Identity And Politics

Apologies in advance for a trip into philosophical musing, rather than current events…

As part of my effort to understand our current disaster of a government, and especially my understanding of the people who continue to support it, I’ve been re-reading an old classic: Eric Hoffer’s “The True Believer,” which I hadn’t read since college. (A long time ago!) Hoffer addressed the phenomenon of mass movements, and the reasons for their appeal and emergence. Basically, he argued that attachment to such movements is due to a personal emptiness and an accompanying need to feel a part of something larger than the self.

As I read, I highlighted observations that seemed particularly relevant to our current time (somewhat challenging in a Kindle!), and especially relevant to the appeal of MAGA and White “Christian” nationalism.

Hoffer wrote that “the less justified a man is in claiming excellence for his own self, the more ready is he to claim all excellence for his nation, his religion, his race or his holy cause.” In “The True Believer,” he frequently notes the religious character of mass movements and revolutions–writing that the hammer and sickle and the swastika “are in a class with the cross.”

Hoffer argued that people join mass movements to escape individual responsibility–that membership in a mass movement offers frustrated and/or unhappy folks a refuge from “the anxieties, barrenness and meaninglessness of an individual existence.”  Belonging allows one to escape an “intolerable individual separateness” by immersion in and identification with a tribe of some sort.

Hoffer’s analysis points to one of the many ways we can “slice and dice” a population and explain otherwise mystifying political differences.

As regular readers of this blog know, I’m a “true believer” in civil liberties. I celebrate America’s Bill of Rights because it protects an individual autonomy I cherish–the right of each of us to live a life in accordance with our individual goals and beliefs, so long as we do not harm the person or property of others and so long as we recognize the equal rights of those who differ.

It took me a long time to recognize that for some people individual liberty and autonomy are terrifying, and recognizing the equal rights of those who are different is heresy.

When I was at the ACLU, I sometimes debated the folks–mostly academics– who argued against “too much” liberty and championed a point of view called “communitarianism.” Communitarians argued that social cohesion was more important than liberal individualism and the emphasis on civil liberties and civic equality that were an outgrowth of Enlightenment philosophy. Their position was that, since individuals are necessarily “embedded” in various groups and institutions, they need to conform to the overarching values of those groups in order to find meaning in their lives.

Obviously, there’s a mean between extremes–too much liberty is anarchy and too much community is communism. The Greeks were right to advocate a “golden mean.” (It is also obvious that what constitutes “too much” is a matter of opinion…)

How does this very abstract debate operate in American society?

Civil libertarians understand that some people disapprove of others, but we take the position that “If you don’t like gays, or Jews, or Muslims, or whoever, fine. Don’t hang out with them. Don’t invite them over for dinner. But don’t try to take away their rights. Live and let live is the American creed. Those who are intent upon elevating the beliefs of their religions or cultures–their “tribes”– will advocate for rules that impose their tribal beliefs on society at large, disadvantaging or even outlawing people of whom they disapprove.

If there is a middle ground, I’m having trouble envisioning it.

If Hoffer and others are right–if people who are frustrated with their lives and terrified of freedom and personal responsibility are prime targets for membership in intolerant mass movements–we need public officials who understand the need to address the causes of that frustration to the extent possible. We live in a time of dramatic, complex and unsettling technological and environmental change, much of which is beyond the ability of even a wise and competent government to ameliorate–and right now, we don’t have a wise or even minimally competent government.

But diverting public monies from wars of choice to measures improving the quality of life and a rational social safety net would be a start…

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The Simple Truth

Academic types (I plead guilty) like to explain that reality is complicated and it isn’t always easy to determine just what causes have produced just what effects. When it comes to relatively complex policy issues, that’s (usually) true. But sometimes, we humans find ourselves in a situation that is far simpler to describe than the pundits and political scientists acknowledge.

Jason Linkins recently reminded us that there is a very simple explanation for why we are in an insane war in Iran.

What can be said about Trump’s war with Iran that isn’t already abundantly obvious? The answer: not much. It is not going well, and it probably won’t end well. But having spent time in the salt mines of Trump punditry, I can tell you that we’re going to endure a difficult round of think pieces purporting to explain How This Happened. So maybe this is the best time to assert the obvious, using my favored rubric of Trump analysis: Imagine if the dumbest person in the world and humanity’s biggest asshole were the same person, and that guy was president. Then imagine he started a war with Iran. Now check the news. One look, and here’s what you should be thinking: “Yep, that tracks.”

As with all of Trump’s presidential exploits, success is always constrained by two factors: The aforementioned sharp limitations of his intellectual capabilities and the fact that he is perpetually surrounded by an inner circle made up of clowns somewhere on the spectrum between “rampantly evil” and “thoroughgoing dipshit.”

