Tom's Musings

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.

I just finished listening to An Unfinished Love Affair, a memoir by the renowned American Presidential historian, Doris Kearns Goodwin. On one level, it touches on her deep affection and respect for her late husband Richard Goodwin, a man who played an instrumental role in the political events of the turbulent 1960s. On another level, the work is a memoir about that troubled and yet unforgettable decade, the last in which the progressive impulses within our American political fabric held prominent sway.

I sometimes have mused about whose life I would have preferred to live as opposed to my own which, I must admit, hasn’t been all that bad. As a young man, my choices drifted toward athletes. You know, it would have been nice to trade places with Ted Williams, perhaps the greatest baseball hitter of his generation. A bit later in life, I aspired to trade places with Hugh Hefner of Playboy magazine fame. For sure, no young man bursting with excess testosterone would pass on the chance to enjoy his libertine lifestyle. On reading this memoir, however, I’m convinced Richard Goodwin had a near perfect life, at least now that I enjoy the gentle wisdom of some maturity. That is, now that I’m older than dirt.

‘Dick’ Goodwin was there at the side of John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Eugene McCarthy, and Robert Kennedy during many of the salient moments when America redeemed the unfulfilled promises made at its founding. It was a time when universal suffrage became a possibility, and when legal apartheid was rendered an anathema in public policy. The graceful and uplifting words of Dick Goodwin, as expressed through a host of memorable speeches back then, amplified the heartening possibilities that were spawned during those irreplaceable times. Just one of Dick’s oratorical creations, Lyndon Johnson’s We Shall Overcome speech given to the nation to commemorate passage of the Voting Rights Bill, has stood the test of time as a testimony to human freedom and dignity. The message in Johnson’s address resonated across the subsequent decades despite the fact that Goodwin cobbled it together in a few hours just before its scheduled delivery. His heroic efforts were necessary when Johnson rejected a prior draft done by others.

That was an era, a decade, when words and ideas mattered. Our leaders would uplift their audiences with grandiloquent oratory that oft would evoke or recall the great sentiments and ideals of past genius. It was a time when perfectability seemed plausible because our national icons preferred to lift our thoughts and aspirations rather than debase our public rhetoric with short-term, self-serving swill. The greater men of that era chose to elevate the public, not appeal to their darker sides.

The words of Dick Goodwin supported the optimism and energy of those brief shining moments in the 1960s. They helped launch a War on Poverty and inspire a vision for a Great Society in which all might realize their potential to be what they could. That spirit enabled a rough, working-class kid like me to work in a hospital and with poor kids before trekking halfway across the world to help impoverished farmers in India as a Peace Corps Volunteer. On returning, I could easily work my way to a doctorate and a career as a respected policy-wonk and academic. Reaching for your dreams was easier then. The times, along with the words and ideas that flowed from them, inspired so many in my generation to be more than their humble beginnings warranted.

Those times and words spawned a host of new movements and inspired greater dreams. They liberated the shackles that ensnared women and other disenfranchised groups. Soon, they would address a growing ecological catastrophe, among other critical issues. Wealth inequality and poverty reached historic lows as policies bent finally toward the needs of average families. The 89th Congress, in particular, witnessed huge investments in health, education, and cities that lifted the potential of those oft left behind in our political discourse.

As we well know, the decade was not without its dark side. Addressing racial oppression ripped open raw, festering wounds that released deeper emotions through riots and violence. An ill-considered conflict halfway around the world sapped our treasury and diverted our energies from the domestic challenges being addressed in Johnson’s vision of Great Society. That war tore our social fabric apart in raw and desperate ways. Fearing where this national tragedy was taking the nation, Dick Goodwin took his oratorical skills from Lyndon Johnson to first work with antiwar Presidential candidate Eugene McCarthy and then to John Kennedy’s younger brother Robert or ‘Bobbie.’ As much as he loved what Johnson had done on the domestic side, he saw (like a younger version of me also did) the Greek tragedy aspect of the President’s war in Vietnam. It was a conflict that ultimately destroyed so much in southeast Asia as well as so many hopes and possibilities at home.

Violence and rage were endemic by the end of the 1960s. There were escalating protests against the war along with bombings and periodic eruptions of violence, including a few fatal bombings. The apogee of the insanity might well have been the bombing of Sterling Hall on the University of Wisconsin campus, the Physics building that was located a block from where I would soon spend most of my professional life. The bombing had taken place because research for the Department of Defense presumably was being carried out there. The spouse of a graduate student killed in that bombing eventually worked at the research entity I helped manage later in my career

That was the sad side of the era. Inchoate rage and internal divisions erupted periodically to tear at our social fabric. I sat in a remote Indian town in Rajasthan, India at the end of the 60s. From that remote perspective, it seemed as if the country was imploding. We seemed destined to succumb to our worst instincts. There was a poignant moment in the book as Doris and her (then) dying husband poured over boxes and boxes of memorabilia from his days as an advisor to those great men. They found a message from Jackie (Onasses) Kennedy to Dick when he was working with Robert Kennedy as the liberal Senator from New York labored to secure the 1968 Presidential candidacy. Her message was something along these lines … “You know, Dick, Robert will end up like my husband did. There is just too much hate in this country.“ Sadly, she proved to be prescient.

The lessons embedded in that book, and from the teachings emanating from that tortured decade, are similar. Life is a continuing battle between our better angels and the other side. We saw both in the 1960s. Today, our lesser angels dominate, flooding our political discourse with greed, oppression, division, and hate. Our lesser angels seem dominant today. They appear unlikely to diminish their hold on the apparatus of government and the media again in my lifetime. Still, I had those moments of hope so long ago, even if only for a few moments.

