Tom's Musings

I am struck by the naivete of those who think doing public policy is easy. I spent my professional life in the public arena (pursuing poverty, welfare, and human service challenges). Believe me, these are complex, difficult nuts to crack. Yes, technical quests (e.g., putting a man on the moon, for example) we’re amazingly complex but eminently doable with sufficient treasure and effort. Social policy challenges, like the kind that kept me up at nights during my career as an academic and policy wonk, often fell into the category of wicked problems.

Just what are these wicked problems? They are public issues where the initial question might be ill-defined or ambiguous, where the theoretical basis for analyzing the issue is uncertain, where there is no consensus on the end points or goals, and where the available data and research are open to various interpretation. Good luck with that. I could explain how the vigorous welfare reform debates of the 80s and 90s (when it was a front-burner national question) were a poster child for a wicked issue, but that would demand a long dissertation.

Instead, I was thinking of something simple … a question on which I recently ruminated in my hyper-active mind. How do we think about fairness in our tax system? I bet each of us has said, publicly or internally, we’ll, that’s not fair. So, what is fair, what’s not?

Let us say you were put in charge of the nation’s tax system. Your mandate was to come up with a fair way of paying the country’s bills. Let’s briefly look at a few options for doing so:

A FLAT FEE … in this approach, every adult would pay the same in taxes no matter their income. You would divide the annual budget by the numbers of adults (or tax units) and arrive at a tax bill for each person (or family). This approach is simple and has a prima–facie look of being fair. You could argue that everyone gets a roughly equal benefit from public goods, so all should contribute equally. Of course, many would be forking over all their earnings while others could meet their obligations with pocket change. Still, some would argue that no one should pay more if they use a roughly equivalent value of the public good. And others would justifiably argue that some benefit from public goods more than others, though spirited arguments would surely follow that assertion.

A REGRESSIVE TAX APPROACH … In this approach, those with more pay less. This sounds unfair on the surface. Still, it happens and more than you realize. Sometimes, the very character of a tax is regressive even if it doesn’t appear so on first glance. A sales tax or a VAT (value added tax) can impact those along the income distribution disproportionately. For example, a tax on food hits the poor more since they spend more on food than the rich, and food is a non-fungible good (you can’t go without food, at least not for long).

There are many variants on this theme. Sometimes, regressivity is a function of power. In the U.S., the tax system has become increasingly regressive both overtly and on purpose … more or less since the Reagan years. Why? Wealth buys power! And many working class folk vote against their own self-interest in this regard, a reality I yet struggle to understand. It is why Warren Buffet has pointed out the absurdity that he pays proportionally less in taxes than his secretary.

A FLAT TAX … this is similar to a flat fee but differs in one important respect. Rather than imposing a flat amount, every tax filing unit would be subject to the same tax rate. That sounds fair, being less regressive than the flat fee approach. Let’s say everyone would pay 20 percent. The rich would pay more in absolute dollars but at the same rate as their poorer fellow citizens. And yet, think about this for a moment? The average or flat rate would need to be higher for those at the bottom of the pyramid to raise enough money to pay the bills. Is that fair? After all, 20 percent of a $million bucks is $200,000, while 20 percent of $10,000 is $2,000. Should the rich person feel aggrieved? He or she often does.

A PROGRESSIVE TAX … A progressive approach to taxes results in those with a greater ability to pay actually contributing more. That sounds fair on the surface, though the rich have long squeeled in horror at the very prospect. They probably had a point when the top tax rate hovered at 90 percent for top earners after WWII. Yet, that progressivity enabled the nation to pay down the war debt, stabilize post-war Europe, invest in education (e.g., the G.I. Bill) and infrastructure, and create a robust and prosperous middle class. The conservative wing usually argues that high tax rates dampen risk-taking and innovation. Worst of all, it penalized success … oh, the horror. Even if there are rates at which work and investment suffer, what are they? Top rates of less than 40 percent have not demonstrably lessened the economic engine in the U.S. Yet, conservatives argue for further cuts, even as our public goods suffer while private incomes and wealth soar to unheard of heights.

A NEUTRAL SYSTEM … This principle touches less on the mechanics of raising revenue than on the overall purpose of the system. According to some, taxes should only be levied to pay public obligations and not for other purposes, no matter how worthy. I ran into this issue while working on a welfare reform scheme for Wisconsin. We looked at ways the state tax system could be made pro-poor (by the way, this work did lead to a state level earned income tax credit). One economics colleague questioned this quest of ours. At that time, he was working on tax reform in the state and had been arguing for a system that did not try to remedy other ills, even noble ones like poverty. If anything, we have looked to the tax system for solutions to many problems. While often a noble aspiration, many distortions and inefficiencies can be introduced. Or, as practices of the dismal science oft say, there is no free lunch.

I’ve only touched on a few principles and approaches in the tax system that impact the perception of fairness. No matter what approach you adopt, someone (some group) will argue you are not being fair. No matter how careful you are, there will be collateral damage and unintended consequences. They cannot be avoided. In truth, not all of them can even be identified in advance. And the worst impediment of all is the zero-sum game aspect of doing policy. There are few real win-win scenarios. That’s the bitter realty of the policy game. Yet, as I used to tell my students … you will not find a more frustrating and challenging professional avenue to pursue in the future, nor a more rewarding one.

One last thought! Think about the current clown car in Washington. They have made doing policy very simple. How will a change impact ME, OR MY SMALL TRIBE. Nothing else matters. With that definition of fairness, all becomes rather simple. You really don’t need experts to make policy, just hyper-selfish assholes. And yet, appointing the most incompetent clowns to high office (a kakistocracy) scares the crap out of me. True, you can make policy choices simple, but then you can’t find policies that work, at least not well nor for the public at large. I mean, really! Would you choose your plumber to do open heart surgery on you?

In case you are wondering, I wouldn’t.

There is little doubt that I live in a bubble. Virtually all whom I associate with share my values and perspectives, though we might heartily argue details. Occasionally, though, the fundamentals of my world view are questioned (though remarkably rarely). Two recent examples occurred. First, it was alleged that the MAGA crowd might be nuts, but I should acknowledge that the Dems have no plan of their own. Second, an accusation followed that, since I criticize the Trump-Musk rampage through our federal government, I must favor waste and abuse in the public sector.

I thought on these two points for a moment. Below are my immediate reactions:

1. The Dems dont have a plan of their own? There is a decent point buried here. What did the iconic humorist, Will Rogers, once say … I don’t belong to an organized political party. I‘m a Democrat. On thinking about this, I have a theory. If you know me at all, you would know I have a theory on just about everything. My theory on this issue goes something like this.

Democrats, in the recent century or so at least, have tried to embrace many within a broad tent. They see themselves as being the voice of the common people, whatever that means. The challenge of doing this, a problem really, is that our pluralistic society has too many interest groups. Many of these view the world myopically, whatever helps others costs them something. Thus, it becomes extremely difficult to keep all these self-interested groups happy. The net result is an unclear or confusing message.

I’ve always been upset when economists chime in on many policy issues. These practitioners of the dismal sciences will often pose questions like … will you (or your family) be helped or hurt by this tax change? Most policy changes have winners and losers in the short run. To pose every question in these terms positions governance in a zero-sum framework. The public good or general well-being be damned. The thing is, you can’t please all the people all the time. Sometimes, progress involves personal sacrifice.

Republicans, on the other hand, have a much simpler challenge. They focus on a single interest group … the filthy rich. Every issue in society has the same solution … regressive tax cuts that redistribute much to the elite and pennies to real people. You would think that the working classes would be upset by this. But no, they have gradually flocked to the Republican Party over the past several decades. The reason that average workers vote against their self-interest is not the stuff of rocket science. They have been hoodwinked by the oldest con in the books. Simply frighten them with images and assertions about those close to them on the economic ladder, but who strike them as different from them … people who are darker, speak a foreign language, or follow a different culture/religion. Then, promise to save these good folk from this alleged threat. That Latino immigrant is the source of all your problems. Or those ‘woke radicals’ want to take Christmas away from you. I (read Trump) will give you permission to hate them. Better, I will save you from them.

Hell, it worked in the ante-bellum South. White farmers on small farms and working class stiffs were penalized economically by the backward feudal system supporting slavery. Inequality, even among Caucasians, was intolerable. Yet, simply by being told they were better than Blacks, non-wealthy whites went off to fight and die willingly for this horrific system that kept them relatively poor. Very little has changed in the 165 years since.

