Political

Politics of many subjects, including schools, funding, testing, representatives, ethics

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Moral Inertia

What is the law of inertia? an object at rest will remain at rest, and an object in motion will stay in motion with the same velocity (constant speed and direction), unless acted upon by a net external force.

Both of these conditions, both rest and motion, prevail in the moral universe as well. First,  no immorality will change unless something interferes with its progress, and it will continue because “an object in motion remains in motion.”

The other half of inertia is “an object at rest will remain at rest.” In the moral universe that means we will sit and watch immorality speed along, unless we are acted upon by an outside force.

You can apply this to the actions of the Trump administration on immigrants, on the poor, on the diverse, i.e. those who fail to meet the standards of “normality.” Is it possible that such actions begin with legitimate concerns? Yes, but a campaign in motion will continue in motion, so it naturally gains scope and intensity, without an outside force to stop it.

Motion includes planetary cycles, so moral planets also revolve around us. Like the planets of our solar system our moral planets spiral outwards from the center, even escaping the gravity of the stabilizing star of our morality.

Finally an object escapes gravity altogether and becomes a lost planet, as we are becoming. This is only my personal opinion. It is not predicted by Newton’s laws of motion or the corresponding laws of morality.  Take it or leave it; it is my  own nightmare.

We are witnessing how the laws of inertia apply to immigrant intolerance, i.e. what we will put up with.  It begins with illegal border crossing, a legitimate concern. Then the imperial power declares that even those born of illegal immigrants within the boundaries of the country are illegal, the so-called “dreamers.” No outside force intervenes, the imperial progress continues.

Then the imperial power declares that all immigrants are not only illegal, but “criminals” and “rapists,” and the round-up includes all immigrants because they are a legal and moral threat to the country. They are pulled off the street because they look darker than Caucasians and /or resemble Latinos or African-Americans.

Because no outside force intervenes the threat goes outside the boundaries of the country, and  bombers destroy ships exiting a country on the suspicion of carrying drugs. No search or seizure of drugs, just bombing of ships and lifeboats, because they are suspected. No one stops the bombers because all follow the laws of inertia.

We notice that whom we classify as an “illegal threat” keeps growing. First they were the narrow group of “criminals,” then they were the “dark-skinned,” then a whole nationality of people are threats to our security. Our moral bearings are slipping with every campaign, because, by inertia, we let them slip.

Where will this end? All-out war against whole nations suspected of harboring drug lords? Is there no limit to how we much we generalize from one one suspicious-looking pedestrian to a whole nation of criminals? Not unless the object, the paranoid imperial power, is acted upon by an outside force.

No such force exists in this country, because we are all objects at rest.   We remain complicit. The potential of our inertia is frightening because it inhabits political parties, churches, patriotic militias. They, too, are inert against immorality; they even join its momentum. They permit immorality and eventually contribute to it..

Each time we  placidly observe the abuses of immoral institutions they grow in strength and hate. We begin to invent reasons why our immorality is moral. We kid ourselves to justify our inertia, to justify our immoral planets.

Our country awaits some outside force to shake our moral inertia.  It could be as simple as one person in Congress speaking out.  One influential pastor decoupling her church.  One militia commander re-discovering patriotism. What will it take? Are we satisfied to live morally inert or will we advocate for, and become, that outside force?

Otherwise the moving object will keep moving, as the law of inertia dictates.

 

 

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We’re Not An Experiment Anymore

Fourscore and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure  (Gettysburg Address)

Abraham Lincoln offered this perspective at the lowest moment of the Civil War, but he lived to see the nation endure as one nation.  The American experiment, “whether that nation . . .can long endure” was fulfilled. We could argue that the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments, Women’s suffrage, and the Voting Rights Act were were all part of the experiment, but those were confirmations of the experiment that survived the Civil War along with the afterthought of Reconstruction.

An experiment is “an operation or procedure carried out under controlled conditions in order to discover an unknown effect or law, to test or establish a hypothe sis, or to illustrate a known law” [Merriam Webster’s Dictionary].  We have discovered that the nation could endure the assault on its principles.  We have tested the hypothesis with one hundred seventy years of confirming evidence. We have illustrated what was only a hypothesis at the writing of the Declaration of Independence.

It is self-indulgent to call us the “American Experiment.” We are past experimenting and well into the stage of confirming a nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We have reached the conclusion of the Experiment, practicing what we have learned. We build on a secure foundation of truth.