Those precious days of Camelot, when dreams seemed authentic and aspirations possible, are unforgettable. The memories of Doris about her late husband and about those times bring a warmth to my worn-out soul. That feels good. It is a feeling I need so much in these discouraging times

While I rather like my boiling water metaphor for capturing our contemporary political landscape (introduced in my prior blog), something must be said about a more primitive dualistic approach. There have been many binary visions of both society and the world. One of the more recognizable is Manicheanism, a system that emerged in the 3rd century CE. As developed by Mani, a Persian philosopher, this view focused on the essential duality of existence, what might be considered as a fundamental conflict between good and evil. Though other early religious traditions incorporated elements of this philosophy, Manicheanism was considered heretical by its main competitors, including Christianity. Still, it attracted many adherents.

Hegelian philosophic forms of duality sit at the core of many world views. Marx certainly developed an evolutionary view of competing governance modalities over time in which capitalism and communism represented competing visions in his era. As is the want of many thinkers dominated by a preferred outcome, this grand socio-economic clash would (in his eyes) soon end with the triumph of Communism. Fortunately, he was wrong.

Still, such clashes of ‘good versus evil’ have a certain plausibility about them. After all, they typically are the foundational basis of many religious belief systems. Some historians (Eric Foner for instance) have grounded the essential tensions within our own American history to a primal contest between the reconstruction versus the redemption frameworks for looking at society.

Let’s explore this particular tension for the moment. The United States surely had a flawed concept of democracy right at the beginning. Essentially, only white, propertied males were entitled to wield authority and political power. This certainly was true in the ante-bellum South where rich slave owners called the shots, and a good proportion of the population were held in virtually permanent legal and effective bondage. A vicious civil conflict was waged over whether such a flawed society might continue, one that cost somewhere between 600,000 and 700,000 lives.

Toward the end of that horrific conflict, and in the subsequent years, what some have called America’s second founding took place. In the passage of the 13, 14, and 15th amendments to the Constitution, the U.S. segued (theoretically at least) into a nation of laws where all enjoyed protection under our legal system (once again, theoretically). It was also a time when the push to extend suffrage more broadly found its legs. It would take time, about another century, but a mature democracy would emerge. Big steps occurred with the extension of suffrage to women toward the end of the Progressive Era and with the passage of the Voting Rights Act as part of Johnson’s Great Society in the 1960s. That decade also saw a broad recognition of basic rights for other disenfranchised groups and the beginnings of what would become the DEI (diversity, equity, inclusion) movement.

Social evolution, however, is never linear, nor is it guaranteed. We know that the entrenched, oligarchic elements of the South rallied in the post Civil War period. Through violence (the KKK) and apartheid laws, a form of ersatz bondage and rule by a white elite were reintroduced and embedded firmly into the fabric of society. Later, after legal segregation was attacked by a Supreme Court ruling (Brown v. Board of Education) and the civil rights legislation of the 60s, the forces of the right undertook a second, and broader, counter attack. They were dedicated to ultimate victory this time around.

These two resurgent counter -revolutions (the post- bellum and post-1960s versions) have been referred to as the redemption movements. They seek to reverse the successes of the long struggle to establish a participitory society where all have an opportunity to excel and where all are fully protected under the laws of the land. They are designed to redeem some type of lost past where people like themselves called the shots uninhibited by rules and regulations.

The reconstruction movement, on the other hand, represented a ‘second’ attempt to create a more perfect Union. While the redemption counter-revolution reacted to reestablish effective control of a Caucasian form of economic and authoritarian hegemony, the reconstruction alternative focused on full opportunity and equity for all. It drew inspiration from the high sounding words and principles articulated by the Founding fathers.

The redemption counter revolution has been underway since conservatives got their act together in the 1970s. These revolutionaries began to effectively usurp more control over the Republican Party during the Newt Gingrich era of the 1990s. The GOP continued to lurch to the right until all moderate elements were purged, and Donald Trump was able to establish a form of strongman control of the party about a decade ago. The contemporary Republican Party, now fully embracing authoritarian rule, is poised to realize the vision of the redemption cause. It is dedicated to reversing the principles of America’s second founding (e.g., eradicate DEI for example) and to reestablishing an authoritarian and hierarchical view of the social order as it was in our earlier ante-bellum era. Hard right visions, as we know, oft look to some glorious past for inspiration.

To achieve their ends, the new authoritarian leaders will need scapegoats (migrants and WOKE liberals) as well as grand visions (a Greater America). All autocrats need such chimeras. Making America Great Again is the classic misdirection ploy designed to keep the hoi poloi distracted while power is employed to advantage those at the top. Already, we see Trumpians making expansionary gestures (Panama, Canada, Greenland) to placate those who hopefully will not notice when an even greater proportion of the country’s wealth is redistributed to the top.

Most tyrants evidence some form greater whatever aspirations. Putin wants to reestablish the Soviet Union and now is bogged down in the Ukraine. In the 1990s, Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic had illusions of a ‘greater Serbia.’ I recently visited the Croatian town of Vukovar which sits on the Danube River across from Serbia. When that Serbian strongman embarked on his madness, Vukovar was besieged for 80 plus days. Over 80 percent of the place was destroyed. The residents were then displaced for some 8 years. The delusions of madmen have real consequences. For Milosevic, the United Nations eventually brought him to heal, and the International Court later convicted him of crimes against humanity. Unfortunately, Trump and his minions likely will suffer no just consequences.

In sum, America is in the midst of its own internal duality. Will it redeem the original promises of equality, justice, and opportunity for all? Or will the counter-revolutionaries seeking a hierarchical society reminiscent of Hindu cast systems prevail (the Mudsill perspective). If not that, perhaps a Taliban version of religious tyranny might serve the same purpose. These titanic struggles wax and wane over time, but I’m really pessimistic in the moment. I fear that the good guys are beaten down, that greedy titans now control the levers through which society can be controlled. Again, I’m so glad I’m old and near the end.