2. I must favor waste and abuse. … Apparently, because I don’t believe Elon Musk and his kiddie corps are making our federal government efficient, I must be in favor waste and abuse. I’ll start responding to that as soon as I stop chuckling.

As it happens, my first professional position was with the State of Wisconsin. I worked on the Quality Control system for public assistance programs. This was a federal-state effort to identify and root out abuse, inefficiencies, and simple errors in income support programs designed largely to help vulnerable families. Rather quickly, we reduced program error rates to within strict federally-based standards.

However, having the attention span of a firefly, I quickly flitted to other challenges … one being to bring the management of these programs into the computer age. Wisconsin was the first in the nation to successfully to automate the key elements of its AFDC, Food Stamp, and Medicaid programs (elegibility and benefit levels). By the end of all this, the overhead costs were the lowest nationally. In AFDC (the major incone support program for poor children), less than a nickel for every dollar in benefits went to administrative overhead costs.

I mention this to point out the following point. All that success mattered not a single whit to those seeing ‘waste and abuse‘ everywhere in welfare. If they did not like the intent of the program, or despised the intended beneficiaries, they went on believing, often passionately, that these were public resources being totally wasted. Neither good design, sound management, nor efficient administration had any bearing on their perception of the program.

And so in marches Musk. He wants further tax breaks for the uber wealthy. He wants further federal contracts for his companies which, of course, are beyond reproach. So, they suddenly find all this waste and abuse and start slashing costs across the board. Given how quickly they moved, they could not have done ANY ANALISIS before hacking away or eliminating programs altogether. This was merely a hatchet job on programs deemed unworthy, probably because they helped populations for which Musk and Trump’s MAGA crowd had little use … working folk and the vulnerable. Let them eat cake!

For once, I would like those slashing away at federal and local programs to start by defining waste and abuse. Tell me precisely what is bad about a program and how they might measure it. Labeling something as failing absent such rigor is meaningless and nonsense. Until I see that done, and in a way that can pass a smell test, I will retain my skepticism.

There is one other point that has not been directed at me personally but which rattles my chains. Namely, the Dems have abandoned the working class.

3. Dems no longer care about working stiffs. I have read this claim in a number of opinion pieces over the past several months. The basic line goes something like this. The Democratic Party once embraced workers during the FDR era when government led us out of the great depression. But they have since abandoned hard working folk.

I certainly get that rural people and low educated urban types are anxious. Small towns are drying up. Those without degrees, and some with degrees, are facing uncertain futures. With ever more powerful Artificial Intelligence systems poised to emerge, those anxieties are likely to be fully realized. There is no easy answers to that reality.

Having said that, one thing remains clear. The Republican Party is the last place to look for any relief or solutions. They have been singularly focused on pleasing the uber rich for many decades now. In fact, they will do anything to ensure that the wealthy have a large supply of desperate workers available to labor for them at ever lower levels of compensation. Their anti-labor positions explains why workers in the U.S. are far behind their peers in other advanced nations with respect to labor protections.

What the Dems don’t do well is play the classic con game. They don’t play to emotional social and cultural issues to keep their base aroused and angry. No, the Dems actually think through what workers might need to improve their lives. Unfortunately, the GOP is far, far more adept at muddling the waters with inflammatory side issues (a war on Christmas … really?).

Perhaps, when Trump completely tanks the economy, things will begin to change. They might, but I’m not hopeful. The American electorate strikes me as uniquely myopic and backwards. It didn’t seem like that when I grew up in a working class neighborhood in the 1950s. I wonder if fluoride in the water made people dumber over time. 🤔

I take small comfort in the thought that karma might exist. As pointed out in the initial meme, the elite are hurting themselves at the moment. Alas, those at the top usually find a way to enrich themselves in the end, even as us regular folk suffer from their machinations.

There is little doubt that I’ve become a grumpy curmudgeon in my advanced dotage. One issue that has irritated me of late concerns our national debt, an issue that arises with greater frequency in the Trump era. Essentially, are we on the brink of ruin and what shall we do about it?

Yes, it is true … I hang out with people who focus on politics and other arcane policy topics like the public debt as opposed to the antics of the Kardashians (whomever they are) or obsess on the latest sports rankings. Of course, I could get new friends … a possibility I should consider. Then again, I had much trouble getting the ones I have now. So, why bother.

Anyway, here is how several dialogues have gone of late. Oh my god, we have a national debt burden of some $36 trillion dollars! That observation might be followed up with a comment about how much we pay to service this debt (over $2 billion a day). Then, the conversation often drifts toward apocalyptic visions of various horrible consequences likely to occur. BTW … I generally agree with this part of the conventional dialogue. Even I’m concerned about the size of our public debt.

Our budgetary debt and continuing structural deficits, in all probability, are unsustainable. At some point, a federal government that spends close to $7 trillion per year while bringing in about $5 trillion in revenue will run into deep shit, if not something worse. Several pitfalls await. At some point, debt service payments become so large that other essential needs are sacrificed. The temptation to print money and aggravate inflation becomes overly attractive, if not downright seductive. Worse, the dollar may weaken and, given that fully one-third of our debt is owned by foreigners, these kind folk from other parts of the world may no longer be willing to buy our bonds much longer. That is, we will no longer look like a safe fiscal haven. Other issues might be noted but, for the sake of conciseness, won’t be.

The conversation then typically takes a turn that gets me grinding my teeth. We need to cut spending. Or worse, I don’t like Trump, but maybe his DOGE initiative is on to something. First, let me say I’m all for prudent and responsible government. Trump’s (really Elon Musk’s) wild and impetuous cuts, however, are simply irresponsible and self-serving. For one thing, you don’t start by firing all the inspector-generals in the bureaucracy…the very people charged with rooting out waste and fraud. Second, it was clear from the onset that DOGE was an attempt to destroy remaining confidence in the public sector (thereby rationalizing more privatization where someone could make a buck at the taxpayer’s expense). More to the point, these broad cuts are designed to provide fiscal cover for the proposed $4.5 trillion dollar tax cut swimming through the Donald’s orange-covered, yet avaricious, dome.

If you wanted to cut government costs prudently, you might do what Bill Clinton did. He saw that Reagan had ballooned the national debt by $1.8 trillion and had left him with significant structural annual deficits. So, he put his VP in charge of looking at where cuts might be made based based on expert analysis and judicious thought. His team cut some 377,000 positions throughout the bureaucracy. That wasn’t enough to set our fiscal house in order. Bill also raised the top tax rates as Republicans screamed that Armageddon was upon us. He also expanded tax breaks for working class folk by increasing the EITC, which conservatives saw as waste in their self-serving world view.

Despite GOP claims that the sky would fall, the actual consequences were that the economy boomed and the stock market kept going up. Better still, Bill actually ran several annual budget surpluses, an event almost as rare as the Chicago Cubs winning the World Series. Amazingly, good government involved judicious cuts and revenue enhancements. Who would have thought?

Since then, subsequent Republican administrations went back to their mantra of regressive tax cuts and increased borrowing. After the Bush and early Trump tax giveaways, the debt Reagan left us looked like pocket change. Obama then did yeoman’s work in reducing annual deficits (while rebooting the economy after Bush’s housing speculation collapse). Biden did his best but was constrained by the Covid pandemic after effects. A crushed economy needed to be stimulated. He did what he could, but conservative opposition hemmed the Dems in, as they typically do. The GOP fought their efforts to put our fiscal house in order tooth and nail.

So, Trump arrives back on the scene with our finances in a $36 trillion dollar hole. What does he do … he promises even more regressive tax cuts. Really? How much sense does it make to slash revenues further when you are already swimming in debt? If Democrats had long been accused of being the spend and borrow crowd, then Republicans might well be thought of as the cut taxes and borrow gang. Either way, you wind up in the same dilemma … you aren’t paying your bills.

And yet, the knee-jerk reaction, even among many liberals, is that we need to cut spending. They decry that we want too much from government, that we are too dependent on Uncle Sam, that we simply spend too much. We need to be more independent, they say. But is that true?

Has the rhetoric influenced our collective behaviors and perspectives? Since the 1980s, we have seen wave after wave of tax cuts (most of which favor the wealthy) along with some modest belt tightening that generally squeezes programs designed to assist the working classes and the vulnerable. The net result has not been a return to fiscal sanity. Rather, we’ve seen a massive redistribution of income and wealth from the middle and bottom of the pyramid to those at the top. The 1 percenters have seen their share of the income pie rise from 10 percent in 1979 to about a quarter of the total in recent years … a tectonic change.

