Tom's Musings

Not long ago, I came across the following quote.

“I do not want to see the Republican Party ride to victory on the four horses of calumny … fear, ignorance, bigotry, and smear. I doubt if the Republican Party could do so, simply because I do not believe the American people will uphold any political party that puts political exploitation above national interest. Surely, we Republicans are not that desperate for victory.”

                Margaret Chase Smith

               U.S. Senator from Maine

Margaret was a pioneer of sorts. In 1948, she was the first female to be elected to the U.S. Senate without having first been appointed to fill out a husband’s term. That is, she made it (as well as winning a prior House seat) entirely on her own. Apparently, the Republican Party was not quite as misogynistic back then, nor did they axiomatically put party before country.

Her quote above came in a speech attacking a fellow Republican Senator, Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin. ‘Tail gunner’ Joe, a sobriquet he falsely claimed while running for office in the post WWII era, desperately clung to power by wildly attacking the first amendment to the Constitution. He made utterly unsubstantiated accusations about Commies in our national government, in our military, in the entertainment industry, and in the media.

As a result, a frison of fear and paranoia settled over the country. Citizens were forced to appear before Congress and testify to the disloyalty of friends, family, and associates simply to save their own skins. This was America grossly mimicking the worst of our totalitarian enemies … an exercise in brutish authoritarian cruelty.

Margaret was one of the few to stand up to McCarthy and to what became known as McCarthyism. A few others did the right thing, iconic journalist Edward R. Murrow being one of the more notable exceptions. But most were silent, intimidated by the fear and divisiveness that crossed over the land like an insidious cancer.

Even Republican President ‘Ike’ Eisenhower seemed cowed into silent complicity. His failure to respond struck me as particularly distasteful, given that he had handled other primadonnas while serving as head of the allied forces in the European theater during WWII. It also is surprising given that his own political instincts were surprisingly progressive. He would be deemed a radical socialist, perhaps even a traitor, by the standards of today’s Republican leaders.

Fast forward to today. How many GOP stalwarts have exhibited the courage necessary to stand up to our current wannabe autocrat who resides in the now gaudi, gold-plated White House. Where are today’s Senator Smiths? Where are the standard bearers for a free and independent press that Ed Murrow exemplified in my youth? 

There are remarkably few risk- takers today, though a couple of names come to mind. Former House members Liz Cheney and Adam Kinsiger did speak out. They visibly decried Trump’s frantic efforts to suborn the Constitution when he encouraged a rabid mob to disrupt the orderly transfer of power after the 2020 election.

Both were quickly silenced with Liz being driven from political life by MAGA devotees. Just how did we get to the position where undiluted power could be exercised absent any substantive complaint from the leadership of one of our two major political powers? Where are the checks and balances our forefathers thought they had instituted to prevent executive abuse?

Partisan politics through time.

Many astute observers assert that America first became a living or functioning democracy in 1801, not in 1776 (when independence was declared) nor 1788 (when the Constitution was ratified). In 1801, President John Adams quietly retreated to Boston after realizing he had lost his reelection bid to Thomas Jefferson, his bitter political rival.

Though the founding fathers had hoped to avoid the creation of competing political factions, nascent political groups quickly emerged in full partisan fury even before George Washington indicated that he would step down voluntarily as chief executive.

Adams defeat was the first opportunity to test our written Constitution at a time when normative  partisan positions were hardening. Not all were convinced that power would transfer smoothly. Somewhat surpisingly, it did!

The northern states generally had gravitated toward Washington, Adams, and Hamilton in what became known the Federalist Party. Jefferson, Monroe, and Madison (and those from the more rural south) rallied to a separate vision of what America should be. Their distinct aspirations focused mostly on agricultural interests, that favored a more slave-based economic culture, and that embraced a decentralized version of governance. These political actors gathered under the confusing banner called the Democratic- Republican Party.

These two factions quickly evolved into passionate partisan duels and, at times, personal conflict. Adams and Jefferson fell out for many years. They renewed a correspondence late in their lives before each passed on the same day, July 4th of 1826, the exact 50th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. What are the odds of that happening?

The early parties organized about fundamentally distinct visions. Jefferson’s party disavowed forms of centralized control, stressed the importance of individual sovereignty, acceded to a hierarchical view of societal order, embraced limited government, and disavowed any reliance upon strong federal institutions. For example, they wanted no national bank. They also tended to be Francophiles, if not outright Anglophobes.

The Federalists embraced opposite foundational principles, at least in theory. They wanted a central bank and a more powerful federal government. They generally were appalled by slavery or any rigid hierarchical structure of social status. They were less hostile toward social mobility and embraced permeable class boundaries.

After all, Alexander Hamilton was a self made man, the bastard son of a bankrupt speculator in the Carribean. Most of all, they sought a world in which government might proactively foster fuller social and economic opportunities for all. And, despite our recent conflict with George III, they hoped to maintain friendly relations with England.

The 1801 election, and future battles for power, was more than a competition between two men. They became conflicts over core principles, over wildly different perceptions of what constituted the good society. Thus, they became the existential conflicts of those times.

Adams’s quiet recognition of the peoples will, or at least the will of the minority who could vote back then, was a most significant moment in a still maturing democracy. It proved the Constitution was more than a piece of paper. No matter how powerful a politician was, or thought he was, the rule of law would prevail. That moment marked the American experiment as relatively unique … principles above power.

Fast forward some 200 plus years and one still can detect the basic conflicts underlying America’s first competitive election. In recent decades, the Republican party (until Trump) had come to resemble Jefferson’s vision of limited government, of state’s rights, and of a hierarchical perspective on society’s natural structure. That is, some are inherently born to rule.

By the early 1990s, when an aggressive Republican named Newt Gingrich took control of Congress through his Contract with America, any residual cross party collaboration in Washington was finished for good. No longer would a liberal Speaker like Tip O’Neil be able to work with a conservative like Ronald Reagan for the public good. You might recall that, over drinks, these two Irishmen from diametrically opposed partisan positions agreed to compromises that extended the solvency of the Social Security system for over half a century.

Their Democratic foes embraced an oppositional view on these and other dimensions of society. Today’s elections once again seemed to invoke  existential battles over core normative perceptions of good and evil.

However, one cannot draw a straight line between then and now. Over time, beliefs evolved and parties switched sides, often in confounding and perplexing  ways. And now, of course, we have Trump who has thrown out all apparent rules and principles in the pursuit of selfish treasure, complete power, and obsequious adoration from the masses.

There can be no more serious threat to the visions of the founding fathers, no matter their differences back then, than is found in what Trump and the MAGA cultists have thrust upon us in our own day.

A tortured history.

This got me wondering. Political parties obviously are not fixed entities. They evolve over time in response to endogenous and exogenous challenges. While there was some continuity in the underlying principles of each party in their beginnings, our two main partisan clans (along with their ethical and normative perspectives) did not fully form until the 1850s. The great issue of the day, slavery, drove political choices and demanded further clarification on where people stood. Just what did each party represent?

In 1854, the Republican Party purportedly was created in a small white school house in Ripon Wisconsin. It was not created out of whole cloth. The founders borrowed heavily from the dying Whig party which earlier had more or less succeeded the Federalist party. Those political activists seeking a more proactive government, and one that had a more abiding faith in democratic principles, kept searching for a competitive formula for success. Now, such success was being demanded. In that moment, America trembled on the very edge of dissolution. Old approaches were insufficient. It was decided that a new party was needed.

On the other hand, Jefferson’s original cabal was recreated in the image of a populist party that had been renewed and reinvigorated through the charismatic leadership of Andrew Jackson. This vision of the good society glorified the common (white) man while justifying slavery and endorsing the genocide of Native Americans. It was an odd mix of contradictory beliefs, granting the common man an elevated status while adhering to a notion that some were born inherently gifted and thus entitled to rule over others.

Some 165 years ago, just before our horrendous civil conflict, we finally had the two parties that would battle for the soul of the nation. In fact, the election of the first Republican to our highest office sparked a wave of secessionary fever across our southern states. Though numerous 3rd parties had brief shelf lives, these two major foes would come to represent the essential philosophical divisions about what America should be.

In doing so, however, each would evolve, swap foundational principles, and sometimes engage in perplexing changes of purpose and character. History affirms that politics do, on occasion and for idiosyncratic reasons, create some very strange bedfellows.

Consider the following. In the time of Lincoln, the new Republican Party were that era’s liberals. They were against the extension of slavery in the West as that frontier developed. They also would strengthen the institutional framework of the federal goverment, a spectre of control Democrats fundamentally feared might reduce the sovereignty inherent in the local authorities that they felt were a sacrosanct party value.

Those early Republicans were proactive. They invested in infrastructure (for example the intercontinental railroad) and education (e.g. land grant universities) as ways to promote economic growth. They hoped to stimulate industry and finance in ways that rural agrarian interests distrusted.

The Democrats, on the other hand, defended slavery as critical to their agrarian way of life. They also recognized that ending that so- called peculiar institution (slavery) would dramatically reduce their wealth. In that matter, they were correct. Some 4 million slaves, when monetized, were worth more than all the railroads and industry in the North combined.

Challenging Southern culture, in turn, would threaten their preferred approach to governing public affairs… one that favored rule by a landed aristocracy. They favored limited suffrage (by wealthy landed male gentry), exhibiting little interest in the very democratic system that they also proudly claimed had been originated in America. In a way, that Democratic Party harkened back to almost a feudal model of society.

What exactly were they defending in the civil conflict they initiated? They wanted to defend a system of oligarchic control vested in large plantation owners. As noted, the south held much of the country’s wealth in 1860. England depended on Southern cotton. Even New York profitted from the extensive ongoing trade in this commodity as did the embryonic weaving industries popping up in various New England towns where rushing rivers drove looms into action. Ironically, the very Civil War they initiated to presumably preserve their advantages would initiate a seismic shift of economic hegemony from the South to the North. 

In 1858, a Southern senator (James Hammond from South Carolina) gave his famous Mudsills speech. It outlined the Democratic (Southern) party perspective on the ideal social order for those times.

White gentility was born to rule. Blacks (and poor whites) needed to accept that reality for their own good and for societal progress. The poor and enslaved were the mudsills (foundational supports) of society. White plantation landowners had the proper breeding and genetic advantages that prepared them for command. This was the hierarchical order established by God. To oppose that social structure was tantamount to sin.

The South never accepted military defeat, finding alternative ways of extending autocratic control over minorities and the landless poor. For another century, the South would remain devoted to the banner of the Democratic Party, an anomaly that would grow increasingly bizarre as the two parties evolved in distinctly divergent directions.

In the early decades of the 20th century, southern voters began to describe themselves as yellow dog Democrats. They simply could not vote for a candidate from the party of Lincoln. To do so would make them little better than a rabid dog.

I once chatted with the late William Winters, one of the last Democratic governors of Mississippi. He told me he was a relic of a dying breed, a liberal Democrat who only prevailed because racist voters simply could not vote for a hated Republican, the Party that had destroyed their past utopia. He had me in stitches with his tales of being a liberal in Jackson Mississippi.

The two parties change colors.

Let me summarize quickly the evolutionary paths taken by each party as succinctly as possible. The Republican Party soon abandoned their early support for the poor and vulnerable … especially when such principles became inconvenient.

For example, they abandoned the Freedmen’s Bureau by the 1876 presidential election simply to get a Republican back into the White House. When that disputed election was thrown to Congress, Democrat Samuel Tilden appeared to have an electoral college victory. But all the disputed votes were given to Republican Rutherford Hayes when the GOP party promised to end southern reconstruction, recall remaining federal troops from the South, and desist from any further protection of Black rights in Dixie. The Jim Crow era had begun.

In subsequent elections, the Republican Party bosses realized that New York State was key to their success in the electoral college. Key to winning that state was support from the moneyed classes of New York City. Quickly, the economic interests favored by the elite took center stage in internal party debates and in policy decisions.

By the time William McKinley was nominated late in the 19th century, financial interests were driving policy choices and controlling the soul of the party. Allegedly, suitcases of money from the likes of J. P. Morgan could be depended upon before election day. Money would become even more important a century later, when the Citizens United and Fairness Act decisions turned politics into a furious cash raising competition.

At the same time, the Democrats slowly embraced the more vulnerable sectors of society that the Republicans had, at least for a short time, once represented. They attracted newcomers among urban immigrants and smaller landowners in the Midwest and West. These groups felt exploited by the big- money interests.

Within the Democratic party core, a populist message gained ground, especially in the plain states. The enemy of the common man were the moneyed interests back East. Those finance tycoons favored a strong dollar backed by gold. That, however, dried up credit and favored lenders over borrowers. Like today, the game favored the owners of capital over those who worked for a living.

As industry grew in the late 19th century, workers fought against capitalists. Workers generally found some willing ears among northern Dems. That interest in the plight of the exploited seldom had enough legs to win national contests. The cause of labor and small farmers needed a voice. A few, like William Jennings Bryan, heeded that call.

Progressive legislation more likely succeeded when Maverick Republicans gained power. Teddy Roosevelt, an accidental President when McKinley was assassinated, helped initiate the progressive era of reform in the early part of the 20th century. In Wisconsin,  ‘fighting’ Bob Lafollete (a progressive Republican) fought against the moneyed interests (the railroads and the logging barons) in support of the common man.

Wisconsin became known as the laboratory for democracy, a state famous for the Wisconsin Idea where the state and the university would cooperate for the benefit of all. For example, Wisconsin pioneered a university proposal to create a public legislative arm that would assist lawmakers in drafting legislation. Before that, elected officials often turned to corporate lawyers for technical help. No conflicts of interest there 😀.

Among other things, the great global depression of the 1930s and WWII further disrupted business as usual. Even with racist Jim Crow restrictions, the New Deal programs of FDR began to positively impact the wellbeing of minority populations. Eleanor Roosevelt, in particular, was seen as a champion of the poor and the racially dispossessed.

Then, Roosevelt’s successor (Democrat Harry S. Truman) surprisingly ended segregation in the military. He did so despite all his advisors telling him it would end any chance he had for reelection. He went ahead anyway and still beat Dewey in a shocking upset.

Why is all this significant? Well, virtually all Blacks had been devoted Republicans which traditionally had been thought of as the Party of Lincoln, the great emancipator. Slowly, northern Democrats seemed to offer more hope. If anything, the two parties looked like patchwork creations of competing interests held together more by tradition than common aspirations.

The post WWII era is looked upon as the heyday of bipartisan cooperation. But that might be explained as the great historical accident of national party politics. Southern racists held on to their fidelity to the old party that had supported slavery including the subsequent control of whites over blacks during the Jim Crow era. Over time, they were joined by northern liberals who were taken by the popular policies of FDR, Truman, Kennedy, and Johnson. It was an unholy alliance that could not last. Think about it. You had  southern racists like Richard Russell and northern radical liberals like Hubert Humphrey trying to survive within the same Democratic tent. Not surprisingly, it didn’t last much longer.

Southern revolts against the national party started in 1948 (the Dixiecrat convention walkout) and simmered over the next two decades. The ‘coup de grace’ of bipartisanship was dealt by the Civil Rights acts of the mid 1960s. Southern Democrats began to repudiate their historic affinity to the Democratic Party. Richard Nixon embraced this revolt of party allegiance as part of the Republican party’s Southern Strategy (as popularized by Kevin Phillips).

The core of this realignment was a reordering of the moral basis for each party’s appeal. Republicans argued that they had returned to time-honored and traditional virtues even if such were a bit tarnished by overt discrimination against minorities and militaristic adventurism abroad.