“… an oligarchy is taking shape in America of extreme wealth, power, and influence that literally threatens our entire democracy.”

President Joseph Biden, Jan. 2025

Outgoing Presidents have long issued warnings to the country. Our first chief executive, George Washington, told us to beware of ‘foreign entanglements.’ Dwight Eisenhower pointed to the emergance of the ‘military industrial complex’ as a matter for national concern. I wonder what Abe Lincoln might have said had he not been struck down suddenly by an assassin’s bullet. He might have returned to his admonitionment about the fragility of ‘houses that are divided cannot stand,‘ a prognosis that would have much applicability to our current fractured American polity.

I read an opinion piece this morning by Dave Zweiful. Now 84, he is the editor-emeritus of the Capitol Times. For decades, he waxed eloquently on the public issues of the day for this Madison, Wisconsin based media outlet. He was the classic avuncular wise man who represented calm and reason when passions had been riled. Yet, on the eve of Trump’s second inauguration, he lamented that never in his long life of both observing and commenting on public affairs had he ever conceived that so base and disgusting a man as Trump would rise to the top position in America. He shared my perspective in that we were all raised to believe that our leaders had to be smart, competent, and (at least somewhat) ethical … all the attributes distinctly missing in the Donald. How could such a thing happen?

I look out across our social and political landscape and what comes to mind is a pot of boiling water. The liquid has been driven to a froth from which escapes steam eager to speparate from the liquid mass left behind. At times, distinct bubbles can be seen. Yet, what is most certain is that our original societal metaphor of a melting pot is no more. We now longer merge together but quickly are flying apart.

Let us look at my evolving analogy a bit more closely. The droplets escaping the liquid’s mass are individuals seeking refuge from what they perceive as a world in turmoil. If you listened to Trump’s inaugural address earlier today, you might believe we were minutes away from the apocalypse. It is the ancient Fascist tactic of scaring the crap out of people while offering them solace in a savior … the new leader.

On the other hand, the distinct bubbles we begin to see are groups of like-minded persons who aggregate around salient themes. For example, we have the ultra nationalists who focused on ethnic identity; the religious fanatics who focused on cultural passions such as abortion and gay marriage; the economic elite who obsess about the public good as being a plot to impede their ability to acquire even more wealth; the extreme ‘rights’ oriented types who see an ever increasing array of social wrongs to be addresses. The list of issues and challenges around which to structure a group identity appears somewhat limitless.

Now, these interests have always been with us. But there is a difference today. Our methods for disseminating information has disintegrated into a fractal mess. No longer do we have a common source of nightly news that is delivered in sober and relatively neutral terms. In recent decades, we have dozens of conventional and boutique social media platforms designed to curate and deliver targeted messages to specific audiences. In addition, individuals aggressively seek out affinity groups in cyber space that support their specific, if sometimes bizarre, world views.

The bottom line is that many of us live in such bubbles. These individualized worlds are separated from the population as a whole and other bubbles floating freely out there. They are self-contained in terms of possessing a coherent philosophy even if that internal world seems bizarre to outsiders. These worlds are supported and reinforced by a stream of continuous messaging that emotionally inflame the recipients and keep them bonded to their illusions. Meanwhile, communication across bubbles becomes more difficult over time, since each bubble can choose its own highly selective information sources.

As a result, belief systems increasingly are divorced from reality. The MAGA crowd really believes that Biden was a disaster for the economy as President, even as we remain the envy of the outside world. Alas, it would appear that the ties between reality and belief are irrevocably broken.

In point of fact, only 25 percent of all respondents asserted that Biden was a good or excellent chief executive. Even Trump earned a 36 percent approval rate (around the top of similar approval rates for hard-right officials across other countries) while Obama received a 52 percent up vote. Obama did bring us out of the depths of the terrible 2008-9 housing crash but, by the numbers, his economy was not nearly as good as the one Biden is leaving Trump. In addition, our most recent WH occupant leaves office without major foreign wars and a nation with a host of excellent social measures of well-bring (e.g., lower crime rates, higher rates of health coverage).

The Wisconsin experience is a case in point for this reality-belief gap, the essence of our new bubble reality. Wisconsin is a classic swing state. Biden won here by 11,000 votes in the previous election while Harris lost here by about twice as many total votes last fall. From a variety of surveys, voter sentiment was negative around the time of the November election. The prevailing negativity focused on a bad economy. The Dems, many asserted, had abandoned working people. Inflation was out-of-control. You would expect to see people starving in the streets.

The reality, of course, was radically different. Nationally, the national GDP (a measure of overall income) was growing at a robust 3.1 percent in the 3rd quarter of 2024. Unemployment was 4 percent, a rate considered frictional by economists. (A frictional rate is one where virtually all seeking employment can find jobs). Consumer spending continued to be robust. And inflation had settled back to a 2.5 percent annual rate, close to the target rate set by Federal Reserve governors. As I oft repeat, our economy remained a primary driving behind global growth.

Despite widespread and erroneous beliefs among the body politic, the Wisconsin economy also was going gangbusters. The state unemployment rate was less than 3 percent last fall, well below the national rate. While Wisconsin had lost almost 84,000 jobs during the Trump administration, it had gained 186,000 during the Biden years. And the Dems did much to offset hardship during their tenure. Some 300,000 Wisconsin Medicare recipients are saving $475 per year in lower drug costs after passage of one Biden initiative. The Department of Education projects that 62,000 Wisconsonites will enjoy some $2.4 billion in relief from canceled student loan debt obligations. And Federal pandemic relief funds allowed Wisconsin Democratic Governor Tony Evers to shore up schools, infrastructure, child care, and health care even as State Republicans aggressively fought all of these investments in the public good despite a large $4 billion dollar budget surplus curtousy of a robust economy.