Even if we could squeeze the public sector more, where would we start? Should we cut the so-called out of control federal bureaucracy? In truth, the federal payroll has been stable for several decades even as the U.S. population has grown by some 70 percent. Besides, federal labor costs represent a remarkably small portion of the total budget. The aggregate cost of federal personnel last year amounted to some $336 billion. That may sound like a lot. However, that figure amounts to 1 percent of our GDP and less than 5 percent of the federal budget.

Im fact, you could fire them all and make very little headway. And believe me, there would be pain if the federal workforce was slashed indiscriminately. Remember when Newt Gingrich forced a shutdown of nonessential public services in the 1990s. The public went nuts when they couldn’t visit national parks or get passports renewed. Gingrich expected no one would notice. They did, and he soon caved.

Just where would you start if you were serious about our debt problem. The answer is not easy. Let’s look where we spend the big bucks … the programs you would have to savage to afford another tax break for the uber rich. Of the $6.8 trillion in outlays; $1.5 trillion goes for Social Security, another $1.5 trillion goes for major health programs (Medicare and Medicaid), about $1.3 trillion for national defense and $750 billion goes for servicing our existing debt. Soon, there is not much left. We spend a minor portion for all other services with surprisingly little on the programs most people despise… $70 billion on SNAP (Formerly Food Stamps) and TANF (formerly AFDC). Cutting these programs would get you little more than pocket change.

Attacking the big items, on the other hand, can quickly backfire. Will you go after the elderly and disabled? Not so good since they evoke public sympathy and, more importantly, they vote. How about eviscerating health care for the vulnerable and aged. Not good optics when people die or rural hospitals are starved out of business. Defense? How about getting rid of a few really expensive ships and planes. Not likely, since programs designed to kill people are the only ones Republicans passionately support. Perhaps renege on our debt obligations? You might try, but then it would then be a cold day in hell before we could borrow in the future.

The reality is that this sales pitch about financing another $4.5 trillion tax cut by eliminating waste and fraud is utter bullshit. Nor is it true that our spending is out of control, as we hear repeatedly. How many times have we heard the refrain … we can’t afford this or that program, no matter the merits.

Public expenditures in the U.S. amount to slightly more than 36 percent of our GDP. That may sound like a lot, but not when compared to our peer nations. In Canada, the equivalent rate is 42 percent, the U.K is 44 percent, Germany is 48 percent, and France is 57 percent. And take Denmark, they spend more than virtually all other countries and yet, shockingly, they have the happiest population according to repeated international hedonic surveys. The GOP is aghast at this, calling them socialists or worse. After all, how could taxes and happiness go together? The answer is simple … those people believe in the public good and are willing to pay taxes to minimize life’s uncertainties.

Nor is it true that we are overtaxed, or that our taxes are a drag on the economy. Our federal tax revenues amount to about 16.6 percent of our GDP (our federal spending approaches 20 percent). The average level of federal taxes in the European Union is close to 20 percent, higher in the more advanced nations. Our total revenues (fed, state, and local) hover around 30 percent of GDP, still well below our peer nations. Certainly, taxes have not slowed our economy, which has remained very robust, if not the envy of the world, until the recent election.

We’ve all heard several other political tropes. One favorite is why can’t the federal government be run like a family. The implications is that families pay their bills. Yeah, right. Private debt in the U.S. has reached $27 trillion, less than the federal debt level, but still a striking number. And if you sum up the total debt in the U. S., including all outstanding loans and debt securities from companies and households, while encompassing all levels of government, the total we have borrowed as a society has reaches $93.5 trillion. A trillion here and a trillion there and soon we are talking about real money.

I’m not arguing that debt is something to be ignored, not in the least. We are on an unsustainable course, both in the public and private sectors. In the public arena, however, I feel strongly that we can only do so much by reducing outlays. We simply are not out of line with our competitors. Besides, we still have major infrastructure and other compelling needs (science and education) to address.

Yet, everyone with whom I’ve chatted about this issue immediately goes to the expenditure side of the ledger. I believe we should start on the revenue side. In the immediate post WWII, our war-driven national debt exceeded our GDP for the first time in recent memory. The top personal tax rates were set at about 90 percent for top earners, a confiscatory rate that remained high throughout the Republican administration in the 1950s. However, the federal debt was substantially eliminated while our economy boomed, creating a robust middle class.

Inexorably, America’s anti-tax fetish took hold. Kennedy reduced the top rates to 70 percent, and the supply side advocates that rode into Washington with the neo-conservatives led by Ronald Reagan dropped the top rates into the low 30’s. Since then, the top rates have fluctuated within 33 to 39 percent range with a current top rate of 37 percent.

Again, is this an unsupportable rate? Will any increase destroy our economy and stifle work and innovation? We get a partial answer by comparing our top rate with our peer nations. It turns out that we tax income at comparatively low rates. The top rates average about 43% in OECD (the Organization of Economic and Cooperative Development) countries. However, in the more advanced OECD nations, we find higher top rates; around 55% in Denmark, France, and Austria. Of course, total taxation goes well beyond personal income taxes. Still, there is little evidence that we are overtaxed in the U.S.

We finally come to the bottom line. Debt is a problem. At some time, we will have to pay our bills, much like we did after WWII. While no one argues that some expenditure cuts are warranted, I would start on the revenue side. I could see some taxes eliminated, like corporate taxes. These largely enrich tax lawyers, while the tax burden falls on consumers and equity holders. On the other hand, we could do so much more on returning to a progressive tax system. That is where our flexibility lies.

As I’ve repeatedly argued, the uber wealthy have seen tectonic increases in their share of the economic pie over the past four-plus decades. As Warren Buffet, the Oracle of Omaha, has observed, it makes no sense that he pays a lower percentage of his income in taxes than the secretary who manages his schedule. One way we can restore a vibrant middle class (the share falling into the middle- class bracket has fallen from 60 percent to less than 50 percent) would be to once more use our tax system to offset the disequilibria that inevitably results from the dynamics of capitalism. Absent countervailing forces, the rich will keep getting richer.

This rant touches upon a point I stressed in my policy classes. The first step in addressing policy conundruns is to define the issue correctly. If that is not done, one’s prospects for solving the problem quickly evaporate. Yes, debt is an issue to be addressed. But let us not become myopic by only addressing the spending side of the ledger. The more promising route involves focusing on increasing revenues. For too long, the uber-wealthy have employed their wealth and power to curry additional favors for themselves. It is time to look at the elephant in the room. Those who have a disproportionate amount of the nation’s resources must pay their appropriate share of our bills.

France probably has been our longest and most faithful ally. Poor Louis XVI went bankrupt funding our revolution, eventually losing his head over that rash move. And despite the excesses of the French Revolution, President Thomas Jefferson remained a confirmed Francophile. Unlike our sometimes strained ‘special relationship’ with the U.K., we never had a substantive falling out with the French … until now.

During my studies, I had several jobs including one as a ticket taker at a movie theater. One perk of this position was free movies. I must have seen the Woody Allen classic titled Bananas some 100 times. The Allen character gets caught up in a Carribean Island revolution where the government is overthrown and a strong man takes over, presumably to serve the people better. Unfortunately, the new leader turns out to be a nutcase. For example, he ordered everyone to wear their underwear on the outside, among other nonsensical orders. In the movie, the Allen character is put in his place to avoid further embarrassment. Would our current nutcase in power be so easily replaced.

That’s what it is like watching the wrecking crew that is the Trump administration. The inmates are now in charge of the asylum. We are witnessing a classic kakistocracy where the most inept now have virtually total control. There is one possible bright spot in all this. We might learn whether it is possible for anyone, no matter how inept, to run a modern government efficiently or whether competence is a required attribute. Time will tell, both whether competence is necessary and whether the public can learn anything from empirical evidence when that truth becomes incontrovertible.

I must say, the early returns are not favorable regarding the MAGA experiment. On the domestic front, there are troubling signs already. The stock maket appears to be extremely volatile in recent days. Moreover, the Fed in Atlanta has revised their projections for growth in the 1st quarter of the current year sharply downward. They had predicted a plus 2.3% growth of GDP early on, an estimate which was in line with a similar increase evidenced in the final full quarter of Biden’s tenure. Then, they recently projected a 1.8% GDP decline in the current quarter and (even more recently) suggested an even steeper decline. This would be like the economy falling off a cliff.

Just this morning, the numbers for private sector job growth in February were released. At 77,000 new jobs, the growth was way below expectations (and much below typical performance in recent years). When the savage public sector cuts are added (including the inevitable ripple effects of those cuts) and the trade war consequences unfold, employment rates likely will tank dramatically. Remember the global depression in the early 1930s? While that catastrophe might have been sparked by the bursting of overheated equity markets in the late 1920s, the real damage came from high tariffs and conservative economic policies.