Americans prefer to consider us an experiment. We are the confused teenagers of democracy. We are in the awkward stage, trying to find our true identity. We need more time to prove the hypothesis that “all men are created equal.” We are still in a safe place like our parents’ basement, not confident we can make it in the world.

That’s our version of delayed development, but we are completely viable, more than that teenager who dwells below the surface. We survived the experiment.  We are the adults of democratic practice., whether we want to admit it or not. It’s time to get out of the basement and fulfill our potential. Get a job, America!

We can stop calling this the “American Experiment.” Since we are adults, let’s call it a “vocation” or a “mission” or a “summons,” (to  bring to the surface (a particular quality or reaction from within oneself”). The ” American Vocation.” I like that. Or “the American Mission.” Or “the American Summons.”

But how do democratic adults act in a crisis of values? Adults are proven by fulfilling the values they were brought up with. They don’t pretend they are in an identity crisis. They live up to the expectations that any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. 

  1. We react  constructively to a moment of crisis–a shooting, a natural disaster, an economic crisis. We don’t point fingers at brothers or sisters, blaming others first.  We assume joint responsibility for responding. That is how we were taught.
  2. If we are squabbling over who is right and who is wrong, we listen to the adults in the room. The adults are the ones who are not blaming immaturity on the siblings, but are viewing the crisis as a shared challenge, which demands the best efforts of all sides.
  3. Instead of getting angry with our rivals, we consider the weight of the tragedy or crisis and share the dismay and sadness that collapses hope. We may be frustrated that we are not the mature citizens we thought we were, but we are disappointed with ourselves, not finger-pointing. We have nothing to prove. We have only to practice what we have learned.
  4. Instead of claiming we were right all along, we  consider what are the shortcomings of the one complaint or solution we always insist is the answer. Only an immature adult has to be right all the time. Only a mature adult admits his opponent could be right.
  5. Instead of looking for a convenient scapegoat, we look for multiple causes for a crisis. The solution may involve multiple strategies, long-term effort and patience. A mature adult doesn’t listen to immature complaints that someone else is not living up to the Experiment. We consider complex solutions.

If you have raised teenagers, you could probably name other signs of arrested development. You get the idea. Teenagers have to be respected, but challenged to grow up.

Maybe we believe the old solutions are the best solutions. We prefer to be less accountable, to think of our enterprise as an “experiment.”  We want to go back to our parents’ basement, where we can re-think democracy. That is no longer an option. The world is turning, and we are accountable to the American Vocation” or whatever you want to call “living in the present.”

The “American Experiment” doesn’t suit our stage of development.  We have good principles. We are dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. We can not pretend we are helpless or blame our upbringing. Our family, our nation, so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Bored by National Emergencies

Two investigative reporters have enumerated the President’s Emergency Declarations to expand his powers to govern without the approval of Congress (N.Y. Times, August 22).

Karen Yourish and Charlie Smart listed ten Emergency Declarations that President Trump has invoked to gain control of U.S. tariff regulations, U.S. Immigration Policy, U.S. Energy regulations, the International Criminal Court, the District of Columbia Home Rule, the sovereignty of the states in law enforcement, among others.

Many of these declarations have already been successfully challenged in lower courts, but the President plans to continue appealing up to the Supreme Court. Meanwhile the tariffs continue and cities continue to be occupied by the National Guard, awaiting the results of litigation.

[Details of this investigation at: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/08/22/us/politics/trump-emergency-immigration-tariffs-crime.html?campaign_id=9&emc=edit_nn_20250904&instance_id=161874&nl=the-morning&regi_id=58015410&segment_id=205242&user_id=c0905f751b354fe438caeb62c91726b3]

Governing by emergency reminds me of the Aesop’s fable,”The Boy Who Cried Wolf.” In the fable, a young shepherd decided it was fun to alert the townspeople that their sheep were endangered by frequently crying “Wolf!” thus bringing them out to the pasture for nothing. When a wolf actually attacked the herd and the boy cried “Wolf!” the people ignored his cry, since he had already alarmed them for nothing. Thus the wolf devoured the flock.

Crying “Emergency!” could have the same effect on voting citizens. Yourish and Smart speculate: they’ll just acclimate. By invoking so many crises, Trump signals that he must take abnormal action to cope with an abnormal time.