Now, what will the champion of the common man, our Donald Trump, do after he assumes the reins of government today. His nominee for Treasury Secretary, Scott Bessent, said the following during his hearing in Congress. Extending the 2017 Trump tax cuts is “the single most important economic issue of the day.” Those tax cuts, and the previous Republican cuts favoring the elite are primarily responsible for our national debt approaching $35 trillion dollars and the $50 trillion redistribution from the working classes to the top of the economic pyramid. Trump and the MAGA crowd are not the heroes of the working folk. They will continue the rape of those poor folk through regressive policies that began during the Reagan years.

While I struggle against blaming voters for their inability to see what is happening, they must bear some responsibility. Still, the newer communication technologies are evolving faster than the average person can comprehend. We only become aware of how deeply we are impacted until long after the fact. I remain pessimistic. Given our bubble-dominated world, I don’t see how we easily escape our private, group supported world views. I cannot see how we can claw our way back to a world based in something closer to a broader consensus about what is happening out there.

I will admit, however. I, too, am in my own personal bubble. I now belong to bluesky.com (having quit X and Facebook). Those I follow on this platform have similar leftist views to mine. My friends and followers here in Madison (and elsewhere) are highly educated (at top universities) professionals (doctors, lawyers, engineers, elite academics, etc.) who see the world through evidence and reason. We support one anothers values and perspectives. The materials we read, the observations we share, and general information we absorb tend to be filtered in ways that weed out contradictory input. Like all bubbles, ours is becoming less permeable over time, and perhaps more isolated. Moreover, it becomes more and more difficult to escape our private spheres. We look to it, and to one another, for comfort and support in a tempestuous world. As outgoing President Biden remarked, an oligarchy seems on the verge of taking over our political apparatus. But most of us remain impervious to that threat. Do our bubbles inure us to existential threats? Are we beyond reach?

I wish I had an answer to all this. I don’t. I’m afraid the insert below is all too true. As I keep saying. I’m so glad I’m old while the world about me spins out of control.

“If a nation expects to be ignorant and free … it expects what never was and never will be.”

Thomas Jefferson, 1816

Recently, Facebook announced the ending of its fact-checking initiative. Independent sources had reviewed millions of posts to weed out misinformation, disinformation, and outright fabrications. Zuckerberg, a favorite tech bro of the President-elect, complained that this institutional practice of META had proven to be politically biased. Checking accuracy is biased? I think it is more appropriate to say that the system was proving inconvenient to the richest (and most powerful) men in the world. The search for factual information surely is not easy, and certainly can be irritating to those seeking absolute power. However, it is seldom intentionally biased.

On the other hand, I must say that my personal experiences with FB’s community standards program bordered on the bizarre. I had three runs on this still popular platform, each of which ended badly. During my first, I reached 30,000 friends and followers, adding probably 50 new followers each day toward the end before they banned me for life. I snuck back on and quickly reached 7,000 plus friends and followers. Then, I was banned for life a second time, after being sentenced to their gulag (periods where my access was restricted) numerous times.

My despicable post on this occasion of my second life ban is found above … a picture of the iconic American hero Jesse Owens receiving one of his 4 gold medals at the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin. His Homeric performance in front of Hitler has been seen as a brave affront to one of the most despicable authoritarian regimes and philosophies in history … one based on the myth of Aryan dominance. My comment attached to the post was totally benign. I noted that FDR never invited Jesse to the White House but that was understandable (though still lamentable) given the President’s need for support from Southern Democrats to pass legislation designed to get us out of the great depression.

It is very difficult to detect why such a post would get anyone banned for life, never mind for a day. Of course, there is the German athlete giving the Nazi salute. In reality, this man wound up becoming a good friend of Owens, giving him suggestions that helped the Black athlete win gold in the long jump event, while he settled for silver much to the displeasure of Herr Hitler. And despite the salute, he was no Nazi. When his political perspective became all too clear, he was sent to the front and died fighting in the Italian campaign.

Most recently, my third forced exit, I was not banned formally. I merely found that I could no longer log into my account any longe. Neither could I change my password nor create a new account. I have become a permanent Facebook exile. And so, I have migrated to bluesky.com. I like it a lot. It seems less of a money grab and more of a place to connect intelligently with like-minded folk. And so far, they have not assigned me to social media jail, deselected any of my posts, nor banned me for life.

Facebook’s community standards program, on the other hand, has always been seen as a joke. You would be assigned to their gulag for using obvious irony, obvious to anyone with an IQ over 75 that is. I remember one clearly. I posted something along the following lines: All Democrats will vote next Tuesday, November 5. All Republicans will vote the following day, Wednesday. Any idiot would see the humor in this except for the geniuses at FB. They must have a terrible impression of just how dumb their audience might be. My legion of followers would continuously share horror stories on their incredible, almost incomprehensible, ineptness.

Their fact-finding, it should be noted, was separate from their community standards initiative and never struck me as so obviously incompetent. On occasion, I would have a post removed after being found to be suspect by independent fact checkers. That was rare, however, and it is true that I oft did repost information which I did not verify myself. On the whole, though, I did see this service as helpful since I didn’t want to become a conventional Republican who routinely distributed misinformation or, worse, disinformation.

Now, fact-checking is gone. The logic behind its removal remains suspect in my eyes … political bias? Really? Accurate information is politically biased? No! I suspect Zuckerberg’s motives are quite transparent. You cannot become a core member of the new oligarchic ruling elite if your platform is dedicated to bringing truth to the American people. Unvarnished facts are the bete noir of those who wish to exercise control over the body politic. And today, that control depends on controlling broad-based social-interaction platforms. Social media giants such as X and Facebook are essential to controlling the political narrative in a world dominated by a small elite. After all, how else can you manipulate the masses into supporting people and policies that obviously go against their self-interest.