THE BIGGER DANGER!

In time, we likely will survive an economic recession, even depression, though the costs will be extremely painful. What might prove more disastrous is the collapse of the Western alliance that has maintained relative stability in the world for the last eight-plus decades. With global issues such as climate change and AI looming, we cannot fathom the consequences of a collapse of the old order where comity and cooperation among advanced nations generally prevailed and which resulted in the most prolonged period of global security and economic well-being in history.

“I think we have to assume, after the events of the last 10 days, that we cannot in any way count on America as an ally.”

General Richard Shirreff Past Dep. Commander of NATO

As demonstrated by the above quote, those halcyon days may be over. I’ve always been a globalist at heart. I recall joining the World Federalist Society as a very young man. It just struck me that hyper-nationalism was counterproductive and primitive. Despite all the challenges, I had concluded that we needed to think more broadly about things than we did … that we had to embrace the world beyond our own tribe and our own narrow self-interests. The world would not be well served by a zero-sum perspective where we benefited at some unavoidable cost to others. Cooperation, not competition, we’re the keys to progress.

Even a century ago, we lived in a world of hyper-nationalism with all the discord that such juvenile tribalism produced. In the run up to WWI, we had a divided world where the central powers (Germany, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and the Ottoman Empire) squared off against the so-called allied powers (led by France, England, and eventually the U.S.). After an uneasy cease fire, that conflict started up again in WWII. now, the Axis powers (Germany, Italy, Japan, and a few others) fought the allies (led by Britain, France, and the U.S.) once again.

This horrific world conflict endured for slightly over three decades and might well have cost some 100 million lives worldwide. The outcome was a smashing of much of the old order of ambitious nation states mostly run by monarchist, oligarchs, and dictators. The colonial empires soon disappeared, and a slow movement toward democracy and human rights eventually emerged. The breakup of the Soviet Union seemed to signal a new age for human freedom and potential. The creation of the European Union, on the other hand, seemed to suggest a future model for cooperative governance.

That prospect of a brighter future now has dimmed. A new wave of autocrats and fascist strongmen has emerged. These new autocrats include Victor Orban (Hungary, 2010); Kim Jong-Un (N. Korea, 2011); Vladimir Putin (Russia, 2010); Xi Jinping (China, 2014); Narenda Modi (India, 2014); Recep Tayyop Erdogan (Turkey, 2014); and Donald Trump (U.S., 2025); among others. Some of those named predate the year specified. For example, Putin has been around since the late 1990s, Jong-Un is the latest in a family dynasty, and Trump had an earlier run in the spotlight starting in 2016. But Putin did not fully end Russia’s constitution until 2010, Jong-Un continues his death-like control over his desperate country, while Trump remained semi-controlled by U.S. constitutional norms until his recent reelection. Now, these autocrats have more or less complete control and share a common goal of sweeping aside democratic norms. They are creating a new axis of evil.

What we have seen in the past several weeks has been the shocking realization that the United States has switched sides. Once the protector of democracies, even if we supported right-wing autocrats too often during the cold war, Trump has made it clear that we now are on the other side of history. He is making the United States the beacon of hope for oligarchic authority and autocratic rule. Vladimir Putin is his idol, whether because he admires that despot’s power or because Putin has blackmailed or extorted Trump’s slavish obedience. Perhaps we will know someday.

In the meantime, our abandonment of Ukraine has been seen by the world as a fundamental turning point. There can be little doubt that the brutal treatment of Zelensky by Trump and Vance last Friday was a calculated ambush designed to cover America’s abandonment of prior guarantees. In 1994, the U.S. (and Britain) made ironclad guarantees to protect Ukrain’s territorial integrity if that nation abandoned their nuclear armaments. Those promises are going up in smoke. Similarly, the 1974 Impoundment and Control Act afforded Congress the power to spend money, delegating the White House responsility for carrying out Congressional intent. Trump has swept aside the separation of powers to create an imperial Presidency. He alone will dictate American policy.

And so we are seeing a new order emerge in which my country is on the wrong side. Worse, Trump doubled down on his actions during the State of the Union speech last night, a diatribe that was positively received by a large majority of viewers, who were mostly MAGA supporters it must be noted. Still, is it not like the rapturous responses enjoyed by Hitler during the early years of his reign, at least before his insanity brought utter ruin down upon the German people?

My only hope now is that I’ll be gone before the inevitable tragedy unfolds. Alas, I had hoped my final years would have been just a bit less painful. 😕

I’ve always been shocked at how illiterate most people are about historical patterns that are repeated over time, especially about what we might glean from our past. They imagine that what happens in the present is somehow unique in the annals of time. Certainly, some technological breakthroughs are legitimately new. We’ve never before had the instantaneous communications brought to us by the digital age and satellite technology. But human behaviors are repeatable and, in fact, are repeated quite often. Yet, we often act as if what we see about us is new, thus ignoring the lessons and insights available from history.

I was particularly aware of this tendency to ignore historical precedents while engaged in the nation’s obsession with welfare in the last decades of the 20th century. The press and most politicians reacted to each ‘new’ welfare reform concept as if no one had ever thought of such a thing before. Of course, virtually every idea had been conceived of in the past while most, in one form or another, had been tried previously. Even a rudimentary overview of history would have sobered exaggerated expectations and diminished the hyperbole surrounding each new initiative. One possible exception in the political welfare drama was Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan of New York, the Harvard professor turned politician. In debate, he would reference earlier reform efforts, going back as far as the Elizabethan Speenhamland plan, when discussing contemporary reform concepts. But he was a distinct outlier.

At the moment, I’m dwelling on how unique (or not) is the MAGA revolution. It probably is true that no previous administration has attempted to destroy our constitutional Republic in such an overt and obvious manner. Nor can I recall the American public accepting, even endorsing, these attacks to our very way of life. Can anyone recall so many cheering the (Jan. 6) insurrectionists who attacked our democratic principles and our sacred constitutional protections, with perhaps the KKK of the 1920s and various populist groups during the Great Depression being exceptions. Still, despite the generally sanguin response to Trump and Musk’s attacks on our institutions, there are signs that even the American electorate, dullards that they might be, are beginning to catch on to the existential fate facing the nation. Still, as of this writing, I retain little hope that the ongoing coup in Washington might be reversed.

In this musing, I focus on some small patterns. For example, many are likely to believe that a sitting President has never tried to bend the basic contours of our governing framework when frustrated by the opposition, at least not to the extent of our wanna-be dictator. Is Trump’s obvious wesponizing of the DOJ, the FBI, the Judiciary, the intelligence community, our military, etc. unique in our history. Not really! President James Polk manipulated our military and the State Department to find appropriate pretexts for expanding the U.S. dominion all the way to the Pacific Ocean, including starting a likely unjust war with our neighbors to the south. FDR considered expanding the number of Supreme Court justices when the existing members of the Court refused to cooperate with his efforts to jump start our economy during an utterly crippling global depression. Other examples surely can be cited.

But let’s focus on the modern American government which, in terms of scope and complexity, has only been around since World War II. Has any recent (prior) President attempted to weaponize the bureaucracy for personal and political purposes, as Trump seems to be doing. Why, yes! In 1971, Richard Nixon was captured on his office taping system as he outlined the qualities he wanted in the next chief of the Internal Revenue Setvices (IRS). “I want to be sure he is a ruthless son of a bitch … that he will do what he is told, that every income tax tax return I want to see I see, that he will go after our enemies and not our friends.” Nixon did not succeed in turning that institution into a personalized weapon. A surviving institutional affinity for the rule of law prevailed in the end, helped by the self-destructive behaviors of the President himself assisted by a residual support for core principles (e.g., seeing the country as a nation of laws) on which our constitution was founded.

Another moment from the not too distant past strikes me as analagous to our current political tragedy. First, however, let’s peruse a bit of context. Over the course of my lifetime, the distribution of values across the political parties shifted from a confusing allocation of ideological purity among the two major parties to a hyper polarization of beliefs … the GOP shifted to the hard right while the Dems drifted to the left. President Johnson’s civil rights victories in the mid-1960s corrected a political misalignment that remained intact for a century after the conclusion of our Civil War.