Will the wolf eventually appear and the voters cry “Bah!” ?

Maybe the wolf has already appeared in the guise of the National Debt. It has been well-documented that the Social Security fund will fall into insolvency within the next ten years. The cost of replenishing that fund would be astronomical, unthinkable. Should the administration cry “Wolf!” to make Social Security solvent or has the American voter grown numb to emergencies?

We could raise the retirement age for full Social Security to 67.5 years for everyone’s full benefits and to 64 for the reduced benefits. The increase could be justified by the increased life span for the last two generations. It would require a true national emergency to convince voters that this reasonable budget measure was necessary, but who could convince them? Not the boy who cried “Wolf!”

With the current interest on the National Debt already exceeding the budget items for Medicare or for National Defense, it is fair to say we are near, if not in, a National Emergency on deficit spending. When the next budget comes due this October, how will anyone in federal government, Congress or the President, convince us we are in a budget crisis? Would we listen to the boy who cried “Wolf”?

Can we convince the voting public that a painful sacrifice is necessary, when the tolerance for National Emergencies has exceeded our patience ?

  1. We could reverse the recent tax cuts, which cost us $4 trillion, comprising most of the recent budget deficit that added to the National Debt.
  2. . We could reduce the budget for National Defense, which is equivalent to the sum of the ten highest national defense budgets in the world. If we cut 10% of our defense budget we would still be three times more than the next largest–China’s.
  3. We could restore the IRS cuts, which would allow for persistent and thorough investigations of tax evaders, those who exploit loopholes and deductions and pay a lower balance than most of the middle class tax payers. Many of them pay no taxes at all.

None of these measures would be popular with the wealthiest taxpayers, but shouldn’t they be called to assist in a time of National Emergency? Or are Emergencies called only to raise tariffs, an expense that victimizes the average consumer?

When responsible representatives try to sound the deficit alarm, how will they gain credibility? Will they be believed in this “Year of the National Emergency”? Will they be like the boy who cried “Wolf” for the last time?

What if we had a real National Emergency?

 

 

 

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The Suck and Susceptablity of Power

Is President Donald Trump a dictator? Really a semantic question. What has happened in the first eight months of his administration feels like a grab for power. Perhaps he is an aspiring dictator.

The pushback from the lower courts and the protests of the governors has moderated the grab, but the intention is clear. The President wants as much power as a democratic ruler can amass. What Republicans have traditionally campaigned for — the divestment of federal control–has lost all credibility.

What shocks observers at home and abroad is the degree of power a U.S. President can actually amass and the complicity of those who should restrain him. That is the perception of dictatorship regardless of whether President Trump has been successful or not.

Today CNN offered some examples of the overreach of power in <whatmatters@newsletters.cnn.com>:

  • Taking power from Congress. Trump wields tariffs as a weapon and sets the rates himself.
  • Expecting help from the courts: he expects the Supreme Court justices he appointed to fall in line with his challenges to the separation of powers.
  • Installing loyalists
  • Controlling information: He fired the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics ,tried to delete the very idea of climate change from the federal government.
  • Imposing will over the arts: Taken over the Kennedy Center.
  • Rewriting history: Changing exhibits at the Smithsonian.
  • Purging top general officers from the military
  • Targeting political enemies
  • Seeking advantage in the coming elections: Trump has pushed for red states to create more Republican seats in Congress.

The President insists he is not a dictator, yet from the above indications he would like to be. A good example is his assumption of a Congressional prerogative, the control of tariffs. His illegal assumption of this power gives him leverage over industry, foreign policy and the perception of power.

  1. The President appears to be favoring domestic industries by raising the tariffs on foreign products. Unfortunately the Republicans’ chief talking point in the 2024 campaign was the lowering of prices and control of inflation.The effect of tariffs is to raise prices. Whether domestic industries and American voters have the patience to endure the short-term pain of higher prices will be the theme of the 2026 campaign.
  2. The President has flexed his muscle with foreign powers by manipulating the tariffs on their goods on a daily basis. He has shown his leverage by getting Canada, Mexico, China and some of Europe to negotiate and comply. He may have already tested the limits of his capricious use of the tariff. If he persists, some nations will rebel against manipulation of their economies.
  3. Most all, the President wants to be perceived as powerful. He already has made foreign authorities dance to his tune. He has usurped Congressional power. He has made domestic corporate leaders fall into line. Regardless of the long-term effects of tariffs, he is presently perceived as the ultimate global power broker. As they say, power is the great aphrodisiac, and the President wears the perfume of power.

