Consequences…

As the evidence of Trump’s mental illness gets stronger and more difficult to hide, and the resistance gets stronger, it’s possible to envision an end to MAGA’s horrific assault on America’s philosophy, norms and institutions and to engage in speculation about what comes next. Just how much of the damage being done is irrevocable? What can be fixed, and what harms lie beyond repair?

There is no denying the amount of damage done in just the first hundred days. It isn’t simply the “I’m king (or Pope) delusions–Trump and Musk have mostly resembled toddlers who somehow got control of the family’s technology, not understanding how it works or what the intended uses are–and are just gleefully smashing mechanisms they don’t begin to understand.

The rest of the world has looked on with a mix of horror and schadenfreude. (Our anguish has actually prompted some sanity elsewhere–both Canada and Australia have repudiated Trump-lite candidates in the past couple of weeks.) The Guardian recently reported that the United States has been added to the watchlist maintained by an international organization monitoring democratic progress and regression.

Civicus, an international non-profit organization dedicated to “strengthening citizen action and civil society around the world”, announced the inclusion of the US on the non-profit’s first watchlist of 2025 on Monday, alongside the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Italy, Pakistan and Serbia.

The watchlist is part of the Civicus Monitor, which tracks developments in civic freedoms across 198 countries. Other countries that have previously been featured on the watchlist in recent years include Zimbabwe, Argentina, El Salvador and the United Arab Emirates.

Not exactly the company we’re used to keeping….

The decision to add the US to the first 2025 watchlist was made in response to what the group described as the “Trump administration’s assault on democratic norms and global cooperation.”

In the news release announcing the US’s addition, the organization cited recent actions taken by the Trump administration that they argue will likely “severely impact constitutional freedoms of peaceful assembly, expression, and association.”

It’s instructive that the organization cited assaults in two separate domains: democratic norms that affect our internal governing behaviors, and the attacks targeting international cooperation, because my own reading of the daily damage being done reflects a similar division.

Assuming the success of what I have been calling the resistance, We the People will face the formidable–but ultimately “do-able”– task of reconstructing our federal governing apparatus. It won’t be easy, and a lot of Americans will be badly hurt before repairs can be made. Much like the occupants of a house destroyed by a hurricane, ordinary citizens will have lost a great deal–but they can also (to use Biden’s terminology) “build back better.” (Perhaps the threatened drastic cuts to Medicaid and other social welfare programs will finally prompt us to emulate the other Western countries where citizens have access to national health care systems. Etc.)

In other words, given sufficient time, Americans can repair the domestic damage. That is very unlikely to be the case with our international stature. Trump has demonstrated–vividly–that America cannot be trusted, that we are always just one election away from irrationality and chaos. We are already seeing the EU step up to fill the leadership gap in NATO. (We are also seeing China and Russia savor the moment–a more troubling development.)

America is in the process of learning an important lesson: it’s much too late to retreat from the global economy. Trump’s insane tariffs will hurt us badly, but the fallout will also demonstrate the folly of trying to retreat from an increasingly integrated world ecosystem. We can re-enter the global marketplace and economic reality, but I am convinced that the days of America’s overwhelming global dominance are over. Permanently.

And pardon me for my arguably unpatriotic reaction to that reality: it’s probably for the best. Our efforts to control the international order have too frequently been Machiavellian rather than noble. We have certainly done a great deal of good–which is why the assault on USAID is so horrific–but we’ve also flexed our international muscle in ways that were unwise and even shameful.

A global order in which we actively participate but don’t dominate–an international order in which no one country is able to call the shots–would be a step forward.

And while we’re not telling everyone else what to do and how to do it, we’ll have a civic house to rebuild.

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The War On Women Continues

One of the constants of Trumpism has been its war on women. Trump himself sees women only as sexual objects; the Christian Nationalists who support him see us as “feeders and breeders”– designed by God to submit to men and produce babies.

I was reminded of MAGA’s war on women when I read that Trump’s “big, beautiful budget” will defund Planned Parenthood, among other obscenities that will differentially hurt women.

During the first Trump  administration, Trump blocked women’s access to health care through legislation, regulations, judicial appointments, and legal action, slashing funding for family planning, rolling back rules requiring employers to offer no-cost birth control coverage, and revoking multiple protections against sexual harassment, sexual assault and discrimination.