Lnkins reminds us that the purported goals of this exercise shift with the days of the week–sometimes it’s regime change, sometimes a nuclear threat that knowledgeable folks discount…the story changes with the weather. (Like me, Linkins thinks the “wag the dog” thesis deserves consideration–the more we learn about the Epstein files, the more likely it becomes that full disclosure would confirm what most of us already believe about this sorry excuse for a human being.)

Whatever the actual motivation–and it sometimes seems as if both Trump and Hegseth confuse war with a video game–we’ve seen Trump ask for help from the allies he has consistently demeaned and threatened. Trump seems amazed that  countries he has routinely spit on, countries upon which he has imposed shifting levels of punative tariffs, countries that are now facing the consequences of his third-grade understanding of how the world works–are now uninterested in saving his behind.

As Linkin notes, it is especially maddening (at least to sentient beings) to see the administration react to Iran’s clampdown of the Strait of Hormuz

as if it’s some unfair trick the Iranians pulled and not one of the most singularly obvious strategic choices the regime could make under the circumstances—the other being Iran’s decision to attack other Gulf states, knowing that it would be a pain point for the U.S. both economically and diplomatically. But by Trump’s own admission, the very fact that Iran retaliated in any way has caught him completely flat-footed. “They weren’t supposed to go after all these other countries in the Middle East,” he told reporters on Monday. “They hit Qatar, Saudi Arabia, UAE, Bahrain, Kuwait. Nobody expected that. We were shocked!” Right now, there are 13-year-old kids about to invade Kamchatka in their first-ever game of Risk that look like Carl von Clausewitz compared to Trump.

America may rid itself of this disaster of an administration. We may–may–reform some of the obvious structural flaws that got us here. (Curing the deep racism and White Christian nationalism of the MAGA cult is, unfortunately, less likely.) But the rest of the world will never again trust a United States that elevated so demonstrable a moron/asshole/lunatic to the Presidency. As Paul Krugman recently put it, Americans are now watching scenes from the death of Pax Americana.

At this point, we face a variety of consequences–all bad–including a not insignificant threat of worldwide economic disaster. And it will be our fault.

A few days ago, I had breakfast with a former colleague, who shared his fury with the people who he reminded me are ultimately to blame for the demise of American hegemony: the voters who supported a man who wasn’t simply obviously and clearly unqualified, but who was a convicted felon, an adjudicated rapist, a highly-likely pedophile, a demostrable ignoramus and a certifiable moron.

Actually, it’s a toss-up between those voters and the would-be free-riders who didn’t bother to cast ballots.

Somehow, “told you so” doesn’t seem satisfactory….

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From The Middle Out

One of the most depressing aspects of contemporary politics has been the descent from civil debate to playground taunts. Name calling has replaced reasoned disagreement, an unfortunate shift vastly accelerated by the election of a President whose maturity and intellectual development stopped somewhere around third grade.

I have been particularly annoyed by the revisionist and entirely unfair criticisms leveled at former President Joe Biden. One can grant his deterioration with age without ignoring or diminishing the quality of his leadership, his policy decisions and his appointments of highly qualified people.

Despite the accusations of the bratty child who currently occupies the Oval Office, Biden left Trump an economy that was recognized globally as the best in the post-pandemic world. His approach to economic growth wasn’t simply light-years more grounded and sophisticated than Trump’s ignorant championing of tariffs and fossil fuels–it represented a welcome break from less empirically-grounded approaches, seen in his insistence that economic growth happens not from “trickle down,” but “from the middle out.”

A transcript of a 2024 conversation from Pitchfork Economics–a podcast by David Goldstein and Nick Hanauer (one of my longtime favorites)–featured a conversation with Jared Bernstein, who chaired Biden’s Council of Economic Advisers, and it focused on Biden’s philosophy. As Bernstein explained,

Bidenomics starts from a framework that growth originates from the bottom up and the middle out. You asked for a contrast, and that’s very different than trickle-down economics, which not only doesn’t work—and that’s an empirical statement, not a judgmental one—but has in fact exacerbated inequality and damaged growth, particularly through an inability to make the kind of investments that you see our administration making. So let’s get to the pillars of Bidenomics because investment is one of them.

Empowering workers. Nick, you and I, as long as we’ve known each other, have talked about the importance of worker bargaining power. And in fact, that word power, those five letters, mean a ton to how economies function and yet they’re little-discussed in much of classical economics.

Pillar two: Investment. Reversing decades of disinvestment in our public goods and in many cases, partnering with the private sector to invest in domestic production in key areas where markets have consistently failed to provide adequate investment.

And pillar three: Competition and lowering costs. So those are the three pillars.

