Bregman then explains why that view is not only pernicious, but wrong, and he launches into an explanation of how poverty affects people and society and--more importantly--what research tells us that we can and should do about it.

Rather than paraphrasing his 15-minute talk, I am encouraging you--actually, begging you--to click through and listen. It’s important.

As our partisan, arguably criminal administration withholds grants and disaster relief funds from the states that didn’t vote for Trump, and engages in other activities meant to reward the states that did, we are hearing more about something called “soft secession”--a term being applied to the various efforts by Blue states to counter what they (accurately) see as an illegal effort to punish them.

Lincoln Square recently published an essay from the Intellectualist, examining that phenomenon. It began with an explanation.

“No shots have been fired, yet the fracture is real. Across climate policy, fiscal negotiations, and public health, states are filling the void left by Washington. Millions of Americans now wonder why they are paying into a government that does not serve them, or whether the republic that once bound them together still exists in practice.

The United States is experiencing a soft secession: a durable reallocation of governing legitimacy from Washington to regional compacts, accelerated by structural underrepresentation and post-Rucho redistricting incentives.”

American governance has always featured a robust federalism. The United States began as a decidedly dis-united and uneasy amalgamation under the Articles of Confederation, and in order for the Constitution to be ratified, the Founders made several concessions to state authority--some of which proved unfortunate. Over the years, as the the Bill of Rights was applied to the states by the 14th Amendment, transportation and communication improved, and commerce became nationalized, most of us came to see ourselves as Americans rather than, say, Virginians or Hoosiers.

The discriminatory deployment of federal largesse to reward Republican states may be changing that.

The linked essay points to the growth of regional alliances to counter areas where Washington is failing. California and Washington state established--and Hawaii joined-- a West Coast Health Alliance, pledged to “uphold scientific integrity in public health” to counter the loss of credibility of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention under RFK, Jr. As the essay notes, this wasn’t an act of defiance, but of competence. “And competence, when Washington falters, becomes sovereignty by another name.”

We are seeing several other examples of increased cooperation among the Blue states targeted by the Trump administration.

Nearly two dozen Blue states have filed joint lawsuits to block Trump administration vendettas. Blue state coalitions have sued the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and FEMA over rules that tie disaster and emergency relief money to voter citizenship checks and local immigration enforcement, and they have mounted coordinated responses to political assaults on state universities, non-profits, and local municipal funds. Local and state jurisdictions in those states have worked to strengthen local laws that limit ICE access to public property and data.

Illinois Governor JB Pritzker and Colorado Governor Jared Polis launched a private initiative to encourage Blue state resource pooling--a project in which states will share staff, legal expertise, and operational strategies to protect state institutions and coordinate contingency plans against federal pressure. The initiative is modeled on previous reproductive rights compacts in which states shared and stockpiled abortion medication.

The movement toward state-level action can also be seen as a response to a longer-term fiscal reality: Donor states like California, New York, New Jersey, and Massachusetts send far more money to Washington than they get back. The Rockefeller Institute estimates that New York’s net outflow in 2019 was $142 billion, and that California’s in 2021–22 was $83 billion. Meanwhile, states like Alabama, Mississippi, and West Virginia are net recipients.

That fiscal imbalance is magnified by representative imbalance.

The House has had 435 members since 1929--meaning that each member now represents an average of 761,000 constituents, nearly four times the 1910 ratio, leaving “districts too vast, voices too diluted, legitimacy stretched to breaking.” The Senate is worse: Wyoming’s 580,000 residents have the same two senators as California’s 39 million—a 70-to-1 disparity. In 2017, the GOP “majority” represented some 34 million fewer Americans than the Democratic “minority.”

And as readers of this blog know, gerrymandering has worsened the imbalance. Meanwhile, Republicans continue to weaponize social policy. Opposition to interracial marriage morphed into opposition to same-sex marriage and today’s Red state restrictions on transgender healthcare and drag performance.

And as the linked essay notes, media has sharpened the Red and Blue state divides. “On Fox, coastal cities become decadent caricatures; on MSNBC, rural states become authoritarian shorthand. Algorithms amplify resentment until Americans know one another less and despise one another more.”

So much for “We the People.”

That blind spot was once again on display with the publication of an energy industry analysis that focused on one of the negative consequences of our politicized governance. As the Indiana Capital Chronicle reported, investment research firms are warning their clients to avoid Indiana and its investor-owned utility companies. They pointed to the recent, disputed firing of a state regulator who failed to do the governor’s bidding as an example of that politicized governance.

“The analysts warned that political intervention in the regulatory process has “meaningfully increased the risk and ROEs needed for investing in Indiana utilities.”

The firm also downgraded the Hoosier State’s regulatory rating for political independence from “average” to “below average” in a report that panned an “intrusive Governor and shifting commission.”

The assessment came within days of Gov. Mike Braun’s sacking of former Commissioner Andy Zay on Aug. 3, prompting an Aug. 10 lawsuit that featured dueling allegations.”

Zay filed suit, accusing the governor of illegally firing him “based upon political disagreement” and his “exercise of independent judgment.” The state avoided the need to defend itself in court by settling that lawsuit for $625,000. (While neither side acknowledged wrongdoing, a settlement sum of that magnitude sort of speaks for itself...)

The inability of our Hoosier office-holders, both administrative and legislative, to understand that political interference has a negative effect on the state’s ability to attract investment is just one example of their persistent failure to recognize that actions have consequences--their failure to connect cause and effect.

Permit me to connect just a few other dots-- decisions that negatively affect the ability of the Hoosier state to recruit employers and high quality workers.

A legislature at war with education sends a signal to potential employers that they will have trouble finding a skilled workforce. Siphoning money from public schools that teach accurate science and introduce children to the diversity they will encounter in the workforce in order to fund religious academies is one bad sign; waging war against once-storied public universities by insisting that vetted scholarship is really “liberal indoctrination” ensures that intellectually curious students will either depart Indiana upon graduation or avoid the state entirely and enroll elsewhere.

A legislature that ignores both medical science and women’s rights by banning abortion (and effectively criminalizing medical assistance for emergency pregnancies) sends a message to doctors and to women considering employment in the state. In the wake of that travesty, even companies that are already located here are finding it difficult to recruit workers--male or female--from families still in their childbearing years.

A legislature that refuses to raise the state’s minimum wage from 7.25/hour--last set in 2009--is hardly encouraging the growth of a skilled workforce. While market forces dictate that most Indiana workers are paid more than that, keeping the legal minImum low is evidently thought to be a sign that the state’s laws are pro-employer (and that’s certainly true, they are). Instead, it is another sign to potential employers and employees alike that the Hoosier state is backward.

Indiana’s lawmakers firmly believe that the way to attract business is to keep taxes low. What they fail to understand is that by starving local governments of the revenue needed to maintain the public infrastructure and amenities that create a good quality of life, they are actually repelling potential employers. Quality of life has increasingly become a major factor for companies choosing a new business location because it has been shown to help attract and keep top talent.

And while I’m connecting dots--there’s a strong connection between Indiana’s less-than-mediocre government and the extreme gerrymandering that has kept the state firmly in the control of a single political party for the last eighteen years. When elections offer little or no competition, when lawmakers and administrators feel entitled to their positions and are unconcerned about facing genuine opposition, they have little or no incentive to serve their constituents or worry about the public good. (That lack of competition is a reason Indiana voter turnout is among the lowest in the country...)

Years of single-party dominance produces self-satisfied, lazy and increasingly corrupt office-holders. It was only when Democrats were thought to be mounting an actual threat to the sitting Secretary of State, Diego Morales, that Indiana’s GOP removed him--not for his increasingly obvious corruption, which none of them have yet acknowledged, but out of concern that they might lose the office.

To coin a phrase: it’s time for a change.

I didn’t realize just how big a hit until I read the opening paragraph from an Arwa Mahdami column in the Guardian. Mahdami was examining a phenomenon that Americans often described when traveling in Europe--they ate as much or more as they did at home, but frequently lost weight, prompting a lively discussion about why that might be. Mahdami dismissed theories about the makeup of flour (!) and suggested that the weight loss was probably due to the fact that a visit to Europe usually involves more walking than we Americans do in our car-dependent home towns.

Be that as it may, it was her first paragraph that grabbed me.

“It’s not just the mass shootings you have to watch out for in the US, it’s also the lettuce – a dodgy bit of iceberg could leave you sick with cyclosporiasis. And then there are the frozen blueberries, recently recalled because of a “reasonable probability” they could “cause serious adverse health consequences or even death”. And the alfalfa sprouts that may harbour salmonella. And the fruit bars that may be contaminated with glass. I could go on: there’s been a surge in foodborne illnesses in the US this year and food recalls have been getting a lot of attention.”

This growth in food-borne illnesses can be directly traced to the Trump administration’s cuts at the FDA, and to reduced oversight of food production. As an industry publication, Food Navigator, recently reported, deep personnel cuts have resulted in fewer inspections, a loss of institutional memory, and a worrisome increase in food-borne illnesses.

CBS reports that, just so far during Trump’s second term, the FDA has lost about 20% of its staff. The cuts at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are worse; that agency is down 25%. The CDC used to have 11 scientists tracking food parasites; it now has three. The report quotes Susan Mayne, an adjunct professor at the Yale School of Public Health:

“We had a national advisory committee, a committee that advised FDA and USDA on how to prevent microbial contamination in food,” said Mayne. “That advisory committee was disbanded. We used to convene meetings with our Mexican counterparts on how we can work together to improve food safety. That entire team was let go.”

When asked about the cuts, Health and Human Services director Robert F. Kennedy Jr. simply lied. He told reporters the reports of cuts were “invalid.”

Kennedy, of course, is a noted crank who has made the Trump administration a disaster for public health and medical research. Recently, Moderna and Merck announced positive results from a major clinical trial of a cancer vaccine--potentially, an enormous breakthrough. But as the Bulwark and other media outlets have reported, along with the excitement, “there has been concern and even alarm—not about the treatment itself, but about the threat Donald Trump poses to the research ecosystem that made its creation possible.”

The fear stems from the administration’s broad and persistent attacks on American science--including cuts and rule changes that have negatively affected precisely the sorts of grants that financed the research that laid the foundation for the vaccine’s development. As the linked article reports,

“The administration has also attacked this specific type of vaccine. The Moderna-Merck treatment uses mRNA technology—as did two of the COVID vaccines—and Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has singled out mRNA for particular vilification. Last year, he canceled hundreds of millions of dollars in funding for the research and development of mRNA technology, including Moderna’s work on what was supposed to be a new platform for vaccines against influenza.”

As the article notes, Kennedy’s animus toward mRNA vaccines is based on wild, unsupported conspiracy theories tying COVID shots to harm and death. Scientists in the field report that Kennedy’s crackbrained hostility is already having a chilling effect on research into mRNA for other purposes, including cancer. Meanwhile, the broader cuts to grant funding made by this administration have set back numerous promising avenues of research.

More interference is on the way. The administration has plans to change the grant approval process to require sign-off from political officials, rather than relying on intensive peer review by actual experts in the field.