Trump II has been more of the same–and then some.

Trump has decimated boards that administer workplace anti-discrimination laws, rescinded prior Executive Orders against discrimination, reduced enforcement of the Pregnant Workers Act, and undercut civil rights and anti-discrimination laws across the government, with anti-DEI efforts front and center. The administration has cut funding for research on women’s health, erased vital information from federal websites, and eliminated the Gender Policy Council. It proposes huge cuts to Medicaid, SNAP and other programs disproportionately depended upon by women and children. (There’s much more at the link.)

All of these measures are part of the Right’s hysterical resistance to culture change.

A significant minority of Americans feel existentially threatened by the progress of women and minorities. That progress challenges their worldviews, their beliefs about the “proper” order of the world. Trump was elected by those hysterical people. Even those who recognized his personal repulsiveness supported him because he promised to reverse what most of us consider social progress– to turn back the cultural changes that so frighten and infuriate them.

I wondered what research tells us about whether government can reverse cultural changes, so I looked into it.  

Studies tell us that such efforts face significant structural, social, and generational resistance. It turns out that entrenched social changes are really difficult to reverse. Shifts of attitudes about race, gender roles, sexuality, and religion occured over generations, and as a result, contemporary perspectives on individual autonomy and diversity are unlikely to be reversed.

 
 
 
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Three Cheers For The Indiana Bar!

It’s easy to be critical of Indiana, and especially of the collection of ideologues, MAGA wanna-bes and invertebrates who dominate our state legislature, so it is especially gratifying when an Indiana organization speaks up for democratic governance and the rule of law.

That organization–hopefully, one among many to come–is the Indiana Bar, the organization that represents the legal profession in Indiana. A few days ago, the president of the Bar association released the following statement. In normal times, this statement would be anodyne–a “this is who we are” reminder to citizens who may not appreciate the role of law and lawyers in maintaining stability and civic fairness. But in the Age of Trump and MAGA, it is a heartfelt and incredibly important reaffirmation of the importance of the rule of law and the determination of lawyers to protect it.

Here is that letter.

Each year on May 1, Law Day offers a moment to reflect on the foundational principles that shape our democracy. Chief among them is the Rule of Law, a concept that not only guides our profession but ensures a just and orderly society.

But what exactly is the Rule of Law? And why does it matter?

At its core, the Rule of Law means that no one is above the law and that laws are applied fairly and consistently. It guarantees that our rights and liberties are protected through transparent legal processes. The Rule of Law empowers a parent to challenge a school policy, enables a small business owner to enforce a contract, and protects a citizen who questions government actions. It ensures that power is exercised within bounds, and that all individuals are held accountable under the same legal standards.

The Rule of Law also depends on an impartial and independent judiciary. It is enshrined in both our U.S. and Indiana Constitutions and has long served as a safeguard against tyranny and injustice. Further, under our system of justice, everyone has a right to representation. Lawyers must be free to represent clients without fear of retribution, and clients must be free to choose their counsel without worry of sanction. Our country’s founders, having lived through systems of unchecked authority, built our country rooted in the idea that the rule of law must govern.

Speaking during the first National Law Day in 1958, President Dwight D. Eisenhower said: “The clearest way to show what the Rule of Law means to us in everyday life is to be reminded of what happens when there is no Rule of Law.” He saw this firsthand during World War II while battling Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan. His words remain relevant as we consider the global and domestic challenges that test the strength of our institutions today.

Respect for the Rule of Law is not a given; it must be valued and actively upheld by each generation. One of the greatest threats today is a growing misunderstanding of the Rule of Law. We see its benefits in every trial and every instance of due process. As legal professionals, we have a duty not only to follow the law, but to promote it. That means defending judicial independence, the ability of attorneys to zealously represent clients, and protecting the right of all people to be heard.

President Ronald Reagan put it succinctly: “True peace rests on the pillars of individual freedom, human rights, national self-determination, and respect for the Rule of Law.”

President John F. Kennedy likewise offered this reminder: “Only a respect for the law makes it possible for free people to dwell together in peace and progress… Certain other countries may respect the rule of force. We respect the Rule of Law.”