In my earlier years, the titular heads of the GOP included Thomas Dewey, Robert Taft, Dwight Eisenhower, Richard Nixon, Nelson Rockefeller, Barry Goldwater, and Gerald Ford. Only Taft, a descendent of President William Taft, and Goldwater would be considered Republicans by today’s standards. The remainder would fit easily within today’s Democratic Party, a few being considered true leftists. True Republicans (by today’s standards) in those days did not fare well. Taft was bullied aside in 1952 by the popularity of General Dwight D. Eisenhower, while Goldwater was buried in the 1964 presidential election. During the immediate post- WWII period, the GOP remained ideologically diverse and relatively sane. In fact, President Johnson’s civil rights breakthrough depended on strong GOP support.

A political inflection point emerged with the election of Ronald Reagan to the Presidency in 1980, a darling of the hard right since the Goldwater debacle back in the 60s. With his avuncular style and easy wit, the former B-level movie actor made extremism look relatively harmless. In truth, however, Reagan’s rhetoric was far more biting than his actual political decisions. While he did throw a few bones to the right wing of his party (smashing the power of labor unions for example and spending wildly on ill-considered defense systems), his overall record was mixed. He would first reduce taxes precipitously, then raise them again. And Reagan never cut spending in ways that could justify the tax cuts he wanted and then passed into law. He was a hard liner in the abstract but a softy when actual people were hurt. The result of his confusing reign was little inroads into federal spending while a substantive lessening of the progressivity of our tax laws. This resulted in an increase in the national debt of some $1.8 trillion and the start of a trend among the once fiscally sober GOP becoming the party of budgetary irresponsibility.

Key to understanding the Reagan years lies in the ideological battles around Reagan, a man of great charm but very limited intellectual abilities. That is, he could easily be persuaded by the people he trusted, and who had easy access to him. Two forces (groups) vied to control the White House agenda. There were the so-called ‘prags’ (or pragmatists) and the ‘wing-nuts’ (the hard-right contingent).’ The ‘prags’ were led by Jim Baker, a moderate conservative who served as ‘chief of staff’ and , most importantly of all, had Nancy Reagan’s trust. The ‘wing-nuts’ were led by Ed Meese, a man who was less polished than Baker but who likely was closer to Reagan’s emotional core. These main ideological forces spent as much time focused on one another as they fought to neutralize the other side than they did on actually governing the country.

This internal White House political struggle is important for at least one reason … it was a portent for the greater conservative struggle over the next several decades. The hard- right and the moderate wings of the GOP would battle continuously for supremacy in the coming years … with the more moderate elements generally prevailing at the national level … Bush (father and son), McCain, and Romney. At the Congressional and local level, the drift was decidedly toward the extremists wing of the party, Newt Gingrich being the prime example. A friend of mine at the time (a long- term Republican operative in Congress) described Gingrich to me ‘as a bomb-throwing revolutionary.’ Not that Newt would throw actual bombs but that he wanted to blow up the ‘business as usual’ way of governing. There would be no compromising with the other side no matter how much sense it made.

Of course, Trump’s emergence in 2015 marked a decided victory for the hard-right contingent of the Republican Party. Still, he was not prepared for victory. He was not expected to win. In truth, he was even less intellectually capable than Reagan (which takes some doing) and could not even approach the former actor’s charisma and charm. But the country had shifted to the right by this time, making a man who failed both in business and as a human being seem preferable, if not desirable, to almost half of the country. Importantly, someone like Trump spoke directly to the rage found within the Republican base, a set of passions long frustrated.

Even the Donald was surprised he won the first time around. Thus, he felt unprepared and assumed that he needed some actual adults in the room to run the country. As a consequence, he surrounded himself with the same two groups that Reagan had in his White House three decades earlier. You had the contemporary version of the ‘prags’ (e.g., V.P. Pence and General Milley) as well as the ‘wing-nuts‘ (e.g., Bannon and Miller). One group pushed him to the extreme while the other (if some of their written works are factual) spent an enormous amount of time stopping the President from unleashing ruinous havoc on the nation. Still, by the end of his tenure in office, many of the prags were gone or (in Donald’s so-called mind) discredited. Trump felt secure in pushing his more rabid followers toward an actual insurrection to remain in office even if he didn’t quite control all the levers of power to effectuate a complete coup.

For his second term, all is in place. All remaining moderate elements of the Republican Party have been purged … Cheney, Kinsinger, and Romney being the last of the RINO line of opposition. Donald has surrounded himself with sycophants and cultish followers. The extremists housed at the Heritage Institute had plenty of time to develop a detailed agenda and plan to institute a permanent political and institutional replacement of our democratic republican form of government. The long battle for the soul of one major party is finished. Shockingly, half the country has embraced this extreme vision of the future (even though it remains to be seen what might happen if inflation and unemployment spike). Finally, the legacy media is in disarray. Recently, Jeff Bezos, owner of the venerable Washington Post (which brought down Nixon over Watergate in 1974) issued a dictate proscribing liberal editorials. Only ‘freedom-oriented’ and ‘free-market’ opinions will be permitted. Meanwhile, the liberal network (MSNBC) is shedding its existing liberalish luminaries. We may soon have a one-state, Fascist propoganda feel to our media without total government censorship.

A hybrid form of an oligarchy and a kakistocracy now governs in Washington. Will the coup endure and become permanent? That is not certain. There is some resistance in the judiciary and (despite the recent purged in the Pentagon) the willingness of the military to follow blindly unconstitutional orders remains an unknown.

Within months, if not weeks, we might know our futures with much greater certainty. But right now, it doesn’t look good.

A couple of days ago I was telling friends that Trump’s next step toward creating a total authoritarian state would involve a purged of the military to recreate something over which he could exercise total control. That began last night with what is known as the Friday Night Massacre. The African-American CHAIR of the JOINT CHIEFS and other top brass were sacked!

A decent analogy: Perhaps Hitler’s ‘night of the long knives’ or Nixon’s purged of the Justice Department to stave of impeachment.

The analogy is irrelevant…the meaning is clear. He now has most institutions lined up to support his establishment of an authoritarian regime and to dispose of what remains of our Constitutional government.

The American democratic experiment: B. 1787 … D. 2025.

R.I.P.

So, I’m sitting here being engaged in yet another depressing discussion of America as it swirls around the toilet bowl. Everyone I know feels as if we are caught up in the twilight zone … reality is more horrific and fanciful than anything imagined by the most creative of science fiction authors.

Then it hit me … the perfect analogy for our current situation:

It is as if the Japanese had just invaded Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, and half of America cheered them on.

😞

I got a message from an old Peace Corps colleague a few days ago. It contained a somber theme of loss and despair. Some of his despair was personal (his wife left him, and he faces health issues) and some of it was contextual (his despondency over our country’s disintegration). Earlier today, I got a message from two neighbors (and good friends) who happened to be visiting their daughter who (with her new spouse) has moved to Spain. They suggested I look over a news piece talking about how a University of Wisconsin returned Peace Corps volunteer group is fighting against the Trump agenda.

And so, I’ve once again started reflecting on one of John Kennedy’s more significant legacies … the Peace Corps. Really, can you think of any federal initiative so directly at odds with the current administration’s zeitgeist than a program of self-sacrifice for the common global good. I mean, Trump is the paragon of transactional self-interest even though he has bankrupted nearly every business initiative he has undertaken. In the last few days, for example, he has blamed Ukraine for being the aggressor in their war of survival while seeking pay-back or ‘compensation’ for the military aid previously given Kiev. In Trump’s world, if you can not make a buck on something, you shouldn’t do it. He is the man who called American soldiers ‘suckers‘ and veterans who died during their service ‘losers.’ After, all they died for a cause … who does that?

Below, I am in the center of the picture … trying my best to become an agricultural specialist. I now look and wonder, who is that guy? 🤔 Look at how skinny he is, and all that hair. And where did those Clark Kent glasses come from?

As you all know by now (if not from the previous paragraph), I was one of those ‘suckers’ who responded to President Kennedy’s call to ‘do something for your country’ and not to ask the nation ‘to do something for you.’ I initially applied for this exciting opportunity in 1965 when the concept was fresh and young, during what was known as the ‘wild west’ days of the program. It was still more of a raw idea than a polished, bureaucratic venture. In any case, we who sought this experience were driven by a kind of primitive idealism … a passion to make the world a slightly better place. So many of my fellow volunteers remarked, even decades later when we gathered for occasional reunions, that they joined based on President Kennedy’s inspiring vision and his call for sacrifice and service.

The pic above contains my two groups that trained together in the summer of 1966 and who finished up our service in the summer of 1969. The top foto captures the members of India 44-A, the group assigned to do public health in the state of Maharashtra (near Mumbai or then Bombay). The bottom is my group. We allegedly did rural development in the State of Rajasthan, a desert area in northeastern India that bordered on Pakistan. These were not easy assignments. In fact, they tested us severely.