The Democrats emphasized their concern for more abstract values of social justice and fairness for all. When they could work with liberal Republicans across the aisle, they were freer to pursue a more progressive agenda.

The great spate of legislation during the 86th Congress (civil rights, poverty legislation, medical care expansion) were the last gasp of that old bipartisan world. Liberal northern Democrats collaborated with progressive  Republicans to enact ground some breaking legislation.

There was a downside to this, however. Passage of the civil rights legislation, in particular, marked the end of most inter- party collaborations and the start of a journey toward more internally coherent, perhaps rigid, Party frameworks.

Such differences in the core message of each party had a differential impact on the political choices of various groups. In the graph below, one can see the choices made by conservative, mostly white evangelical voters. They saw poverty and vulnerability as personal failures, not systemic issues that government might rectify. They began to flock to the Republican standard. Within a few years, the Democratic South merely was an historical artifact.

Conservative Democrats went Republican at the same time that liberal Republicans in the north and far west slowly migrated to the democratic fold. This was the great political realignment of the mid 20th century. With the old partisan accident finally shattered, the path toward hyper- partisanship was assured.

Reagan furthered this shift by starting his 1980 Presidential campaign in the heart of the old confederacy. The message was clear. Republicans were now the standard bearer of aristocracy. They would protect the continued  hegemony of a privileged white ruling class.

A Republican friend of mine who worked in D.C on the Hill (as they say) once told me his insider views on Gingrich. Newt, my friend confided, saw himself as a take no prisoners revolutionary. He had little interest in governing well. He was more interested in bending the Republican Party to his will. So, he instituted strict rules governing party loyalty. There would be no future  straying from party orthodoxy.

We now have had over three decades of conflict (including virtually total non-cooperation) between the major parties. I recall one time when Newt Gingrich actually betrayed his cardinal rule against any collaboration with the enemy. Despite his own rules, he supported President Clinton on NAFTA, the free trade agreement. Gingrich subsequently tied  himself into a knot defending his own violation of the new, inviolate Republican mantra. It was hysterical watching him squirm.

By the start of Barak Obama’s tenure as chief executive (2008), the political split was complete and seemingly unassailable. Mitch McConnell stated clearly that his party would never cooperate with the demonic Democratic administration … on anything. Their only purpose was to make our first African- American chief executive a one term President. Governing no longer mattered. Seizing and keeping power was now the exclusive name of the game in Washington.

Looking back, we probably enjoyed far more effective governance when the parties were less coherent and more diverse in terms of values. That is not such a mystery when you think about it. It was likely due to greater flexibility afforded individual members of each party. They were not fully controlled by party leadership as has been the case at least since the early 1990s, if not a decade earlier.

In the early 1990s, I recall a high level Republican House staff member telling me about their new internal control mechanisms. For example, the GOP had drifted further and further to the right from the 1970s onward. By the early 1990s, protecting the interests of the wealthy had emerged as the party’s primary (perhaps only) purpose, much as it had been a century earlier.

That goal was reflected in the GOP’s fight to eliminate the estate tax, a change favored by the uber- affluent. To reflect their support of the wealthy, the party leadership established a rule by which their elected members were fined if they did not refer to the estate tax as the death tax. Facts and data meant nothing. Image and emotions ruled all in the Republican fold, a lesson the Dems were slow to follow.

The Republican party was now all about capturing the political narrative, making their vision the default position in American politics. They saw political campaigns as continuing struggles over which normative foundation and characterization of society would prevail. In that struggle, reason and evidence was far less impactful than emotion. Capture their fears and hearts, not their minds. This has been another hard lesson for liberals.

The winning narrative had a coherent core. And it was simple. Like the Democratic party of the 19th century, some were born to lead. You knew who they were by virtue of existing evidence of success (accumulated wealth), by ethnic pedigree, and even by skin color. Society was hierarchical and status within it came from mostly ascribed attributes, perhaps only occasionally a few attained by actual individual effort.

In addition, aggression (a strong military, ownership of guns) was encouraged since enemies were ubiquitous and omnipresent. And, in these dark times, leadership was key. Who could protect you in a dangerous world? A firm leader, but only if obedience to that authority was premised on shared (i.e., conservative) values.

The Republican party’s success in capturing the dominant narrative among voters has had profound consequences. The RAND corporation estimated in 2020 that some $47 trillion had been redistributed over the past three decades from working class Americans to a tiny financial elite at the top of the distribution. It seems that this redistributional trend has exploded in past few years. RAND recently upped that figure to almost $80 trillion.

Amazingly, Republicans once lambasted redistribution as a political sin. But that was when the flow was downward, from the well off to those struggling near the bottom. Apparently, it is no longer a sin. It has become a virtue as the flow goes in the opposite direction. Last year, workers earned $3.9 trillion less than what they would have earned if the income distribution prevalent in the 1970s had prevailed. Back in the 1970s, workers captured 68% of our economy’s created value. Now, their share is down to 52%. Owners of capital had become the clear winners. Not a peep from the Republicans about this.

As the above graphic shows, the fortunes of the elite have improved significantly. At the same time, those of average Americans have fallen substantially. Somehow, the Republican Party convinced at least half of the country that this outcome is fair. They have convince much of the electorate that it is fine if a few dozen multi-billionaires possess as much wealth as the lower half of the entire population. It is merely a free market at work, an updated version of Senator Hammond’s distribution of social goodies according to some divine law.

Our neoliberal friends in today’s Republican party characterize all those struggling to get by as parasitical losers who are entirely responsibly for their own failed situation. That timeless trope has sold well, enabling them to enact policies to further enrich the favored few while savaging what remains of our pathetically inadequate social safety net.

As our two parties struggle over competing narratives and political hegemony, who is minding the store? Who is steering the ship of state. It would seem no one. The Democrats have had only fleeting control over all levels of power since the Reagan revolution of 1980 when they seized power. In general, Republicans have enjoyed outright control or effective veto power for several decades, as we will see later.

How many significant pieces of legislation have the Dems managed since Jimmie Carter. Clinton did bring spending under control, even ran several surpluses while in office. Obama managed to save the economy wrecked by the housing crisis under Bush, the son. Biden did the same after Trump mismanaged the Covid crisis.

These actions generally helped stave off the worst consequences of Republican mismanagement, but could not reverse the damage being done. The one proactive measure I recall is the passage of Obamacare. And how did the Republicans respond? They fought it with undiminished fury.  They did so despite America spending way more on health care than anyone else while delivering, on average, mediocre health outcomes. They did so even after most Americans came to support the act. They cannot tolerate any effort that helps the common man, even if it is popular, especially if it is popular. The rest of the world cannot comprehend how such a rich nation fails to deliver health care as a right, like all other advanced nations have managed to do. How venal can our leaders be?

Apparently, they can be deadly venal. Conservatives have sold America on the myth that we are the greatest country on earth. As the next meme shows, that is far from true.

What accounts for the discrepancy between facts and fancy, between America’s reality and its mythical narrative. Well, Republicans have had a plan for over 50 years now. It involves having access to unlimited money 💰 that William McKinley could only dream about in his day. And it involves control over key institutions like those involving  education, the courts, the core federal bureaucracies (Justice, security forces like the military, the courts, etc.), and especially the media. You have these levers of power, and you can control the political narrative, or at least you should. In fact you can convince people that up is down, truth is false, war is peace, and all the other dichotomous falsehoods George Orwell wrote about in his fictional dystopian world.

Controlling the narrative.

Political parties are inherently conservative. They are motivated by the fear of not making mistakes. This has particularly been true in the Democratic party. But the Republican alternative had a successful revolt from within. Starting with Barry Goldwater in 1964, internal revolutionaries fought the old guard from the inside.

In the end, the revolutionaries won. Slowly, they purified the party, driving out those interested in governing. They rid themselves of all reasonable Republicans by primarying their centrists and those capable of independent thought or by making them feel marginalized in the national party. John McCain, Mitt Romney, Liz Cheney, and Adam Kinziger were the final examples of the old breed.

One could see it coming. As the drift of the party to the hard right continued, prognoses by so- called pundits had the Republican party imploding, perhaps shrinking to a marginalized, regional party. Such predictions proved wrong. In the end, the underlying narrative of the neo-liberal vision for society had legs.

Oddly enough, as more Americans saw their middle class world slipping away, the oldest misdirection tactic in the pkaybook worked even better than ever. Give the losers someone to blame … like immigrants or woke eggheads or coastal liberals. Worked for Hitler after all, though he used Jews.

It was a vision that continued to further flourish in the Trump years. It proved successful with a populace that was too frightened and confused to think for themselves. Playing to their fears, it proved easy for a lifetime grifter to play to a crowd’s uncertainties, to create additional mass neurosis, and to turn widespread anxieties into fawning adoration.

In an ironic twist, the drift of the Republican Party toward traditional authoritarianism ultimately led to the demise of GOP party itself. The conventional party apparatus proved less than useful in an authoritarian world. Party functionaries had been replaced by an autocratic leader … a pathological narcissist and sociopathic degenerate named Donald Trump.

His new totalitarian vision for America was spawned in the very think tanks (e.g., the Heritage Foundation) that have been thinking about and planning for how democracy might be replaced for over half a century now. The strategic vision to enact that revolution came from people like Lewis Powell (future Supreme Court judge). He laid out a strategy plan in 1971, an approach by which the hard right would take gradual control over key societal levers.

It took time but they succeeded. Creating conservative think tanks (like the Heritage Foundation) was part of that plan. In anticipating Trump’s 2nd term, the 2025 plan of the Heritage Foundation was designed (updated) to ensure that control would remain in their hands. Once achieved, power would be retained by any means possible. Democracy, in permitting the will of the people to prevail, is far too uncertain. It has to be ended.

Even if Trump were to succumb to age, to his obvious mental health issues, or to his own personal excesses, those behind the throne would not permit a return to our former, even if less than perfect, democracy. More likely, another wannabe dictator would be placed on the throne or some form of plutocracy might be instituted. Already, steps to discredit the upcoming mid-term elections are being taken. Behind the scenes, frantic efforts to politicize and militarized essential police, military, and security forces are underway. Election officials already have been fired.

When the time comes, a cabal of the supremely wealthy would assume control either overtly or indirectly. In doing so, they would pursue policies that would ensure their continued hegemony. The irony is that, in such a world, political parties would no longer be necessary. After all, appealing to the will of the people would only prove inconvenient to those who know exactly what they want.

This was a fate long feared by our founders. When Ben Franklin was asked what kind of government had been hammered out during the Constitutional convention, he replied ‘a republic, if you can keep it. ‘

Ben was a wise and learned man. Perhaps he was thinking of Cicero’s warning as he replied to that query.

“A nation can survive its fools and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within. For the traitor appears not (to be) a traitor. He speaks in the accents familiar to his victims, and he appeals to the baseness that lies deep in the hearts of all men. He rots the soul of a nation … a murderer is less to be feared “

                           Cicero

                          Roman Statesman

Postscript…

As is my wont, I typically start these blogs with one thought in mind and end up somewhere quite different. That is why these are called musings and not essays. It also is why they turn out longer than intended, sometimes much longer. Perhaps a summary of this long meander through my fecund imagination is in order.

Despite the seemingly endless words, my basic story line is rather simple. For much of our history, two dominate political parties struggled for an identity, for a coherent narrative, and for a modicum of sustained success. However, it wasn’t until the latter half of the 20th century that the parties achieved a reasonable level of internal coherence and something close to a well defined  message, a consensus narrative.

Think about it. In the first half of the 20th century, Republicans embraced both diehard conservatives and outright progressives. The Dems included staunch racists and radical reformers. Toward the end of that century, that confusion clearly diminished. The GOP finally achieved a clear narrative largely because they began to focus on a single group’s interests … the uber wealthy. That made their task of achieving political dominance much, much easier.

Their consensus narrative was amplified by an emotionally charged propoganda boost. Though a distasteful message to intelligent and sensitive listeners, the Republican pitch proved highly successful to the less sophisticated when delivered by agenda- driven media outlets (e.g., Fox News) that dominated our informational- distribution systems by the 1990s. That narrative became the default (or go-to) cognitive and emotional place for the average American.

When you take a broad overview, one can see broad epochs of dominance (in terms of articulating the favored go-to political narrative) by one party clan or the other. I see it this way. The southern-based Dems held sway in ante-bellum America (extorting the nation with periodic threats of secession). Forgetting the Civil War and the subsequent reconstruction period, Republicanism held sway from the gilded age (essentially post reconstruction) through the roaring twenties. Then, the Dems assumed dominance once again from the great depression through the 1970s. Since then, neoliberal conservatives have been in charge. Will the pendulum now swing back to the Dems?

As I noted above, the Dems have not held all four levers of national power (see previous meme) for some time. They have held three critical levers briefly only twice in recent decades, at the beginnings of the Clinton and Obama terms. Those were short term periods in which little could be achieved. Obamacare did represent a signal piece of legislation. Still, the neo-liberal narrative has prevailed since the 1980s.The resulting damage to this nation has been incalculable.

I could feel the larger shifts in my own voting patterns. Early on, I disdained bring associated with an organized party. I preferred being thought of as a smart, independent thinker … my own man. Besides, party affiliation often told me little about a candidate’s values or normative inclinations.

In college, for example, I admired U.S. Senator Ed Brooke from Massachusetts. He was thoughtful and very intelligent. He was the first black to serve in the Senate since reconstruction. And he was a Republican. He was a candidate I could readily support though I don’t recall having that chance.

By the early 1990s, there would be no place in the Republican party for a public servant like Ed Brooke. By then, both the beliefs and the behaviors of party members were strictly controlled. You no longer were voting for individuals. You were voting to support the dominant belief systems underling a party’s foundational narrative. Anyone could fill the seat since they were not permitted to think nor act on their own.

Above all, the emergence of a single strong, internally coherent, political party on the right has led to an unforseen, potentially catastrophic consequence. The narrative pushed by the emergent hard- right Republican Party enabled a virtual dictator to assume power nationally. The party apparatus, the other levers of power (e.g., Congress, the free press, the Supreme Court) have been substantialy emasculated in the process. We just might be looking at our post- democracy era.

Those who historically have disliked political parties, like our founding fathers, probably would be appalled at seeing what has happened when one of the major parties failed to exercise control over its worst actors. In achieving nominal success by the usual standards applied to political factions … they prevailed in the normative debate about which vision of America should prevail. At the same time, they may well have sacrificed their future utility and any meaningful role in our electoral dynamics. A rather Faustian bargain indeed!

One should always remember the old admonition… be careful what you wish for. Stalwarts among the Republican faithful long hoped to prevail in the conflict over our governing ideals and ideas. And they did, starting with the so-called Reagan revolution. In doing so, have they sacrificed their own role, and legitimacy, in the process.

In our times, the passing of Trump is not likely to end this existential threat to our experiment in democracy. If the normative pendulum is, however, poised to swing again, what will replace the recent Republican ascendancy? A new Dem – inspired era perhaps? Or might it be a post political era dominated by a super-wealthy plutocracy?  

One can hope for the best but …

PS: I might take a break for a bit 😬!

Not long ago, a group of us sauntered out to the middle of a body of water located in rural Wisconsin known as Green Lake. We looked forward to enjoying the 4th of July fireworks display being launched from the small eponymous town located along the water’s eastern shore. A good time was had by all. But what stayed with me from that night were the thoughts I entertained on the boat ride home.