There’s a book by Rick Wilson titled “Everything Trump Touches Dies.” Everything, evidently, includes us.

For those of you who don’t live in our backward Red state, a short explanation: Indiana has laws that protect the power and status of the two major parties. We also have extreme gerrymandering that ensures that our politics are dominated by rural folks who would sooner run naked down Main Street than vote for a Democrat. An Independent candidate wishing to run statewide needs to procure 37 thousand signatures from certified voters. So while Independents have done surprisingly well in local races where the signature requirement is less daunting, the two major parties have succeeded in keeping Independents and third-party candidates out of the “big time.” (The sole exception has been the nonthreatening Libertarian Party, which earned the right to a spot on the ballot by exceeding 2% of the vote for Secretary of State.)

That cozy arrangement is now under attack by the new Lincoln Party, a creation of Independent Indiana. Greg Ballard, a former Republican mayor of Indianapolis, obtained considerably more than the required signatures, and is running for Secretary of State. If his vote exceeds 2% of the votes cast for that office, the Lincoln Party will join the Libertarians on our future ballots.

That 2% goal appears to be a slam dunk, and Ballard actually might even win the office. Indiana’s Republican officeholders are a less-than-mediocre bunch (to be kind), and Hoosiers who are unenthusiastic about them but would vote for a rutabaga rather than a Democrat may be less reluctant to vote for a Lincoln Party candidate--especially one who was once a Republican.

The Lincoln Party is doing more than offer Hoosier voters a new choice--it is challenging our low civic literacy.

Ballard is promoting the distribution of a state-sponsored voter’s guide, saying “No Hoosier should ever walk into the voting booth feeling unprepared to cast their ballot, and no one should stay home because they didn’t have time to learn who or what would be on that ballot.” The proposed guide would include a sample ballot, candidate information, ballot questions or constitutional amendment guidance, polling locations, calendar reminders for early voting or Election Day and more.

Currently, five states mail out such guides, and--at least in 2001, the latest information I could find-- thirteen others make them available at election offices and online. All of those states have higher voter turnout than Indiana.

The major party candidates were unenthusiastic--to say the least-- about this proposal to give Hoosier voters basic information. According to the Indiana Capital Chronicle, Republican candidate Max Engling’s campaign issued a statement pointing to the costs of informing voters, and accusing Ballard of wanting “to grow state government and stick taxpayers with the bill.” Democrat Beau Bayh’s campaign was somewhat less dismissive, but issued a statement to the effect that Bayh “believes that “the millions of dollars of taxpayer resources required to mail a 32-page booklet that many people will discard upon receiving, can be better spent elsewhere.”

Implicit in these dismissive statements is the notion that giving voters unbiased information about the candidates, the functions of the offices they are seeking, and the mechanics of casting a ballot is wasteful.

Now, there may well be a less expensive way to reach Hoosier Voters. Perhaps the Secretary of State could partner with the League of Women Voters, which currently offers much of that information online. But there is much to be said for putting tangible information in the hands of hardworking Hoosiers, large numbers of whom are unlikely, for a variety of reasons, to search out online information.

And I do wonder if there isn’t a reluctance to inform voters of the actual duties of elected offices. A surprising number of the television ads I’m seeing in the run-up to the midterms has candidates making promises they would have absolutely no authority to keep even if elected (I’ll lower your taxes!)-- ads that obviously rely on the voters’ ignorance of those realities.

If our candidates for public office are truly concerned about Indiana government’s wasteful spending, I can offer a number of examples that I consider far more wasteful than an effort to provide voters with accurate and useful information. For example, Indiana loses over $605 million annually just to data center tax breaks, with most going to Amazon. I’m sure an investigation of various other “incentives” would uncover equally egregious examples.

The Lincoln Party is sure shaking things up in our backward Hoosier state....

The speech was lengthy, but for those who might be curious about who I am, and the experiences and beliefs that prompt these daily rants, it may be illuminating. (And it’s Sunday, so a longer “sermon” may be forgiven....).

_______________

I’m immensely honored—and flattered—to be asked to give this talk, but I must tell you that the request threw me into a real panic. “Last Lecture” sounds so portentous—not to mention that it seems to be an invitation to share whatever I might know before I totter off to the old folks home or the grave. Those who know me know I rarely have trouble sharing my opinionated perspectives, but the task of “summing up,” of connecting the conclusions I’ve reached to the life experiences that led me to those conclusions, seemed—and still seems—overwhelming.

But here I am.

I think I have always been a “political” person, in the sense that the question that has always fascinated me is: how should people live together? What sort of social and political arrangements are most likely to nourish our humanity and promote—in Aristotle’s term—human flourishing? If the old African proverb is right, if it “takes a village to raise a child,” what should that village look like, and how should its inhabitants behave? How do we build that kind of village? Is the human community headed in the right direction, or are we on the wrong road? My conclusions have been shaped by my life experiences as much as by my scholarship, and for the last several years, some of them have been keeping me up at night.

Let me begin with an important caveat: unlike so many of you in this room, I am not a scholar in the traditional sense; in fact, I have been a lifelong dilettante. (I do prefer the term “generalist,” but as Popeye said, “I yam what I yam”…) I’ve done a lot of different things over the past 50+ years, and the result is that I know a little about a lot of things, but depth isn’t my strong suit. Over the years, however—probably as a defense mechanism—I’ve convinced myself that there is value in casting one’s intellectual net rather widely. In my case, at least, it has allowed me to connect some seemingly unconnected dots, even when my own mastery of the subjects involved is tenuous or superficial.

Let me get the biography out of the way. I was born in 1941, and I am very much a product of the 1950s, when women were expected to be decorative and submissive—or at the very least, quiet. You can see the problem.

I grew up Jewish in Anderson, Indiana, where being Jewish was at best exotic and at worst, Satanic, and where I was usually the only Jew my classmates had ever encountered. Those experiences undoubtedly deepened my interest in the nature of justice, the tendency to divide people between “we” and “they,” and the effects of marginalization. They also kindled an ongoing fascination with the ways in which religion shapes our worldviews and how it intersects with and influences civil law.

I left Anderson for college when I was 16. I wanted to major in liberal arts, but my father insisted that I get a teaching degree, because if my eventual husband died, I would need something to fall back on. (At the time, educated women were secretaries, teachers or nurses; I couldn’t type and the sight of blood made me queasy. Ergo! I’d teach.) Because I was so young, my parents sent me to Stephens College for Women, a two-year school that took very seriously its obligation to act in loco parentis. After Stephens, I briefly attended the University of North Carolina, where the most indelible lesson I learned was that when you pay Full Professors 3000/year, you get what you pay for. (This was still the late 1950s, but even then, 3000 wasn’t much.) I transferred to IU Bloomington to finish my undergraduate degree, got married and divorced, and later did a semester at Butler, pursuing an MA in literature that I never finished.

I married a second time and took my first job (well, first if you don’t count the summer I worked for my father’s friend at his—no kidding—Cadillac-Rambler agency, where I was billed as Anderson’s first female used car salesman.) I began my adult work life as a high school English teacher. When I became pregnant with my first child, however, I could no longer teach—Even though I was married, those days, once women teachers or librarians “showed,” we could no longer be in the classroom. The theory evidently was that the kids would know what we’d been up to…

I went to law school when I was 30 and had three small children (four if you count the husband I had at that time). There were very few women in law school then, and my most important epiphany revolved around the need for potty parity… the few women’s restrooms had been included as a grudging accommodation to the secretarial staff. After graduating law school, I was the first female lawyer hired at what was then Baker and Daniels. (To give you a flavor of the time—serial interviews with prospective associates were conducted by several of the partners, and I was in conversation with two who were being very careful not to ask improper questions—this was barely ten years after creation of the EEOC. Since I had three children, I thought it reasonable to volunteer my childcare arrangements. One of the partners was so obviously relieved that I wasn’t some sort of radical feminist, he blurted out: “It isn’t that there’s anything wrong with being a woman. We hired a man with a glass eye once!)

I practiced corporate law at B & D for three years, until Bill Hudnut asked me to take charge of the City’s legal department. I was the first woman Corporation Counsel in Indianapolis–or, to the best of my knowledge, in any major metropolitan area. At the time, Indianapolis had two newspapers. The afternoon paper, the Indianapolis News, had a front-page “gossip” blurb, and I still recall its juicy little item after my appointment was announced: “What high-ranking city official appointed his most recent honey to a prominent position…” I guess it was inconceivable that I’d been appointed because I was a decent lawyer, or even because I represented a constituency Bill was reaching out to. I was a divorced female, Bill had a reputation, and that could only mean one thing.

I left City Hall to be the Republican candidate for Congress in 1980, running against Andy Jacobs, Jr., in what was then Indiana’s 11^th Congressional district. That was back when Republicans were rational, and political campaigns less toxic. The worst thing I said about Andy was that he was a Democrat. My youngest son later served as his Congressional page, and after he retired, Andy and I would occasionally have lunch. As I say, things were different then….

I also remarried during that campaign and I’m happy to report that the third time was the charm—it’s been 35 years and counting.

After the election, I practiced law, started a Real Estate Development Company that went broke during the recession of the late 1980s, and served six years as the Executive Director of Indiana’s ACLU. (NUVO headline: ICLU Taken Over by Card-Carrying Republican!) I joined IUPUI’s faculty in 1998.

Like many of you, I’ve lived through the women’s movement, the Civil Rights movement, the 60s, the sexual revolution, the gay rights movement, the decades of religious zealotry that a friend calls “America’s most recent Great Awakening,” and a dizzying explosion of new technologies. As George Burns once said, I’m so old I remember when the air was clean and sex was dirty.

All of these experiences required me to think in different ways and from a variety of perspectives about the questions with which I began this talk: what is a just society? How do we mediate the tensions between individual rights and the common good? Who gets to decide what the common good is? Can government institutions ensure social order without doing unnecessary damage to individual autonomy? How?

When I first became politically active, at nineteen, it was as a Republican. I was persuaded—and remain persuaded—by what has been called the “libertarian principle,” the belief that the best society is one in which individuals are free to set and pursue our own life goals, determine our own telos, so long as we don’t harm the person or property of a non-consenting other, and so long as we are willing to grant an equal right to others. Back then, with some notable exceptions, the GOP understood the importance of “so long as” in those last two caveats. Times, obviously, have changed. The political party to which I belonged then no longer exists, except in name.

For those who begin with the libertarian principle as I just shared it, good faith political arguments tend to revolve around the nature and severity of the “harms” that government can legitimately prohibit or regulate, and the extent of government’s obligation to provide a physical and social infrastructure to be paid for through citizens’ “dues,” called taxes. Needless to say, we are not having those good faith arguments today—instead, we are in what may well be an existential struggle between science and reason on the one hand, and a variety of fundamentalisms—characterized by the rejection of reason, evidence and empirical knowledge—on the other.