The President is counting on the trust and gullibility of American voters to assist his grab for power. He denies every accusation, most of all that he is a dictator. He has controlled the narrative till now, but he may have counted too much on the complicity of American voters. Many of them have read 1984, Brave New World or The Hunger Games. Many of their triggers could go off at any moment before the 2026 election. Deception has a shelf life in a literate country.

The elite left wing may sneer at this. The results of the 2024 election speak for themselves. Too many voters believed the exaggerations and promises and elected President Trump by a decent margin. It felt like the right wing media had controlled the narrative and forged a powerful mandate. The Supreme Court derailed the pending investigations of his felonies with its decision on Presidential immunity. There seemed to be no way to unplug the Hoover Vacuum of power suck.

Yet aspiring dictators have the tragic flaw of believing their own narrative. Their addiction may prove their downfall. While power is sucked up from one end, the leak of doubt is opening at the other end of the canister. As prices rise and promises fail, the suck of power may succumb to a different message: “the narrative sucks.”

If foreign nations, industrial leaders and the voter-ship of America lose patience with the aspiring dictator, a lot could change by 2026. As the psalmist said:

Thou didst set them in slippery places. Thou didst cast them down into destruction! How they are brought into desolation, as in a moment! They are utterly consumed with terrors! (Psalms 73:18-19)

To control this metaphor: the narrative suck may take down the aspiring dictator from high places. It is one thing to aspire, another to hold your ground in a slippery place, and the most slippery of places in the Twenty-first century is the American Presidency.

 

 

 

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The Leader We Need

The call for a new Stephen Miller to counter the old one is a pathetic strategy for vetting a new leader for the Democratic Party. I read about this disheartening goal in the current online issue of The Atlantic (August 7, 2025),  which by no means endorsed the quest.

The whole idea of imitating the leadership of the Republican Party is not only self-defeating, it is degrading and short-sighted. What the electorate needs is a breath of fresh air, not a deodorizing of the old one.  Voters feel this more than they know it. They will respond to a candidate who offers an inspiring vision rather than a competing one.

Maybe it’s because I have just heard Doris Kearns Goodwin speak that I am focused on the character of Presidents more than their platforms. Maybe it’s because character has been in short supply in the current administration. No one sacrifices for integrity, principles, or consistency in Washington anymore. I am convinced that those habits can come into currency again.

Goodwin says the primary traits of character in the Presidents she has studied are: empathy, resilience, listening skills, humility, and self-reflection. These sound like the traits of a spiritual icon, not so much a politician, yet Abraham Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, Franklin  Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson  shared many of these qualities, and no one ever recommended them for sainthood. Maybe Lincoln.

Lincoln appointed his most potent political rivals to his cabinet. Teddy Roosevelt threatened powerful business interests with his labor and social reforms. Franklin Roosevelt appropriated tax dollars for training and employment programs of enormous scale that had never been tried before. Following the assassination of a President, Johnson passed the Civil Rights Bill against the threats of southern Democrats. When cautioned that he would lose the loyalty of those partisans with this bill, he said, “Then what the hell is the Presidency for?” These Presidents brought the kind of leadership needed for crises. We’ll pass over Johnson and Vietnam for the moment. Goodwin, herself, broke with Johnson on this issue.

Who represents high values in American politics today? Many who hesitate to run for high office, because they would be stampeded by the high profile, high charisma candidates we tend to vote for. Yet many less likely candidates are not short on courage, they are just short on constituency. They need to be recognized for their integrity, not Party loyalty. Loyalty is vastly overrated, as we have seen in the recent administration. Loyalty is prized by the Mob.

Many of these candidates have  been assaulted for their policies, gender, or ethnicity. Think of Gretchen Whitmer, victimized as a principled woman or Josh Shapiro, a Jewish Governor with moderate politics. Pete Buttigieg for his gender preference.

Some are going to suffer for their moderation in a liberal leaning Party, Andy Beshear, Governor of Kentucky or Jared Polis, Governor of Colorado. If he crossed over, Adam Kinzinger. Kinzinger is not done with politics, but he is toxic in the Republican Party.