These ideals are not partisan. They are foundational.

The Indiana State Bar Association stands firm in this commitment. We believe that the Rule of Law is more than a professional ideal, it is the bedrock of our civic life. And we call on every Hoosier attorney, judge, legal professional, and citizen to join us in protecting and promoting it. If the Rule of Law suffers, we all suffer. If the Rule of Law is threatened, we are all threatened. By deeply understanding its significance, honoring its principles, and vigorously defending it, we ensure that the Rule of Law, America’s foundation, endures undiminished.

Let this Law Day be not only a commemoration, but a recommitment.

Michael Jasaitis

ISBA President

Kudos to the Indiana Bar Association!!

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Being An American

I recently happened on a post I wrote in the run-up to the 2000 election, addressing a question that had been posed to me during a speaking event. The question was “What does it mean to be an American, and how will the answer to that question matter in the 2020 election?

I argued that being American requires understanding, supporting and protecting what I have frequently referred to as “The American Idea”– the essential elements of our country’s version of liberal democracy: majority rule and the libertarian brake on that majority rule, aka the Bill of Rights. American identity isn’t based upon race or religion or country of origin–it is based upon support of the American Idea.

I also argued that, in order to protect the legitimacy of U.S. government, we needed to address the escalating assaults on majority rule– gerrymandering (the practice whereby legislators choose their voters, rather than the other way around); the growth of vote suppression tactics (everything from voter ID laws to the spread of disinformation); the disproportionate influence of rural voters thanks to the operation of the Electoral College; the growing (mis)use of the filibuster, which now requires a Senate supermajority to pass anything; and the enormous influence of money in politics, especially in the wake of Citizens United.

Those assaults on democratic legitimacy were troubling enough in 2020. They clearly enabled the further assault on American democracy that we are experiencing under a mentally-ill would-be autocrat and his MAGA cult in 2025.

Trump hasn’t limited his efforts to the assault on majority rule. He has also taken Musk’s chainsaw to the individual liberties protected by the Bill of Rights, refusing to recognize–let alone honor– fundamental rights to due process, free speech and (above all) civic equality.

Individual liberty in the United States is protected by the constraints on majority rule required by the Bill of Rights and the 14th Amendment. Those provisions–those protections–mirror the libertarian principle that animated the nation’s Founders: the right of all people to live as they see fit, so long as they do not thereby harm the person or property of others, and so long as they are willing to grant an equal liberty to others. That “live and let live” principle doesn’t just  require limitations on government overreach; it requires that we combat official sanctions of racism, anti-Semitism, homophobia, misogyny, Islamophobia…all of the “isms” that deprive some citizens of equal civic status and that operate to deny them their individual liberties.

It’s one thing to understand Trump himself: he’s obviously damaged– needy, massively ignorant, intellectually limited, declining into dementia. The harder question is, what explains the MAGA cult? What leads millions of presumably sane Americans to cheer on Trump’s defiantly anti-American efforts?

Part of the answer is civic ignorance; understanding and protecting both majority rule and individual rights requires an informed citizenry–something we don’t have, as mountains of data clearly show. When people don’t know how their government is supposed to work, they are less likely to recognize assaults on its governing philosophy. But civic illiteracy doesn’t explain MAGA, although it undoubtedly feeds it.

Racism, White Christian Nationalism and other associated bigotries are at the root of MAGA and Trumpism. America has never been able to overcome the periodic emergence of primal hatreds that motivated the Confederacy and the KKK, despite the fact that those hatreds are contrary to everything that defines Americanism.

Back in that 2020 talk, I said I was convinced that our civic challenge was about America’s structural and systemic distortions—that (assuming a Biden victory) our first order of business should be to confront the misuses of power that make fair and productive political debate about substantive issues impossible–that these failures of American governance needed to be addressed before any of the policymakers we might elect would be able to discuss, let alone pass, rational, evidence-based policies.

The need to address those systemic distortions has become more imperative, as we watch Trump take advantage of them to turn America into a very different country. As I said in 2020, you can’t drive a car if it’s lost its wheels, and you can’t govern if your institutions have lost their legitimacy.