The developing collaborative alliance between the billionaire tech bros and the new Administration assuming formal power on the 20th of January has rather deep roots. From the earliest days of political parties, newspapers oft aligned with one normative perspective or the other. They signed on as mouthpieces for Jefferson and the Democratic- Republican gang or Adams and the Federalists. Facts seldom got in the way of attacks on the enemy. Newspapers became propoganda outlets.

Times changed. The media eventually did become more neutral, professional, and fact-based during the 20th century. But mid-century, especially in the aftermath of civil rights successes and the extraordinary activism of the 89th Congress, conservatives organized to fight back at the liberal agenda. The start of this counter revolution is credited to Lewis Powell, a tobacco lawyer whom Nixon appointed to the Supreme Court in 1972. Powell saw how badly Goldwater’s conservative insurgency fared in 1964. Lyndon Johnson swept nearly all states with more than 60 percent of popular votes cast. Lewis saw a need to alter the default political narrative at the ground level.

The year before his appointment to the Court, he wrote an influential memo that became the long-term blueprint for, in his terms, saving capitalism, which he saw as being on the verge of extinction from leftist attacks. At the core of his strategic plan lay a call for conservatives to take control of key institutions … the courts, the media, and the places where ideas are formulated (e.g., think tanks and universities for example). Only in this way could the basic framework through which people saw government might be altered.

Supported by the uber- wealthy, the elements of this counter-revolution were quickly put in place. A host of organizations were established or strengthened starting in the 1970s … the Cato Institute, Americans for Prosperity, the Heritage Foundation, Manhatten Institute, AEI, Competitive Enterprise Institute, Honors Trust, the Federalist Society, the Judicial Crisis Network, the Republican State Leadership Committee, Alliance Defending Freedom, the 85 Fund, the State Policy Network, and so many more. In one way or another, they were all designed to reframe the dominant political narrative in America. It was the start toward a cultural transformation of the foundational narrative established by FDR in the New Deal.

New ideas (or old ideas repackaged) were one thing. Controlling the systems for disseminating those ideas was another. Picking up steam in the 1980s, right-wing zealots began to develop new media outlets or assumed control of existing options. The Sinclair conglomerate purchased hundreds of local TV stations. The billionaire Dickey Brothers bought up scores of local radio stations. Now, some 1,500 radio stations across the country are spewing right-wing propoganda continuously. Then, of course, we have Rupert Murdoch and Fox News to be followed by Breitbart, One America, and a host of blatantly hard-right propoganda outlets. As has been noted often, you can drive from the Atlantic to the Pacific while being assaulted continuously by local, right-wing talk shows. This shower of misinformation might occasionally be interrupted in a few major cities, but not often.

The right got some things correct from the beginning. I had an academic colleague who spent a moment or two at the University of Wisconsin before returning to Washington D.C. for her first love … liberal politics. She asserted back in the 1990s that Democrats and liberals were missing the boat. Those on the left communicated with one another. They presumed that their audience was as sophisticated as they were and would be moved by logic and evidence. In their arguments, they appealed mostly to the mind.

She thought that notion to be irredeemably naive. Conservatives, she noted, were writing opinion pieces and letters to the editors of smaller newspapers, not the NYT or the Washington Post, and in simple language. They focused on appealing to emotions, not the intellect. The liberal set very often saw change as a top-down movement where you first convinced the intelligentsia of your (evidence-based) truth before it was inevitably adopted and enacted by national elites.

Conservatives, on the other hand, saw the struggle from the bottom up. Work on the fears and historic prejudices of common folk. The right saw the battle in terms of effectiveness, not correctness. They certainly did not wallow in the realms of abstract principles such as fairness, rights, or justice. Conservatives never lost sight of a traditional, well tried, tactic. Keep people scared and continually offer them up scapegoats for them to fear. Then, of course, offer them a convenient savior at the proper moment. 🙄

I can’t recall any moment in my life when the mechanisms of social control have been cornered by an ideological perspective to such an extent. In addition, the redistribution of resources from average folk to the economic elite is, if anything, accelerating. We have not seen such inequality of wealth and opportunity since just before the great crash of 1929. That grand depression turned the prevailing political narrative on its head. This combination of control over information flows with unlimited resources poses the most distinctive threat to democracy in my experience.

Thus, I’m not sanguine about our current situation. Should I wish for a collapse of the economic order? I hate the thought of such widespread suffering. Yet, what else might turn us away from the impending oligarchic regime that threatens to consume? Money will flow upward at increasing rates given the proclivities of those assuming power. And the right’s increasing control of information and news portends that dystopian world George Orwell predicted early in my life. Reason will be upended while justice and equity will become faint, elusive apparitions. War will be peace: black will be white: up will be down. Even now, we see political projection on a grand scale. Republicans accused the Dems of weaponizing the Justice Department as Trump salivates at the thought of ending a government based on the law while punishing his many real and imagined enemies.

Eliminating fact checking on one of our largest social media platforms is merely a minor skirmish in this larger war. Our ability to nurture and sustain an informed public might already have been lost. But I might luck out. After all, I might not last another four years. Perhaps I won’t see the final end of the American experiment where Trump’s promise to his Evangelical supporters will be realized. Vote for me one last time, and you won’t have to worry about voting again. At linh last, the dictatorship of the hard right will be sold as our bright and shining future, our city on the hill.

Dictatorship is Democracy!

I’ve been trying to move on from my string of political rants but that has proven difficult as the country I once admired now swirles around the metaphorical toilet bowl. But I do have good intentions.