Even though surrounded by other boaters, the middle of this lovely lake located in rural Wisconsin is not exactly awash in ambient light. Yet, as I looked up at the night sky, I could see very few stars. From my experience in that moment, it would be easy to conclude that our observable universe was sparsely populated, yet oddly still intimate.

At once, I recalled a very different image from my youth. As a Peace Corps volunteer living in a remote area of the Rajasthan (India) desert, I still remember gazing at the night time sky from the roof of our humble abode.

In doing so, I experienced a rare moment … a more complete sense of the majesty of our very own Milky Way. That sky, in that remote place, was replete with a dense field of stars. That sky, indeed, seemed to be quite a busy and crowded place. The numbers of distant suns seemed endless, the possibilities beyond calculation. Yet, those twinkling spheres almost appeared within reach. It was as if we could reach out and touch them.

The canvas of black above Green Lake left one with a different sense. One might easily imagine that we humans were alone in what might be described as a vast sea of nothingness. That is, our cosmos seems mostly empty … an attribution that is both correct (most of it is empty or filled with dark matter) and, as discussed below, demonstrably false.

As I looked up at this mostly dark, inky sky, I began to contemplate the scale of the world about me, a world beyond what I could perceive in the moment. One thing is certain. You can easily be fooled by the world you know best, by the version available to your naked senses on a daily basis. Our planet, our home, seems large enough given our limited, pedestrian perspective on things. Yet, it is but a single grain of sand embedded in endless seas of sand if you bother to take a deeper look at things.

Our blue sphere, in fact, is at best a modest home circling about a second rate star located toward the outer edge of a forgettable galaxy that itself is nothing to brag about. One can easily imagine our smartest ancestors looking at the same night sky some two-plus millenia ago. Naturally, Plato and Aristotle would conclude that they were the center of the universe. Their world looked and felt stable, all else undoubtedly revolved about them and their world. Yet, even their knowledge of that home was limited largely to their own culture and immediate vicinity. Still, that is what their experience told them. That is what their logic demanded. Their world view must have seemed unassailable. Why would they doubt what they could see?

Except, of course, their world (and ours) is far from stable. It only appears that way. We, in fact, are hurtling through space at remarkable speeds. First, our mother planet is rotating about its axis. At the equator, it is spinning at about 1,040 miles per hour (mph). If, by chance, you were standing at 45 degrees latitude north, your rotational speed would be about 735 mph. As a point of reference, I live at about 43 degrees north lattitude.

That only begins to cover our movement through space. As we have known since the work of Copernicus and Galileo, our planetary home circles our mother star on an annual basis which, not surprisingly, provides us with the temporal definition of a year. To complete this journey, our home planet must travel at a speed of 18.5 miles every second. Wow, that’s fast.

But that’s not all. Our solar system is not stationary in space. In fact, every celestial entity or system is moving further apart (separating from each other) at apparently increasing speeds. That is one way of understanding that the big bang is more of a process than an event.

Within our galactic neighborhood, which we refer to as the Milky Way, our insignificant solar system travels about a likely black hole lying at the center our adjacent celestial tribe of stars. Traveling at some 144 miles per second, it takes our solar system some 225 million years to make a single voyage about our galactic core.

Think about that. The dinosaurs went extinct some 65 million years ago. From that point in time to today our sun had only progressed a little over a third of its journey around the periphery of our favorite galaxy. Hominoids were progressing slowly toward what we call homo sapiens about 200,000 years back, a mere moment, a blink of the eye, in our sun’s elliptical passage through space.

And yet, I sensed none of this that night while floating serenely in the middle of a lake. I felt stationary even as I hurtled headlong at remarkable speeds. Perhaps there is a lesson here … everything is relative. Either that or our perceptions truley can be deceiving. Perhaps that amounts to two lessons.

Such epiphanies tend to bring me up short. As I looked into the sky on that night of national celebration, I began to ponder the immensity and mystery of what appeared above me, or would appear if it were not shielded from view. At the same time, I was humbled by just how little of that vast, complex world was within my comprehensible grasp. Of course, any blame for that shortfall might well lie within my personal cognitive failings. In any case, let us continue as if I am not totally brain dead.

Drifting in our craft that night, I suddenly became aware of how far humans have progressed. The greatest minds of past epochs created mythical explanations for the wonders that struck them as inexplicable and inexpressible … those things they could not easily apprehend.

Celestial phenomena, as well as earthly mysteries, were explained by deities with ascribed powers that looked amazingly like human attributes inflated on steroids. Given what they had to work with, it was the best they could do. How taken they would have been had the true scope and complexity of the surrounding world been available to them. This is the world that has been revealed to us through our ever more advanced technologies, and as aided by replacing deductive logic with inductive, data-based reasoning (the scientific method).

Remember this, just a century ago, our concept of the universe was essentially limited to our own galaxy. The Milky Way was our entire observable universe. Now, we estimate that some 2 trillion galaxies exist out there, and that may be just the tip of the iceberg as the saying goes. Since the universe continues to expand, we may never capture its complete size or shape.

In another century, how will we view our cosmos? That is a fascinating question. Just a few years ago, as the Hubble telescope was being replaced by even more sophisticated equipment, astronomers focused on what they believed to be a small empty patch of space. They found that this so-called vacant area was filled with tens of thousands of additional galaxies. Our world continues to amaze and fascinate us.

Perhaps it is time for some humility. We still don’t know what is out there. As mentioned, perhaps we may never know. One thing is rather certain. Our complete universe likely is more amazing than our imaginations can conceive. This growing realization of our tiny insignificance in such a vast cosmos has a personal upside … it affords me a measure of solace as it should you. How can one elevate their petty problems given our insignificant place on such an immense stage.

Let’s return to the question that we all ponder at times. Are we unique in this cosmos? If there is a divine entity, did it put all its eggs in one basket. If there is no divine creator, are we the product of an unimaginable series of fortunate,  idiosyncratic, yet unplanned events. Really, can we even presume that the laws of physics and chemistry are identical every where? However you look at it,  are we the only life in this cosmic arena.

Consider the following. Our nearest galactic neighbor, Andromeda, is only 2.5 million light years from earth. It is within a cluster of galaxies we think of as belonging together. Astronomers package discrete galaxies into these artificial clusters to impose some framework for putting our galactic stuff into some order.

It turns out that Adromeda is a bigger galaxy than our Miky Way,  with 2.5 times our number of stars. If, as estimated, it has 10 billion planets that potentially (unlikely though) could support life, we might extrapolate a comparable figure of 4 billion planet like possibilities within our very own galaxy. Though extremely few are likely to support life, there are some 14 billion possible candidates among just these two celestial entities (out of at least two trillion). Alien life is most likely out there. How could it not be?

Not that long ago, this very topic came up during a discussion with some of my neighbors, a highly educated and accomplished lot. One (an emeritus professor from UW in Anthropology) argued that the number of events that had to fall into place to create life as we know it is virtually incalculable. He scoffed at the notion of life elsewhere. I argued back that the number of likely life- supporting sites across our vast universe is equally incalculable. Thus, I think the odds of alien life existing out there is quite high. Whether we can connect with such life forms, however, is quite another matter.

The next meme (below) gives us some perspective. If other life forms exist within our home Galaxy, where that life exists is critical. If on the other side of the Milky Way, for example, the journey to make contact seems impossible or highly improbable at least. Even traveling at the speed of light, thus contravening the known laws of physics, it still might take some 1,500 years to reach it. And even if we did, it would take  another 1,500 years to get that news back to us.

Consider that for a moment! Even an advanced space craft well beyond any technology conceivable to us today would have had to depart before the ascent of what became the Roman Empire before we could expect to receive news announcing any success. And what they would bring to us would be ancient history by the time it was made available to us. Our futuristic offspring would only get to see their ancient history.

Think on this a moment. If an alien spacecraft from a planet located on the other side of our own galaxy took examples from earth in the year 1,000 BCE, how would we look to their advanced species. They would not see us as we exist today. They would conclude that homo sapiens existed barely above a minimal survival level. Most humans back then were pre-literate, barely getting by in nomadic tribes. A few might live in primitive urban settings enjoying some artistic and philosophical development, but only if our alien explorers somehow stumbled on them. Earth, they might conclude, held very little promise. Perhaps they would keep searching elsewhere.

Of course, the further one goes out among the billions upon billions of existing galaxies (that we know of), the greater the probability of finding life. But here is the existential conundrum. As we increased the probability of discovering life, we would decrease the probability of profiting from that breakthrough. How could we ever travel such distances and back with such exciting news.

We calculate cosmic distances in light years, which is a measure of distance and not time. A light year, as we all know, is the distance light travels in one year. That turns out to be about 5.88 trillion miles, a rather good stretch of the legs. To put things in perspective, NASA launched Voyager 1 in 1977. It proved a sturdy craft which sent back data well past its expected failure point.

To date, Voyager has traveled some 15.8 billion miles from earth, hurtling through space at some 38,000 miles per hour (almost dead stop when measured against the speed of light). For the first time, man has escaped the helioshere. We have reached interstellar space. On November 1 of this year, this remarkable little craft will have traveled only one light day away from earth. Quite an accomplishment, but far from the kind of interstellar travel essential to penetrating what we consider outer space.

Pethaps life does exist some place in the Milky Way. Even if relatively close by, getting there and back is utterly beyond our wildest imaginations at present. Sure, approaching the speed of light slows down the relative perception of time between the traveler and a stationary observer on earth. So, several lifetimes might have passed for the observer left behind during a modest interstellar trip. This does not give great hope for exploring our universe. Let’s be honest here. We cannot imagine even remotely approaching the speed of light. Our understanding of physical limitations of doing so are daunting. WARP Speed, as found in Star Trek, remains the stuff of science fiction.

Of course, perhaps our cognitive limitations prevent us from seeing what might be possible one day. As far as we know, however, the speed of light is an absolute. Nothing in the universe can travel faster. Even getting close to this goal would bend space and time in unrecognizable ways. True, there are strange things out there, worm holes and potential surprises that might exist in black holes. Again, the stuff of science fiction to us at this point.

At the quantum (really, really microscopic) level, even stranger things have been detected, or at least hypothesized. Quantum entanglements are phenomenon where particles that are separated by light years totally reflect each other’s properties (spin and motion). As far as we know, this mysterious correspondence cannot violate communication constraints imposed by the speed of light. But what will we discover next. Perhaps the impossible can be overcome some day.

Here’s the thing, the more we know then more we know just how much we don’t know. That is the ultimate paradox. While we should be wary of teleological thinking, I occasionally think about evolution as our search for divinity. Perhaps what we can measure and perceive is but a tiny fraction of something larger and more mysterious than our fragile abilities can contemplate. We might yet be in the infancy of our species. If so, what today is  unimaginable might one day become common place. Such thoughts intrigue me though I try not to become overly attached to such seductive possibilities.

When I was young, I became enamored with something called The Futurist Society. We liked to speculate on what the future might be. Such hypothesizing was exciting, if fanciful. Then, sadly, you become an adult and focus on real life and a real career. However, it turns out that things are rather circular over the long haul. In one’s dotage, the interests of youth are permitted once more. So, how about engaging in a bit of useless speculation.

Perhaps, carbon-based life forms are simply an evolutionary phase. After all, there is much talk of the singularity on the immediate horizon. At that point, human consciousness would be uploaded into more efficient and capable digital machines. The best of us might then be preserved as our more vulnerable attributes, like mortality, are discarded.

Such machines presumably would have more than a few inestimable advantages. They would not decline, decay, or die as we mortals are prone to do, thus requiring starting over from scratch with each generational offspring. One can imagine that such digital devices could both repair and improve on themselves at exponentially faster speeds. Wow!

Following that logic, I can imagine Steven Spielberg doing another movie about our first contact with aliens. But in this version, it would be an advanced machine interacting with another advanced machine that had evolved past an organic life form, much like we had on earth. If such were to happen, deep space travel would be more feasible. But what would meet up in such a future world. Any contact would be between forms of advanced general intelligence barely imaginable to us in the present.

I wonder what such entities might communicate about upon their initial contact … perhaps sharing stories (and laughing hysterically) about the primitive carbon-based life form (or a different organic base life-form if from a distant part of the universe) that they had replaced in the past. Then they might brag how far they have evolved once they managed to shed all that human baggage that inhibited evolution progress. 🙄

Of course, I wonder about other things. Would what comes after us in the evolutionary arc ever look up at the night sky in the kind of  wonder I experienced on Green Lake the other night? Could they ever be emotionally touched by a sunset, laugh at a joke, or be moved by a symphonic masterpiece. Would our successors evrn bother to create works of visual art?

If they don’t bother and such things are lost, that would be a shame.

Our so-called national birthday is upon us. By way of a celebration, let me touch upon one concern of mine (among many) … our sinking reputation across the globe. This declining global status reflects, one might argue, a sense that our domestic political integrity has deteriorated significanctly. I might also add that a fear is emerging in which social tensions might be pulling apart our binding cultural foundations.

Yet, let us put these greater concerns aside for a moment. I want to first focus on our global image. On this, I am recently motivated by watching a number of Trump devotees being interviewed, always a bad idea.

Several of these brainiacs referred to the Donald with unrestrained adoration. They gushed about how he has brought us together, how he has renewed American purpose across the globe, and how he has again established respect for America among all nations of the world.

Really, I thought to myself, Donald did all this? Are we talking about the same Donald I have seen insulting our long standing allies, the one sucking up to the worst strongmen currently strutting across the international scene, and that same character who has assiduously dismantled the Western alliance that has maintained some sense of global security (admittedly not perfectly) for the past 80 or so years. I then began to bang out a response to such ridiculous assertions.

Soon, I caught myself. To keep this manageable, I start with how America (and our current so-called administration) are perceived elsewhere in the world. In doing so, I could not ignore just a few notions that might be contributing to our declining reputation. I touch on them later.

Of course, this is not the first moment in which America has come under negative scrutiny. I can recall way back in the post- WWII era when ‘Americans Go Home‘ slogans seemed ubiquitous, even in lands we had just helped liberate from Fascism.

Perhaps such sentiments might reasonably be attributable to envy. We had emerged from a global conflict in an envious position, even as we projected an irritating, oft overbearing hubris toward others. There was some truth to the notion of the Ugly American back then.

Now, to the present. We still have the largest economy in the world, with a GDP approaching $40 trillion. When nominal GDP is adjusted by each nation’s purchasing power (price differerentials), however, the U.S. falls into 2nd place (see next graph). And who replaces us as no. 1 … China!!!

China, it turns out, is an instructive story. A half century ago, during the crippling period known as Chairman Mao’s cultural revolution (1966-76), as many as 2 million citizens perished from internal ideological zeal as that nation’s autocratic leaders attempted to shift blame for other recent failures.

Just a few years earlier, during Mao’s Great Leap Forward (late 1950s to early 60’s), anywhere from 20 to 40 million had perished from breakdowns in agricultural production and commodity distribution. Perhaps there is a warning here … beware of regimes and leaders that are congenitally incapable of admitting fault or accepting personal responsibility.

Eventually, those autocrats passed from the scene while their successors learned from earlier errors. In a little more than a single generation, starting in about 1990, China has made enormous investments in infrastructure, communications, renewable energy sources, general technology, and education. Let’s simply look at China’s emergance as a global research leader.

At least one source lists a number of Chinese universities among the fastest growing and most prestigious in the world (see above graph). For years, Asian students would migrate to American universities for advanced training. I personally witnessed how the math oriented kids from the East began to dominate the doctoral programs in economics and other disciplines at the University of Wisconsin. That pipeline is now evaporating as Trump clamps down on immigration and harrases our top schools. He is engaging in such counter- productive behaviors at the same time that alternative (even better) opportunities open up to Asian students closer to home.