Somewhere close to 100 eager volunteers were present on the first day of training, only some two dozen remained at the end of our tenures. In fact, well over half never even made it to India while more left (or were asked to leave) during our tour. This was not for the faint of heart (and it should be noted that PC made significant positive strides over time). Yet, I can still recall Carolyn, the Asian looking woman in the top pic, saying how inspired she had been by Kennedy’s call for sacrifice. Most of us were, in one way or another. We believed we could make a difference.

I write about our tribulations and triumphs in the work pictured above … Our Grand Adventure. So, if you want the gritty details, related often with humor and insight, that’s the place to go. But the work also touches upon the tenor of the times. The 60s marked a visible shift in how we looked at the world, from the bland and conformist greyness of the 50s to the radical rebelliousness of the late 60s and early 70s. We forget how traumatic that transition was … a true societal inflection point. There were close to 1,000 real or attempted or planned domestic bombings in the late 60s, culminating in the UW campus bombing of the physics building in August of 1970. The world radically changed between the Camelot days of the Kennedy administration (the early death throes of American Apartheid notwithstanding) and the disorientation associated with defeat in Vietnam and the further loss of faith in government emerging from the Watergate scandal.

Still, many of us had faith back then. Despite all, we saw a future with hope. We really believed that our national experiment in democracy and inclusion was perfectible and, perhaps naively, that we could help in that endeavor. Amazingly, we really believed we could make a substantive contribution.

As I wrote in Our Grand Adventure and as Doris Kearns Goodwin recounts in An Unfinished Love Story, we experienced many moments of hope and exhilaration. One of those finer moments occurred in the middle of the night during the 1960 presidential campaign. Candidate John Kennedy landed late (after midnight) in Ann Arbor, Michigan, after a debate with Ruchard Nixon. Kennedy was seething about a claim Nixon had made during that debate that Republicans were the party of peace while Democrats tended to lead the country into war. Though the junior Senator from Massachusetts generally sounded more hawkish on foreign policy than his opponent during the campaign, he struck a different note that night.

Perhaps he was surprised. There were some 10,000 (mostly students) still waiting for him to arrive at this late hour. Given the crowd, he felt compelled to make a few unscripted remarks. At one point, he challenged this youngish audience to consider giving a couple of years of their lives to work in some foreign land, to give of themselves to make the world a better place, to make a personal sacrifice for peace. He never mentioned a Peace Corps. He never even promised an actual program. It was merely a call to their better natures.

It was enough! The students who listened to his challenge that night were electrified by his words. At the 50 year anniversary of the Peace Corps in 2011, a woman who was there vividly recalled the reaction of those assembled. It was as if a match was struck that lit a flame … a spark that would not be extinguished. Within weeks, the message about this new volunteer program (which was imaginary) spread across campuses. Kennedy’s campaign staff were bombarded with queries about this amazing new volunteer opportunity. Soon, there was no turning back. By a Presidential executive order, the Peace Corps was established on March 1, 1961, almost 64 years ago.

Who knows, perhaps Donald Trump, at the behest of Elon Musk, will end the Corps on March 1, 2025. I would not be surprised at all. I would be sad, though. I doubt my group improved the world in any measurable sense, though we had our modest successes during our service. What I do know is that my colleagues back then went on to remarkable lives as adults. As I’ve noted before, I can not say that the Peace Corps experience was responsible for those remarkably accomplished lives (which I believe were seldom matched by other such groups of young people). Yet, I sense there was something about being tested as we were that had an unmatched value-added impact on our adult lives.

What will inspire today’s youth to do similar things in the future? Not the words or actions of Donald Trump, unless you endorse his dystopian vision of a Dickension world of survival of the fittest. I surely do not.

Over the past two or so days, I’ve also exchanged emails with a neighbor about our childhoods. He is a rather famous infectious disease doctor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who is still working hard in his mid-80s. We shared the hard-scrabble nature of our early years … he in small town northern Wisconsin and me in a rather poor, working-class ethnic neighborhood in Massachusetts. Still, it was easy to work our way to successful careers. As young people in those long ago days, we had faith in the future. And perhaps we gained some faith in ourselves.

Today, we are driven by despair and perhaps comforted by a form of gratitude that we won’t have to suffer what appears to be lurking on the horizon … at least not for long. To repeat my mantra, I’m so damn glad I’m old.

“If you’re wondering if you’re in a constitutional crisis and the republic could collapse at any moment, you are.”

Rick Wilson

As Rick Wilson suggests above, America is in the midst of a traditional coup-d’etat. For those of you not familiar with his work, Rick is a former Republican operative who became disenchanted with his party during the Trump takeover of the GOP. He went on to attack Trump and his minions in the MAGA movement through his Lincoln Project initiative.

I started to focus seriously on this possibility of a real coup when two former Peace Corps volunteers from my old 1960s India-44 group reached out recently. Our group no longer communicates that much, so two messages in one day stood out. Both messages essentially posed a similar question, are we now involved in a real coup? That same question has been circulating among my close neighbors and associates, generally retirees with advanced degrees from top universities and highly successful careers behind them. These were not people who would panic easily or be misled by political propaganda. Perhaps this growing sense of dread we all felt was justified.

What is happening in Washington surely has the feel and quality of a traditional coup-d’etat. The standard elements are in place … the identification of outgroups or scapegoats, the vilification and denunciation of all critics of the new regime, the sweeping aside of most expert government officials to be replaced by obsequious sycophants, the immediate freeing of some 1,500 insurrectionists who attacked both law enforcement and threatened our constitutional transfer of power (thus making them available for future paramilitary actions), and the systemic replacement of all those who might hold the current set of power brokers (i.e. the new autocracy) accountable. This list could continue, but you get the picture. It took Hitler less than 60 days to sweep aside the Weimar Republic even though the Fuehrer didn’t have a majority of the people behind him when appointed Chancellor. Trump did get the majority vote in 2024 and has a slim majority in Congress. On paper, he is in a more advantageous position than the Nazi leader back in the early 1930s, and he still has plenty of time to do the same here and now.

Yet, we oft tend to check ourselves against hyperbole and exaggeration, and rightly so. There is this innate reaction that it can’t happen here. Not in America! As G.K. Chesterton once said … “The whole modern world has divided itself into Conservatives and Progressives. The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of Conservatives is to prevent (those) mistakes from being corrected … Thus, we have two great types – the advanced person who rushes us into ruin, and the retrospective person who admires the ruins.” Such sentiments suggest blame should be placed on all sides in our political scheme of things. What we see about us is politics as usual, with sins to be found in us all.

After all, the struggle for authority and power has been an intricate part of our Republic since the bitter contest between Jefferson and Adams created our nascent political parties at the end of the 18th century. Moreover, we have had many periods in our past where the rule of law has been tarnished and where our democratic principles have faltered. John Adams passed the infamous Aliens and Seditions Act; Abe Lincoln eschewed the legal protections of habeas corpus at the beginning of our great Civil conflict; the long nightmare of Jim Crow laws and legal apartheid impacting minorities remains an embarrassing scar in our history; the Palmer Raids during the Red Scare at the end of WWI found thousands being rounded up mostly because they were immigrants and thus presumed to be a danger to society; then the the arrest and resettlement of Japanese-Americans into concentration camps during WWII primarily due to prejudice based on their ancestry; and the wholesale persecution of many thousands during the McCarthy era from an irrational (and mostly unfounded) fear of alleged disloyalty. The republican form of government envisioned by our founding fathers is not easily done. It takes work and constant vigilance. Yet, despite the inefficiencies of our system of checks and balances, it remains the best form of self-governance we can imagine. Or, as Winston Churchill once quipped, it is a terrible system but beats the available alternatives.

Yet, the current effort to dismantle the very foundations of our Constitutional framework seems more authentic and quite different from past scares. It strikes an increasing number of otherwise sober observers as fundamentally more dangerous than virtually any prior threat. Even our Civil War did not threaten to undo our basic institutions, merely seeking to divide us into two nations that reflected fundamentally distinct cultures but which would retain certain bedrock guarantees in each. The London-based news outlet, the Guardian, issued an incisive editorial view on America’s current political drama, calling it a ‘coup veiled by chaos.’ “Donald Trump is provoking a U.S. constitutional crisis, claiming sweeping powers to override or bypass Congress’s control over spending in a brazen attempt to centralize financial power in the executive branch. If he succeeds, Nobel Lareate Paul Krugman warns, it would be a 21st century coup – with power slipping from elected official’s hands. The real story behind the President’s trade war, he (Krugman) says, is the hijacking of government. And Mr Krugman is right.” In a recent poll conducted in the European Union, Donald Trump was seen as the greatest threat to world peace by far, greatly exceeding the dangers posed by his fellow autocrats in Russia, China, North Korea, and Iran.

