recent Gallup Poll surveyed the trust landscape, to determine who we still trust–and who we don’t.

Three in four Americans consider nurses highly honest and ethical, making them the most trusted of 23 professions rated in Gallup’s annual measurement. Grade-school teachers rank second, with 61% viewing them highly, while military officers, pharmacists and medical doctors also earn high trust from majorities of Americans.

The least trusted professions, with more than half of U.S. adults saying their ethics are low or very low, are lobbyists, members of Congress and TV reporters.

Of the remaining occupations measured in the Dec. 2-18, 2024, poll, six (including police officers, clergy and judges) are viewed more positively than negatively by Americans, although with positive ratings not reaching the majority level. The other nine, notably including bankers, lawyers and business executives, are seen more negatively than positively, with  more than 50% rating their ethics low.

That poll was conducted before the takeover of our government by Trump and Musk, before the clearly illegal, unethical and untruthful activities that have–in Steve Bannon’s immortal words–“flooded the zone with shit.” Even before that assault, Gallup reported that there had been a serious long-term decline in Americans’ confidence in U.S. institutions. Trust in Judges, police and clergy has plummeted.

In that 2009 book, I wrote that the trustworthiness of business and nonprofit enterprises depends on the ability of government to play its essential role as “umpire,’ impartially applying and reliably enforcing the rules. When government is not trustworthy, when citizens cannot rely on the Food and Drug Administration, the FAA or the Social Security Administration, among others, trust and social capital decline.

We’re back to Hobbes’ state of nature.

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A Functional Media?

Research strongly suggests that Americans are split between an informed electorate and those delicately referred to as “low information voters” (also known as “MAGA”). As I’ve pointed out repeatedly on this blog, our current information environment reinforces misinformation and disinformation, catering to those who simply want their prejudices confirmed. The Internet has proved to be a warm and fuzzy place for those whose “research” is confined to searches for confirmation of their pre-existing biases.

That reality allows Trump to engage in fact-free bloviating–also known as lies–secure in the knowledge that a multitude of propaganda sites will obediently echo them, no matter how ridiculous or easily and repeatedly debunked.

A recent essay from the Bulwark posits that today’s media falls into roughly three categories:

There’s the state media—Fox, Newsmax, the Federalist, HughHewitt.com—which have become pure propaganda outlets.

There’s the “neutral” media—the New York Times, the Washington Post, ABC News, CBS News, CNN—which believe that politics should be covered as a sport with reports about who’s up and who’s down. Extraordinary efforts are made by these institutions to present both sides of every question, even if it means presenting the case for illiberalism or platforming people who the media orgs know are lying to their audience.

Finally, there’s pro-democracy media—outlets which understand that America is experiencing an ongoing authoritarian attempt and that they must stand on the side of small-l liberalism.

The author believes that maintaining these categories is unsustainable-that the three spheres will soon “collapse into just two: Media organizations that oppose authoritarianism and media organizations that accept it.” He quoted an editorial from a technical publication–Techdirt— which recently made a surprising announcement:

Over the last few weeks, I’ve had a few people reach out about our coverage these days . . . [and about] how much we were leaning into covering “politics.”

When the very institutions that made American innovation possible are being systematically dismantled, it’s not a “political” story anymore. It’s a story about whether the environment that enabled all the other stories we cover will continue to exist. . . .

We’re going to keep covering this story because, frankly, it’s the only story that matters right now, and one that not everyone manages to see clearly. The political press may not understand what’s happening (or may be too afraid to say it out loud), but those of us who’ve spent decades studying how technology and power interact? We see it and we can’t look away.

So, here’s the bottom line: when WaPo’s opinion pages are being gutted and tech CEOs are seeking pre-approval from authoritarians, the line between “tech coverage” and “saving democracy” has basically disappeared. It’s all the same thing.

Digital illiterate that I am, I had never heard of Techdirt. But the quoted language confirms something that most political scientists know instinctively: at base, everything is politics. The people who refuse to follow the news of what government is doing, who claim that they “aren’t political,” are kidding themselves.

When the federal government stops funding cancer research, when Social Security checks fail to appear in a timely manner, when government operatives are erasing efforts to counter discrimination (or, as they currently are, reinstating discriminatory messages and behaviors)–when federal officials are telling states to handle their own fires and floods, and threatening your employees with deportation, when insane policies are threatening to tank the economy and erode your retirement–it is no longer possible to tell yourself that “politics” is irrelevant to your life.

The article suggests that tech outlets are among the first to speak out because “they have specialized knowledge—and because they don’t have relationships with people in politics to tend to.”  They are able to see clearly what is happening and willing to speak out against it.