My first book was What’s a Nice Republican Girl Like Me Doing at the ACLU? I wrote it while I was still at the ACLU, and had begun to recognize the truly appalling extent to which the general public is ignorant of America’s history, philosophy and constitutional system. My book was intended to be a sort of chatty introduction to those subjects. In it, I first articulated something I still call “the American Idea–” that this is a nation not based upon geography, ethnicity or conquest, but on a theory of social organization, a philosophy of governance that was meant to facilitate e pluribus unum—out of the many, one. The American Idea set up an enduring conversation about the proper balance between “I” and “we”–between individual rights and majoritarian passions.

At IUPUI, my first major research project was a three-year study of the Charitable Choice provisions of 1996 welfare reform, usually referred to as George W. Bush’s “faith-based initiative.” The Ford Foundation funded an investigation into the premises upon which that effort was based: the idea that faith-based institutions are better able to move people off welfare, the belief that there were “armies of compassion” waiting to rush in to help (and not so incidentally save the government money), and the belief that religious organizations had been unfairly excluded from governments’ contracting regimes.

All of those assumptions were wrong. Empirical research failed to substantiate the superiority of faith-based nonprofits—indeed, in our three-state study of job-training efforts, the secular organizations had better results—and because most faith-based organizations with the interest and capacity to work with government were already doing so (and had been welcomed, not excluded), the promised “armies of compassion” failed to materialize.

What I really learned from this research was that the Bush Administration hadn’t the foggiest notion how America’s social welfare system actually worked (or didn’t), and—far worse, from my perspective—had only the dimmest understanding of the First Amendment’s religion clauses. (The one thing the Bush Administration did extremely well was convince me that I was no longer a Republican.)

At the ACLU, I had recognized the extent of civic illiteracy among the general population; my Charitable Choice research introduced me to officials at the highest levels of government who viewed the Constitution and Bill of Rights as nuisances to be circumvented. That research also introduced me to the immense and underappreciated influence of religious worldviews on public policy formation.

Of the nine books I’ve written, the two that taught me the most—the ones that required the “deepest dives” into our philosophy of government and suggested some answers to Aristotle’s question—were God and Country: America in Red and Blue and my most recent textbook Talking Politics? What You Need to Know Before You Open Your Mouth.

It was while researching God and Country that I came across Frank Lambert’s illuminating description of the difference between the Founding Fathers and those he calls the Planting Fathers. The first set, the Planting Fathers, did come to the colonies for religious freedom, but they defined religious liberty as “freedom to do the right thing.” They came to America to build a ‘ Shining City on the Hill,’ and most of them believed that God not only wanted them to follow the “right way,” but that He also wanted them to make sure their neighbors did too. Religious freedom meant that government would establish the “correct” religion.

One hundred and fifty years later, when George Washington swore to ‘faithfully execute the office of President of the United States,” he undertook to “preserve, protect, and defend” a Constitution those Planters would have found incomprehensible. The new constitution was the product of the men we call the Founding Fathers, and it made no reference whatever to God or divine providence, citing as its sole authority ‘the people of the United States.’” In the intervening 150 years, the Enlightenment had changed the way we defined liberty.

It was an epiphany, because it provided a lens through which to understand so much of our current political environment. American politics remains a contest between the numerous Puritans still among us and those I call Modernists, both secular and religious. Policymaking has become a power struggle between Puritans who believe the role of government is to make the rest of us live “godly” lives, based upon their particular version of the good, and those of us who demand that government act upon what John Rawls called “public reasons,” based upon logical persuasion and scientific and empirical understandings. Contemporary Puritans remain deeply antagonistic to the Enlightenment and to secular ways of knowing—especially science—and they utterly reject the notion that each of us gets to define our own morality. Scroll down a Facebook page, or read the comments section of an online newspaper, and you’ll come across posts from fundamentalists of various stripes who wrap themselves in victimhood whenever government fails to impose their preferred worldviews on everyone else.

In God and Country, I wanted to “unpeel the onion,” to explore the ways in which ostensibly secular policy preferences are actually rooted in religious ways of seeing reality. In many of our current policy arguments, of course, the religious dimensions are obvious: think death penalty, abortion and same-sex marriage. But there are also debates about presumably secular policies in which unrecognized religious perspectives rather than data and evidence are really driving the disputes. Take economic issues—particularly those involving poverty and inequality, issues where the influence of America’s early Calvinism remains strong.

Mitt Romney may be Mormon, but his disdain for the 47% was grounded in a culture with a deeply entrenched, if bastardized, version of Calvinism; a belief that God smiles upon the “elect,” and the poor are poor because they are morally defective. Accusations that poor folks lack “middle class values” are a modern, sanitized version of that theologically-rooted conviction.

In God and Country I explored the religious roots of policy preferences about the economy, the environment, foreign policy and criminal justice—and I learned a lot about different versions of Christianity in the process. But what I really came to understand was the importance of paradigms, the worldviews that shape our perceptions of reality. Even those of us who consider ourselves entirely secular, who have no doctrinal religious beliefs, hold views that are rooted in early, religious ways of understanding the world around us.

Paradigms are really where biography matters. My views of reality and human obligation were shaped by my own religious background and culture. On my office wall is a cross-stitched paraphrase of a Talmudic injunction to the effect that, while God doesn’t expect us to perfect the world in our generation, we aren’t free not to try. I was raised in a congregation that chanted “Justice, Justice shalt thou pursue.” I am not religious but I remain a product of a very specific culture. As we all are.

And that brings us back to the question that has consumed me for most of my 73 years: what sort of social order, what kind of legal system, is most likely to protect both individual liberty and the common good?

Given my biography and experiences, it shouldn’t be surprising that I think Enlightenment philosophers like Montesqiueu and Locke, and Founders like Madison and Jefferson got the big parts right. Not that our Constitution and jurisprudence don’t have some pretty substantial defects, but the basic balance between individual autonomy and government power, the constraints upon the use and misuse of that power, are essential to a society that facilitates human flourishing, and to a village that nurtures its children. The problem is, few of our citizens know anything about that balance or those constraints.

As many of you know, I founded and direct a Center for Civic Literacy here at IUPUI, because we desperately need to reinvigorate civic education. When a polity is very diverse, as in the United States, it is critically important that citizens know at least the basic outlines of the country’s history, philosophy and governing architecture; in the absence of other ties—race, religion, national origin—a common understanding of, and devotion to, constitutional principles is critical to the formation of national identity and commitment to the common good.

Such devotion is a far cry from the faux patriotism so often displayed by our least self-aware policymakers. Someone needs to explain to Rudy Giuliani that genuine patriotism has to be based on an understanding of the nation’s history and institutions—the good, the bad and the ugly—if it is to enable, rather than impede, deliberative discourse and democratic citizenship.

It won’t surprise anyone here that I see education, the search for truth, respect for evidence, the willingness to examine and re-examine one’s most basic beliefs, as the essential key to human progress. (I tell my students that—whatever else they learn, I will consider my classes successful if they leave using two phrases far more frequently than they did before they enrolled: it depends, and it’s more complicated than that.) The ability to live with ambiguity and complexity, the ability to internalize Learned Hand’s observation that “the spirit of liberty is the spirit that is not too certain it is right” is at the heart of the human enterprise.

And that pursuit is increasingly under attack. Recently, Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker proposed cutting $300 million from the University of Wisconsin’s budget. Even more appalling, he wanted the university’s mission changed from “Basic to every purpose of the system is the search for truth” to “meeting the state’s workforce needs.”

As the New York Times wrote in a scathing editorial, “It was as if a trade school agenda were substituted for the idea of a university.”

More recently, legislators in Oklahoma have proposed to eliminate AP History classes in that state, because they teach students “negative things” about America. In other words, the classes educate rather than indoctrinate.

Scott Walker and those Oklahoma legislators are emblematic of the anti-intellectualism and the assault on reason and evidence that has come to characterize the American Right. These shallow and ambitious politicians believe that education and job training are synonymous, that scholarly research and the “search for truth” are elitist non-essentials, and that humans don’t need to know anything that doesn’t either promote an unreflective nationalism or lead to directly to gainful employment. They’d have handed Socrates that cup of hemlock in a heartbeat.

My husband says I’ve been in a bad mood since 2000, and he’s right. The problem, as I see it, is twofold: first, Americans increasingly inhabit alternate realities; the second is that we no longer understand ourselves to be bound by a social contract.

In Talking Politics, I argued for the need to distinguish between facts that have been documented and agreed to by responsible people of all ideological perspectives, and the different conclusions and interpretations that may legitimately be drawn from those facts. To use an analogy from the courtroom, two sides to a conflict may “stipulate” to what happened, but then proceed to argue in good faith about what those agreed-to stipulations really tell us. That’s the way our political discourse should work. But increasingly, as we all know, it doesn’t.

We have lawmakers who reject evolution and the massive evidence of global climate change, not because they can marshal evidence—persuasive or otherwise—but because they choose not to believe it. There is mounting concern over what scholars call “motivated reasoning”—the tendency to cherry-pick evidence and to see only those things that support one’s preferred beliefs. Our ability to construct our own realities has enormously increased with the precipitous decline of what has been called the journalism of verification, and the advent of what Eli Pariser calls “the filter bubble,” the sophisticated algorithms that filter the information we get online and thus allow us to inhabit a world that reinforces our pre-existing biases and beliefs.

The problem is, as Neil DeGrasse Tyson recently put it, reality doesn’t care whether you believe in it or not. We may well have passed an environmental tipping point; even if we haven’t, the world my grandchildren will inherit will be less conducive to human habitation than the world I’ve inhabited. I have argued that we should view environmental policy through the lens of Pascal’s wager—if we act to mitigate environmental harms, and it turns out we’ve been wrong about climate change, the only damage done will be to the bottom line of the fossil fuel industry (which can well afford it), and the rest of us will enjoy cleaner air and water. If, however, we ignore 98% of climate scientists, and it turns out they were right, we risk making the planet uninhabitable. That seems like a no-brainer to me, but apparently you can’t reason people out of positions they didn’t reason themselves into. So much for science and reason.

In the realities occupied by our contemporary social Darwinists and historical revisionists, there is no concept of a Social Contract, and no appreciation for the importance of the physical and social infrastructure required by our village. Too many of our lawmakers and pundits seem oblivious to the multitude of systems—both physical and social— that our village needs in order to function, let alone flourish. When those largely invisible, taken-for-granted networks of support don’t work—or when they have been corrupted or co-opted so that they only work for some groups and individuals—a society fails to function as it should.

Folks in that alternate reality object reflexively to any and all social welfare proposals, seeing them as contrary to the principles that animated the Constitution and Bill of Rights. They need to re-read Locke, and revisit—or visit—social contract theory. That theory tells us that government’s job is to promote both individual freedom and the common good. Despite the increasingly hysterical rhetoric from the Right, the two are not mutually exclusive. In fact, they are interdependent.

Without a social welfare infrastructure, even the most privileged individuals can’t flourish for long. Arguments about how a social safety net should be structured, and the proper limits to place on government largesse are entirely reasonable and important, but those aren’t the arguments we are having. Instead, we are hearing from people who believe they are entitled to the benefits of the physical and social infrastructure we all pay for—but disfavored “others” are not. I have been absolutely astonished by the vituperative and inhumane opposition to the Affordable Care Act (aka ‘Obamacare’). Opponents aren’t arguing for alternative programs—they’ve made it quite clear that they simply don’t want their taxes used to provide health insurance to “unworthy” poor people.