Some are short on charisma, such as Cory Booker of New Jersey or Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota. They are both failed Primary candidates, but they are courageous and principled U.S. Senators.

Perhaps charisma is a requirement of a U.S. President today, but it should not be the first requirement.  The point is that the Democratic Party and the voters who elect them to office or the Convention are responsible to find a candidate with a record of integrity and unabashed character.  Voters have been fooled by charismatic charlatans long enough. They need to demand more of their leaders.

Character exists in politics, but politics has been driving out character. Voters need to recognize it and prize it for its rare value. They need to get over the prejudices that keep certain candidates from running for the Presidency and look for courage and depth. In their hearts voters long for this kind of leadership.

We can have character, if we raise our standards for leadership and shake off our gullibility.   We are smarter than politicians think we are.

 

 

 

 

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An Unfinished Memoir of Speech-Writing

Just finished Doris Kearns Goodwin’s latest book, An Unfinished Love Story: A Personal History of the 1960’s. With all her finesse as a biographer and historian, her choice of titles is peculiar.  It tells me how much she loved the man who inspired this reflective chronicle of the sixties, but it does no justice to the valuable insight the book offers into three figures who dominated that decade: Presidents Kennedy and Johnson and the would-be President Bobby Kennedy.

And I am no book reviewer, so I will try not to pose as one.  What impressed me was the insight into the personalities of these men, as well as Kearns Goodwin’s husband, and the whole process of speech-writing, which I grossly underestimated. Her stories penetrate the  soul of the news much more than the three broadcast networks in the 1960’s and sweep us into the Oval Office and Presidential family homes where relationships were formed.

Kearns Goodwins’ biographical take on her husband is unapologetically affectionate and admiring. They met after his Washington career had ended, and he had returned to Boston. He had been a Tufts and Harvard Law School graduate at the beginning, and he had become a passionate political writer after a high intensity career as a speech-writer in the White House. At the end of his political career he had collected memorabilia with a trove of  over three hundred boxes of primary documents of the 1960’s.

One day he proposed that he and Doris begin to excavate the chaotic piles of boxes to compose some kind of perspective on the history he had witnessed. Thus began the research behind this book she eventually published after his death. Written from her biographer’s perspective, it follows him into the inner sanctums of Presidential meetings and personal relationships with the Kennedys, the Johnsons and their speechwriters.

Richard Goodwin and his wife show mostly admiration for John Kennedy during his Presidential campaign and his shortened term as President. JKF had extraordinary energy and endurance for the campaign trail and almost uncanny ability to listen to every voter and constituent. He showed amazing poise preparing for the first televised Presidential debate, as if he did it every day. He laid the foundations for the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act, but never managed to push it through the divided Congress. The end of his Presidency is connected seamlessly to the beginning of Lyndon Johnson’s ascendancy.

A fascinating character study is the adversarial relationship between Bobby Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson. Kennedy is portrayed to resent the stolen legacy of his brother by the boorish, dominating Texan Johnson.  He never wanted to work in the Johnson administration and reluctantly accepted the Attorney General role in the 1964 Johnson Presidency. The what-might-have-been of John Kennedy’s Presidency seemed to haunt his brother, if we are to accept the perspective of Kearns Goodwin. That cloud hung over the five years of the two administrations preventing either from acknowledging the abilities of the other.

Goodwin himself favored the Kennedys because Bobby was an intimate friend. During the period running up to Kennedy’s decision to run for President, they had many private meetings together, sorting through the pro’s and con’s of Kennedy’s most important decision. Goodwin was with him immediately before he was assassinated.

At the same time Kearns Goodwin shares the deep animosity between Bobby Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson with Johnson as the aggrieved party. Johnson is forever perceived by Bobby as the blustering pretender to John’s legacy with no opportunity to amend his image. Bobby does not come out well in this story, except as a devoted friend to Richard. Do we see him through a jaundiced eye of a Lyndon Johnson advocate?

Jacqueline Kennedy receives the admiration of both the Goodwins for her deferential treatment of Johnson and willingness to forgive apparent slights of her reputation. The dignity of her public image seems fully confirmed by her private relationships. Her scholarly depth and voracious curiosity were a revelation to me.