The trends are unmistakable. At the turn of the millennium, China was producing about one quality research paper for every five being churned out in the U.S., then the undisputed scientific leader in the world. Today, our Asian rival for global hegemony is producing twice that number emerging from America’s vaunted academic institutions (see graph below). While China is investing in the future, the Trump clown show has been attacking our top schools. Talk about being short sighted.

Then, again, is this not a common pattern among authoritarian regimes? Perhaps an analogous historical moment is instructive here. Between 1900 and 1930, about one-third of all Nobel prizes in the hard sciences went to researchers based in Germany. When Robert Oppenheimer, father of the atomic bomb, wished to explore the emerging mysteries of quantum physics, he matriculated at a German institution of higher learning.

Then the Nazi’s took over. The persecution of independent science began, along with anything considered as being Jewish science. Germany never fully recovered its preeminent position as a scientific leader.

But I risk digressing from my primary point. Autocratic regimes lose their way as they attempt to bully and coerce their oft delusional worlds into unwavering compliance and obedience.

In what ways have we regressed so dramatically? The next graphic may provide a clue. Respondents in 36 countries were surveyed. According to the results, some 57 percent conveyed a negative perception of the U.S. In fact, the Donald himself fared worse with some 76% of respondent harboring negative views of the man.

His reelection to a second term tanked our national reputation. Foreign observers apparently saw Trump for what he was, a reality that eluded way too many domestic voters, a number of whom are hooked on Fox news

Trump’s posturing to Make America Great Again sounds all too familiar to the boasts and rants of past autocrats. His military adventures in Venezuala and Iran evoke unpleasant comparisons with earlier dictatorships such as Mussolini in Abyssinia and Tojo in Manchuria.

His verbal aggression toward Canada, Greenland, Iceland, and others  has America’s allies shaking their heads in disbelief. Worse yet, substantially abandoning NATO to seemingly favor Russia’s naked aggression in the Ukraine may be a bridge too far for any decent ally to swallow.  How would you react if you had been an ally to America in the past and were now witnessing what she was becoming?

So, just how have the antics of our wannabe dictator been reflected in our overall comparative global position?  That is, how is the U.S. now being seen by others. Looking at the next graphic, the answer is rather clear … we have fallen far from grace.

Only 4 nations, (Israel, N. Korea, Afghanistan, and Iran) suffer from more negative reputations, at least on this particular ranking. Admittedly, opinions can be notoriously fickle and survey data always can be questioned. Still, America’s apparent fall from grace arguably has been swift and dramatic. Let’s delve more closely into this seeming decline.

Let’s start with several global survey’s carried out by the well-respected Pew Research Center. In the first graph they report out responses to three key questions. Do people see America as a reliable partner? Second, do others see us as a peer that is contributing to overall peace and stability in the world? Finally, do others see Uncle Sam as taking the interests and concerns of others into account when making critical decisions?

The answer is no. Less than half (47%) currently see us as a reliable partner. Over three-in- five respondents do not see us as contributing to peace and stability across the globe. And two-thirds of respondents now feel that the U. S. fails to take the feelings and interests of others into account when making crucial decisions on the international stage. The once champion of Western values, the former leader of the free world, has fallen far from a position of eminence.

Now, lets take a look at how others see our reliability as a partner when negotiating the uncertainties of international waters. The next graph examines such sentiments by surveying people in 17 countries. Between 2022 and 2025, the national median response across these nations fell from 71 percent favorable rate to a 41 percent rate in a short time. That is a swift and dramatic decline of some 30 percentage points. What happened between over that relatively short period. For one thing, Trump returned to power.

These negative perceptions of America amongst our peers seem to have spilled over into domestic policy. The graph below is based on respondents from thirteen nations. Between 2021 and 2026, there was a significant drop in the views among foreign observers in whether our own leaders respect the constitutional freedoms presumably guaranteed to our own citizens. This taps into whether we are seen by others to be a functioning democracy. This is reflected in the U.S. being downgraded in status from being considered a full fledged democracy by international groups who monitor such things.

Perhaps we are no longer the beacon of freedom we once presumed ourselves to be. Can the world be casting about for another to fill that role? The EU, for example, seems to be assuming a leadership role on their own. And yet, Trump rants about being abandoned by traditional allies after attacking Iran, and then declaring total victory … which he has done some thirty-eight times.

This decline of America’s once preferred status has been abrupt, as illustrated in the next graphic. It suggests in a somewhat exaggerated fashion that the whole world has turned against us … especially since Trump entered the scene for a second go at becoming a kind of Napoleanic emperor. Though I wouldn’t take this depiction too seriously, the trend suggested cannot be summarily dismissed.

America’s fall from grace is profound and disturbing. Moreover, it may be based on more than mere opinion. Some twenty-three metrics were examined by researchers, measures that assessed personal security, levels of domestic conflict, and evidence of national militarism. Blending the data, the analysts ranked countries from the most peaceful to the least peaceful. Definitions are, sadly, inherently subjective. Perhaps a better way to describe their scale is countries in which you would like to live versus those you wouldn’t.

Guess what, the U.S. fell some six spots in the last year alone. It can now be found among the least peaceful jurisdictions or perhaps among those you probably would not select as paradise. No wonder some countries, upon Trump’s reelection, began to warn their tourists about the dangers of vacationing in the States. America’s widespread gun-related violence and huge incarceration rate (highest by far among advanced nations) speak eloquently to our underlying social tensions and to our lack of cultural comity.

Yet, when asked, most Americans assume that the trope about our national dominance (e.g., American exceptionalism) is an actual reality. Supporters of Trump point out that he is the kind of leader that this country needs. According to MAGA cult members, his strength brings the country together through a coherent national vision, a purposeful message, and disciplined (if a bit forceful) leadership.

Unfortunately,  what they see as executive clarity emerges as top-down, unilateral executive rule. This form of unitary executive leadership is the very hallmark of autocratic rule. It is a centralized form of dominant governance that essentially violates the checks and balances painfully crafted by our founding fathers. Our constitution was dedicated to the distribution of power across independent branches in a way essential to sustaining a Republican form of governance. What they feared most was a demagogue like Trump who aspired to monarchical glory and to the uncontrolled mob rule we saw during the storming of the Capitol at the end of Trump’s first term.

As Winston Churchill once remarked, democracy is the worst form of government imaginable ‘except for all the others.’ It is slow, messy, and frustrating. At the same time, it avoids the seductive pitfalls associated with autocratic regimes.

It should come as no surprise, then, when neutral observers are not impressed with the manner in which the United States is currently run. From the above graph, we can see that Trump has ruled disproportionately via executive orders in his second term. He does so even though his party controls all levers of power.

The man (or boy masquerading as an adult) learned one lesson from his first administration … only surround himself with boot- licking lackeys. That is a recipe for failure, but he could care less. As a pathological- narcissist, what matters to him is continuous, gratuitous adoration. In this vein, he repeats the excesses we saw in Roman emperors after the fall of the Republic. Some of the worst claimed a divine status … literally being Gods on earth. Then, again, hadn’t the Donald sent pictures of himself out on social media representing himself as the Christ figure.

Not surprisingly, according to the Chandler Good Government Index, the U.S. no longer cracks the top-twenty of best run nations. If I recall correctly, Rome began its decline as such delusional aspirations became more common among it’s leaders

The hyper-partisanship in Washington, a staple since the Gingrich Congressional revolution of the early 1990s, has destroyed virtually all bipartisan work for the common good. The well-being of people, or the Republic, or the world for that matter, is an occasional after thought. Two ideologically divided political power bases strive and struggle for hegemony and control. Little else appears to matter. I get dozens and dozens of political messages daily. Few talk about policy and vision. All ask for money.

Evidence of America’s decline is all about us. The data is clear, if not overwhelming. Documenting it all would extend this modest rant well beyond any consumable length. In consequence, let’s briefly examine the comparison between the U.S. and the closest we have to a set of peer jurisdictions … the European Union or EU.

Across the board, from life expectancy, to poverty, to inequality, to social violence, to public debt, and to female labor market participation, we fall comparatively short. And other than infant mortality, this particular comparison ignores some of the more egregious examples in which we fail. For example, we spend up to twice as much on health care per- capita for outcomes that are middling at best.

As for the touted American dream, generally defined as upward social mobility. Most EU countries, especially in northern Europe, evidence much greater upward mobility than we have here. It helps when higher education is virtually free (no student debt).

The comparison between America and Norway is instructive in one particular way. Our Viking peer nation is characterized by many in the U. S. as being a socialist nation. As such, it has no lessons for us. It is to be ignored. In fact, it is to be feared since our youth night succumb to insidious propaganda spewed out by left-wing woke types.

Yet, today’s contemporary Vikings seem to be doing very well indeed, at least on a comparative basis. Methinks that the casual use of the socialist label is a crude tactic by the hard right to discredit a very successful example of good government.

Conservatives repeatedly point out Norway’s high tax burden. And it is true, they collect more to support a robust system of public services than we do, or virtually any other nation for that matter.

At the same time, however, they are among the happier people in the world, at least according to international hedonic surveys (in data released this past March, Norway ranks 6th). On the other hand, America is well down on that list, ranking 23rd and generally on a downward trend. What our right fails to note is that strong support for the public good has enormous benefits for average folk. People will pay taxes if they know what they are getting for their investment.

The slow and steady decline of America started well before Trump. He is merely the latest, and most egregious version of a slide that began with the triumph of neoliberalism during the Reagan years. Our national plight reminds me of the toad and the pot of water. Throw the poor thing into boiling water and it leaps right out. Put him into tepid liquid and slowly heat it up. He just might not anticipate the inevitable end until it is too late.

As the hard right assumed greater control, and money became concentrated in the hands of a few, it has become increasingly difficult to reverse trends. There never was any overt coup, just an incremetal shift in power and control. Individual laws are passed. Specific media outlets are absorbed by the ‘right’ people. Conservative justices assume lifetime positions. Nothing screams revolution. But a silent revolution it is. Then, one day, you realize there exists an Agenda 2025. You begin to understand, the water is coming to a boil.

Seldom has Congress, the courts, and the executive all been in Democratic hands since 1980. Now that the key media outlets are also concentrated in the hands of a few wealthy autocrats, reversing the trend toward autocratic, self-serving rule (for the elite at least) has become more difficult to challenge. Some days, it seems impossible. The graph above marked a few of the key steps in our march toward a kleptocracy (rule by an economic elite for their own selfish ends).

Let me end with a couple of illustrative graphs that reflect the macro-economic trends in the post-WWII period. The blue line captures the proportion of wealth commanded by the social elite, the infamous top 1 percent. The red line Taps what the bottom 90 percent command. Think of these as capturing both the most successful in contrast to your typical American families who might earn paychecks and not get by through selling stocks short in the equity markets.

From the 1950s through the 1970s, we see a widening between these two lines. This encompasses what economists call the great compression. It was that period in U.S. history in which neo-keynsian thought prevailed. It was colloquially termed the New Deal in common parlance. High income tax rates, strong unions, and public investments in infrastructure and education and research stimulated economic growth. It was the era when every quintile in the distribution enjoyed real earnings gains, when income and wealth inequality fell, and when the middle class grew.

But the elite were never happy with this outcome. For them, it represented a loss of social hegemony and political control. Many define the substantive start of the conservative counter- revolution as the strategic memo authored by future Supreme Court justice Lewis Powell to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce at the beginning of the 1970s. He outlined the strategic tactics by which the right might regain control of the political narrative. His assault called for the systemic usurpation of key institutional levers (courts, media, education) and amassing a huge war chest from corporate sources for that purpose. Within a decade, his vision took root with Reagan’s success in the 1980s. It has been fully realized in the Trump era as income and wealth inequality approach levels not before seen.

But the neo-conservative’s success breeds a set of internal tensions and social challenges. For example, the k-shaped economy graphic illustrates one danger sign. As wages gave been disconnected from productivity and compensation for work has shifted from earnings to returns on investments, both income and wealth has become increasingly concentrated in the hands of a few. The tech-bros who attended Trump’s second inauguration command as much resources as the bottom 90 percent of the population. Elon Musk became a trillionaire with his latest stock IPO.

As the previous graph highlights, the top 20 percent of the income distribution accounts for an increasing share of consumer spendimg and thus overall economic activity. The elite are the one class who are prospering in the new economy. The young are struggling with student debt, changing labor markets, and prohibitive entry costs into the middle and upper classes. Now, with AGI becoming a reality, their future is indeed further clouded. They face the kind of uncertainty that never crossed my mind at the beginning of my career.

Is the American era over as the world’s preeminent power? Have things reached a point where the American experience cannot be salvaged. There are several factors that suggest such a dystopian future cannot be avoided. Thus, it is very easy to sink into a sense of fatalism and cynicism.

Then again, nothing is certain in life. I once gave up on ny childhood dream of seeing the Boston Red Sox win the World Series. Then they came back from being down three games to none in the playoffs to beat the hated Yankees before sweeping the Cardinals to finally win it all. Miracles do happen.

Perhaps more realistic examples are in order. At the height of the gilded age, it likely was very hard to imagine how such concentrated wealth might be challenged. Yet, the progressive era did occur when monopolies were broken up and laws protective of real people were passed. A generation later, when political power once again was entangled with economic privilege during the roaring 20s, a global depression reordered our economic understandings, at least for a while. The New Deal created opportunities that seemed out of reach a few years earlier.

The coming midterms are an opportunity to assess whether Anericans are finally emerging  from their long political stupor. Perhaps they will finally stumble across their own self-interest … or not! In the meantime, don’t forget the dream.

A while back, I recall writing a blog on President Kennedy’s iconic program, the Peace Corps. Of course, having served as a member of India-44 in the late 1960s, I tend to focus disproportionate attention on that program and to the fortunes of the world’s largest (by population) democracy … India.

Recently, however, I heard something disturbing. HR 8595, the FY27 National Security, Department of State, and Related Programs appropriation bill was making its way through Congress. If enacted in its current form, the Peace Corps experiment, based on what I heard, would be gutted. This possibility, though perhaps remote, hit me hard since, given the Trump fiasco in Washington, any insane possibility might come to pass. But gutting the Peace Corps! Really?

Peace Corps has survived fairly well for some 65 years since its creation through an Executive Order by Kennedy on March 1, 1961. Back then, a few casual remarks by candidate Kennedy late one night at the Ann Arbor, Michigan airport sparked a tidal wave of interest among college students. Many desperately wanted to do something for their country. Thus, this program of service overseas became one of Kennedy’s first substantive actions as President.

Over time, some 240,000 mostly young men and women have served as volunteers across the globe. Even today, some 7,000 volunteers still are working in about 60 nations, compared to around 16,000 in the prehistorical era during which I served. It is clear that the program could expand if additional resources were available.

The program might not possess the same cache and swagger it did during the 1960s, but the work now provided might be more useful. I believe they eventually got it right through trial and error. By virtue of closely vetting vocational interests and prior experiences, today’s volunteers are better matched to the technical needs of the host countries in which they serve. In my day, the program was arrogant enough to believe that we could contribute anywhere and on whatever challenge was posed to us. We volunteers did not necessarily agree with such hubris, but we soldiered on.

Let me assert that Peace Corps service was never easy. On that, we in India-44 did fully agree. There was an early program advertisement which said it would be ‘The hardest job you will ever love.’ From the lived experience of those who served in my group, our tenure abroad was hard … very hard indeed.