Another example is the current effort—in Indiana and elsewhere—to exempt so-called “bible-believing Christians” from compliance with otherwise applicable civil rights laws. In our system, religious citizens have absolute liberty to believe whatever they want—that’s the individual rights pole of the continuum. But religious or political beliefs, no matter how sincere, don’t entitle people to sacrifice newborns or blow up abortion clinics, and they don’t entitle them to engage in behavior that is contrary to America’s cultural and legal commitment to civic equality. That’s the public good end of the continuum. There is no religious privilege to behave in ways that we collectively deem destructive to our social health.

Let me just share a final few observations:

Social justice is a term we don’t hear very often these days. Social justice is aspirational, and its elements are subject to debate, but at its heart, the concept is concerned with mutual obligation and the common good. In its broadest outlines, a just society is one that meets the basic human needs of its members, without regard to their identities or social status—a society that does not draw invidious distinctions between male and female, black and white, gay and straight, religious and atheist, Republican and Democrat, or any of the other categories into which we like to sort our fellow humans. It is a society that recognizes and respects the inherent dignity and value of each person.

We should want to make our village more just for many reasons, practical as well as moral: for one thing, a more equitable society is in the long-term best interests of even those people who don’t feel any obligation to feed hungry children or find jobs for ex-offenders or make health care accessible to poor people. That’s because in order to remain competitive in the global economy, America needs to make use of all its talent. Social injustices that prevent people from contributing their talents cost all of us in lost opportunities and unrealized promise.

It’s obvious that many Americans don’t much care about wasted resources, but the second argument should be compelling even to the “I’ve got mine and that’s all that counts” crowd. Democracies require stability in order to survive. In countries where there are great gaps between the rich and poor, in countries where some groups of people go through their lives being marginalized or despised while others enjoy privileges and respect, in countries where some people are exploited while others benefit—that stability is hard to come by. A wealthy friend of mine once put it this way: “I’d rather pay more in taxes than spend my days worrying about angry mobs rioting in the streets or desperate people kidnapping my children.”

Even in highly individualistic America, no one succeeds solely by his own efforts. That social and physical infrastructure I’ve been harping on supports and enables entrepreneurship and wealth creation, and we taxpayers have built and maintained that infrastructure. And that’s fine. That’s what it’s for. We all benefit when someone builds a better mousetrap, or improves on the other guy’s widget. But when that entrepreneur profits from his better mousetrap, we who supplied that infrastructure have a right to a portion of his profits in the form of taxes. We also have a moral obligation to those for whom the existing infrastructure just isn’t sufficient or accessible.

There’s a credit card commercial that says “Membership has its privileges.” Membership in society should have its privileges as well. That’s not an argument for massive welfare programs or redistribution of wealth. It is an argument for fundamental fairness, an argument that recognizes that we all benefit when inclusive social structures operate in the interests of all of our members.

From time to time, greed and fear obscure the reality of human interdependence. Unfortunately, we seem to be living in one of those times–an era characterized by an intentional refusal to recognize that there is such a thing as the common good, and a willful ignorance of the importance of mutual social obligation.

Addressing that willful ignorance is what social justice requires, but that is easier said than done.

I’m painfully aware that cultural institutions, folkways and intellectual paradigms influence people far more than logic and reason, and that culture is incredibly difficult to change. Structural barriers and ingrained privilege don’t disappear without significant upheavals or outright revolutions.

We may be approaching such a period of upheaval, not unlike the Sixties. When I look around, I see a depressing revival of tribalism, and widespread expressions of a racism I thought we’d moved beyond. The election of an African-American President was a sign of progress, but it clearly lifted a rock—and what crawled out is unbelievably ugly and destructive. The growth in inequality threatens to exceed the inequities of the gilded age, if it hasn’t already, and it is hard to argue with those who look around and see not a republic, not a democracy, but an oligarchy.

When I look at America’s politics, I’m reminded of a 1999 movie called “The Sixth Sense.” The young boy in that movie saw dead people; I see crazy people. I know that isn’t politically correct, but how else would you characterize some of the voices dominating our public discourse? How else explain the “birthers” and conspiracy theorists, the “Faux News” pundits and the websites peddling nativism, paranoia and propaganda? In what universe is Sarah Palin a potential Vice-President, or Roy Moore a state Supreme Court Justice or James Inhofe Chair of the Senate Committee on the Environment? On what planet do people pay attention to buffoons like Donald Trump or Ted Cruz or Louie Gohmert?

If I had to guess why so many of our fellow-citizens appear to have gone off the deep end—why they are trying to stockpile guns, roll back women’s rights, put gays back in the closet, stigmatize African-Americans and stereotype Muslims—I think the answer is fear. Change is creating a very different world from the one most of us grew up in, and the pace of that change continues to accelerate. As a result, we have a lot of bewildered and disoriented people who find themselves in an increasingly ambiguous world; they are frantic for bright lines, clear rules, simple answers to complicated issues, and especially, for someone to blame. People who are confounded by new realities, and especially those who are unhappy or dissatisfied with their lives, evidently need to attribute their problems and disappointments to some nefarious “other.” So the old racist and sexist and homophobic tropes get trotted out.

Unfortunately, the desire for a world where moral and policy choices are clear and simple is at odds with the messy reality of life in our global village, and the more these fearful folks are forced to confront that messy reality, the more frantically they cling to their ideological or theological touchstones.

It may be that this phenomenon is nothing new, that there aren’t really more crazy people than before. Maybe, thanks to the Internet and social media, we are just more aware of them. I hope that’s true, but I don’t know–I only know that a scroll through Facebook elevates my blood pressure.

At the end of the day, what will prevent us from fashioning a social order that promotes and enables human flourishing is continuation of this retreat into anti-intellectualism, bigotry and various kinds of fundamentalism. We villagers only become fully human—we only flourish—through constant learning, by opening ourselves to new perspectives, by reaching out and learning from those who are different.

I do see some welcome signs that the fever is abating, at least in the United States and at least among younger Americans. I would turn this country over to my students in a heartbeat: they may not be the best-informed generation, but they are inclusive and intellectually curious, and they care deeply about the planet and about their communities. For my grandchildren’s sake, I hope they can salvage this “village” we call Earth from the mess my generation is leaving them—and despite the fact that this has been my “Last Lecture,” I hope I hang around long enough to see if they succeed.

I have posted dozens of blogs addressing the multiple negative consequences of starving the nation’s public schools in order to funnel tax dollars into the pockets of people who mostly don’t need those dollars. But the incredibly negative fiscal consequences of voucher programs aren’t even what makes these programs most damaging.

There are several reasons that the authors of Project 2025 promoted school vouchers so heavily.

As I have pointed out, most of the “private” schools accepting vouchers are religious schools--and a significant percentage are fundamentalist. Not only do several of them teach religious dogma rather than science or accurate history (in Louisiana, a study found several substituting creationism for evolution), the segregation of children by religion reinforces social polarization. In public schools, children from various backgrounds mingle in the same classrooms, an often-overlooked element of efforts to achieve e pluribus unum, or “from many, one.” (I’ve also previously reported on my own co-authored study of voucher schools in Indiana, which found few of them bothering to teach civics.)

A number of those schools also actively discriminate on the basis of religious dogma--refusing to accept gay children or the children of gay couples. And despite initial efforts to describe vouchers as a measure to help minority children “stuck” in substandard public schools, some studies have found that voucher students are overwhelmingly White.

Several scholars have pointed out that these programs operate almost entirely in urban regions. Rural areas simply don’t have enough children to support additional schools, so the net effect in many states is to siphon funds from rural public schools to support voucher options in the more densely populated urban areas.

Other studies have confirmed that the bulk of the dollars being taken from public education are going to wealthier families, many of whom were paying private school tuition before We the Taxpayers thoughtfully took that burden from them.

By far the most telling consequence of this movement to destroy public education has been the utter failure of these private religious schools to produce the educational outcomes promised. Children in voucher schools do not perform better--and often perform significantly worse--on standardized tests of reading and math.

Recently, Heather Cox Richardson visited the voucher debate, and put it into historical context. She began by relating the Nat Turner uprising, and the reaction to that event by the slaveholding South--a reaction that was twofold: justifying slavery and withholding education from enslaved Blacks.

“Denying enslaved Black Americans access to education exiled them from a place in the nation. The Framers had quite explicitly organized the United States not on the principles of religion or tradition, but rather on the principles of the Enlightenment: the idea that, by applying knowledge and reasoning to the natural world, men could figure out the best way to order society. Someone excluded from access to education could not participate in that national project. Instead, that person was read out of society, doomed to be controlled by leaders who marshaled religion and propaganda to defend their dominance.”

Richardson then traced the efforts of the then-Republican Party to rebut this anti-education effort, from Lincoln to Brown v. Board of Education. Brown, as we know, was met with the South’s “massive resistance” to integration. Some areas closed their public schools, while others took funds from the newly integrated public schools and redistributed them to segregated private schools.

Richardson notes that this massive resistance has never died--that “The drive to push tax dollars from public schools to private academies through a voucher system remained a top priority for those on the right.” She documents the massive amounts being siphoned from public schools in Arizona and in Texas, where a study by the state comptroller showed that “of the more than 100,000 families participating in the new private school voucher program, most are white and from urban areas... About 70% were already attending private schools or being homeschooled.”

I encourage readers to click through and read Richardson’s lengthy post in its entirety. Her report amply supports her concluding paragraph:

“In 1831, southern lawmakers tried to create a white nation by making it a crime to educate Black Americans. In 2026 the intent to exclude certain Americans from participation in the Enlightenment principles that undergird the nation remains the same, only less explicit.”

Thanks to that same mysterious Internet, we can and do Face Time frequently, and we recently had a conversation that I have subsequently been mulling over. He had just returned from Kigali, Rwanda, where he had made a presentation at a conference, and while he was there, he’d visited a museum dedicated to the history of Rwanda’s 1994 genocide. The remains of over 250,000 people are interred in that memorial, which is dedicated to telling the story of the events leading up to the genocide against the Tutsi.

That genocide took place over a span of around 100 days, during which members of the Tutsi ethnic group were systematically killed by Hutu militias. Most scholars estimate that somewhere between 500,000 and 662,000 Tutsi died. Wikipedia notes that the genocide was “marked by extreme violence, with victims often murdered by neighbours, and widespread sexual violence, with between 250,000 and 500,000 cases of rape.”

Reports note that the horrific violence was rooted in “long-standing ethnic tensions.” My son reported that the museum had focused on those tensions, and especially upon the longtime dehumanization of the Tutsis, and that exhibits emphasized that the same process of dehumanization has preceded and characterized virtually all other genocides, including--but by no means limited to--the Nazi holocaust.

Our conversation then--understandably-- pivoted to the reality of America’s long history of racism and the Trump administration and MAGA’s increasing use of, and efforts to normalize, similarly dehumanizing language.