By his wife’s account Richard Goodwin was an overworked speechwriter, who sometimes went days without sleep trying to meet a deadline. He was able to retire from the Johnson administration despite a relentless pressure to stay. He wanted to write for his own purposes and had an appointment at Wesleyan University that would allow him that leisure. Johnson valued his services so much that he pretended Goodwin’s resignation didn’t even exist until the month before it would take effect. He pressured Goodwin to work part time for him, but Goodwin wanted a clean break. There was an odor of disloyalty when Johnson finally released him.

In contrast, when Kearns Goodwin insisted she needed to resume teaching at Harvard, Johnson finally compromised, allowing her to work part time with him on his  memoir. He never begrudged her the time she needed for her academic career, although he did not compromise without a struggle.

Goodwin often felt that Johnson took too much credit for his speech-writing in public as if he had single-handedly crafted the language. His perspective on Johnson appears to show considerably less respect than his spouse’s. Kearns-Goodwin’s assessment admits the manic-depression of the President and his domineering personality, but she pays tribute to his strength as a leader and as a master of the Congress.  His deceptive ruthlessness about Vietnam is portrayed more as a tragic flaw than as a diabolical  plot against the country. Meanwhile Goodwin wrote diatribes about the sacrifice of young men for an ignoble cause.

Eventually Goodwin publicly broke with the Johnson administration about Vietnam and made some bitter enemies. He declared the utter deceit of the administration before the Pentagon Papers were even made public.  He wrote and demonstrated with righteous passion, resolutely burning his bridges. On the culpability of President Johnson, the Goodwins were divided as so  many were in the 1970’s.

In the eyes of Kearns Goodwin the speech writer does as much to shape policy as the speech-makers do. During the campaigns the speech writer did most of the research and crafted position papers for the candidates before getting feedback.  In this book the politician is portrayed more as the megaphone for a political position that has been laid out by the speechwriter.

Goodwin describes a similar process when he prepared speeches for Lyndon Johnson. He crafted policies for civil rights, health infrastructure, labor policy, housing supports that became known as the Great Society. In fact, he coined the expression “great society” in a series of policy papers that finally emerged as the title of an entire legislative plan.  No one thought to give him any credit. It has always been Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society.

Goodwin describes a process of drafting and sending his drafts to Johnson for mark-up, a process that could go on for a half-dozen cycles before the speech was loaded in the teleprompter. He learned to capture the President’s voice, as he had learned under John Kennedy, so that both executives felt they were saying their own words. Perhaps they forgot sometimes that the words themselves were manufactured by a master stylist, whose work was to appear invisible. This art becomes more transparent in this book, giving tribute to the content of speech-writing as much as the style.

The voice of this story probably is the most mysterious. The views of the husband and wife are merged as they reflect on the reigns of their Presidents. Who are the real John/Bobby Kennedys and the real Lyndon Johnson? We don’t even know which perspective illuminates them in this book. The Goodwins have merged their opinions of these political icons so we are not sure which of them is speaking when Kearns Goodwin spins the narrative. We suppose each one has softened the prejudices of the other, but how  much?

Since I am not a book reviewer, I get to say I liked it, it was illuminating, and it satisfied me as all of Doris Kearns Goodwin’s writing does. The title could be more descriptive, I venture to say.

 

 

 

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Collateral Damage and the Constitution

The Supreme Court’s allowance of the Trump administration’s dismantling of the Department of Education takes indiscriminate aim at the hopes of students on the margins. The Constitutional issue may be the overriding  of the power of Congress to regulate the programs it funds, but the collateral carnage is far greater in its immediate impact.

Who provides the loans, the grants, the stimulus programs that disappear once the Department of Education dies by execution?The Resource Replacement Myth assumes that whenever the flow of funding is cut off upstream some agency downstream, such as state government, will replace it. The Myth defies the reality of flowing water as well as the economy of flowing revenue.  Water and funding do not appear spontaneously when they are shut off at the source. It is self-evidently absurd. Yet Republicans for generations have assumed that funding for education will appear at the state level as soon as it is cut off at the federal level.

The argument that states will absorb this loss of revenue for the neediest students in their schools is either naive or cynical.  No state will suddenly find the revenue to provide for these populations of students of minority status, of poverty or of unpopular national origin. States consistently plead poverty when educational needs come to their attention.  The parents of these students are not typically influential .  If the funding from the Department of Education supplied the needs of an influential class of citizens, whether white or wealthy or Ivy-elite, enough commotion would arouse the legislators to draft a bill to serve their special interests. But most of the federal funding has supported a  community with muffled representation. There will be no spontaneous replacement of funds in their classrooms.

