Tom's Musings

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

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

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

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

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

THE BIGGER DANGER!

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

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

General Richard Shirreff Past Dep. Commander of NATO

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

R.I.P.

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

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

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

😞

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rick Wilson

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

AMIDAH!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.