The administration has repeatedly used the phrase “Poisoning the blood of our country” to describe non-White undocumented immigrants. Trump himself has called migrants “animals,” accused them of spreading “bad genes,” and described undocumented families as “infesting” the nation--language that echoes Nazi rhetoric against the Jews. He has called political opponents “vermin” and people who crossed the border illegally “animals.” The use of such dehumanizing language has steadily moved from Trump’s early rally speeches into DHS/White House institutional accounts, where White supremacist tropes and viral memes increasingly posted on official government social media accounts appear to be an effort to redefine who “belongs” in the United States and who should be considered an “invader.” Other.

After that conversation, I visited several internet sites devoted to analyses of genocides and the conditions that produce them. One of them, Genocide Watch, listed the ten stages leading up to bloodshed: Classification, Symbolization, Discrimination, Dehumanization, Organization, Polarization, Preparation, Persecution, Extermination, and Denial.

The site explains that

“Genocide is a process that develops in ten stages that are predictable but not inexorable. At each stage, preventive measures can stop it. The process is not linear. Stages occur simultaneously. Each stage is itself a process. Their logic is similar to a nested Russian matryoshka doll. Classification is at the center. Without it the processes around it could not occur. As societies develop more and more genocidal processes, they get nearer to genocide. But all stages continue to operate throughout the process.”

As Genocide Watch notes, all cultures have categories to distinguish between “us and them.” Some of those distinctions are racial, some ethnic or religious. (Examples were Germans and Jews, Hutus and Tutsis.) One of most important classifications used to differentiate “us” from “them” in what the site identified as “our current nation-state system” is citizenship--and as the site emphasizes, “Removal or denial of a group’s citizenship is a legal way to deny the group’s civil and human rights.”

It starts with “Us versus Them” and “Those people.” It devolves into “vermin” and “animals” and “invaders” and other epithets that effectively remove the “people” descriptor, which is what “dehumanization” does.

Ever since that conversation with my son, I have wondered where America is in that process, and whether a country founded on the (unrealized) principle that all people are equal will allow the worst among us to redefine who counts as “people.”

I am very much afraid we’re farther down that road than most of us want to recognize.

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True, the negative consequences of what I am calling “politicization” are intensified by the Trump’s insanity--which is becoming more obvious every day. (He recently responded to questions about the bond market by threatening military intervention.If that doesn't convince you, listen to this...) When Joe Biden began displaying the ravages of age, both his essential mental soundness and the competent and well-meaning administration he’d assembled made that decline far less worrisome than the precipitous decline of a man-child whose ignorance, serious mental issues, and thirst for revenge on anyone and everyone who ever thwarted his greed or ridiculed his tacky grandiosity were longstanding.

As Trump loses what is left of his already-disordered mind, that thirst for revenge, that desire to lash out and punish anyone who opposes him has been (as we say in academic-speak) operationalized. Federal officials have admitted withholding grants from Blue states for no other reason than that they would be spent in states that had voted against Trump.

And now, in the wake of the fierce weather that has battered large parts of the country, the administration is placing political conditions on disaster aid. Salem, Oregon Salem, just won a lawsuit against Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin and FEMA in which the city charged the Trump administration of “dangling disaster aid above local leaders’ heads in exchange for a rejection of diversity, equity, and inclusion programs.”

The Judge in that case found that “ As wildfires, severe storms, and floods routinely ravage through the State of Oregon, disaster relief has become a tool to advance unrelated executive policy.… It is hard to imagine the connection between the use of preferred pronouns and the fires currently burning through central Oregon.”

It isn’t just Oregon. The New Republic previously reported

“The White House has admitted in court that it deliberately canceled federal grants to states that didn’t vote for President Trump.

In court documents filed last week, and first reported on by The New York Times, Trump administration officials confirmed they terminated $7.5 billion in clean energy grants in October “based solely” on political criteria, focusing on states with Democratic leadership that voted for Kamala Harris in 2024. The admission came in a lawsuit filed by California researchers challenging the cancellation of Biden-era funding in multiple federal agencies.”

As multiple reports have noted, Trump has been withholding disaster relief funds from American citizens who happen to live in states that recognize that (gasp!) trans people exist or that teach about racism in their public schools. Last month, he denied FEMA disaster aid requests from four blue states after accepting the aid requests of six red states just two days before.

Here in Red Indiana, where our MAGA governor has asked for federal aid in the wake of devastating storms that have flooded much of the state, we will probably get the assistance that--by law--should be made available on the basis of need, not politics. (Even Hoosiers in Blue cities will benefit, which raises the question: don’t the morons in the Trump administration understand or care that there are lots of Red folks--Trump voters--in the Blue states they are declining to help?)

Pointing out that this behavior is illegal is beside the point. This is an administration that routinely ignores both the spirit and the letter of the law. More recently, it has been ignoring court rulings as well. As the Guardian has reported,

“During Donald Trump’s second term, federal judges and legal analysts have accused the administration of an unprecedented pattern of noncompliance, finding that officials violated or sidestepped court orders in at least 31 major lawsuits and over 250 individual immigration cases covering deportations, spending cuts, and policy rollbacks....

The Republican administration’s power struggle with federal courts, which is testing basic tenets of US democracy, reflects an expansive view of executive authority that has also challenged the independence of federal agencies, a president’s ethical obligations and the US’s role in the international order.”

The unanswered question is whether the millions of apathetic Americans who didn’t bother to vote in 2024, not to mention the millions who cast ballots for a profoundly unfit White man because they were unwilling to elect a Black woman, have learned anything from the disaster we now inhabit.

I guess the results in November will answer that question.

Reich posts opinion pieces regularly, and they are all worth reading and considering. A recent one focused upon just who is “raking it in” as America’s national debt explodes. Much of that explosion, Reich tells us, is the result of the billions of dollars in lost revenue from Trump’s invalidated tariffs, and the effect of Trump’s tax cuts to big corporations and the already very wealthy. And then, of course, there are the soaring costs of Trump’s war.

Reich reassures readers that crossing the forty-trillion-dollar threshold doesn’t mean a depression is looming. But he focuses in on what we can only describe as the actual-- and very troubling-- effects of that debt.

The problem is that an increasing portion of our nation’s budget — and your tax dollar — is dedicated to paying interest on this growing debt. Annual net interest payments on the federal debt have surpassed $1 trillion, making servicing the debt one of the largest of all federal budget expenditures.

That’s money we don’t spend on schools, healthcare, roads and bridges, and social safety nets. We’ll soon be paying more in interest on the federal debt each year than we spend annually on Medicare.

Reich then explains something that is not widely understood--the identity of those who benefit from those interest payments.

“This is an issue you hear very little discussion about, because the wealthy and powerful of this country would rather you not know. (And don’t expect Trump suck-up Bessent* to tell you, because he’s too busy denying that economic inequality is worsening.)

Foreign governments and foreign investors hold only about 30 percent of our debt. The rest — roughly 70 percent — is held domestically. That is, we pay the interest to ourselves.”

And who, exactly, are the “ourselves” we are paying? Reich tells us that by far the largest amount--nearly half--”is held by mutual funds, pension funds, insurance companies, and banks.”

And who owns those funds, companies and banks? Who holds the Treasury bills that are generating the growing amount of interest the rest of us are paying on the ballooning national debt?

People at the top. Rich people.

Reich spells it out.

“The richest 1 percent of U.S. households hold about 35.6 percent of all financial assets — shares of stock, corporate bonds, and Treasury bills — so it’s safe to assume they hold at least a third of all Treasury bills.

Here’s where things get really interesting.

Decades ago, wealthy Americans financed the federal government mainly by paying taxes. Their tax rate was far higher than it is today.

In the 1950s, under President Dwight Eisenhower, the richest Americans paid a marginal tax rate of 91 percent. (Tax deductions and tax credits lowered this top effective marginal rate somewhat.)

Today, the tax rate on wealthy Americans is far lower. The richest 400 Americans pay an average effective total tax rate of about 24 percent — including federal, state, local, and corporate taxes. Jeff Bezos — America’s second or third richest person — paid no federal income taxes in 2018. Trump paid no federal taxes for years before he became president.

So now, wealthy Americans finance the federal government mainly by lending it money and collecting interest payments on those loans.”

So while the richest Americans are collecting those growing interest payments, the taxes they pay have reduced government revenues by $10.6 trillion, courtesy of the tax cuts bestowed by George W. Bush and Donald J. Trump. As Reich reminds us, since 2000, 65 percent of the benefits from those tax cuts have gone to the richest of Americans — 22 percent to the top 1 percent. As he sums up: “Decades ago, the wealthiest Americans financed the government by paying higher taxes. Now, the government pays wealthy Americans interest on a swelling debt, caused largely by lower taxes on wealthy Americans.”

The taxes on ordinary Americans increasingly go to pay wealthy Americans interest on those loans--rather that funding the government services everyone needs.

And that is the real problem with our enormous national debt.

A young boy failed to talk. His parents took him to specialists, all of whom said he was normal, but still, he never spoke. Then one day, when he was nearly five, he looked up from the breakfast table and said “This toast is burned!” His mother was astonished. “Why haven’t you ever talked before?” “Well,” he responded, “Up till now, everything’s been okay.”

A lot of Americans who haven’t been “talking”—who haven’t been civically engaged, who haven’t bothered to vote, who’ve been quiet because from their standpoint, everything was going along okay—have suddenly realized the toast is burned. Now, they want to talk, but they aren’t sure who to talk to, or how to frame their concerns.

In less than three months, America will hold a truly momentous election. The result will depend upon the degree to which a majority of us understand how badly the toast is being burnt--the degree to which a rogue Court and a greedy and criminal administration are destroying what I have called “the American Idea.”

The coming election will not pit Republicans against Democrats. As a good friend of mine--a man who spent several years as a high-ranking elected Republican--likes to say, the Republican Party we used to know no longer exists. It has been replaced by a cult that has hijacked the name.

The coming election will also not be a contest between Democratic Socialists and so-called “mainstream” Democrats. We simply do not have the time or bandwidth for Democrats’ usual circular firing squad.

There are a number of things that the coming election is not. It’s not a referendum on the fewer than 1% of trans girls playing sports on women’s teams. It isn’t a referendum on whatever “woke” is thought to mean these days. Given the profligate spending of the Trump administration, it won’t involve different approaches to fiscal responsibility. In fact, the coming election will be almost entirely devoid of policy argumentation.

Instead, it will determine the continued existence of the America in which most of us grew up.

We will go to the polls--hopefully in very large numbers--to decide whether this country will continue to pursue the two elements that have historically defined us: liberty and civic equality. (Note that I said “pursue,” because we have yet to perfect those elements, but they have always been the national goal.)

The Founders gave us a system that was intended to protect our “inalienable” rights. They didn’t believe those rights were granted by government; instead, they believed the proper function of the state was to protect those pre-existing human rights. When a government can decide who has rights and who doesn’t, rights become privileges, to be awarded to those favored by a given administration.

The Fourteenth Amendment explicitly added civic equality to the Bill of Rights. In America, all of us have the right to be treated equally by a government bound to the rule of law. A government that prefers citizens of a particular race or religion is unAmerican.

Those are the fundamental American principles that are at stake this November.