Let’s see what today brings. Vivek Ramaswamy, one of the tech bros who circles in Trump’s orbit, is not someone with whom I would normally agree. Recently, though, he went on a rant about the decline in America’s educational/cultural standards. According to him, we coddle our kids rather than demand the best of them. We want them to be happy rather than prepared for a competitive world. We indulge our young as opposed to challenging them to achieve their potential. As a result, most are entering adulthood ill prepared for what awaits them. Presumably, our educational systems have come to reflect this tendency that enables, or even facilitates, mediocracy. According to Vivek, that is why the U.S. tech industry needs to reach out to other countries for top talent, and why Trump’s hopes to cease the import of foreign talent is counterproductive.

I fear he is on to something. I read all the stories from American teachers lamenting the poor attitudes and performances of their students. Even before Covid, kids couldn’t use cursive, could not write coherent papers, could not (would not) read entire books. In general, American kids fared poorly on international assessments of educational achievement. I was stunned when elite academics from our top universities also suggested a lack of interest in reading among the best of American undergraduates.

Perhaps it is a generation enslaved to their cell phones, tablets, and insidious forms of social media. Apparently, though, many of our youth have trouble negotiating rather simple analytical challenges. I began noting such a decline late in my academic career. The preponderance of doctoral students gradually shifted from American candidates to foreign kids who were better prepared for the demanding quantitative requirements, certainly in economics but even in the discipline of Social Welfare. During my many years on the admissions committee for the Social Work masters program, I reviewed thousands of applications. I became discouraged with the endless number of candidates with near perfect undergrad GPAs but who could not string together coherent sentences on why they wanted to pursue this career. Some of my research colleagues, particularly the economists, lamented that the newer cohorts of foreign doctoral students were advanced in their computer and statistical skills but often lacked imagination, initiative, and an understanding of American culture and institutions. They were great at complex tasks that did not demand original thinking. The problem was that American applicants could not compete with their foreign counterparts in critical technical areas. They simply were not good enough. Alas, these trends preceded the rise of Facebook, WhatsApp, Tic-Toc and all such apps.

I recall my own youth. As I’ve written elsewhere, I grew up in a struggling working class neighborhood. For the most part, my long-ago peers were not the kids headed for future leadership or for financial success. In general, they did not spend their time in libraries, but rather in the streets as we employed our imaginations to create our own forms of rough and tumble amusements. I often joke that our folks routinely kicked us out of our apartments with the admonition not to return until the street lights were on. Parenting was way more casual back then. We were not supervised 24-7 and certainly not coddled by any means. But we did develop interpersonal skills, learned to negotiate social situations, and to develop personal initiative.

My grammar and junior high schools were hardly state of the art educational facilities. My elementary school, in particular, was located in an ancient, quite decrepit, building though, in truth, neither had the advanced bells and whistles that adorn contemporary schools. Yet, my cousin and I both recall getting a marvelous educational foundation that served us well through life. We could diagram sentences, developed a love for reading, and even I (a numbers retard) learned to handle fractions, long division, and square roots with some facility. Basically, we all learned to read, write, and to do basic computations (remember multiplication tables). It simply was expected of us.

To my recollection, I did not stand out among my peers back then, though that may be my imposter syndrome speaking. At home, my father did subscribe to the Reader’s Digest condensed books series and was a committed fan of the Perry Mason mystery series by Earle Stanley Gardner. I devoured all that came into our humble abode before getting my own library card. With no smart phones and apps to distract me, a lifetime love affair with reading came into my life quite early. I even dreamed of becoming a writer one day myself … not a common aspiration on the hard scrabble streets of my youth.

As Jonathan Haidt points out in his NYT best seller, The Anxious Generation, most of today’s kids mature in an enabling bubble. Their parents hover over them constantly, chauffering them from one structured activity to another while ensuring that their precious offspring never experience anything negative or disconcerting. They blame education professionals if their darling issue seems stressed or fails to get a top mark as a student. They blame others if their child is not popular enough or happy enough. They step in to smooth the way when kids encounter the speed bumps we all do in life. Nothing reflects our excessive protectiveness of the young as the trend of parents accompanying their recent university graduates to their initial job interviews. Really? It seems to me that our parents wanted us to deal with challenges as a form of reality-testing. Adulthood was hard, they said, so get used to that early on. Got into a scrap with a neighbor kid, you dealt with it on your own. Don’t look to mom and dad to be rescued.

In my generation, as I recall, we made our own decisions and found our own way in life. In my high school, you didn’t run to your parents if one of the teaching religious brothers whacked you for acting out in class. You knew your folks would only give you another whack at home. You didn’t run to them if you got a low grade in a subject. You knew they only would push you harder to study more. Needed some spending money, get a job. I started delivering newspapers and got my first real paying job at 14 years of age. And you were taught fundamental behavioral standards like being kind to elders. I recall, as a young tyke, refusing to give up my seat on the bus to an elderly female passenger when my father asked. I was shown the error of my ways when he got me home, obviously a lesson I never forgot. There were no excuses, just expectations to do better, to achieve more, to rise above what you thought you were, and to behave decently.

Perhaps there was something to this high expectations approach to raising the next generation. Ever notice the winners of national spelling Bs. It strikes me that they are invariably immigrants from India or some part of that foreign world. A few had only been here a few years with English being a second language. I recently noticed a meme (though it may have been around a bit) that showed the U.S. math team that finally had beaten the Asian teams in annual international competitions for the first time in well over a decade. Progress, I thought, until I looked closer at the picture. Every member of the U.S. math team clearly was of an Asian ethnic background. Nothing is wrong with that, but it does reinforce one of my priors. Nurture is critical. Culture is critical. I can recall a woman who worked for my late wife at the Wisconsin Supreme Court. She and her husband were Chinese immigrants (he worked in a local lab). My spouse found their approach to parenting their one son to be radically different from American norms. The kid was immersed in a range of activities (academic, musical, athletic) and expected to do very well in each. He was required to follow a 24-7 schedule. We thought it rather hard on the kid but, in the end, he was accepted at Harvard University. It simply was expected of him. That high-expectation approach seemed typical among Asian parents.