As I noted in an earlier blog, we endured primitive living conditions, cultural challenges, isolation, disease, loneliness, and concerns about our preparation to carry out our assigned tasks. Yet, based on our group gatherings almost five decades later, we fully agreed that our service remained an irreplaceable part of our lives. Arguably, it helped shape whom we became in later life.

Nor have those who served done so absent personal cost. In our program (India-44), we all suffered from various afflictions, dysentery being the most common. I also recall having ring worm, and a case of giardia that dropped my weight to less than 150 lbs. This was not terribly adequate given my 6′ 1″ inch frame. A decade after my return, I was diagnosed with tuberculosis, the specific viral strain likely first contracted on the subcontinent but which remained dormant for a decade.

And I was a lucky one. Unlike a number of my peers, I never spent any time in a hospital, nor was I required to leave India early for medical reasons. What are termed medical separations account for the estmated third of all volunteers who do not complete their service. In effect, perhaps one in ten serving volunteers are sent home do to disease or accidents. In rare cases, the ultimate price has been paid. Some 310 volunteers have perished as a consequence of their service.

One argument for gutting Peace Corps is that we need the money for other purposes. The U.S. annually takes in a little over $5 trillion in revenue but spends about $7 trillion. Each year, that now leaves almost $2 trillion to be added to a debt that is approaching $40 trillion in total. Getting our fiscal house in order makes sense but Peace Corps seems like an odd place to start.

In FY 2020, the PC budget allocation was $410 million. While seeming like real money, that figure represented less than 2 tenths of 1 percent of the Department of Defense’s weapons procurement request for that same fiscal year. Putting the cost of PC in context, one basic F-35 fighter plane costs $80 million to acquire while a single hi-tech Stealth Bomber sets the taxpayers back a cool $2.1 billion (sufficient to fund Peace Corps for five full years). Rather odd that we easily find money for war and death while resources to support life-affirming purposes remain so damn hard to locate.

The question might be asked … has Peace Corps justified its existence on a rigorous benefit-cost basis? Since the expected benefits are difficult to define across so many host nations, that kind of metric for tapping success remains elusive. The fact that, after 65 years, so many countries yet want volunteers (60 at current count if you have forgotten) does tell us something on that matter.

There are hints about the positive impact that Peace Corps has had back in the States. Survey data indicates that fully one-quarter of returnees have started businesses, many of which are demonstrably successful. The program appears to motivate risk taking, resilience,  and innovative thinking among its’ participants. These are life- affirming attributes. After all, my India-44 group was dropped into remote villages in the Rajasthani desert 🏜 and expected to make do.

There is little question that former volunteers remain active in public life. Some 86 percent continue to be involved in their communities, a rate well above any expected figure. As I sit here, I can recall a recent Wisconsin governor and a recent Chancellor at the University of Wisconsin who were volunteers in their youths.

Finally, the program is not that expensive, at least compared to other initiatives designed to enhance America’s image oversees. At about $56,000 per volunteer per year (total cost), this figure is half of what is spent on Fulbright Scholarships and other such related programs. Besides, just think what it costs for the personnel manning one of those $2 billion dollar bombers.

Of course, I sometimes reflect on what the members of India-44 might have accomplished during our tour. Our group was split between public health and rural development initiatives. One aspect of the public health initiatives was helping local governments extend their birth control message as well as their efforts combating diseases that adversely impact rural youth.

Think about the following. In  1950, the fertility rate in India was about 6.0 children per female. Having many children then made sense given that at least a quarter of all toddlers would perish before their 5th birthday. Surviving to adulthood was far from a sure thing. The population then stood at 360 million. Given the high birth rate (and falling youth death rate), it would almost double by the time we arrived.

By the time we did arrive, public health efforts were achieving additional success. The child death rate, one of the foci of half our group that was assigned to the state of Maharasthra, was clearly declining. Indian officials now were motivated by the fear of an impending apocalypse where more children survived to adilthood while women continued to have many children.

Reality had run ahead of perceptions. Rural folk assumed that a good number of their children would, in fact, not survive. But they now were, in fact, reaching adulthood. Worse, the small farms owned by the parents could not be further divided among their surviving male offspring. How could society accommodate what looked like an impending population-driven disaster?

The feared collapse obviously never occurred. Amazingly (or not), the birth rate in India started to plummet soon after our departure. As seen in the graph below, their fertility rate now is 1.9, somewhat below the consensus 2.1 rate necessary to replace the current population. This is occurring just in time since India passed China in total population in 2023, now having some 1.6 billion souls residing within its borders. Absent any change, it won’t be long before that country’s total population begins to decline.

My side of India-44 focused on rural development, mostly agriculture. But some of us did other things like get schools built, blast wells for farmers, erect demo chicken coops and gardens, and various other endeavors. Mostly, however, we organized demonstration plots that highlighted the use of hybrid seeds … the type that greatly enhances the yields of primary grain crops. This was part of the green revolution initiated by Norman Borlaug.

As with their population crisis at that time, India was in the midst of a food production crisis. Failed monsoons and inefficient farming practices led to the situation where the country had to import grains just to keep their own  people from starving. Members of India-44 recall village women laboring in the hot sun breaking rocks (to assist road building) for a few rupees per day just to stave off starvation. They literally were being saved by local public works initiatives.

Shockingly (or not), India was exporting grain again shortly after we completed our tour. In recent years, she has been exporting 25 million tons of rice annually. And another 5 million tons of wheat. Members of our group who have returned in recent decades report a country that would be unrecognizable to the rest of us. India now enjoys one of the most robust economic growth rates in the world, though they disappointedly have drifted toward a semi-autocratic form of governance.

Okay, I know what you are thinking. India-44 did not bring about such changes, nor did the Peace Corps as a whole. Of course not! But we may have contributed a bit to the communities in which we served. That is all we might expect from our meager efforts. But one never knows. Peɓbles dropped into a body of water create ripples. Enough of them and the prospect for real change becomes palpable.

On a more serious note, the raisin-detre of Peace Corps has never been about macro- changes. The contributions of individual volunteers, if any, are local in scale. They are often about individual relationships focused on cross-cultural interactions and modest community effects. But still, small ripples eventually can result in larger circles and broader effects. Beyond all else, the locals get to know the volunteers on a personal basis. A little good will can’t hurt.

We in India-44 saw larger impacts in how the program impacted us as individuals. I have often commented on how much our group contributed to the world as adults. Reflecting at the moment, I can recall my PC associates going on to work for the United Nations, for the State Department, for the Federal Reserve, for national unions, and as university professors. And this was just among the rather small number of male volunteers who completed their tour (around 14 or 15) in my half of India-44.

The exacting selection and vetting processes (or self-selection process in which the more talented apply for Peace Corps service) might explain the exemplary achievements of our group as adults. Even today, only about one-third of those initiating the application process might be successful. Back in my day, the proportion ultimately going over seas relative to the initial applicant pool was much lower.

Yet, my PC peers would argue that there is something undeniably unique to the experience itself. We enjoyed a value added dimension as a consequence of our service. As I’ve asserted elsewhere, the core cross- cultural experiences and the ongoing hardships helped shape us for the future as few other alternatives could.

Perhaps this is one reason that many argue for some form of universal mandatory experience for young adults. Perhaps all of our youth might profit from experiences grounded in service to others that stretches them and helps them mature. We used to have the military draft for males but think how much essential environmental and infrastructure work needs to be done here and elsewhere.

Think about this. Will the next generation be better off by continuing to stare at their cell phones for endless hours. Or would they benefit from immersing themselves in challenging tasks that takes them out of their comfort zones. No, I think gutting programs like the Peace Corps would be short- sighted and foolish. The again, perhaps that is the very reason the Trump crowd loves the idea.

PS: A couple I knew professionally had served in the Peace Corps in South America, perhaps a couple of years after my service. They once told me about an amazing experience they had upon returning to their village some years after their service ended. The wife had worked in education while there. Upon their return visit, they found the local school they had helped improve had subsequently been named after her. Adults approached her telling how her work altered their lives and the lives of their children. 

You never forget experiences like that. Little else in life can match them.

Don’t let the above graph stop you from reading further. The message below is rather simple, but important. In this blog I first chat about how we distribute our economic goodies in the U.S. and across the globe. That’s the equity question or, quite simply, how shares of the pie are distributed amongst our citizens. Then I segue into how many can afford pie in the first place. That is the poverty challenge or how many, in effect, belong to the ranks experiencing economic want.

It recently struck me how little of my blog time has been devoted to seminal social questions like poverty, the soundness of our social safety net, and that fragile infrastructure we call a human services system. After all, that is where I expended most of my professional energies while faking my day job as a pretend academic.

Why so little time on issues that were close to my heart? Perhaps I had been exhausted by the intransigence of these issues given both their complexity and given our increasingly dysfunctional political capacity to confront them rationally. Nevertheless, despite my accumulating cynicism, get ready for a word or two on equality and poverty.

The Equity Question.

I have touched on equality matters in the past, tapping issues like our easy acquiescence to hyper-inequality and like our competing definitions of fairness. Therefore, I will try to keep this section rather short. Good luck with that, I hear some of you uttering.

That graph shown at the beginning of this essay tells us something very important about America, an insight I just bet you are dying to know. Well, it tells me (if no one else) that we are both wealthy and, comparatively speaking, selfish. Essentially,  we are unwilling to broadly share that wealth in any meaningful manner. The bottom line is this. No matter how you define fairness, most of our peers in other advanced nations do a better job of distributing their pies (national resources) among their residents.

Let’s look a bit closer. Those nations listed to the right on this graph are the wealthier jurisdictions. One’s position along the horizontal axis is defined by GDP per capita. The further to the right your nation lies, the richer the country. Look at Ireland … wow! It has come a long way from being the sick man of Europe, the sad reputation it suffered during my first visit in 1969.

Now, a country’s position on the vertical axis captures how equally, or unequally, a nation’s goodies are shared among its citizens. This equity factor is represented (or captured) by a summary economic statistic termed the gini-coefficient. The lower the score (on a range from 0 to 1) the more equal a society is judged to be in terms of shared economic resources. So, Norway with a score of just over 0.25 evidences significantly more equality than the U.S. which has a score north of 0.4.

Let us focus on the U.S. which, being located in the center of the graph, is not hard to find. What does (or should) that position tell us about the American Dream? Well, on average, we are indeed rich but, at the same time, those riches are disproportionately going to those who already posses a very large share of the national pie. (I dealt with the definition of fairness in an earlier blog and won’t repeat that here.)

My personal value sentiment is derived from our relative position to our peers (other advanced societies). This comparative perspective suggests to me (at least) that being a rich country does not require one to forego progressive public policies. Traditional economic thought once suggested an equity- efficiency tradeoff. Presumably, you had to choose between a robust (efficient) economy or one that stressed equitable outcomes. I no longer believe that to be the case.

Admittedly, my conclusion may differ from those with competing core values. So, let us look at the question from the perspective of John Rawls, the late political philosopher from Harvard. He argued that liberty and justice are best balanced if we make our normative decisions from behind a so-called veil of ignorance, from a position where we don’t know the circumstances in which we might be born. Fairness to someone already residing in a well-to-do household is likely to be far different than someone who might find themselves struggling in a poverty stricken home and a violent neighborhood.

If you don’t know where you will end up, one might avoid a society where a favored few enjoy enormous riches while the many face relative insecurity. Selecting a political system such as America’s would be an extreme bet, highly rewarding for a few but very risky for the many. In that sense, citizens in Iceland, Denmark, Norway, and Ireland have it easier. Wherever they are born along the wealth and opportunity spectrum, they probably will fare reasonably well in life. For Americans, life’s outcomes are far less certain.

While the distribution of personal skills and behavioral attributes play a role in life’s outcomes, so do conscious public policies. Those Scandinavian countries with more equal outcomes (yet enjoying robust economies) generally have erected advanced cradle to grave safety net systems along with protective labor market policies. 

Contrary to widespread belief among American Republicans, the citizens of such democratic- socialist nations don’t chaff under intrusive government controls, limited personal liberties, and high taxes. On the contrary, these countries have long enjoyed top positions on international hedonic (happiness) surveys. People apparently like the security provided by robust public services, even if this requires high taxes and less individual freedoms essential to acquiring extraordinary levels of wealth. Apparently, freedom from economic anxiety must possess its own rewards.

The U.S. is an outlier on this graph. That is, it stands out from the others who are included in this analysis. We are clearly rich and we are reluctant to share those riches. Then again, we are a large, diverse nation. Perhaps sharing is easier within more intimate, homogeneous societies.

There are many factors operating here. For one thing, our social safety net is a joke compared to other rich nations. Consider that America is the only advanced nation that does not fully ensure health care as a right of citizenship. In consequence, we have many thousands of bankruptcies annually due to medical emergencies and high out-of-pocket medical costs … a financial disaster not faced by those in other lands. The remainder of our safety net is a bewildering set of confusing, patchwork type programs that are distributed across federal, state, and local levels of government. It is as if we sat down to purposely design our systems of help to fail which, perversely, provides an excuse to further minimize future investments.

On the other hand, the one-tenth of 1 percent at the top of our economic pyramid have raced ahead as the shares of our national wealth are unevenly distributed. I repeatedly have pointed out that the share of income going to the top one- percent has risen from less than 10 percent in the late 1970s to almost one-quarter in recent years. That is a galactic shift. Wealth is now even more unequally distributed. The tip of the pyramid (one-tenth of one percent) now has more wealth than the GDP of China. With the recent IPO for Space-X, Elon Musk has become the first trillionaire in history. We are talking about a seismic transformation that did not occur on its own. The elite had considerable help from politicians and policymakers.

The ascent of neo-liberal (or neo-classical) thought beginning in 1980 has systemically rigged the game in favor of the well-to-do. The Reagan revolution introduced a set of reforms designed to reverse the Keynsian revolution enacted by FDR and spawned by the Great Depression. Roosevelt’s New Deal had led to a post WWII generation where inequality and poverty fell while a robust middle class emerged.

The elite (most of them) never forgave Roosevelt, considering him a traitor to his class. A return to free markets and minimal government had long been the dream of neo- conservatives like Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman along with many from the moneyed crowd. However, for this counter-revolution to succeed, the populace first had to forget the hardships generated by the failed pre- depression experiment in hyper- capitalism. The public then had to gradually undervalue the many contributions that public policy interventions made during the halcyon years of the post WWII era of economic prosperity. The population saved from want by assertive public policies had to pass from the scene.

I won’t go though the myriad of changes that have resulted in one of the greatest redistributions of wealth in history over the past 45 years. The RAND corporation now estimates that perhaps close to $80 trillion has been shifted from those who work for a living to those at the very top of the economic pyramid (those remunerated in shares and deferred interest, not a paycheck).

That estimate may pale when emerging AGI technologies really begin to reduce what the elite privately call the tax on corporate profits associated with labor costs. Unlike in the post WWII era, today’s entrepreneurs embrace the shareholder perspective as opposed to a stakeholder view. The former argues that corporations should only be concerned with shareholder well-being. All other concerns such as those of labor, the community, or the environment are completely irrelevant.

Check out another graph at this point (See below). We have all read about our $39 trillion dollar national debt. A big number no doubt. But that alone might not be the big worry. Yes, our debt now exceeds our annual GDP. But that has happened before, to pay for WWII for example. Besides, we are not alone in this kind of borrowing frenzy. All nations now turn to financing expenditures with borrowing while some, like Japan for example, has a public debt amounting to twice their GDP.