American voters will decide whether to return to office the assortment of cultists, cowards and White “Christian” nationalists who have empowered the most corrupt and incompetent administration in American history--an administration that has wrecked the economy, damaged public health, diminished America’s global reputation and authority, trashed the “people’s house,” and rewarded its sycophants while engaging in a campaign of retribution against those who dare to stand against it--an administration that has trashed the nation’s Constitution, ignored the restraints of the Bill of Rights, and dared anyone to do anything about it.

This is an administration that believes itself to be a monarchy, headed by a mentally-ill and increasingly senile malignant narcissist.

If the polls and surveys are right, some sixty percent of Americans know that the toast is burnt. If those Americans come out to vote, and if Trump’s efforts to suppress the vote fail, we can eject the administration’s fellow-travelers and begin what will be an arduous and lengthy process to recover our country, and repair the systemic inadequacies that facilitated this disaster.

Sixty percent is a majority, but there is something very wrong with America’s civic education when forty percent of us do not disapprove.

If the unAmerican forty percent turn out, and the sixty percent spend their time and energies squabbling with each other, we really could lose America.

This former Republican says Vote--and Vote Blue No Matter Who.

It isn’t just the tax rates. It’s also the loopholes. One of the many “in the weeds” tactics pursued by our current, deeply corrupt administration has been the expansion of the provisions--the loopholes--used for years by savvy CPAs and tax lawyers. One of those longstanding loopholes gives them the ability to use accounting tricks to shift reported corporate profits into low tax jurisdictions.

In his Substack, Krugman focused on Malta.

“It’s a huge investment destination: There are only a bit over 500,000 people on the island. But it has attracted more than $500 billion in foreign direct investment. At the same time, Maltese companies have invested about the same amount overseas. That’s about a million dollars per man, woman, and child in each direction.

Of course, it’s all fake. What we’re actually seeing is a proliferation of shell companies that are used by companies elsewhere as ways to launder, transfer their profits so that they pop up in Malta, which has a basically zero tax rate on corporate profits.”

Malta provides Krugman with examples of the difference between tax avoidance and tax evasion. Avoidance makes use of legal mechanisms, many of which shouldn’t be available, but are. Evasion involves illegal shenanigans. Krugman says there’s some of both going on in Malta, avoidance and “quite a lot of actual money laundering and sheer criminal activity.”

The effects of this profit shifting are significant. As Krugman reports,

“Estimates for the United States are that we lose probably north of $100 billion a year to companies finding ways to make their profits appear someplace else. If you want a sense of perspective, that’s roughly the entire budget of the food stamp program. It’s roughly the entire amount that Medicaid spends on health care for children.

These are programs that the administration falsely insists are full of fraud, but international profit shifting is fundamentally tax fraud, although it may be legal.”

Malta’s use as a tax haven is an example of what Krugman and others have called “the downward spiral of oligarchy.” It clearly demonstrates the power of people with money who are determined to avoid taxes. And--rather obviously-- their ability to avoid taxes leaves them with even more money and power, hence the “spiral.”

Krugman notes that there have been tentative moves by the European Union and the US to address the problem--beginning with an international agreement that he characterizes as weak, to the effect that corporate tax rates must not be below 15% anywhere. But--surprise!--Trump withdrew the U.S. from that agreement.

Whenever I read about the unwillingness of the super-rich to pay a fair share of their profits to the country that made those profits possible, I think of Elizabeth Warren’s speech back in 2011, when she pointed out the connection between an infrastructure provided by government and paid for with tax dollars, and the ability of businesses to generate profits. “You moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for. You hired workers the rest of us paid to educate. You were safe in your factory because of police-forces and fire-forces that the rest of us paid for.”

Some of the ultra-wealthy get it.

Warren Buffett once pointed out that his tax rate was lower than that of his secretary. Billionaire Nick Hanauer warns that--absent reform--pitchforks are coming. And Patriotic Millionaires, an organization of some of the wealthiest Americans, wants to get big money out of politics, pay workers more, and tax the rich. Their website acknowledges that “Wealthy Americans like us have rigged the tax code to give ourselves countless handouts, leaving working people paying higher rates than billionaires.” The organization argues that America needs a tax system that “puts a check on the extreme inequality that threatens our economy and our democracy.”

My favored analogy is simple: if I join a country club, I pay dues for the privilege of using its amenities. As Oliver Wendell Holmes once put it, taxes are the dues we pay to live in a civilized society. Like Elizabeth Warren, I find it inexcusable that billionaires who have benefited most from the infrastructure made available by the taxes paid by those with far less-- refuse to pay their dues.

As the column pointed out, we live at a time when political labels are increasingly meaningless. We have fewer people identifying as “centrist” or “moderate,” and so-called independents espousing wildly incoherent views. (Donald Trump--who couldn’t define political terms if his life depended on it--has called Joe Biden a socialist, and it probably won’t be long until he changes that to his new favorite epithet, “communist.”)

As we’ve seen in this year’s primary contests, there’s also a maddening tendency among elected officials and the political press to equate “far left” and “far right” candidates as occupying equally extreme, dangerous ends of the political spectrum, though those in the former camp mostly want universal healthcare and affordable housing while the latter is more likely to endorse the forced deportation of non-white people from the United States.

While I am among those who considered several of Francesca Hong’s positions untenable (to be kind), I entirely agree with the University of Wisconsin professor who wrote that “The @nytimes hasn’t written a single article asking if ‘voters will think Tom Tiffany is too radical’ because he is an election-denying, pro-ICE, authoritarian extremist.” When Hong lost, media headlines trumpeted “the Limits of the Left” and “a terminal failure of the far left.” None greeted Tiffany’s win with acknowledgment that it represented a victory for the far Right.

The article then described the policies proposed by candidates in both the “far Right” and “far Left” camps.

On immigration, self-identified democratic socialists (arguably the farthest Left) are calling for free legal representation for immigrants and the abolition of ICE--positions that recent polling show 48% of Americans supporting. Georgia’s “mainstream” GOP Senate nominee sponsored the Laken Riley Act, (the first piece of legislation that Trump signed in his second term), an Act that targets undocumented immigrants charged with nonviolent crimes for deportation, and a bill to end birthright citizenship, which is inconveniently protected by the 14th Amendment.

When it comes to reproductive rights, Hong and other “far Left” candidates support reproductive rights; they also support universal childcare programs and paid leave programs to allow people to access reproductive care. James Fishback of Florida’s GOP, along with most contemporary Republicans, insists that “life begins at conception and abortion is murder.” They would shut down any remaining abortion providers and replace them with crisis pregnancy centers. (To be fair, Fishback would establish paid maternity leave for those required to reproduce.)

When it comes to taxes, virtually all those in the Lefty camps want to raise taxes on billionaires and corporations in order to fund investments in housing, education, clean air & water, and healthcare.” Some endorse a universal basic income. Republicans have a variety of approaches, but virtually all of them rob the poor to fund tax cuts for the rich.

In Michigan, El-Sayed’s opposition to funding Israel’s military was consistently labeled “far Left.” He also wants to end the war in Iran, along with the “warlike pathway that the foreign policy establishment has pursued with China”; to impose an arms embargo on Israel; to reinvest in foreign aid and re-engage with international bodies like the World Health Organization and the Paris Agreement. His basic argument is for “spending our taxpayer dollars here at home” rather than on funding foreign militaries.

Meanwhile, Bo French, a typical Republican nominee (in his case, for Texas Railroad Commissioner) wants to prohibit the sale of Texas land to people from Muslim-majority countries. He argues that “America has been at war with Islam since the time of our Independence, and stopping the subversive influence of Islam in Texas by banning all Muslim countries from acquiring land and interfering in Texas Oil and Gas will be my top legislative priority,” Shades of Indiana’s Micah Beckwith! (And speaking of Beckwith--and Rokita and Banks--you really can’t get any farther Right than those extremists without being a full-fledged Klansman.)

Credit where credit is due: the GOP has been successful in painting “extremism” as a Left phenomenon, despite the fact that even the most “out there” Leftists are far more representative of the majority of Americans than the increasingly neo-fascist Right.

I guess it all depends on how you define “extreme.”

ICE, like Hitler’s Stormtroopers, employs public, sometimes dramatic detentions that are intended to intimidate onlookers. (As a coalition of 21 state attorneys general has written, “the imagery evokes comparisons to repressive tactics that have no place in a free country.”) Critics of ICE have highlighted the incidents in which ICE “enforcers” have emerged from unmarked vehicles with their weapons drawn, and other incidents where they have abruptly taken people off of the street and forced them into unmarked vehicles, noting that such tactics were like those employed by German Stormtroopers and the Gestapo.

The goal of ICE increasingly seems to be less about individual arrests--and certainly not arrests limited to “the worst of the worst”--but about creating a generalized fear among American citizens, especially those who are Brown or Black. That fear is heightened by reports of the horrific conditions that are apparently common in the detention centers they’ve established around the country, and by other reports that have focused on the recruitment of out-and-out thugs and “Proud Boys” to fill ICE ranks.

And now--courtesy of American know-how and technological progress-- we’re told that ICE is acquiring a new tool of repression. The Department of Homeland Security plans to spend up to $20 million outfitting ICE officers with electroshock “distraction gloves.”

The linked essay accurately explains why this represents a frightening escalation of state over-reach.

“In standard law enforcement protocols, the act of reaching for a belt, unholstering a Taser, or brandishing a baton constitutes a clear, observable line of escalation. It alerts observers, signals intent, and creates a distinct temporal beat where both the officer and the subject recognize that severe non-lethal force has entered the room.

Integrating a high-voltage electrical pulse into a standard patrol glove will erase that temporal beat entirely.

”The equipment involved, specifically the Generated Low Output Voltage Emitter (G.L.O.V.E.), operates by delivering electrical charges directly through physical contact. An officer doesn’t need to pause, reach, or display a weapon. The mechanism for inflicting immediate physical pain is woven into the very fabric worn on their hands. Force isn’t a tool drawn in response to a crisis; it becomes an instantaneous extension of a touch in this scenario. When the physical barrier to inflicting pain vanishes, the operational will naturally shift toward physical compliance over verbal de-escalation.”

There are numerous ways to tell when traditional non-lethal weapons have been used. They leave markers, physical “signatures” that can be used as evidence by those conducting oversight. These gloves, however, don’t puncture the skin. They “inflict acute pain while leaving minimal to no physical trace.” Oversight becomes nearly impossible. As the linked essay warns,

“When a state apparatus shifts its enforcement tactics from visible force to invisible compliance, the nature of authority changes. Visible force carries a heavy political and public cost. It draws cameras, invites judicial scrutiny, and demands public justification. Invisible compliance, on the other hand, allows coercive power to be executed quietly, efficiently, and without generating the visual triggers that normally prompt civic pushback....

We don’t maintain a free society by making state coercion easier, quieter, or less noticeable. We maintain it by demanding that every assertion of physical power remains visible, accountable, and subject to public review. When pain can be administered at the touch of a hand without leaving a trace, the burden of restraint shifts entirely to the goodwill of the state. In a constitutional republic, goodwill was never supposed to be the baseline check on power.”