Another fact strikes me as potentially important to the dumbing down of America. Politicians used to elevate the general discourse in their public statements and speeches. They would reference great literature and sprinkle uplifting quotes in their talks. Who can forget the inspiring words of JFK or even LBJ (during passage of the civil rights bills). They relied on writers like Bill Moyers, Ted Sorenson, and Richard Goodwin. They knew that words and ideas moved people, could raise them above petty concerns and provincial perspectives. I can still hear Kennedy’s words from his Ich Bein Ein Berliner speech issued over six decades ago. Now we have a President-Elect whose public statements dwell in the gutter … that focus on divisive fear and hate.

Speaking of the Donald, is it true that he publicly stated that he might use force to take Greenland and Panama? Or that he wants to change the name of the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America? Or that windmills drive wales crazy? And his minions rage that the Dems hid Joe Biden’s decline? How hypocritical! It ought to be a very humorous, if perilous, four years.

More seriously, it cannot serve our future well when the man holding the highest office in the land cannot read or comprehend material at the level of a college freshman (at best) or who speaks with a 5th grade vocabulary. What lesson does that impart to the young of this nation? Oh look … you can be dumb as a sack of rocks, a virtual illiterate, and yet achieve fame and fortune and mass devotion? Just have no moral compass and cheat and lie your way to the top. A rather impoverished role model in my view.

Again, I am so glad I’m older than dirt. I am in a position to just bitch about things, not do anything. Even as I criticize some parents, let me be totally clear. I think it is the hardest job imaginable … way above my pay range. That’s why I avoided it like the plague.

I typically question myself when tempted to issue a ‘sky is falling‘ prophecy. Then again, hyperbole is the very essence of our national political discourse. Prior speculation on imminent ‘end days‘ often results in poor reviews, if not embarrassment, for the erstwhile prophet. How many times have we heard the claim that ‘this is the most important election in history?’ And yet, history continues on as if nothing of important took place.

Perhaps this is a mere reflection of my advanced years. However, the sense of doom floating around these days feels all too real to me. Yes, things were awful globally in 1944 when I was born. But the horrific evils of Fascism were on their last legs. The long terror of the Cold War had its cliff-hanging moments of doom (remember the Cuban Missile crisis), but rational minds always prevailed in the end. Really, who besides the war hawks believed in the domino theory (if Nam fell, then California was next). Besides, it was always clear to me (at least) that the Soviets would never conquer us, though we mutually were capable of obliterating society. Besides, it became clear early on that Communism would self-implode. And Islamic-terrorism? While 911 was jarring, it never could threaten our basic institutions. Just the opposite. The Jihadists, at best, would be irritants.

Now, things really do seem different … qualitatively different. I keep asking myself … why? My most common answer is that this threat to the nation is internal. It comes from within and, with this last election, perhaps reflects the normative sentiments of close to half of all Americans. They appear willing to abandon our democratic foundations. Worse, internal dissension is the most dangerous by far. Our Civil War had as many casualties as all our major foreign conflicts combined.

Putting Trump and his MAGA minions back in office suggests a fundamentally radical reorientation of the American political narrative. While the American experiment has been far from perfect, progress toward a true democracy prevailed during our 250 or so years of existence. Now, however, we are on the precipice of a radical reversal. Some form of authoritarianism appears to have been chosen over democracy, divisiveness over inclusion, power over the rule of law, raw competitiveness over compassion, money over equality, unsubstantiated belief over science and data, slavish devotion over merit and competence. And propoganda over expert analysis. To all appearances, we seem on the verge of a classic form of Fascism at home and an outdated shift to isolation globally even as the world moves toward greater integration. Trade wars and the disintegration of NATO? This is what a greater America promises? Really!

While I’m no Nostradamus, let us assume for a moment that my doomsday speculation has merit. What will our intermediate future look like? Stay with me for a bit while I lay out several distinct, but not mutually exclusive, paths … Authoritarianism, Kakistocracy, kleptocracy, and Theocracy.

In many ways, the Project 2025 plan is a blueprint for some kind of hierarchical pattern of leadership. It contains many elements, including savaging virtually all programs designed for the common good. But I am struck by how much damage it promises to do to the checks and balances of our system of government. If there was one dominant obsession among our founding fathers, it was a fear of an excessive centralized government. They tried to balance the needs for national action against the threat of overweening power at the center. Those taking control in two weeks intend to push the limits of a centralized authority, but exactly how. Let’s briefly touch on the threads listed above.

Authoritarianism … if you have dreams of revolution, democracy is the weakest avenue to success. The French Revolution quickly segued from noble sounding sentiments of equality and liberty to the guillotine premised on lawless terror. The early Leninist Communists abandoned worker councils (or Soviets) in favor of a dictatorship of the proletariat. Revolutionaries realize quickly that the masses are difficult to steer in any direction. Rather, the architects of fundamental change are seduced by the power inherent in authoritarianism, or virtual dictatorial rule. It just seems easier and more efficient.

The blueprint for an authoritarian government is laid out in Project 2025. While it has many threads (like savaging programs designed to serve the common good), their plan to impose a virtual dictatorship on our national government worries me the most. It proposes many changes that would shift the office of the President from a limited executive set of functions to one of rather unlimited imperial control. The intent, in the long run, is to ensure a continuity of control by so-called right-minded plutocrats.

I mention one aspect of the plan here. The blueprint calls for an evisceration of protections for federal civil service employees. Vast numbers would be moved from under the existing rules that harken back to the 1880s and the meritocratic reforms introduced by President Cleveland. In the new regime, these workers would become at-will employees. Their hiring and continuation of emoyment would utterly depend on their loyalty to the top. Merit would play little role in their service to the nation and the people. There would remain few ways for civil servants to question rules from the top.