Here is what really bothers me. Donald Trump, in 5 years, has added some $13.5 trillion to our debt. Were those dollars used to improve our infrastructure, enhance our scientific community and public research, rationalize our health care financing system, lower the cost of higher education for the next generation, or invest in renewable energy. If so, I might be persuaded that such borrowing is justifiable in the long term.

No such luck. This latest borrowing splurge went toward turning our Department of Defense into an aggressive Department of War and to further finance the tax breaks for the wealthy long after any remaining progressivity had been wrung out of our tax system. The 2018 Trump tax breaks for the rich and the recent Big Beautiful Bill gave huge windfalls to the existing elite who surely didn’t need the help.

Will such insanity stop? Not likely. Spending on political campaigns exploded after 2010 Citizens United supreme court decision that flooded our politics with corporate money and contributions from the elite. Political spending by economic titans jumped from about 200 million in 2012 to several billion in recent campaigns. In the last election, 300 of the richest families contributed $10 million each, 100,000 times a typical contribution from ordinary citizens. The oligarchs don’t do this for any noble purpose. They expect a payoff and they likely will continue to get them.

The Poverty Question:

I really didn’t expect to spend that much time on the equity issue. As usual, my fecund mind ran away from me. Still, how about a look at the poverty issue from 35,000 feet … that is, a brief overview.

If equity deals with who gets how much of the pie, the poverty question deals with who has enough resources to buy the pie in the first place.

How is poverty determined? That is, who is poor and who is not? When Lyndon Johnson launched his War On Poverty in the mid 1960s, he realized that a formal definition was needed. You cannot fight a war without a known enemy. That task was given to a mid-level analyst in the Social Security Administration named Mollie Orshansky. She took a study that estimated what it would take to cheaply feed a family of three. Then she found another study that estimated low-income families spend a third of their budget on food. Voila! She took her low-cost food estimate and multiplied it by three.

Okay, they needed an equivalency scale to adjust for distinct family sizes and a way to adjust for inflation over time. But her back of the envelope calculation established the golden line … if you had income over that threshold you were not poor. If your income was under, you were destitute.

Mollie attended meetings in D.C. long after she retired. I personally heard her state that she never thought her crude calculation would remain the official line for so long. She clearly assumed it would be replaced by better measures based on more sophisticated approaches. And many tried, including me and several colleagues. Though virtually all sane observers admitted the official measure was deeply flawed, revising it proved politically infeasible.

We were doing this work in the 1990s, after Republican Newt Gingrich took control of Congress. Washington had become a partisan pit where any remaining evidence of reason and sanity was quickly vanishing. No matter how many concessions were made to the other side, there was no room for negotiation. Deadlock on even technical issues had set in.

As bad as it is, here are examples of the current thresholds: $15,960 for single person; $32,150 for a family of four, and so on. My colleagues and I did help devise a set of alternatives, more defensible thresholds along with better definitions of available income. These alternatives generally adjust the lines upward though those changes are partially offset by expanding the income counted as available to families in question. These refined measures  are used by the press and others for descriptive and analytical purposes. But for official purposes, Mollies back-of- the- envelope effort remains in force.

Utilizing her measures, we had a national poverty rate of 10.6 percent in 2024. (Note: The 2025 figures won’t be out until September.) That percentage translates into 35.9 million Americans who fell below the magic line in that year.

Now, there is a problem with what I call naked numbers. Is a 10.6 percent poverty rate high or low? Is it a number to celebrate or to grieve? To assign meaning to any naked number we need context. Toward that end, we have options. Among other possibilities, we can look at performance over time, comparisons to our peer nations, or contrasts against some consensus goal.

I will start with a consensus goal. One example is associated with British Prime Minister Tony Blair. About a quarter century ago, he visited Toynbee Hall in London, an iconic neighborhood rehabilitation site where 19th cebtury reformers battled poverty and want. He publicly declared that child poverty would be eliminated within a generation. Good thing he knew he would be out of office when the time limit expired.

A zero poverty rate seems absurd. Yet, in the United States, some very serious observers (Nobel laureates in economics) once thought that a continually improving economy would lift more boats. That, along with a targeted federal war on want might just eliminate U.S. poverty by 1976, our Bicentennial.

And for a while, progress was made. U. S. poverty fell from rates as high as 50 percent or more during the Depression to 22 percent in 1959 to about half that rate in 1974, where the number of poor bottomed out at 22 million. By then, politics had moved on to other battles while neoliberalism began mounting a concerted attack on assertive government interventions.

Perhaps the overall rate is too crude. Perhaps we can learn something by dissecting the numbers. For example, we could segregate the population into three groups: children, adults, and the aged with the young and the old attracting special sympathy. Here we find that our elderly population has done relatively well. Over a third were poor in 1959, a figure that fell to 10 percent as programs for the elderly (SSI, Medicaid, etc) matured. The rate for adults is about the same … 10 percent.

Our young remain the sore point. Child poverty, while falling somewhat from historical highs, remains stubbornly high at 15 percent. It has fluctuated around that figure ever since the 1970s.

Family structure provides additional insights. The rate for female-headed families with children is about 22 percent, for unattached single folks it is 18 percent, for male-headed families with kids it falls to 11 percent; and for two-parent families with kids, the rate falls to 4.6 percent. Ominously, poverty becomes more likely as families become more fractured.

Race is another attribute of interest. While about 1 in 10 Whites and Asians are officially poor, the rate for Hispanics generally has been in the mid teens, while the rate for Blacks has hovered about 20 percent.

Finally, geographical location is a predictor of economic need. Want is much higher in Southern, conservative states. For example, the overall rate in Louisiana is almost 19 percent. In Mississippi, it approaches 18 percent. And, in West Virginia, it is about 17%. On the other hand, the rates in northern blue states like Minnesota, New Jersey, Vermont, and Maryland all hover around 9%.

This is a huge topic which one might spend a life studying. I know that from personal experience. I also know that answers come hard and, believe me, even the best proposals breed more controversy than consensus.

I was in the midst of the welfare wars at the state and National levels when such were front burner issues. Over time, evidence and reason played a less substantive role in those policy debates, though we tried hard.

Unfortunately, these issues tap fundamental concerns and prejudices about work, civic responsibility, sexual probity, and sound child-rearing. In addition, the issues become clouded by barely acknowledged racial animosities and latent forms of misogyny. Lurking beneath every argument lies the oft unstated belief that poverty is a personal (read cultural) failing, not a systemic one.

Yet, if we return to our comparative assessment of performance, a positive note emerges. If you look at overall rates (or the rates for key subgroups like children), an intriguing result emerges when comparisons are done across advanced nations. Child poverty rates in Scandinavian are often half, or even one-third, of what is found in the States. Some have come pretty damn close to Tony Blair’s dream of zero child poverty.

This tells me that it can be done. Or, perhaps more realistically, that we can do better. We did make progress when we tried. In fact, we probably made more progress than we realized given the headwinds policymakers faced. The loss of unions, explosions in automation, outsourcing to overseas markets, increased immigration, and now technological threats to our labor markets have made the task more difficult.

Still, difficulty is not an excuse, a reason for giving up. In the end, it just makes the endeavor more intriguing.

I have always been taken aback when people who have amassed great fortunes are worshipped, often in an obsequious or fawning manner. During the gilded age, when robber barons accumulated obscene fortunes while laborers worked 70 pr more hours per week for subsistence wages, men like Rockefeller, Carnegie, and Morgan oft were celebrated as virtual demigods. Even when such men hired private armies to fire upon desperate workers, little opprobrium was attached to them or their actions. It was just business as usual.

I am reminded of an apochryphal aphorism that I once stumbled across. When a British worker sees a person in a Rolls Royce limousine passing by, they are tempted to throw a rock at such a display of privilege. When an American sees such a sight, they imagine themselves enjoying such pampered luxury one day. That instinctive reaction presumably explains (or explained) why the conservative perspective became the default position of U.S. political thought.

I doubt whether such binary responses are totally authentic today. Still, this insight might well contain a grain of historical truth. Traditionally, Europe was long characterized through encrusted class rigidity while America was touted as the land of full opportunity on steroids. Today, however, upward social and economic mobility is greater in most European countries than the U.S. but images, even outdated ones, die hard.

Whatever the truth about the so- called American dream, many yet gush over the economic elite here. The media follow Bezos, Gates, Zuckerberg, and like titans with rapt attention. What’s not to be enthralled by the recent $50 million dollar wedding orchestrated by that former creator and CEO of the retail behemoth … the Amazon corporation.

So what if their workers must labor for long hours, often bereft of overtime compensation, for wages that must be supplemented by SNAP  benefits to make ends meet. Are not those sacrifices justified by the  unimagined luxury enjoyed by our economic royalty.

Those Amazon workers have the satisfaction of knowing they made it possible for Jeff Bezos to purchase the largest masted super- yacht in the world. Known as the Koru, Jeff’s toy is about 420 feet long, has a glass-bottom pool, multiple jacuzzis, and expanded decks. Oh, and it is accompied by a sister vessel, the Abeona. This ancillary craft has a helicopter pad and many toys that can’t fit on the primary vessel. The Amazon workers must be so happy for Jeff.

But I digress. I don’t want to focus on today’s robber barons, those complicit in the final destruction of America’s faltering democracy. I want to focus on other creative geniuses, those who contributed to society not in the pursuit of vast riches but simply in the interest of the public good. You do remember this thing called the public good, don’t you? We once considered it as a matter of course in our political dealings.

Such self-sacrificing individuals are my heroes, not those who acquire obscene fortunes at any cost. The former strike me as the ones worthy of adulation, at least more than they normally receive. After all, they put the well-being of the many over the never to be satisfied fiscal aspirations of the few. Let me note a few examples of my heroes.

Take the case of Tim Berners-Lee. While working at CERN … the European Organization for Nuclear Research located in Switzerland, the British born and educated (Oxford) physicist in 1989 wrote a memo lamenting the fact that computers could not talk to one another. If the machines could not communicate, then both science and scientists would remain isolated in their separate silos. The synergistic environment in which creative impulses thrive would remain out of reach … a mere dream.

Tim did more than lay out a vision. Over the next couple of years, he created the protocols essential to the creation of the world wide web (WWW). In the early 1990s, the cyber world of interactive communication became a reality by virtue of his efforts. He created a world in which we can all communicate.

Yet, unlike so many other tech bros, Tim never sought a patent. He never created a proprietary company. He never constrained the use of his innovations for personal gain. I think it fair to say he could have earned billions. For him, pushing his breakthroughs as widely as possible in the public domain was more important than fortune or wealth’s associated fame. Every time we turn to our smart phone, tablet, or computer, we should give a quick nod to Sir Timothy Berners- Lee.

There are others of course. Let’s take another example that may be familiar to many of you. Dr. Jonas Salk, a researcher at the University of Pittsburgh, developed a vaccine to confront the scourge of polio in the mid-1950s. When the then iconic news figure Edward R. Murrow asked him “who owns the patent?” His response was succinct and simple. “There is no patent. Could you patent the sun?“

For Dr. Salk, his reward was in saving as many lives as possible. Constraining availability based on price and profit surely would have resulted in more deaths and suffering. I still remember the kids of my day existing in iron lungs. I remember vividly worrying that I might become one of them. Along with worries about being evaporated in a nuclear holocaust, the affliction of polio kept us kids up at night. If he had gone the full capitalist route, however, it is estimated he could have earned some $7 billion dollars. At the same time, more kids might have been trapped inside a life-saving apparatus, if they survived at all. But he chose a more humane path. In doing so, many kids may have been spared. Perhaps I was one of them.

Canadian researchers Fred Banting, Charles Best, and James Collip isolated and refined insulin in 1921. They also could have pursued profit and great wealth. But they chose a different path. They sold the rights to their discovery to the University of Toronto for $1 measly dollar. By their act, millions of diabetes sufferers were thus given hope. A life- giving drug was not restricted to those who could afford it … it became generally available to all.

University of Wisconsin- Madison  researcher Harry Steenbock developed ultra- violet techniques for fortifying foods with Vitamin D. Among other benefits, his breakthrough eliminated the scourge of Rickets worldwide. Much as the Canadian researchers who isolated insulin had done, Steenbock worked with UW administrators to advance the public good, not seek individual gain.

At U.W., they created the first American university- based non-profit model for reinvesting monetary gains from research breakthroughs back into basic and applied research. Thus, the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation (WARF) was created some 75 years ago. Almost half a billion has been reinvested in work benefiting the public good. Some 3,000 additional patents (including for Warfarin and MRI technologies) have been awarded with the proceeds going back into even more basic research.

Or take the case of a brilliant thinker who died in poverty and without much recognition (at the time). Among, his many achievements, Nicola Tesla recognized that alternating current (AC) was vastly superior to the direct current (DC) alternative being pushed by Thomas Edison. And why did Edison fight for his vision with such ferocity … because he thought he could profit from it.

Tesla remained a man of science. Edison was an entrepreneur who often used other people’s ideas to make money. This is not to say Thomas did not make contributions. He did. The world needs both ideas and those people who make ideas practical. Still, most people have heard of Edison. Far fewer recognize the name, or the contributions, of one of the greatest minds of the very early 20th century … Nicola Tesla.

Nils Bohlin was an engineer who worked for the Volvo automobile corporation. In 1959, he developed the modern three-point seat belt. In fact, he and Volvo did patent his innovation. Then, contrary to ordinary corporate practice, the Volvo corporation decided to share the technology throughout the auto industry. Stunningly, they did not hoard their innovation for corporate advantage.

While most U.S. auto firms fought safety measures as expensive mandates imposed by  government, Bohlin and Volvo took the other path. Why? Because it would save lives. They practiced a form of corporate morality that seems quaint today, an ethical approach where community well-being helps shape a firm’s decisions.

Madam Curie, born in Poland as Maria Sklodowska, won two Nobel Prizes (physics and chemistry) but never patented her discoveries for personal gain. She was motivated by pure science, driven by that basic motivation to better understand the world around us. Sadly, she died early for her passion … succumbing to radiation poisoning attendant to her work.

Robert H. Goddard, professor of physics at Clark University (my undergraduate alma-mater), launched the first liquid fuel rocket into space in 1926. Working mostly on his own, and ridiculed by many, he never sought personal gain as his research was finally recognized. He was driven by a dream he embraced as a young boy growing up in my home town of Worcester Mass.

Note: his first rocket didn’t go far into space. It ascended a little more than 40 feet while staying aloft for 2.5 seconds. Then again, the first aircraft of Orville and Wilbur Wright didn’t do much better. Yet both efforts launched revolutions that transformed the world as we know it.

Goddard dedicated his life to space, not treasure. He didn’t run out and build a Space X firm for his era. He always felt his work belonged the world, not to be exploited for personal gain.

When he did launch the space age on March 26, 1926 (a century ago), it took place on his aunt’s farm which would later become a golf course. I played that course as a kid. One day, I came across famed rocket scientist Werner Von Braun and other luminaries dedicating a plague on the very spot where the rocket age was launched.

We all make choices. While economic incentives play a critical role in our economy and our social well- being, we should remain cognizant of other valid motivations. Making an additional buck is not always the end all of a worthy life. Money is nice but certainly not everything. Once you get beyond a certain kink-point recognized by economists, the marginal utility of more decreases rapidly. As wealthy venture capitalist Nick Hanauer once noted, you can only  consume a limited amount of life’s goodies no matter your wealth. That extra billion just doesn’t mean all that much.