Goodwill, of course, has been entirely absent from ICE--and for that matter, from the Trump administration. For those of us familiar with the history of Nazi Germany and the rise of Hitler, the parallels are chilling. In an essay for Medium, Richard Brody has outlined the similarities, concluding that, “while only time will tell if we allow ICE to become this generation’s version of the Gestapo and Brown Shirts, many of the steps and actions taken to date, are eerily similar to the horrific days of Nazi Germany.”

We won’t avert that descent by giving ICE tools that make oversight impossible.

The upcoming program is especially timely in Red Indiana, where citizens are embarrassed daily by the Christian nationalists running our state government--most notably Lt. Governor Micah Beckwith, who favors us daily with evidence that he has no acquaintance with the Constitution, and Attorney General Todd Rokita, who panders incessently to MAGA Hoosiers, no matter how unrelated the topic to his official responsibilities.

In a speech in 2004, I explained why “Separation of Church and State is good for the Church and necessary for the State.” I chose that title because if you listen to the rhetoric around church-state issues favored by today’s “Christian” nationalists, you’d never know that the wall of separation contemplated by Jefferson and Madison was seen as an important protection for both authentic religion and government.

Permit me to offer a bit of accurate history.

James Madison’s views on religious liberty dominated the Constitutional Convention. Madison based his understanding of natural rights and the role of the state on Locke’s “social compact” and he recognized that-- because the exercise of religion requires that each person follow his own conscience-- it is a particular kind of natural right. Since opinions and beliefs can be shaped only by individual consideration of evidence that a particular individual finds persuasive, no one can really impose opinions on any one else.

Unlike property, or even speech, Madison insisted that the state simply has no jurisdiction over religion. A just state, in Madison’s view, cannot use religion to classify citizens, and it can neither privilege nor penalize citizens on account of religion.

Madison was hardly alone. Roger Williams, the clergyman who founded Rhode Island, was the originator of the phrase “a wall of separation” a full 150 years before Thomas Jefferson used it.

We sometimes overlook the importance 18th and 19th century Christians placed upon liberty of conscience—what they called “soul freedom.” Such views were most strongly held by Mennonites, Quakers and Baptists, but they were also part of the beliefs of colonial era Episcopalians, Methodists and Presbyterians.

I often quote John Leland (1754-1841), a traveling evangelical Baptist with a strong view of the individual’s relationship to God, the inviolability of the individual conscience, and the limited nature of human knowledge. Leland wrote, “religion is a matter between God and individuals; religious opinions of men not being the objects of civil government, nor in any way under its control.” He also wrote that “the state has no right or leave to concern itself with the beliefs of an individual or that individual’s right to expound those beliefs…The state is to maintain order, not to judge right and wrong.”

My very favorite Leland quote is: “The very tendency of religious establishments by human law is to make some hypocrites and the rest fools; they are calculated to destroy those very virtues that religion is designed to build up…Government has no more to do with the religious opinions of men than it has with the principles of mathematics.”

Were there people who lived at the same time as Madison and Leland who felt otherwise? Of course there were. But it was the position of Madison and Leland that prevailed; it was their view of the proper relationship (which might more accurately be described as the proper lack of a relationship) between church and state that became part of our constitutional structure.

Today, in addition to rampant historical revisionism, there are two common justifications for allowing government to take cognizance of religion—arguments that are mutually exclusive, although often offered by the same people. They are sometimes called the instrumental argument, and the ceremonial justification.

The instrumental argument is best summarized by a bumper sticker that was popular a few years ago: something along the lines of “When prayer was removed from the classroom, guns and teenage pregnancy came in.” (I didn’t say it was a logical argument.) This naive belief that exposure to a denatured and generic religion in the classroom will make students behave is exactly the same justification given for current efforts to post the Ten Commandments—if people see “Thou shalt not kill” on the wall of a public building, well, they won’t kill. (For complex theological reasons I do not understand, this evidently doesn’t work if the building is privately owned.)

Unfortunately, available evidence does not support this belief in the magical powers of religious iconography. The United States is by far the most religious of all the western industrialized nations—and we are also the most violent. The instrumental argument for supporting public religion and prayer is basically “my religion is good for people, so the state should impose it.”

The ceremonial defense of public religion, on the other hand, is the argument that it has no effect at all--that it’s meaningless. This is the argument that prayers at graduations and similar venues are merely “traditional” and “ceremonial.” Genuine people of faith find such characterizations deeply offensive. No religion I know of sanctions the notion that prayer is void of particularistic significance and useful only as an archaic (albeit charming) tradition.

This nation’s Founders believed that government neutrality in matters of religious belief was essential if government was to be seen as legitimate, and if genuine religious sentiment was to flourish. You only need look at nations without a First Amendment to see how right they were; European countries have seen state-sponsored religions degenerate into pleasant rituals without vitality, while nations like Iran have employed the force of the state in the service of religious conformity. Both alternatives are instructive.

The Founders would be appalled by our contemporary “Christian” Taliban.

Just in the past few days, we’ve had reports of the millions of dollars he has garnered from the oil and gas interests that have business before the Court. The Daily Beast reports that Alito has made $2.9 million dollars from fossil fuel interests, and that he is preparing to vote in a case that will determine whether oil companies should pay for their dishonesty about the impacts of climate change. (The Trump administration, you will not be shocked to learn, supports a grant of immunity to those oil companies.)

Several other outlets have also reported on Alito’s fossil fuel investments and his evident intent to weigh in on the upcoming case rather than recuse himself. According to the Guardian, Alito realized that $2.9 million from fossil fuel interests between the years of 2005 and 2024. Alito was tapped for the high court by George W Bush in 2005.

The findings come as the Supreme Court prepares to take up a case in which the oil companies Suncor Energy and Exxon asked the justices to find that federal law prevents subnational governments from filing lawsuits against fossil fuel producers for the climate-warming effects of their products.

The Supreme Court said this month it will hear oral arguments in the case on 5 October, the opening day of its new term.

Court Accountability, together with other watchdog organizations, has called for Alito to recuse himself, and for a Senate investigation if he refuses (which he has). They point out that Alito is the only Supreme Court justice with holdings in fossil fuel energy companies, that those holdings are significant, and that they raise a perception of partiality in the pending lawsuit.

The arguably inadequate Supreme court ethics code--adopted only in 2023-- would force recusal only when a Justice has invested in the specific companies party to pending court cases. A Supreme Court spokesperson, responding to a question from NBC News, said Alito was not required to recuse himself from the pending lawsuit because his holdings don’t include the parties named in the case, Suncor and ExxonMobil.

I agree with Lisa Graves, co-founder of Court Accountability, who points to the obvious--that Alito’s oil-tied wealth will inevitably be affected by the results of a case that will impact the entire sector.

“A reasonable person would think if you’re invested in the industry that could benefit from the outcome of a lawsuit, then you could personally stand to benefit from the outcome, even if you don’t hold the stock in the specific company that happens to be the named plaintiff,” said Graves.

That concern is heightened by the fact that Alito had inherited--and made a small fortune--from ExxonMobil stock, but had sold the stock, conveniently ensuring that the recusal rule would not apply.

The Guardian article pointed to Alito’s history of favoring fossil fuel interests. In the 2007 case Massachusetts v Environmental Protection Agency, he was one of four dissenting justices who argued greenhouse gas emissions could not be regulated under the Clean Air Act, and in 2022, in West Virginia v EPA, he joined Neil Gorsuch’s majority in arguing that the EPA lacked broad authority under the Clean Air Act to require a shift away from fossil fuels. Worse still, he joined the majority in two 2024 cases overturning the longstanding Chevron doctrine--a decision making it much more difficult for agencies to defend environmental regulations.

A similar article by The New Republic detailed Alito’s considerable remaining investments in fossil fuel companies, and pointed out the significance of the pending case for fossil fuel companies generally. The outcome “will determine whether municipal and state governments can seek damages for decades of Big Oil deception regarding the climate harms these companies knew their fossil fuel products would cause—a make or break decision for Alito’s second stream of income.”

Anyone who has followed Supreme Court jurisprudence is already aware that Samuel Alito is an ideologue given to highly dishonest approaches to settled precedents with which he disagrees. I have previously highlighted that dishonesty in his majority opinion in Dobbs, the case that overturned Roe v. Wade, and partially eviscerated the constitutional doctrine we know as the right to privacy.

Next to Alito, Thomas--who just takes money and trips-- is a corruption piker.

Few if any of us follow or understand the consequences of nefarious actions taking place in “the weeds” of governance. When government agencies are run by honorable people, that isn’t a big problem--but when the people we’ve installed are intent upon figuring out ways to stay in power and rob us blind--it enables the grift.

Two recent examples:

Talking Points Memo has recently reported on game-playing at the Census Bureau.

A proposed Commerce Department rule would exclude undocumented immigrants and other non-citizens from the census, and stop the census from collecting most demographic data on Americans. (The exclusion of immigrants would violate the Constitution, but to this administration, that’s a feature, not a bug.)

As the linked report notes, these changes would have several enormous negative impacts:

They would change allocations of power in Congress, shifting it toward red states. When the federal government apportions congressional seats after the census, a count that excludes non-citizens would see fewer congressional seats apportioned to blue states, and, as a result, more apportioned to red states.

The changes would futher skew the Electoral College, which is based on each state’s congressional allotment. Fewer seats for blue states in Congress would mean blue-state voters with less power to elect the president.

The proposed changes would also eliminate a crucial source of data. A refusal to collect data on race and other demographics would eliminate access to information that is critical to both the government’s grant-making process and to researchers.

And finally, the changes would make it much harder to challenge maps that are racially gerrymandered, since accurate data is critical to such challenges.

Example number two: in the Bulwark, Catherine Rampell recently reported on what she called “Trump’s gift to the money launderers.”

“Biological, social, and financial parasites are all flourishing, because the Trump administration has destroyed the institutional capacity necessary to detect and eradicate them.

In the latest (non-GI-related) development, the Department of the Treasury announced this week that it would destroy the government’s registry of shell-company ownership. This is an anti-corruption database that Treasury is by law required to maintain, so that law enforcement can more easily “follow the money” when investigating crimes.

Even worse, the Trump administration will also destroy all the data it has already collected, so that no future presidential administration or local police department can use it, either.

“It’s like Trump ordering the deletion of the FBI’s entire fingerprint database,” former congressman Tom Malinowski (D-N.J.), a champion of the 2021 law that created the corporate registry, told The Bulwark.

They’re effectively salting the earth, so that sex traffickers, scam artists, drug lords, money-launderers, and tax cheats can roam free not only through the end of Trump’s time in office but long after he’s out, too.”

As Rampell writes, when Trump was re-elected, “suddenly cracking down on corruption and money-laundering was no longer so appealing to the federal government.”

At least some outlets are reporting on these examples. (The Prospect also has an explanation of the effect of the proposed Treasury rule.) I have absolutely no doubt that there are hundreds of other, similar efforts being made by the clowns and crooks who are currently in charge of the machinery of our federal government. (Periodically, we do hear about the deletion of credible, science-backed data at HHS at the behest of RNK, Jr., the crank who is currently in charge of the nation’s health...)