Kakistocracy … a related form of governance is often called Kakistocracy or governing by the least competent. Why would anyone choose such a method of running national affairs. Well, it mostly is a default option. That is, when loyalty to the top managers trumps all else (pun intended), the number of competent candidates is dramatically reduced. Besides, they might think for themselves … Heaven forbid.

Think about this, Robert Kennedy Jr. as head of the Department of Health and Human Services. I worked there for a year (and consulted with staff there over many years). They deal with enormously complex policy issues that demand the highest level of knowledge and analytical skills. The staff I worked with were knowledgeable and highly professional. Kennedy’s qualifications are that he dropped off the ballot in several states, obsequiously sucked up to the Donald, and he had a brain worm in the past. His views on medicine harken back to the days of bleeding with leeches.

And take Matt Gaetz. Yes. Someone take him. Appointing this cretin as the head of DOJ was beyond the credibility pale. Fortunately, he was so bad that his appointment collapsed immediately after his record as a pedophile and drug user became public. But surely, Trump had to know when he announced his appointment. He just didn’t care. It is as if Trump sits around contemplating who is the most ridiculous candidate for each position. The worse they are, the better they look to him. And the easier it will be for him to control them.

Kleptocracy … This is a form of governance with a rather long tradition in American history. Essentially, this approach suggests that wealth is equivalent to power. Money has always played a big role in government, especially during the Gilded Age of the late 19th century and the roaring twenties of the decade preceding the great depression. There have been many attempts at redressing the oversized role of money in politics, the McCain-Feingold legislation being an important example. All failed in the end.

Now, it seems impossible to turn back the tide of riches dominating principles in our public life. Inequality has reached levels reminiscent of the late 1920s, or just before our most dramatic economic collapse. Such a concentration of treasure among the privileged few bequeethes enormous possibilities for increasing political control on to them. The MAGA crowd does not even bother to conceal that they are in bed with a few wealthy oligarchs. The Dems struggle to maintain some independence, but that becomes increasingly difficult as political fortunes become increasingly dependent on money.

It has been widely accepted that the supply-side tilt of federal policies since Reagan has resulted in a $50 trillion dollar shift of wealth from average folk to elite. At the same time, the so called middle class has been hollowed out … falling by some 11 percentage points since 1980. It strikes me that Trump’s DOGE, the department of government efficiency, will be a transparent effort to savage outlays in most programs helping average or struggling folk. Under Musk and Ramaswamy, these program recissions will be exploited to justify new tax cuts favoring the ultra wealthy. And that is just the beginning. The bottom line is this … the next four years will witness an unabashed raid on the public treasury unlike any we have seen in history. The spiral will accelerate … more money, more power to the elite. Heaven help us.

Theocracy … the final directional option for the future of our government is a well-known variant called theocracy. This is where we jettison all pretense to a secular government in favor of one based on religious beliefs and authority. If you need an example, simply look at Iran or Afghanistan. In such places, secular laws have been replaced by the Sharia where the views and pronouncements of Mullahs outweigh those of experts and elected officials. The interpretation of divine will overshadows all secular considerations.

Of course, the big question is which God and which representatives of that God will dictate divine will in public life. Obviously, the Bible as an arbiter of public policy is a very rough and inexact tool. I mean, do we really want to reimpose slavery, as endorsed in the Old Testament, or stone to death female adulterors … probably a bit harsh for contemporary tastes. I’m sure that the Evangelicals waiting for the anointing of their political hero have other, more favorable, thoughts on these matters.

In my opinion, the theocratic option has never been a serious alternative. It has been a convenient misdirection tactic to be employed by the plutocrats while redirecting vast sums up the fiscal pyramid. The ploy is simple. Confuse and distract the victims with contentious normative issues so they don’t notice the ongoing theft bankrupting them. Things like abortion, alleged attacks on Christians and (unbelievably) Christmas, and threats to Christian cultural hegemony are enough to keep the pot boiling and the sheep distracted. So far, I have not seen any evangelical luminaries ascending into real positions of authority, but the scam undoubtedly will continue, if not increase.

Which of these strategic threads will dominate? All to some degree. The kleptocratic (or oligarchic) alternative likely has the advantage (to my eyes at least). Money talks while bullshit walks, as the old saying goes. But each approach plays a role in the entire scheme of things. And so, each will be featured from time to time, depending on circumstances. For example, if the economy sours, expect a resurgence of theocratic concerns and issues.

Unfortunately, we cannot escape one disturbing reality. The man at the center of this circus is, without question, the least competent and the most damaged public figure in my lifetime. I laugh every time the MAGA minions attack the Dems for hiding Biden’s cognitive decline. Really?

It is readily apparent that the MAGA crowd engages in crass projection … assigning behaviors to their opponents that they have themselves mastered all too well. But this one is over the top. Just read the exposes written by those who closely worked with Trump in the first go around (those who were not part of his cult). They all were appalled by his cognitive and ethical shortcomings. Many spent their time trying to keep the Donald from doing even more damage. You should never cast stones if you live in a glass house.

So, wither America? I have not the slightest clue. But I do feel we face the most perilous challenges in my lifetime. Worse, we are at the mercy of an unstable narcissist driven mostly by a dark and forbidding paranoia. I haven’t prayed since my late teens, but I just may start again.

This past year yielded much bitter fruit, including yet more evidence suggesting that so many of our fellow citizens are either gullible, narrow-minded, or pathologically selfish.

Yet, as I look about at the gifts provided to us by nature, I remain inspired. We at least have the artistic expressions of divinely imagined creations.

I only wish that my fellow humans might be worthy of what nature oft bequests to us.