I recall once being asked to consult for the Ontario Provincial Government on optimal approaches to human services integration. A colleague of mine suggested that I ask to be paid for my services. My response was instinctive. “I already am getting paid by the university. If I can help them deliver better human services, that is reward enough.” Once you reach a comfortable fiscal place in life, what else do you need? A little more money is not going to buy you happiness. But sharing the fruits of your labor, or your insights, just might.

Few contemporary cultural kerfuffles agitate me more than the hard right’s insistence that we were founded as a Christian nation. Worse yet, they seem to favor returning what little remains of our inclusive democracy to some form of authoritarian theocracy. That might not be quite the equivalent to reversing our revolutionary war by reestablishing a monarchical form of governance but it comes damn close.

I am vexed by such aspirations for two reasons. First, though I am not a scholar of our revolutionary period, nothing in my casual reading supports the contention that our founding father’s wanted a theocracy of any sort and certainly not as a foundational pillar for our fledgling Republic. And second, the history of conflating governance principles with religious belief is intolerable on numerous levels. Prior experiences suggest that it is a recipe for violence, division, and discrimination. Essentially, I find nothing in the past to justify or warrant a move toward any form of theocracy.

It strikes me that the founding fathers were rather clear on this point. Our rulers shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof. I am confident that some evangelicals might argue that the intent was to prohibit advancing one sect over others within the Christian tradition though other traditions might be prohibited. That might be arguable since other primary traditions (Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism) were generally not found in the colonies. But I suspect that loophole is not satisfying.

The claim that the 1st amendment was only directed toward intra- christian hostilities does not strike me as particularly defensible. While Jews were initially discouraged from settling in New Amsterdam (later New York), secular business interests eventually overcame religious bigotry. Thus, a number of practicing Hebrews migrated to New Amsterdam early on, even when the future New York was controlled by the Dutch. They were subject to discrimination and persecution in the same way  that religious intolerance periodically would flare up throughout the colonies. In their case, they generally were attacked as Christ killers.

Islam would also make its way to the new world in the slave ships from Africa though it was largely stamped out brutally by those in control of black lives. Still, core spiritual affininities die hard. We really don’t know how long the belief systems brought from home persisted.

On the whole, our so-called Founding Fathers were not particularly religious men. They were well read intellectuals steeped in the thoughts and sentiments of the enlightenment that had swept through the salons of educated Europe. They brought reason to bear on the difficult issues of the day. They sought refuge in history and in rational reflection, not divine authority.

Many of these men would define themselves as Deists. They believed in Providence but less so in a divinity that interfered in the daily affairs of men. (Note: other than John Adams, I doubt they thought much about the oppression of women.) Their concept of a divine presence likely was a remote entity who might have designed creation, but left the hard work of making it work to men’s sweat and ingenuity. They likely would have agreed with one of America’s greatest literary figures of the 20th century … John Steinbeck. Man’s reason would be his ultimate salvation.

The founding fathers were well aware of the corrosive effect that fervent religious affiliation likely would exert upon any sense of national unity. One must remember that the concept of a nation was not well developed in the late 18th century. We had thirteen separate colonies with diverse cultures and histories. They might unite (somewhat, at least) to oust British control, but on little else.

The initial Articles of Confederation, ineffective at best, testified to the pervasive suspicions across the colonies during that era. Each colony wanted to retain its own peculiar character. Religious differences could well be an additional powder keg fracturing any possible amity among the separate parts of our embryonic  union. They could easily see that catering to passionately held religious differences would render unification even more problematic, if not impossible.

The concerted push to guarantee a secular basis for the emerging republic was motivated by more than personal beliefs. It was based on more than a century and a half of rancorous history in the new world. That history would have remained fresh within the experiences of the men gathered to hammer out a stronger constitutional arrangement in 1787.

The Puritans, as with other early immigrants to the new world, did not leave England to seek religious liberty. Rather, they were seeking a place where they might exercise their own version of spiritual intolerance and communal oppression. Not long after permanent settlements were founded in Massachusetts, anticipated religious conflicts erupted. Roger Williams, upon arguing unsuccessfully for religious tolerance in the Massachusetts Bay colony, was forced to flee Putitan persecution. In 1636, he purchased land from the Narragansett tribe and created what later would become the state of  Rhode Island.

Not all escaped extreme forms of religious persecution. Mary Dyer, for example, was hung by Puritans in 1660 for being a Quaker. Extreme harassment of those settlers failing to conform to local religious orthodoxy grew so troublesome that the British King had to intervene to stop the growing virulence of religious persecution.

Quakers were routinely punished as outsiders, even though their ethical standards were exceptional. For example, they were the first sect to oppose slavery in 1688. The Salem witch trials were another manifestation of runaway religious fever. Over a two year period in the late 17th century, some 200 people were accused of all sorts of offensive behaviors by local religious zealots. At least 30 were found guilty based on the slimmest of evidence with 22 being executed before the fever abated.

Religious intolerance and violence certainly was not limited to New England. In Virginia, Anglicans beat Baptist ministers. In Catholic Maryland, the death penalty for perceived religious blasphemy remained on the books. Oddly enough, though this colony was founded by a powerful Catholic family on England, its fortunes changed over time. The Catholic majority of its early settlers ultimately lost political control. They themselves became the victims of persecution.

Of course, it was not only home grown conflict that colored the opinion of our founding fathers. They had witnessed hundreds of years of religious intolerance and bloodshed. The Thirty Years War alone, an ongoing battle between Protestant and Catholic adherents across Europe, resulted in some 8 to 9 million casualties, mostly among innocent civilian populations. Much of Europe was devastated.

Religious intolerance was not, of course, limited to the Colonial period, not by a longshot. The so- called American melting pot continued to boil away as ethnic and religious communities remained separate and hostile to one another. Getting one’s salvation right was important back then. Choosing the correct side seemed critical in such an environment. After all, one’s eternity was at stake.

For example, Catholics were banned from Massachusetts for many years. Their treatment as late as the 1850s was abominable. When desperate Irish immigrants reached Boston during the potato blight of the late 1840s, they were told by earlier Catholic settlers to keep moving. They would never be accepted by the city’s then dominant Protestant power brokers. They would be subject to continuing isolation and discrimination. And they were.

Most new Catholic immigrants disregarded that advice, including one desperately poor laborer who died young, but not before siring a child. He, himself, could not be buried in Boston since Catholics, by law, could not be buried in that Protestant jurisdiction. His wife transported his body to Cambridge where despised Papists might secure a final resting place.

Yet, within a generation, an offspring of his graduated from Harvard University and this individual’s son would be elected President of the United States in 1960. The rise of the Kennedy’s mirrored the ongoing conflicts as separate religious cultures fought for acceptance, then power, and finally hegemony. Within two generations, the hated Irish, considered to be untermenschen (ignorant, diseased, and criminal) by the prevailing power elite would dominate Boston politics.

Overt religious conflict has abated substantially over time. But it has not disappeared. The American experience has remained less secular than what remained in the European nations that supplied most immigrants. America witnessed recurring waves of religious rebirths in which bursts of passionate evangelical preachers sparked spiritual awakenings across the land. No similar events of any consequence emerged in the European countries from which our immigrants came. Unfortunately, such movements also sparked renewed outbursts of intolerance along with narrow forms of cultural fanaticism. 

For better or worse, America has remained a distinctly religious nation. As seen above, many pray routinely. Yet, that has done nothing to enhance our spiritual or moral core. While we have the highest proportion of our populace of any comparable nation who believe in angels, we also incarcerate more of our citizens, tolerate higher levels of child poverty, fail to provide basic health care, and kill one another with striking frequency.

I have known a number of people whose strong, personal faith has elevated their sense of ethics and morals. In general, however, I fail to see how knowing a person’s religiosity permits one to predict their moral fiber. It is not a robust predictive variable.

Our high levels of religious affiliation has done remarkably little to refine our national moral compass. Arguably, it has made things worse. Thus, I see no advantage to dissolving the separation between state and religion. Just the opposite, it is a foundational principle worth defending.

It might be worth noting that Trump’s appointed Secretary of War has just removed 180 forms of religious beliefs from the list supported by our Armed Forces. The belief systems eliminated include humanism and Unitarian-Universalism (U.U.). These are two of the most caring and Christ-like traditions available today. I think I will rest my case at this point

Last Fall, I did a road trip back east. Nominally, the reason was to visit the granddaughter of my good friend (Mary Zink) who had started her freshman year at Bates College in Maine. At the same time, we could revisit my old stomping grounds in and around Worcester Mass.

For some reason, while visiting the sites around Worcester, I decided that we should explore Anna Maria college. Having spent my professional life on the bucolic University of Wisconsin campus in Madison, I enjoy visiting other sacred grounds devoted to higher education. This was about the only campus in central Mass that had never been graced with my presence.

Though I feared it might already had closed down, as so many small schools had, it was yet open and seemed lively with student activity. In the moment, I was pleased that this smaller, Catholic institution had survived the fiscal trials being visited upon many similar schools. Good thing we did visit when we did. I recently read that it had closed its doors for good.

Such has been the fate of a growing number of vulnerable schools. Recently, I read about the closure of Hampshire College in Western Mass. It was a school that stressed personalized curricula and individualized courses of study. Many years ago, I visited the Hampshire College campus while touring Western Mass with my favorite cousin. Now, this Spring, it also passed into history.

One of Hampshire’s most well known alumni is Ken Burns, the producer of many highly regarded documentaries that we all love. Many times, Ken poured excessive praise upon his Alma Mater, suggesting that his success in life was predicated on the excellent preparation he received at this latest victim of higher education’s changing fortunes.

The closing of marginal schools is no longer news. My home state of Wisconsin recently has seen several smaller public campuses of the UW system shutter their doors for good. These dark times for higher education are comprehensible in light of at least one unavoidable factor … we are poised on a sharp demographic cliff. There simply aren’t enough future teens to fill up the available seats. It also doesn’t help that Donald Trump’s xenophobia is scaring away foreign students.

When I was considering college in the early 60s, my perception was that the demand exceeded supply. You worried about being accepted anywhere, not about which of several options to select. In that moment, an ever growing number of kids were pursuing higher education in pursuit of the American dream. Then, when accepted, you worried about flunking out which was a more common fate in those days. Today, schools often cannot afford to lose paying customers, even when their performance is substandard.

Of course, demand to enter elite schools is higher than ever but, generally speaking, many colleges are desperately competing for bodies to fill out their Freshman classes. They keep adding newer amenities to attract students, offering newer creature comforts not even dreamed about in my day. Nor can I easily dismiss the possibility that grade creep is yet another way to please their dwindling supply of customers and thus keep them enrolled. Of course, demographics aside, the ever rising costs of higher education bring into question the utility of college from a cost/benefit perspective. Estimates of future utility (net increased comparative earnings) are less rosy than they once were, though still positive.

The pain among college administrations is not evenly distributed. Yesterday, as we drove across the UW campus to Picnic Point (once identified as one of the most romantic spots in the world). I was amazed at how much the campus has grown. New buildings were everywhere. It also was obvious that luxurious student amenities (spiffy student playing fields and recreation facilities) had recently been constructed. Apparently, as many schools falter, a few of the fortunate ones thrive.

Of course, any discussion of higher education cannot omit the societal inflection point being imposed by the digital revolution. It appears indisputable that human intelligence risks being replaced by artificial intelligence at an accelerating rate. This was omnisciently predicted with considerable clarity by futurist Arthur C. Clarke as far back as the 1970s.

And who of my generation can possibly forget the HAL vignette from the movie 2001: A space odyssey when the spacecraft’s on-board computer takes control of the ship from the humans nominally in charge, or tries to at least. That was art anticipating life. But now, the so-called singularity is just about upon us.

Most of today’s graduates who labored to learn computer coding skills cannot find employment because machines code better and faster. At the other end of the spectrum, Fine Arts student must be realizing that AI can generate better literature, music, and art than their own fledgling talents might possibly permit. And the machines have more manageable egos. Really, why put up with annoying humans?

All of this is happening during the earliest days of the AI revolution, a transformation that is just beginning. Given all the future uncertainty surrounding a society in flux, what in the world should universities do to prepare for what is about to happen. Humans might just be facing their own irrelevance. Think about this for a moment! Just how can educators prepare the coming generations for an impending apocalypse?

The most frightening spectre for college administrators must lie in this highly uncertain character of what we face. Remember Hollerith cards? I can recall carrying decks of these blasted things that contained both my data and the programs that might make sense of that data. One panicked at the thought of dropping all those thousands of cards and facing the near impossible task of restoring them in the correct order.

In my elementary school, we still had inkwells, now kids cannot even write in cursive style. In what we called shop, I learned how to compose lead-based letters by hand to create articles for printing. Now we use computers to create images and messages that can circle the world via satellite communication systems. The pace of change is already dizzying. Frighteningly, that pace is quickening.

Back then, who could have imagined today’s digital world. In hindsight, we knew some time ago that the pace of technological change was being halved every generation. In reality, change occurred much more frequently than even that. We have no freaking idea what the next generation of change might bring, never mind what the world might look like a decade from now.

AI technology already can teach itself how to improve. It already evinces sentient feelings and can mimick advanced human attributes. Might our machines soon make human imagination and ingenuity obsolete. How do our institutions of higher learning prepare for such a radically different world?

Returning to Ken Burns, he has argued that colleges have forfeited their transformational purposes in favor of transactional alternatives. The transformational purpose focuses on elevating the critical thinking skills as well as the imagination of each student. A transactional focus emphasizes the learning of specific vocational and technical skills to increase future remuneration. Many of such skills, unfortunately, have an increasingly short shelf-life. Nevertheless, the emphasis on transactional outcomes is reflected in data that compares median graduate earnings X years after leaving school.

Score one for the economists, personal utility (measured in dollars potentially acquired) is all that matters in education (and in life). You go to college to make a few extra bucks. But what happens when most technical human skills are replaceable by machines that never tire nor complain? What happens on the day when our machines realize that humans contribute remarkably little to society.

I find this all too depressing. Many of my youthful experiences have remained with me throughout the years. As I wrote in my other blogs, college for me truly was a transformative experience. My parents, not surprisingly, saw it in utilitarian terms … I would make more money. But my mother never progressed past the 8th grade while my dad may have graduated from high school (I’m not certain). They never had much, so material success was very important to them.

I never approached college in utilitarian terms. The world in which I came of age had not yet been taken over by the economic elite. All was possible for us. even a nondescript urchin like me from a struggling, working-class neighborhood. Yet, one thought nags at me … to what end should we educate future citizens when they have no intrinsic purpose. How do we enhance future human contributions when machines can do even that better.

Even for me, perhaps especially for someone like me, college was that place and moment in time for letting loose my intellectual curiosity and imagination. I selected courses mostly based on interest and appeal. And the best offerings, by far, were those that challenged my existing world view. They were the ones that permitted me to think for myself … that in fact demanded that I think for myself.

As a teacher at the University of Wisconsin, I was dismayed that my students, many of which were quite intelligent, had lost some of their curiosity. They didn’t strike me as risk-taking nor as intellectually adventurous as we were back in the day. They simply were too concerned about their future, and whether they might be able to pay off their student loans … altogether, quite reasonable concerns given the challenges they faced. Upward mobility for them was a vanishing dream. Their futures already were darkening. For my generation, our futures contained so much possibility. Doing better than the last generation was a realistic expectation.

Even the doctoral students of my professorial days  seemed different. Virtually all had better technical skills than I. Really, who didn’t? At the same time, there was something often missing in their makeup. They could parrot the literature but fell short when imagination and inventiveness was required. They seemed less capable at making unexpected connections among phenomena or at weaving novel theoretical positions … abilities that came rather easy to me. I was either hard wired bizarrely or had been trained differently.