If America were being taken over by the mafia, the picture wouldn’t be much different.

While we Americans are distracted by the “big stories”--the culture wars on “woke” and transgendered folks, the official racism, the Iran debacle, the blatant corruption--the mob is working behind the scenes to buttress minority rule and protect their criminal enterprises. And a GOP-ruled Congress is facilitating it all.

Talk about “stopping the steal!” If the November mid-term doesn’t flush them all out, it may be too late to reverse the destruction.

I often think of a former student--a hospital administrator-- who corrected me when I referred to America’s healthcare “system.” “We don’t have a system,” he explained. “We have an industry.” In the wake of my most recent post, I came across two examples that once again validated the accuracy of his correction.

The American Prospect published an article describing what it termed a “government face plant”--lawmakers are now admitting that a reform intended to address surprise billing--situations where patients are hit with unexpected charges--instead created a parallel system with new middlemen that has actually increased health care costs. After explaining how this effort increased costs, the article essentially echoed the analysis of every health care expert.

“The situation has been mirrored in U.S. health care so often that yet another layer of extractive bureaucratic waste is, well, no surprise. A confounding administrative system is deemed broken, and a new administrative system replicates the problem in a slightly different way. The solution is well known enough that every industrialized country has adopted it in some form—universal public insurance—but it’s zealously opposed by the very industries benefiting from a fragmented status quo.”

The same day I came across the Prospect article, I also read about a recent study from Yale University, focused upon Bernie Sanders’ Medicare For All proposal. The study concluded that a single-payer Medicare for All system would not only be economically viable, but that it would save over $1 trillion in annual health spending while improving the quality and access to care.

“We estimate that a single-payer universal health care system would reduce US national health expenditure by $1041.2 billion annually, or 19.7% of current spending….” a group of five Yale University researchers wrote. “Our findings indicate that the principal barrier to universal coverage in the USA is not the absence of resources, but their allocation.”

The researchers also concluded that a universal model could also save as many as 114,174 lives every year.

The savings are projected to come primarily from five sources:

$377.5 billion by paying no more than other countries for prescription drugs;
$286.3 billion by eliminating bureaucracy and waste;
$285.7 billion by curbing fraudulent billing;
$100 billion by preventing costly emergency room and hospital visits; and
$295.6 billion by reimbursing providers fairly for the care they provide.

Senator Sanders welcomed the additional support. The article quotes him pointing out that we are at a time when “15 million Americans are being thrown off the healthcare they have and 20 million Americans have already seen their premiums double, on average, as a result of Trump’s so-called ‘Big Beautiful Bill.’”

The need to adopt a single payer system has never been greater--or more obvious.

The linked article also reports the results of another research project, this one a consumer financial survey conducted by JG Wentworth. It exposed a problem it identified as “unique to our flawed private system:” It seems that an overwhelming majority of Americans are foregoing preventative care, concerned that they can’t afford it. That trend is especially prevalent among young adults between 18 and 28. In that age group, those avoiding preventative care represent an astonishing 94% of the demographic.

“The consequences of skipped or postponed care cannot be overstated; according to a KFF survey, nearly two out of ten adults say their health worsened after avoiding treatment because of cost. This same phenomenon has bled over to prescriptions, where four out of ten adults say they aren’t taking their medicine as prescribed.

Moreover, delaying care and being unable to afford life-saving medications often result in costly and preventable trips to the emergency room, straining our public health infrastructure and leading to worse outcomes for patients.”

As the article concluded,

“With the Trump administration spending billions of dollars per week to wage a pointless war in the Middle East, and even asking us to pay for the construction of his golden ballroom, there’s no question that universal health care would be a better use of public funds.

“A universal health care system in the US would not require the country to spend more on health care. It would require it to spend less,” Yale researchers concluded. “A system that covers everyone, costs $1 trillion less, and averts more than 100,000 deaths annually requires no new discovery to implement, only enactment.”

If common sense were just a bit more common....

At Can We Still Govern, Dan Moynihan recently noted that in one recent Republican primary, a candidate who had dropped out had beaten the candidate endorsed by Trump, because Trump’s choice had a Muslim-sounding name. In Michigan’s 8th district, Thomas Smith--who had suspended his campaign--beat Amir Hassan. Soundly.

The threat to Abdul El-Sayed, who is running for Senate in Michigan, is obvious.

Moynihan notes the difficulty of studying racism. Even in anonymous surveys, most people are reluctant to express views they know are subject to societal disapproval, including racist views. And a lot of people lie to themselves about the extent of their own bigoted attitudes.

“And so researchers came up with an ingenious way to get at people’s willingness to engage in discriminatory behavior: the audit study. The audit study is an experiment, where people are usually asked to respond to information about two people who are identical except in terms of a key characteristic, such as gender or race.

The classic version of the audit study involves sending two sets of fictional resumes out to employers, where the resumes are identical except for one factor: the name. One name might be a White-sounding name. Another might be a name that sounds more likely to belong to a minority: someone who is Black, or Hispanic, or Middle-Eastern. People will infer the race of the sender by the name. If the responses to the two resumes are the same, no discrimination. But if one name gets systematically less responses, it is reasonable to infer discriminatory behavior.”

Research has clearly demonstrated the persistence of bigotry. In these studies, White job applicants receive many more callbacks than Black or Latino job candidates with identical credentials, and Moynihan notes that this pattern has not improved over time. When it comes to housing discrimination, researchers get the same result; bias against non-white renters and buyers is significant and has remained relatively stable over time.

The cited studies pitted people with identical resumes against each other. In the Michigan Congressional race, however, the minority candidate was advantaged--and rather clearly better (at least, employing MAGA criteria.) Neither Smith nor Hassan had the advantage of incumbency. Hassan had Trump’s “complete and total” endorsement. He had Speaker Mike Johnson’s endorsement. He was a Navy veteran. Smith had only raised $1850. dollars. And Smith had dropped out.

Yet Smith received 50% of the GOP primary vote to Hassan’s 33%.

“Hassan Nehme, another Muslim Republican candidate, blamed the Christian nationalist movement. Moynihan notes that Hassan had faced a wave of bigotry, including lies accusing him of being an immigrant and Muslim. He was neither--he’d once been Muslim but converted, and is “now an avowed Christian who has become fairly critical of his former faith.”

There was really nothing Amir Hassan could have done to win this Republican primary that he did not do. He had every advantage and an opponent who had so little confidence in his campaign that he exited the race. None of it mattered. Hassan’s name did not match the imagined bio it created, but that imagined bio of a Muslim candidate was enough to sink him...

Which brings us to another name in Michigan: Abdul El-Sayed. The Democratic nominee for Senate has already become a national figure for Republicans, who hope to persuade all Michigan voters to treat him they same way that Hassan was treated. Reduced only to a Muslim name. Tied to every Muslim stereotype that Republicans fear. His record as a physician working on public health buried from public view. A debate on actual policies avoided at all costs.

El-Sayed is Muslim, and has been sharply critical of support for Israel’s war. If people want to argue about that issue, fine. But instead, his opponent Mike Rogers claimed that El-Sayed believes that “America deserved 9/11.” He also said El-Sayed is a “RADICAL ISLAMIST” who would “unleash terror.””

Granted, Hassan lost a Republican primary, not a general election. But El-Sayed--who holds two doctorates and was born and raised in Michigan-- faces the widespread bigotry that MAGA’s Christian nationalism has encouraged and rewarded.

I guess we’ll see just how widespread that bigotry really is... and what’s in a name.

That “free market” has been very costly. America spends more than any other first-world country on health care--data shows that healthcare consumes roughly 18% of our total GDP--about twice as much as those other countries. We also have one of the lowest life expectancies and poorest health outcomes of first-world countries, and are the only major developed country without a national healthcare system.

Most of us know the drawbacks: some 8% of Americans have no health insurance, enormous sums ostensibly spent for healthcare actually go to insurance-company paperwork and profit, the linking of health coverage to employment burdens business...the list goes on.

Most Americans are aware of the foregoing aspects of our refusal to recognize that healthcare is not an area where a market approach makes sense. What is less well understood is that government already pays most healthcare costs--but does so in the least efficient, least cost-effective way. I certainly didn’t understand that until I joined a task force at the university, and was astonished by that revelation. Health insurance for government employees at all levels, grants for most medical research, and provision of a wide variety of government programs, amounted to some 70% of all medical costs at that time. It’s undoubtedly higher now.

American healthcare is an incredibly wasteful patchwork...

I thought of that epiphany when I read a recent Substack from Paul Krugman, addressing Dr. El-Sayed’s advocacy of Medicare for All. He explained that--despite the labeling of that position as somehow beyond the pale of a capitalist country--an enormous percentage of U.S. healthcare is already socialized. As he says, the government’s role is so large that U.S. healthcare is better described as partially privatized socialism than as anything resembling a free market.

Well over 100 million Americans are covered by government programs, and private health insurance in the U.S. isn’t just highly regulated--it is also heavily subsidized. And then there’s job-related coverage.

“If your employer pays you $10,000, that’s taxable income. But if your employer pays $10,000 toward a company health insurance plan that meets certain criteria, it isn’t taxable. That’s a huge effective subsidy, running at more than $300 billion a year. Take that subsidy into account, along with the more than $100 billion per year spent subsidizing policies purchased under the ACA, as well as the outlays on Medicare and Medicaid, and net effect is that the government pays for more than two-thirds of Americans’ health insurance.”

Moreover, government programs are popular. Medicare has an 82 percent favorable rating and Medicaid comes in at 73 percent. Private insurers, on the other hand, are widely disliked and repeatedly accused of denying essential care in order to grow their bottom lines.

As Krugman writes,

“The case for viewing insurers as parasites is strong. Many Medicare benefits are now delivered via Medicare Advantage, that is, plans paid for by the government but run through insurance companies. MedPAC, an independent advisory commission, estimates that last year Medicare Advantage plans were overpaid by $84 billion, thanks to practices such as “upcoding,” in which patients’ health problems are overstated to get larger sums from Medicare.

Assessing the waste from employer-based insurance is harder, but most evidence suggests that private insurers have substantially higher administrative costs than Medicare does. Furthermore, the complexity of private insurance, with multiple payers all trying to deny care when they can, is a huge burden both on providers — doctors, nurses, and hospitals — and on patients.”

Krugman points to evidence that Americans may be getting fed up with our “market” system of unaffordable premiums, rampant claim denials, and byzantine claim administration. He also notes that funding healthcare insurance through taxation would benefit middle-income households, who would pay less while high-income households would pay more. And--in a point that particularly resonates with me--in such a system, the U.S. would stop wasting large sums on pointless administrative costs.

El-Sayed is an epidemiologist who was born and raised in Michigan and who served as the executive director of Wayne County’s Department of Health, Human, and Veterans Services from 2023 to 2025. He holds two doctorates, is not a member of DSA and rejects the socialist label. If we’re honest, his electoral chances will have far more to tell us about anti-Muslim bigotry than about a Medicare for All system that most Americans would welcome.

If his name was Smith, I think he’d be a shoo-in.