The podcast was taped in February of 2024, and Bernstein shared some data from that year, noting that the expectations for job growth in January had been for an additional 185,000 jobs, but 353,000 were created. The unemployment rate had been below 4% for two years. (And forgive my snark, but Biden–unlike Trump– hadn’t found it necessary to fire the statistician responsible for producing that data…)

As Hanauer noted, any reasonable examination of the empirical economic evidence available shows an absolutely consistent pattern: when you follow the policies that the Biden administration pursued, the results are higher job creation, higher GDP growth rates, and increased productivity— far better economic results than are achieved by cutting taxes for rich people.

Bernstein agreed, pointing out that growing an economy “from the bottom up and the middle out” produces strong demand from a vast majority of the population. The top 1%, however, is (duh!) only 1% of the population. When the vast majority are doing well, that not only boosts growth through consumption (this is a 70% consumer spending economy) it also  signals investors that the investment climate is good– reassuring them that consumer spending is strong and the broad middle class is strong.

Bernstein noted that the difference between the economics to which Biden subscribed and the older “trickle-down” is essentially the difference between economists who are “empirically driven”– economists who look at the real world results of policies, and reject elegant theories about how the world should work that rather clearly haven’t worked–and others.

But the “middle-out” approach is broader than encouraging demand. The supply side matters, too. Core to a healthy economy is the promotion of competition so that markets function properly. That means getting rid of junk fees, giving Medicare bargaining power, eliminating the overuse of non-competes, and other measures to ensure a vigorous marketplace. Bernstein quotes Biden: “capitalism without competition looks a lot more like exploitation.”

There’s much more in the linked transcript, and I encourage you to click through and read it. Biden inherited an economy just emerging from a global pandemic, and got far too little credit for bringing down the inflation that pandemic had produced. We’re now seeing what happens when an economic ignoramus assumes power, and blames all his own blunders on his predecessor.

The rich get richer…and we’re back to “trickle-down.”

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Simon Says

One of the (far-too-many) daily newsletters I receive is Simon Rosenberg’s Hopium Chronicles. Rosenberg is a longtime Democratic pollster, and provides nerds like yours truly with results of the latest survey research, in-depth descriptions of candidates around the country, and other “inside baseball” data. Recently, however, in the middle of an encouraging report about Trump’s dismal and declining approval ratings, he provided a summary of where this mad, intellectually-challenged, would-be king has taken our country.

Here are the two paragraphs that “tell it like it is.”

He promised no forever wars and launched a forever war. He promised lower prices and he raised them. He promised a strong economy and we are getting job loss. He promised to drain the swamp and has ushered in an age of unprecedented corruption. He promised to make us strong and respected in the world and instead he is making China and Russia great again and us a laughing stock. This week rather than fixing all the messes he has created he is creating a new one – more humiliation by the Senate’s rejection of his rancid “make sure no one can vote any more” bill. As I wrote a few weeks ago the real State of the Union is that everyone is tired of all his bullshit.

Those little cracks we’ve seen in recent months are becoming very, very big ones and today it just feels like he and the regime are cracking open and coming apart. His madness has led him and our nation to ruin and it is no longer possible to pretend otherwise. A dam is breaking. A straw is breaking the camel’s back. The curtain is being drawn from the Wizard, and yes, we are all seeing that that orange emperor isn’t wearing any clothes (sorry for that image peeps).

As Simon noted elsewhere in the newsletter, Trump’s Iran incursion was an impulsive effort intended to distract from the drip, drip, drip of Epstein disclosures–not to mention from a faltering economy, ICE’s terror campaign, and the multiple other administration FUBARS that have been producing Democratic over-performances in election after election. But impulsive is the operative word–it has become abundantly clear that the attacks were not preceded by anything remotely resembling an evidence-based evaluation of the likely pros and (considerable) cons of such an assault. That shouldn’t surprise us: anyone demonstrating competence or expertise had already departed–or been ejected from– this administration. 

Instead of a quick and impressive display of American might, what we got was further evidence of Trump’s incompetence–as Simon says, instead of bragging rights, we got “a global fiasco, global humiliation, and an American economy already weakened due to his batshit crazy domestic agenda now hurdling towards recession and a new inflation spiral.” 

It is really difficult to get one’s head around the amount of damage Trump has been able to inflict on this country in just over one year. The Iran fiasco is simply the most recent–and arguably the most damaging.

As Jonathan Last recently wrote in The Bulwark, in a post titled “Our Low-IQ President did an Oopsie,”

Someday military academies will teach Trump’s Glorious Iran War as a case study in armed incompetence. Every consideration—from the strategic, to the economic, to the logistical, to the political—was cocked up from the start in the most obvious and stupid ways imaginable. Your average Warhammer nerd could have managed the operation more competently.

Then again, Americans watched Trump’s handling of COVID—“if we didn’t do any testing, we would have very few cases”—and still decided to give him control of the country again. So what else did they expect?

Monocle recently published an interview with Michael Wolfe, Trump’s former ghostwriter and a current chronicler of his Presidency, who has probably followed him as closely as anyone.  In this exchange, Wolfe corroborates what Simon says.