We have seen the exact same thing with some specialized legal publications. Lawfare and JustSecurity.org were once destination sites for law nerds. Today they have become two of the most essential media organizations in America.

Why? Because since these people specialize in the law they know exactly how serious Trump’s attack on the rule of law is—and how dangerous it is.

Like Techdirt and Wired, serious people in the legal space are being radicalized—democracy pilled?—because they understand that this isn’t a game and that the liberal press does not have an obligation to present illiberalism as a point of view worthy of consideration.

The people in pro-democracy media understand that liberalism has a moral obligation to take its own side.

“Fair and Balanced” was never accurate, because “balance” by its very nature/definition cannot be accurate. And stenography–he said/she said–isn’t journalism.

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When People Have No Idea what They’re Doing

Simon Rosenberg recently explained what even minimally-informed people know: mass deportation–if it occurs– will raise prices for Americans, disrupt businesses and slow growth. (Of course, growth is already tanking as a result of Trump’s on-and-off tariffs. When even the Wall Street Journal calls a GOP economic policy “stupid,” you can pretty much assume widespread agreement among people who can spell “economics.”) Rosenberg noted that even the threat of deportations is having its effect; victims of crime and witnesses aren’t showing up for court dates because they are afraid ICE will seize them. “That means cases can’t be prosecuted and that means criminals stay free to commit more crimes. Party of law and order my sweet Aunt Annie.”

Speaking of “law and order,” there are reports that the administration is considering a pardon for Derek Chauvin, who killed George Floyd on camera. Such a pardon would be further evidence of the GOP effort to return the U.S. to the days of Jim Crow.

Let’s be candid. The daily havoc being applauded by Trump supporters demonstrates the profound ignorance of the MAGA cult–as does their rejection of expertise as “elitist,” and their inability to recognize the all-too-obvious effects of Trump/Musk actions.

Research confirms that the polarization that characterizes our politics is largely between the informed and uninformed. (For confirmation, you can review the occasional comment from trolls on this blog.) 

The monumental ignorance shown by those cheering Trump and Vance’s thuggish behavior toward Ukraine is a perfect example. In a recent post to The Bulwark, Jonathan Last wrote.

Donald Trump and Republicans explain their worldview by calling it “America First.” That’s a lie.

American foreign policy has always put America first. That’s what nations do. It’s axiomatic. Why did the United States do Lend-Lease with Britain before we entered World War II and bankroll the Marshall Plan afterwards? Why did we airlift supplies into West Berlin? Why did we spend trillions of dollars on nuclear weapons that have never been used? Why do we police the global shipping lanes and ensure stability in Europe, Asia, and the Middle East?

It’s not because we’re nice.

It’s because these actions further our interests. They make America safer and wealthier. They check the rise of rival powers. They put America first.

I urge you to read Last’s entire essay–especially his explanation of “Pax America.”  As he writes, for 75 years after the Second World War, the U.S. was the dominant global power. No country, anywhere on earth, could act without considering our interests.

The relationships in NATO, and among the Five Eyes, and with America’s other really close allies—Japan, South Korea—aren’t merely military agreements. They’re kinships. They transcend peace and war; they’re diplomatic, political, cultural, and economic.

Again: This is leverage. It means that when we go to war, we bring a huge crew with us. Other countries are willing to expend resources, and even shed blood, to stay aligned with us. Even for a contentious war like Iraq, we got nearly 40 countries to participate in some way or another.

This makes things cheaper for us. The Soviet Union and China and Iran have to spend money to dominate and subjugate their clients. Our allies spend money on our behalf, pursuing our interests, because we have shaped them in our image.

As Last writes, no country has ever been more globally dominant–and that dominance has largely been a function of our wealth–our ability to spend money.

Here is the thing you must understand: America will win any contest determined by the ability to spend money.

Rightly understood, this is just another example of how America created rules to benefit ourselves: Of course the richest country in history would build a system in which it could exert influence on the global order by spending money: Because the ability to spend money is one of our key advantages.

And yet today’s “America First” class thinks that spending money in order to shape the world is some kind of weakness…

Why do we spend $10 billion a year fighting HIV/AIDS in foreign countries? I have to keep saying this: It’s not because we’re nice.

We spend that money in order to stabilize the global order. If AIDS runs wild in one country, that creates ripple effects. It destabilizes the local economy, risking political instability, which in turn risks regional instability. All of which poses some small danger to the established order which—QED—benefits America.

We spend that $10 billion to preserve the system that benefits us.

That’s what soft power is.

When people in charge are clueless about how the world works, the world no longer works for us. Thanks, MAGA….

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