Unless the systems are fair, unless we can rely on obedience to the rule of law by those in office, no minority of any sort–political, religious, racial, economic–is safe.

Assuming we emerge from this lawless and destructive administration more or less intact, we have our work cut out for us.

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The Middle Finger Of The South

Ah, Indiana! Long understood by sentient Hoosiers as the middle finger of the south, a state trying valiantly to replace Mississippi at the bottom of the civic barrel.

I thought about Indiana’s retrograde governance when I came across an article from The Bulwark, arguing that while Trumpism is clearly incompatible with liberal democracy, it is quite compatible with the governance of  states that have never quite emerged from the Confederacy.

Liberal democracy has never put down deep roots in the South in the way it did across the rest of the country. The region never really abandoned its warped electoral politics and inclination to single-party cronyism, a Southern political instinct that helps explain how Democratic dominance transformed so completely into Republican one-party rule following the civil rights era. Inequality continues to define economic life in the region. Southern states have remained hostile to many minority groups, particularly LGBTQ Americans, and they are wildly out of step with most other states on reproductive rights. And incarceration in the South remains both less humane and more common than in other regions.

Trumpism is intent upon “southernizing” America. (Okay, I know that isn’t really a word…) The article quoted our creepy vice-president, JD Vance, who during the campaign opined that “American history is a constant war between Northern Yankees and Southern Bourbons” and went on to conclude that “whichever side the hillbillies are on, wins.” He added that he applies that image to America’s current politics , because–in his (Yale-educated) hillbilly view– ” the Northern Yankees are now the hyperwoke, coastal elites.”

The Bourbons, in this understanding, were the Southern planters and professionals who opposed Reconstruction. They fomented discord among poor whites to ensure that they would focus their political energies on their peers rather than those who were their de facto rulers. That elite applauded when, In 1896, the Supreme Court approved segregation with the principle of “separate but equal.”

In 1898, America’s first coup d’etat took place as the Democrats of Wilmington, North Carolina issued a “White Declaration of Independence.” They were attacking the coalition of black Republicans and white Populists that had control of the local government in the 1890s, which the old Confederates of the city found intolerable. With their resentment and rage being fueled by white Democratic powerbrokers, two thousand armed men forced out the duly elected government. None were more pleased by this result than their Bourbon backers.

The article reports that this “banker-planter-lawyer” class is largely responsible for the South’s political and economic underdevelopment–that it was “ostensibly pro-business but viciously self-interested” and that as a consequence, the South as a region still lags economically—pinned down by poverty and hobbled by the absence of public investments. The states have few worker protections, and its working classes have difficulty earning a living wage, making It “virtually impossible” to exist on the income of a single, low-wage, 40-hour-a-week job, especially in the absence of social welfare/healthcare.

That paragraph could have been written about Indiana.

From “Right to Work” (for less) legislation, to one of the nation’s most regressive tax systems, to the legislature’s constant knee-bending to landlords who prey on the poor, to vicious cuts in Medicaid, to restrictions on abortion that are sending medical practitioners out of the state, to the theft of tax dollars from public schools in order to subsidize wealthy Hoosiers and religious schools…the list goes on.

Some years ago, I wrote about ALICE, an acronym for Asset Limited, Income Constrained, Employed; it applies to households with income above the federal poverty level, but below the actual, basic cost of living. United Way of Indiana found that more than one in three Hoosier households was unable to afford the basics of housing, food, health care and transportation, despite working hard, that 37% of households lived below the Alice threshold, (14% below the poverty level and another 23% above poverty but below the cost of living), that these were families and individuals with jobs, so most didn’t qualify for social services in Indiana, and that the jobs they fill are critically important–these are child care workers, laborers, movers, home health aides, heavy truck drivers, store clerks, repair workers and office assistants—and they are unsure if they’ll be able to put dinner on the table each night.

And just like those southern Bourbons, our elected overlords couldn’t care less. They focus instead upon deflecting responsibility by turning struggling Hoosiers against each other–hence the legislative attacks on trans children and DEI and moronic pronouncements that Black folks benefitted from the 3/5ths compromise. 

The theory is, if we’re provided with scapegoats, perhaps we won’t notice the Bourbon corruption, or the lack of public investment in social and physical infrastructure…

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