The question was: Is Donald Trump an intelligent man? Wolfe’s answer:

No. He’s a fucking moron. It’s extraordinary. He clearly has some street savvy but in terms of information and thinking about things in any coherent way, zippo. Steve Bannon once said that Trump’s whole life was a battle against information. He didn’t want to know things because that meant people would tell him things and he instinctively rebelled against that. So nobody tells him anything – not least because he never stops talking.

As I’ve previously noted–and as Simon says– elect a clown, expect a circus…..

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Governing From Fantasy Land

I subscribe to a Substack with a particularly apt title: “Can We Still Govern?” A recent essay reviewed the multiple accusations of fraud used by our clown-car administration to bolster their allegations of “rigged votes” and their war on poor Americans, among other “alternate reality” efforts.

As the essay pointed out, Trump’s obsession with fraud has been the root justification for many, if not most, of the wrongheaded and unpopular decisions of this administration – from gutting the federal workforce, to attacking Social Security, to making it harder, especially for women, to vote, and for the hysterical attacks on immigrants that “justified” his toxic and thuggish immigration raids in Minnesota.

Speaking of toxic, Stephen Miller is one of the most rabid inhabitants of fantasy land. Miller has enthusiastically endorsed the fiction that immigrants “have been cheating for years” and has claimed that “if all of this theft were stopped, it would be enough to balance the budget. The extraction of wealth from American taxpayers to people who don’t belong here is the primary cause of the national debt.”

As the Substack points out,

This is not just untrue, it is a lie on the scale of Elon Musk claiming he would eliminate the deficit. Absolutely fantastical, a kind of fraudulent fraud claim, one untethered from the surly bonds of reason and evidence. The reality, according to an analysis from the libertarian Cato Institute, is the opposite: immigrants have significantly reduced the deficit, contributing a fiscal surplus of $14.5 trillion between 1993-2023.

if there is any rhetorical device that characterizes this administration, it’s the bald-faced lie (although Trump is so untethered from reality, so firmly ensconced in fantasy-land, that it is possible he believes the whoppers he spouts, at least at the time when they occur to him). The linked essay notes his repeated false claim that those evil Somalis had stolen $19 billion dollars from Medicaid in Minnesota, despite the fact that the federal government’s own data shows that Minnesota has been quite effective at controlling waste in its Medicaid program.

The Trump administration uses ridiculous claims like this to justify withholding Medicaid funding from Blue states. The administration’s announcement that it is withholding $259 million of Medicaid funding from Minnesota was how it kicked off its “War on Fraud.”

Trump uses fraud accusations about “fraud and waste” to distract from the reality that his administration is really hell-bent on gutting Medicaid.

The underlying hypocrisy is staggering. Trump is yelling about fraud, even as his administration goes on an unchecked crime-spree. Withholding $250 million in Minnesota’s Medicaid funding will not only do nothing to prevent fraud — it will turn eligible beneficiaries into the victims of Trump’s fraudulent fraud squad.

Indiana’s MAGA legislative super-majority is dutifully following suit.

Just this year, our terrible legislature enacted new and stricter eligibility controls, requiring eligibility checks every six months, mandatory three-month work histories, and copays for non-emergency ER visits. They were unable, however, to pass HB 1066, restricting officials from using tax dollars to purchase luxury cars…Here in Indiana, we emulate the Trump administration by afflicting the afflicted and comforting the comfortable.

What makes this so infuriating is that the Trump administration is easily the most corrupt presidential administration in history. Conflicts of interest are everywhere, while spending is out of control. (I recently posted about the items recently purchased by the Department of Defense, including massive amounts of lobster, King Crab and shrimp, plus $100,000 on a piano, $26,000 for a violin, and $21,750 for a flute.) Before her “reassignment,” we learned that Kristi Noem had spent $200 million on luxury jets  with bars and bedrooms, and had handed another $220 million in no-bid contracts to firms with which she was connected. And as the essay reminds us, “Kash Patel has turned the FBI into his own personal Make-A-Wish Foundation, using FBI planes to party with US hockey players in Italy, with buddies for golf and hunting trips, or to meet up with his girlfriend who now has her own FBI security detail.”

The essay also reminds us that Trump’s concerns about fraud haven’t kept him from pardoning individuals convicted of massive fraud, including–but certainly not limited to–Lawren Duran, who masterminded one of the largest-ever cases of Medicare fraud. Trump relieved Duran of the obligation to repay the over $84 million he defrauded from the public. Democratic House Judiciary staffers report that Trump’s pardons have eliminated over $1.3 billion in restitution and fines.

But sure, let’s make working poor folks who rely on Medicaid re-certify their eligibility every six months. (And don’t let those grifters on SNAP buy candy or soda.) The “good Christians” who support this obscene administration evidently think that’s what Jesus would want…

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