Because the Resource Replacement Myth is ridiculous, the federal government has persisted over generations to distribute aid to local schools with its ham-handed system. The funds bureaucratically trickle down requiring full-time administrators to distribute them. Sometimes they arrive late and often they are less than promised, but they trickle down annually and keep teachers in classrooms, new books in the hands of children, college students in classes. It is the best system we have. The children see only the benefits.

Legislators and Supreme Court Justices do not get this view of education from the bottom up. They just see the problems of administering large grant and loan programs. For some reason they find waste in Education more offensive than failed aircraft development projects or indiscriminate welfare payments to agricultural corporations. At least the Department of Education continues to improve its accountability to minimize waste. Why would anyone in the Department have a stake in over-paying or indiscriminate funding?

The issue at hand is the power of Congress to dismantle the agency it created. Certainly the Court has to curtail the runaway power of the Executive, just on Constitutional principle.

However, the collateral damage matters to more teachers and more students in the public schools than the number of bureaucrats in the Court, the Congress and the Executive combined. The teachers and students depend on this funding for a redemptive education.

Whatever else happens upstream of the public schools, it must not strand students and teachers downstream in an educational desert.

 

 

 

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You Disappoint Me, George Will

I could have been quicker on the uptake but . . .

Oh  George, you’ve put your foot in it now.  I love your  acerbic, often hilarious, prose, regardless of the way your wing dips to the right. Like you, I do not suffer hypocrites. Like you, I love baseball. But I cannot cut you any slack for equating money with speech in politics. And you take it for granted that I will do that, George Will.

Last month you wrote: :

The reformers fret about the “problem” of “too much money” in politics. The complaint, necessarily, is that there is too much political speech, because all campaign spending is to fund, directly or indirectly, the dissemination of political advocacy to large constituencies. [“Peak absurdity on campaign finance reform heads to the Supreme Court,” [Washington Post June 13, 2025].

Shame on you, George, for allowing hidden assumptions into your argument. With that smooth phrase “the dissemination of political advocacy to large constituencies” you overlooked how political advocacy works in modern politics. You assumed that the absurd ruling of Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission (2010) was a given fact, that money is the same as speech. What a silly assumption, George, for a reasonable man to make.

On its face, isn’t the idea of money as a  form of speech absurd?  Isn’t money a desired power, but speech a natural right?  Isn’t money a quantitative force over people’s minds, while speech is an uncertain influence on those who hear it? Isn’t money a lever with limitless torque, while speech is a push against a barrier that resists and pushes back? Doesn’t limitless money ultimately control those who hear speech?

Apparently you live by the Golden Rule, George. Those who have the gold make the rules! You assume that the rich are also the entitled, the ones who deserve power, because they have the will and ingenuity to acquire wealth. Oh, there are a lot of assumptions behind your glib inference that money is a form of speech, assumptions that the Founding Fathers would not condone.

Today we measure the electability of a candidate by how much money he or she raised each month. For what? For advertising in print media, streaming media, broadcast media, social media, podcasts, yard signs, rallies, wherever a message can be planted.  The coherence of media campaigns, the quantity of verbiage, and the dissemination of images will likely determine the winner of the election. That quantity and coherence is bought to life by extravagant spending.

Did we even imagine this degree of media influence before Marshall McLuhan (“The medium is the message” 1964). He was the early prophet of the power of mass media. He saw how viewers would easily succumb to the hot media, like television and movies, because they penetrated our senses. How they would short circuit our thinking with images of reality. Today we are bombarded by those images during the month before a Presidential election until we cry “Mercy!” Yet we do succumb, just like we go out and choose the products of the commercials that annoy us by repetition. Repetition breaks the will. How do we afford the advertising costs for that repetition?

Where was your cutting prosecutor’s analysis when you dismissed $23.6 billion in campaign funding for 2023-2024, because two advertising giants (Procter & Gamble and PepsiCo) spent more? Doesn’t that tell you how much advertising means toward selling its product? Doesn’t that reflect how public sentiment is manipulated by expensive advertising? Shouldn’t we consider whether we want to choose candidates the same way we choose a soft drink? Sloppy thinking, George.