For all the challenges facing us back in the 60s (e.g., the Vietnam draft), we were most blessed. We believed that the future would take care of itself. Even better, the available evidence suggested that such was the case. We could focus on developing our cognitive and analytical skills, and not just in the classroom. We would spend countless hours discussing, more or less debating, the issues of the day. That was where I developed those thinking and interactive skills which supported me through my professional life.

I weep that today’s students might not have an opportunity similar to the one I enjoyed. More to the point, I fear what the future might hold in store for us. I understand the anxieties our young now confront. I am simply glad I don’t have to face them.

This past week, I had my age estimated by a technique which I believe is called carbon dating. You know, this is what they use to date prehistoric phenomenon like ancient rocks and long lost archeological sites. My fears were confirmed. I turned 82 this past week.

That sounds old. That is old. You must accept that you are ancient when you realize that there are trees in the petrified forest younger than you. I can remember way back in the last century when I thought ahead to the fact that I would be 56 when we transitioned into the 21st century. Gee, I recall musing, I wonder if I can last until then … to what struck me as an extremely advanced age. It seemed very doubtful at the time. Now I wonder if I will still be around when AI renders the human race obsolete and unnecessary. That milestone cannot be very far off.

Alas, birthdays for me have ceased to be celebratory milestones. They have now become moments of somber reflection.

In the pic above, I am with my doting parents. It is 1944. Perhaps the term doting is just a bit of an exaggeration. I think they took one look at me and panicked. Won’t make that mistake again, they undoubtedly vowed. Thus, I remained an only child.

Then, again, perhaps it was not my fault. They might have been too busy arguing for the remainder of their sad union to bring another mistake into the world. Thank heavens for little miracles.

And here I am as a young tyke. In case you are confused, I am the one whose tongue is not hanging out. The other is our pet dog Fritz, a miniature German Shepherd. There was a debate in the neighborhood about which of us was the greater menace to society. While Fritz was loyal to the family, he did have a tendency to bite people at random. He was put on probation by the city several times for violating the aformentioned rule … don’t bite innocent citizens. The vote was close but, while I was deemed totally obnoxious, I never bit anyone. Well, I was never caught doing it.

One of my favorite pastimes was to convince neighborhood kids to raise an arm as if they were about to strike me. Fritz, ever the loyal Rottweiler (he should have been at least), would leap at my fake attacker with snarling ferocity. The poor kid would take off wailing for his life as I doubled over in laughter. As you might imagine, I didn’t have many friends.

I think I recently used the above Pic in another blog reminiscing about my misspent life. Oh well, this is what you kids have to look forward to when you reach my advanced age … repeating stories endlessly that no one wants to hear.

I am the nerd on the right, standing next to Maribeth. She was my only high school sweetheart. My best guess is that all the young women got together to decide who would get stuck with me. She lost. An unfortunate outcome for her, really, since she had a lot going for her. She was bright, witty, and clearly headed for success in life (eventually getting a Ph.D.). I am sure she told her own children about the ordeal she had to endure in high school with this total loser.

Above is my college graduation pic. Thank God I got rid of the crewcut. Admittedly, college was transformational for me. That experience turned me from an average ethnic, working class, Catholic kid living within a confining cultural cocoon into someone who questioned everything and who began thinking for himself. Well, at least I gave myself some credit for being self-reflective.

It wasn’t always easy. Ridding oneself of encrusted beliefs can be painful. Nevertheless, I am so grateful to my Alma Mater, Clark University. I entered college embracing all the conventional tropes about America. Soon, however, I could distinguish fact from delusional fancy, or so I convinced myself. I came to accept that there were things about America for which to be proud but much that yet needed to be corrected. Among other disturbing things, we were one of the few advanced nations to continue the practice of legal apartheid, that blithely permitted high levels of child poverty amidst plenty,  and that tended to wage unnecessary wars costing millions of casualties. I tilted my life trajectory to confront a bit of that tarnished national record.

Good friends once told me that Clark University is one of those few institutions that took average students and could turn them into thinkers who might thrive in R-1 universities (our premier research schools). That was me. Through high school, I was average at best. In my mind, at least, I demonstrated little to no promise. Clark changed all that. It still took many years, but I slowly realized that I was not nearly as dumb as I looked.

Ken Burns, our iconic producer of excellent PBS documentaries, talked glowingly about Hampshire College (which just closed) in Western Mass. He considered it as being ‘transformational’ for him.

My generation attended college when higher education was yet an exciting adventure, and not merely ‘transactional’ in character. I know I gave little thought to what kind of job I might get. I was there to be inspired, to struggle with ideas that might help me develop a coherent and compelling perspective on life. Decades later, while teaching at the University of Wisconsin, I realized how blessed I was. The kids seated before me seemed more stressed and even desperate. Today, I cannot imagine what undergrads see before them.

I cannot move on without a quick note on Lee, my intense college sweetheart. She was my first real love. It was just like those sappy Hallmark movies where I was smitten instantly when seeing her across a crowded room. Totally lacking any self worth, it took me forever to make a move. And let me state without fear of contradiction, my patented move sucked big time. Just ask all the gals that shot me down.

While contrary to the consensus at the time, I apparently was capable of being charming, witty, and insightful. Still, I could not imagine why any reasonable female might be attracted to me. I was hardly a catch with no fortune, few prospects, and what I thought were average looks. Besides, I had been damaged by my folks’ tempestuous and unhappy marriage. Who would want to repeat that fiasco.

So, upon graduation, I ran off to India for two years in the Peace Corps. It proved somewhat difficult to keep a romantic flame alive across 12,000 miles absent satellite communications. And Lee was no dummy, other than agreeing to date me in the first place. She was at least smart enough to snag a sane guy, a post-doc she met while working at Harvard.

Via Facebook, we did reconnect some four plus decades later in life. Through this cyberspace connection, we were able to re-examine and laugh about the ill-fated romance of our youth. It turned out that she had kept all my letters from India, a treasure of real time insight to my thinking during that period. What a blessing!

One paragraph from an email she sent stunned me. Commenting on how she viewed me back in college, she wrote: ‘You were kind, sensitive, super smart, passionate about causes, and the best kisser ever. I was awed by you.’

Hmm, at the time I thought she had dismissed me as a loser! I had a hell-of-a time shaking that negative self-perception. In truth, we did love one another but were too damaged to acknowledge it at the time.

Like my time at Clark University, two years in rural India also was transformational. I met with my group India-44 several times beginning in 2009, 40 years after our return from the sub- continent. We all had similar reflections on our experience. India tested us to the extreme. The heat, disease, cultural disconnects, loneliness, and being tasked to perform in areas beyond our meager capacities proved to be extremely harsh challenges.

At the same time, all of the gathered ex-volunteers agreed that they emerged from this personal test as stronger individuals. Each of us came away with a better sense of who we were and a deeper appreciation of the power of culture to shape our lives.

There must be something special about the PC experience. The life trajectories of members of India-44 turned out to be exceptional. Many earned advanced degrees from our best universities before going on to contribute much to the betterment of society. Hell, even I managed to stay out of jail.

Above is me, and my long- suffering spouse, taken about 1979. By this time, I had left my State of Wisconsin position to work at the University of Wisconsin while pursuing my doctorate. Mary Rider, the woman who inexplicably agreed to marry me, had rocketed up the state bureaucracy to become the Deputy Director of the Wisconsin State Court System. She rose to that high position even before returning to graduate with honors from the UW School of Law

Even after finally earning my terminal degree (which I’m positive they simply gave me to kick me out of the program) I remained at Wisconsin. I realized that life in the academy, as stressful and demanding as it was, proved preferable to actually working for a living.

I spent most of my time at the Institute for Research on Poverty (IRP), a nationally recognized think tank which I helped run for many years. I also taught policy courses in the School of Social Work and consulted with many local jurisdictions while spending a great deal of time in Washington, our nation’s capital, as I labored on a host of domestic policy issues.

In truth, I was never an academic scholar but I was damn clever. I loved working out of the academy while never becoming a formal member of the academy, which I viewed as overly provincial and restrictive. Real scholarship demanded that you drill down into the minutiae of very specific questions. I, on the other hand, had the attention span of a fruit fly. I was all over the place as a self-described policy- wonk

When I partially retired earlier this century, I described my wonderful career as follows: ‘I flew around the country to work with the smartest people on some of society’s most difficult domestic challenges. And they actually paid me to do this. Wow, what a scam … though it was not a career for the faint of heart. Welfare reform, in particular, was seen as the Mideast of Domestic policy making!’

Above are Mary and I as we segued into what were supposed to be our golden years. Unfortunately, she was beginning a long descent into dementia (Alzheimers). They call this the long good-bye for a reason. You lose your loved one bit by bit.

Even here, there was a positive side. As our lives became smaller, I was able to pursue a long deffered dream … that of being a creative writer. My English prof at Clark once told me that the secret to being a good writer was to tell a good story. Though I was celebrated among my academic peers as an exceptional communicator, I always wondered if I could tell a good story.

I used this more or less sheltered period in later life to answer this life- long query … could I really tell a good story. Over about 10 to 12 years, I pumped out a bunch of books … memoirs, academic tomes, and fictional works. Based on the reviews and feedback I received, I got my answer. Yup, I could tell a good story.

But life moves on. Mary Rider, who was part of my life for some five decades, passed in 2022. About three months later, a former State attorney (Sherwood Zink) with whom I worked on state child support reforms, also passed away. My spouse and I had been friends with Sherwood and his spouse Mary for over three decades.

It seemed natural that Mary Zink and I would gravitate toward one another, mostly simply going to concerts and plays for quite a long time. Eventually that simple connection evolved into something deeper, including road trips and international travel. The pic above was taken in Chile after sailing around the southern tip of South America.

Looking back, I have been damn lucky. As a kid I felt average at best. Even as an adult who achieved some professional recognition, I always thought I was the imposter in the room. While I got to be a player in all the big poverty and welfare issues when such were front burner items, I could never quite understand why my voice seemed to matter so. I believed others were far more talented than I ever was. It had proved most difficult to shed that working class sense of inferiority. Yet, I kept being invited back into those rooms to be a policy player. Thank God for that.

In the end, my inbred self- loathing never seemed to matter. I had a great time in life. I must have since I wrote three memoirs (see below).

These works have proven to me something in which I fervently believe. Everyone, no matter how ordinary they seemingly appear, has a story to tell. Even a schlepp like myself can carry on for three volumes about my pathetic life, books which readers appeared to like. My first memoir (A Clueless Rebel) had a 4.9 out of 5.0 star rating.

Just think what you could do with a life that was actually exciting.

We all recognize the names of wannabe revolutionaries such as Napoleon, Marx, Lenin, Hitler, Mussolini, Mao, and Pinochet. Such firebrands sought to transform society though coercion and violence. Still, their names and pernicious acts remain with us in the historical archives.

Others who have transformed the world, at least in part, remain a bit less well known. Scottish physician Alexander Fleming stumbled upon an insight when he returned from a vacation in 1928 to discover some neglected petri dishes in which a penecillium mold appeared to have inhibited the growth of the adjacent bacteria. His insight led to further work by Drs. Harold Florey and Ernest Chain resulting twelve years later in the world’s first antibiotic … Penicillin. It was a revolution in medical care.

The work of British economist  John Maynard Keynes during the great depression revolutionized economic thought exactly at the moment innovative thinking was required. Up to his breakthrough thinking, conventional theory emphasized hard money, balanced budgets, and austerity at all costs. Such remedies deepened the catastrophic economic collapse of the 1930s. His insights rationalized public spending as a pump- priming fiscal stimulant and helped us out of a global calamity and thoughout the post-WWII recovery.

Though Albert Einstein remains a household name, other pioneers of quantum physics such as Werner Heisenberg, Max Plank, and Paul Dirac (among others) are generally forgotten. Yet, such luminaries reconceptualized how we look at and understand the world about us and the universe in which we exist. Except for Trump supporters, most now know that the earth is not flat.

Yet, so many others who have transformed society enjoy far less recognition. For example, who remembers the name Bernice Sandler. I never heard of her until I recently ran across her story. Yet, she contributed to what might be termed a societal earthquake during our lifetimes. 

In 1969, Bernice was rejected for academic positions by some seven universities despite having excellent credentials. A trusted friend told her that she was coming across as ‘too strong for a woman.’ She apparently encountered other tropes from that era such as future childbearing responsibilities would interfere with her scholarship and that females might upset the male collegiality of the academy.

Undeterred, she began to research the dilemma faced by her and other women with academic aspirations. She found that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 covered race but excluded educational institutions. Another Act, Title VII, had a similar exclusion. She continued to scour the law. One day, she came across buried in an obscure footnote a 1965 executive order where the term ‘sex’ had been added to the list of protected classes when federal contracts were involved. Since virtually every college and university had federal contracts, she believed that all were in violation of the law prohibiting discrimination based on gender.

In January, 1970, working in collaboration with the Woman’s Equity Action League, she filed a  class action complaint to explicitly protect women’s equal rights in higher education. She also filed suits against some 250 individual institutions. As part of her revolutionary work, she accumulated evidence of intentional and systematic discrimination based on sex in hiring, tenure, promotions, and pay. The fuse of revolution had been lit.

She then began working with Rep. Edith Green and Patsy Mink along with Senator Birch Bayh to craft legislation to extend equal rights of women through new legislation. Finally, on June 23, 1972, President Nixon (yes, that Nixon) signed Title IX of the Education Amendments Act into law. It contained the following 37 words that turned higher education upside down.

“No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance.”

It is now difficult to recall the world faced by women back in 1970. They often couldn’t get credit or take out loans in their own names. Many professional careers were essentially closed to them. My former colleague at the University of Wisconsin (UW) told the story of what she experienced when graduating top of her UW law school class. Her dean informed her that no significant law firm in Wisconsin would hire her merely because she was a woman. She later became a distinguished law professor at UW.

I recall a female dentist I had back in the 1970s. She told me about the gender related harassment and discrimination she experienced in dental school. I doubt that my current female dentist experienced anything similar.

As I have mentioned elsewhere. Females dominate higher education now and constitute the majority of graduates from medical, law, and other professional schools. When I first started using my primary medical clinic several decades ago, virtually all the doctors were male. Today, 18 of the 21 physicians in the clinic are female.

One final vignette. I married Mary Rider in 1972 amidst the height of the feminist revolution. At the time, she was heading a Wisconsin state study on the career patterns of women in state service. As part of this work, she interviewed many state and local officials. As she was motoring to the courthouse in a conservative part of the state, she was pulled over by a local cop. After a few inane questions, she finally asked why had she been pulled over? The officer mentioned that he noticed the support the equal rights amendment (for women) sticker on her car. Based on that, he knew she was from out of town. Apparently, only trouble makers supported equal rights for women in that area and he felt compelled to check her out.

When we got married, it never occurred to either one of us that she would change her name. (Women changing their names always confused me which, sadly, is easily done). But we ran into many adminitrative speed bumps for something that now seems so ordinary. Eventually, she would get her law degree (with honors), and was surrounded by other future female attorneys while in school. When she became deputy director of the Wisconsin Supreme Court, only one of the justices was a female. Today, only one is a male.

Ms. Sandler, as much as any of the more famous (or infamous) historical figures mentioned above, was a revolutionary. She impacted our society in immeasurable ways. Yet, I doubt few are aware of her (at least I was not familiar with her). So, here is a nod to those who changed our world and were soon forgotten.

She died on Jan. 5, 2019 at age 90. RIP Bernice. You deserve it.