One of my former PC compatriots now writes an eloquent blog on contemporary politics titled Feathers of Hope. He answers the question as to whether we are in an real coup as follows. The “The President of the United States is engaged in the systemic destruction of vital government institutions, each of which has been painstakingly built and nourished for generations.” [Jerry Weiss, in Feathers of Hope.] Even some centrists are waking up to the unique dangers facing our Republic. Angus King is a U.S. Senator from Maine. Nominally an independent, he traditionally has been considered a Republican. During a recent Cabinet appointment hearing, he said “… right now – literally at this moment – our Constitution is under the most direct and consequential assault in our nation’s history, an assault not on a particular provision but on the essential structure of the document itself.” Later in his testimony, he went on to say that “Project 2025 is nothing less than a blueprint for the shedding of the Constitution and the transition of our country to authoritarian rule.” That is strong language from someone considered a moderate, if not a traditional conservative.

While the danger signs abound everywhere, perhaps the recent assertion by Vice President Vance best outlines the new threat in the clearest terms imaginable. “Judges aren’t allowed to control the executives’ legitimate power.” This, in a nutshell, defines the new ‘imperial’ Presidency being sought. There will be no checks on the powers of the executive. Consider this for a moment. The abiding fear among our founding fathers was that power would drift to the center in ways that mimicked the monarchical tyranny they wished to avoid. In response, the Founding Fathers worked to distribute power throughout the mechanics of government in ways that limited the usurpation of authority by one man (or by a small autocracy). They spent countless hours putting together the apparatus of government with great intent and greater care. Power was to be muted consciously and with exquisite subtlety. And yet, it seemingly is taking mere days for a wannabe dictator and his devotees to tear it all apart.

Yet, there is an element of illusion operating here. The coup, as it were, is not something that has been suddenly thrust upon us, nor is it the work of one deranged man. And while Donald Trump might be the match that has ignited the fury, the groundwork for this moment has long been in the making, for several decades in fact.

Its ultimate success depends on two factors … eroding our confidence in what is real and in taking control of the key institutions governing society. As we know, the emergance of a fractionalized distribution of information through our digitalization media frameworks makes it easier to manipulate people, especially if you have no basic allegiance to the truth nor any desire to be influenced by faith and facts. A study at the University of Amsterdam recently examined some 32 million messages from elected officials across 26 countries between 2017 and 2022. They found that far-right populist politicians were significantly more likely to issue misinformation or, put more colloquially, outright lies for political advantage. Fox News, and its allies, never purported to present real news. It was a propoganda outlet from day one. And part of their propoganda campaign was to subvert and discredit legitimate news outlets.

Part of the long-term multi-faceted initiative to subvert democracy lay in creating a new language. Lee Atwater, the Republican operative responsible for electing George Bush (senior) in 1988, said the following back in 1981 … “You start out in 1954 by saying [N-word, N-word, N-word]. By 1968, you can’t say the ‘[N-word]‘ – that hurts you. So, you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and your getting so abstract. Now, your talking about cutting taxes and all these things your talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct is that Blacks get hurt worse than whites … ‘we want to cut this’ is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than … [N-word, N-word]. And therein lay one secret to setting the foundations of today’s coup. Play upon the remaining hate inherent in America’s political fabric without being obvious about it. Prejudices and fear remain the touchstones, the lightening rods, of our politics. It is an ancient ploy that yet resonates with so many of our fellow citizens.

The second foundation for today’s coup lies in taking over the basic institutions of a civil society. That did not happen over night. As I’ve discussed ad nauseum in prior blogs, the long-term conservative strategy can at least be traced to the memo written by future SCOTUS justice Lewis Powell in the early 1970s. He noted that ultimate control by conservatives depended on asserting dominance over the media, think tanks, the courts, our educational system, local electoral processes, and like systems. That is precisely what the conservative movement focused on for the next five decades … with considerable success. They gradually assumed more and more control over the very institutions that mattered the most.

With many of the elements in place, the coup was close to being ready to launch when Trump surprised the world by catching the brass ring in 2016. But they were not quite ready, mostly because his election was a shock to even the true believers. A recent article in Foreign Affairs (Feb. 11) put it this way. “Democracy survived Trump’s first term because he had no experience, plan, or team. He did not fully control the Republican Party when he took office in 2017, and many Republican leaders were still committed to the democratic rules of the game. Trump governed with establishment Republicans and technocrats, and they largely constrained him. None of this is true anymore.” This time around, MAGA has a detailed plan, Project 2025, and a devoted coterie of sycophants prepared to breach the walls protecting our most precious institutions. The article went on to say, “Trump ran an openly authoritarian campaign in 2024, pledging to prosecute his rivals, punish critical media, and deploy the army to repress protests.” Heaven help us.

In our great Civil conflict, some 620,000 Americans perished. In two World Wars, another 550,000 or so died to protect our institutions. Now, one uber-wealthy foreigner (Elon Musk) bought the keys to this country for less than $300 million. And most Americans hardly seem to care. Trump’s image and approval rating remain strong. Many describe him as firm and energetic. My initial thoughts on this move toward a dictatorship largely drift toward apathy and resignation, if not despondency. That is, we deserve whatever hell awaits us. I will not shed a tear for a people who seem, in general, so unaware, so self-absorbed, and so full of hate. I certainly hope they never come back with we didn’t know. They had to know, much like the Germans had to at least guess what had happened to their Jewish neighbors in WWII.

Then I pause. The old Hebrew word, Amidah, comes to mind. It suggests resistance, perhaps spiritual or perhaps something more. Nevertheless, no matter the form, one must never acquiesce to evil. I am an old man. Not since I was in my youth, during the Cuban Missile Crisis of the early 1960s, have I contemplated sacrificing my body or life for a patriotic cause. That extraordinary thought now occurs to me. Then again, it would not be much of a sacrifice. After all, how much life remains to me in any case.

AMIDAH!

Is the American age of hegemony and quasi-global authority on its last legs? If so, the so-called American Age will have been short run indeed.

Such a complex topic demands more than can be embraced by a brief blog. Yet, there are a few tantalizing clues that suggest we, as a dominant world power, are in our end game. I can’t cover them all, but let’s start with these:

1. Excessive debt. With a structural deficit of $36 trillion dollars (and growing), we just might have a problem. The fact that we only raise revenue to pay for 75 to 80 percent of our annual outlays (we borrow the rest) suggests this issue will only get worse. This aggregate debt makes us vulnerable to others (we depend on foreign nations to buy our bonds) while servicing that debt crowds out spending on other critical needs. And by the way, while spending is always an issue, the big culprit in the U.S. debt question is selfishness … we want too much for nothing. In particular, there is an unwillingness to demand that the economic winners here pay their reasonable share. You know you have a dysfunctional resource generating system when those that can pay the most actually pay the least in far too many cases. What led to the French Revolution in the late 18th century? It was excessive sovereign debt caused by lavish internal spending and by financing the American Revolutionary War (an unnecessary foreign adventure).

2. We are a nation beset by deep and divisive cultural conflicts. As I’ve said (ad nauseum) we are at war with ourselves. Put too simply, one half of the country wants a mythological land of white nativist supremacy, one of plenty without sacrifice, and desires some form of authoritarian control (reminiscent of the ante-bellum South). The other half seeks a more open, pluralistic society that is both inclusive and which offers distributed opportunity sets (the DEI kerfuffle). As Abe Lincoln first warned in his 1838 Lyceeum speech in Springfield Illinois, internal cultural conflict could could easily tear our Republic apart. Later, in his Senate debate with Steven Douglas, he went on to warn that a divided house could not long stand. To introduce a Roman equivalent, by the 2nd or 3rd century AD, the core culture of the empire was divided between what were considered real Romans and the others (wanna-be Romans from conquered territories). This is much like our internal debate about who is a real American.

3. National overreach. The Pax Americana era wasted much of our treasure over the past 8 decades or so for no substantive purposes. Since WWII, we have engaged in a few legitimate foreign excursions, but also quite a few questionable ones. We could start with our support of France’s continued occupation of Indochina in the late 1940s (which led to our own Vietnam war). Then we kept overextending ourselves in far too many instances, including Bush’s Iraq intervention over chemical weapons that never existed and our longest-ever conflict in Afghanistan (futile no matter how horrific the Taliban are). Our recent history seems similar to the Roman Empire’s constant battles on the periphery of its territories as the core of the empire struggled with internal challenges.

4. Hyper-pluralism. As I’ve recently explored in prior blogs, we are in an emerging age of fractional bubbles (or hyper-pluralism) in both normative and ideological senses. There had been a time when certain consensual understandings were generally accepted by most, at least in principle. There existed a general sense of what it meant to be American. We theoretically embraced a belief in the rule of law, in the importance of distributed authority (checks and balances), of fair play where all should coexist in reasonable harmony and play by common rules (the melting pot), of a reasonable opportunity to succeed (our Horatio Alger myth), and an abiding faith and confidence in our basic institutions (including government). These were elements of a common cultural consensus or understanding. Now, it is survival of the fittest, all for themselves in a form of hyper-individualism, and a political machine dedicated to placing a new version of nativist white supremacy as a dominant national vision. Again, I am reminded of the incoherent babbel within the late Roman empire as local cultures from the Levant region to Hadrian’sWall competed for survival or even dominance.

5. A yearning for autocracy. In such periods of uncertainty and chaos, people lean toward a preference for authoritarian rule. They drift toward the rhetoric of the strongman who promises to ease their fears, strike at their enemies (scapegoats), and solve their problems painlessly. Democracy appears irresolute and messy, as did the Weimar Republic when the Great Depression suddenly halted Germany’s post WWI recovery. When external crises do not warrant a national panic, the would-be strongman gins up one or more bogeymen- type monsters while promising instant relief. Recall Trump claiming the country was in a deep crisis on the verge of collapse when our economy was, in fact, envied by the world and when most social metrics (including crime rates) were the best in decades. Even inflation had subsided to traditional levels in 2024. I am reminded that Rome abandoned its Republican form of rule just as its power and reach was approaching a zenith. And never forget, strongman rule oft segues into government by a kakistocracy where the least competent rule (RFK as head of HHS, really?). And don’t forget that Vladimir Putin has reintroduced a virtual feudal system in Russia as that country struggles in Ukraine, a minor power.

6. A denial of science and data. A corollary of strongman rule is an eruption of Orwellian 1984ish disregard for truth and facts. Fiction becomes belief. Propoganda becomes evidence. Conviction about one’s values and selfish aspirations trump (pun intended) what had been consensual and proven truths. At one point in my lifetime, there were common arbiters of what was real and believable. Political lies were told, of course. Still, the independent news networks strove to deliver authentic information the best they could. Rules existed to ensure both sides of most issues would be heard. Let us not forget that a sitting President (Richard Nixon) was forced to step down for breaking the law and fomenting crude misinformation … by members of his own political party. Today, we have multiple versions of the truth, and the sitting chief executive merely labels everything he dislikes (or is even mildly critical of him) as fake news, all without serious blowback. Worse, his cult-like followers accept this nonsense without question. I am reminded of the Roman emperor who designated his favorite horse as a member of the senate, and neither the elite nor the public were powerless or perhaps unwilling to object.

7. Reluctance to invest in public goods. We might well wish to reassess how and where we are allocating our critical public investments. It strikes me that our perspective currently is overly short-term and lacks vision. There is a shocking disinterest in strategic thinking about our longer-term future. The U.S. was one of the first nations to introduce universal primary education. Partly because of its democratic ethos, it developed (with significant public support) one of the best higher education systems in the world. Sometime after WWI, the States wrested hegemony of the global scientific community from Europe which helped lead us to the halcyon days of unrivaled technological leadership. Public investments in R&I (research and innovation) accelerated to the top, especially during the Republican administration of Dwight Eisenhower (a post-Sputnik boom). In recent times, those investments have lagged. In particular, our universities have come under increasing attack, public (non-proprietary) investments in science have stalled, and fundamental faith in expertise is continually challenged. You know you are in trouble when rigorous research is demonized, and Tic-Tok posts replace science labs as repositories of truth.

8. Cronyism over merit. Of course, one of the more transparent signs of national decay is found in the recent push to replace the federal workforce from one based on merit and competence to one based on loyalty and ideological affinity. Merit based appointments have been the norm in civil service hiring since the Grover Cleveland administration. Eviscerating that sacred principle, however, is one of the main tenets of Project 2025. That plan would turn the bureaucracy from a competency -based workforce dedicated to public service to one that serves the whims of a single man. The entire plan is a vision to replace our current republic with an autocracy or perhaps a plutocracy. I am reminded of the time when President Reagan was shot. He allegedly asked the doctors treating him if they were Republicans. He was jesting, of course, but there is a lesson there. If you were seeking a surgeon to do open heart surgery on you, would their political preferences be the only question you ask? Might you be interested in their medical training and expertise as well? I’ve been in government myself and have consulted with government for decades. It may look easy from the outside, but it is not!

Doing public policy well is very difficult. In some respects, it is more difficult than running a business. The private sector has obvious, transparent goals to pursue. The public sector continuously attempts to achieve multiple ends under terrible resource constraints that are externally imposed and where accountability oft becomes political sport. It is not for amateurs or the faint of heart unless you don’t care about outcomes. When Europe was laboring under a feudal system, China was building a robust (if self-contained) empire. They did it based on Confucian principles … a merit-oriented and ethically-based bureaucracy.

9. Unrealistic expectations. Another sign of internal decay is found in a widespread sense of entitlement. Aging empires become soft. Many citizens expect to be coddled and anticipate living in relative comfort absent much personal sacrifice. Effort and realistic ambitions diminish as the anticipation of comfort evolves into embedded expectation. We see grade creep in schools and universities as teachers are afraid to assert real standards in their classes. We see business managers reluctant to hire young people since they lack minimal behaviors essential to success in the workplace … including basics like punctuality, the ability to accept correction, and the interpersonal skills necessary for corporate cooperation. Almost 10 percent of young job candidates now want their parents to accompany them to initial job interviews. At that age, I couldn’t wait to travel halfway around the world to contribute and to test myself. Again, with a Roman analogy … I am reminded of the bread and circuses showered on citizens to keep them sated and unquestioning.

10. Peering into the abyss. Oddly enough, I started this blog, as I’ve started so many others, with a single, simple thought. We are losing our edge in the world. Alas, my brain once again ran away from me as it is wont to do. That initial point was prompted by the kerfuffle surrounding the emergence of DeepSeek, the AI-R1 innovation recently coming out of China. This version of artificial intelligence apparently outperforms its western (propriety) competitors at a fraction of their costs. Think about this, META (Facebook) alone invested some $180 billion in AI development. Various venture capitalists bet $132 billion just in 2024 on AI development. Yet, a single Chinese firm created an amazing technology in some 2 years for about a $6 million dollar investment. Shockingly, they developed an open-source system where the code is available to all (anathema to Western capitalism). What happened to Communist paranoia and secrecy? How can that be? That is a question deserving deeper thought.

But one thing is clear. Asia, in general, is leaving us behind in creating young technological talent and perhaps entrepreneurial innovation. Many of their youth still come to the U.S. for higher education, and a few stay to buttress our technological infrastructure. But will that last much longer? Unfortunately, Republicans attack our universities and starve them of resources. Now, we threaten to deport foreign talent desperately needed to maintain our position in the world. Talk about a myopic vision. In the late 15th century, Spain expelled foreign elements from their shores, deeming them undesirable and unnecessary. Their global position began to decline after a while. The Dutch received some of this rejected talent. They flourished well beyond what their size would have suggested. Diversity can be a blessing.

These sky-is-falling types of prognoses are all too common. Many turn out to be wrong, or at least premature. Perhaps my musings fall into this category, which I hope is true. On the other hand, perhaps it is all too real this time around. One observation bothers me greatly. The MAGA crowd has perfected the art of psychological projection. They accuse the other side of the very sins which they have mastered to the nth degree. Trump promises to eviscerate DOJ and the FBI because they have weaponized the system of justice (for which there is scant evidence). Then, he can immediately turn these sacred institutions into lethal weapons against his long list of enemies, and do so with a vengeance. I’ve never seen an outgoing president preemptively pardon respected public servants because his successor threatened revenge on them. Can the concentration camps be far behind? Let me end with one wish, one which adorns one of my favorite caps … Make America Think Again.

Perhaps it is time to stop, reflect, think hard, and somehow get us back on track. Sigh! That is easier said than done.