Did we realize the cost and the power of media saturation until after the election of John Kennedy (1964)? Did we know that campaign spending had no limits until after the ruling of “Citizens United” (2020)? Did we realize the power of one man to elect a candidate until Elon Musk spent $277 million on Trump and the Republican Party in 2024? If we didn’t, we should know it now. Even you, George, should acknowledge that big money equals advertising by over-exposure equals votes by weakening of the will to think. Money is a force of the economy, but not a natural right, like speech.

It has all spun out of control in six decades, and you know this, George, I am sad to say. You cynically ignore the greatest violation of free speech of our day: the right to choose thoughtfully. You know full well the power of money, and you should know it is nothing like gold of free speech.

 

 

 

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Quiet Betrayal

July 4, 2025. In an article by Anne Applebaum today’s Atlantic warns that the US is ceding Ukraine to the Russians.  Normally I would not shamelessly appropriate another writer’s work, but the warning inherent in her  story is too important to dilute with my my own commentary.

The current news that the U.S. is withholding weapons promised by the Biden administration is only the most visible betrayal of Ukraine’s struggle for survival.  We are withdrawing all means of support like an ebbing tide.

See excerpts from Applebaum’s article below:

  • how sanctions are useless without vigilance to Russia’s shell game
  • how the loss of international outlets such as Radio-free Europe has left the air waves open to the Russian narrative
  • how the failure of the Trump administration to filter Putin’s talking points turns us away from Ukraine

The Great Realignment

Trump is giving the Russian dictator every incentive to keep killing Ukrainians.

By Anne Applebaum
Photo-illustration of Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin shaking hands with a map of Ukraine behind them
Photo-illustration by The Atlantic. Sources: Chris Ratcliffe / Bloomberg / Getty; Getty.
Updated at 7:20 a.m. ET on July 4, 2025

. . . Putin sees what everyone else sees: Slowly, the U.S. is switching sides. True, Trump occasionally berates Putin, or makes sympathetic noises toward Ukrainians, as he did last week when he seemed to express interest in a Ukrainian journalist who said that her husband was in the military. Trump also appeared to enjoy being flattered at the NATO summit, where European leaders made a decision, hailed as historic, to further raise defense spending. But thanks to quieter decisions by members of his own administration, people whom he has appointed, the American realignment with Russia and against Ukraine and Europe is gathering pace—not merely in rhetoric but in reality.

Just this week, in the middle of the worst aerial-bombing campaign since the war began, the Trump administration confirmed that a large shipment of weapons, which had already been funded by the Biden administration, will not be sent to Ukraine. The weapons, some of which are already in Poland, include artillery shells, missiles, rockets, and, most important, interceptors for Patriot air-defense systems, the ammunition that Ukrainians need to protect civilians from missile attacks. Trump had suggested that he would supply Ukraine with more Patriot ammunition, which is an American product. “We’re going to see if we can make some available,” he said after meeting Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky last week. But what he says and what his administration actually does are very different.

Pentagon spokespeople have explained that this abrupt change was made because American stockpiles are insufficient, an excuse disputed both by former Biden-administration officials and by independent policy analysts. But whether true or false, this reasoning doesn’t matter to the Russians, who have already interpreted this change as a clear signal that American support for Ukraine is ending: “The fewer the number of weapons that are delivered to Ukraine, the closer the end of the special military operation,” the Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters. To be clear, by “the end of the special military operation,” he means the defeat of Ukraine.

At the same time, and with much less publicity, the U.S. is essentially lifting sanctions on Russia. No such formal announcement has been made. But the maintenance of sanctions requires constant shifts and adjustments, as Russian companies and other entities change suppliers and tactics in order to acquire sanctioned products. During the Biden administration, I spoke several times with officials who followed these changes closely, and who repeatedly issued new sanctions in order to counter them. As The New York Times has reported, the Trump administration has stopped following these shifts and stopped imposing new sanctions altogether. This, the Times writes, allows “new dummy companies to funnel funds and critical components to Russia, including computer chips and military equipment.”

In addition to taking Russia’s side in the kinetic war and the economic war, the U.S. is realigning its position in the narrative war, too. During the Biden administration, the State Department’s Global Engagement Center regularly identified Russian disinformation operations around the world—exposing misleading websites or campaigns secretly run or directed by Russian operatives in Latin America and Africa, as well as in Europe. Trump appointees have not only dissolved the center; they also baselessly and bizarrely accused it of somehow harming American conservatives, even of having “actively silenced and censored the voices of Americans,” although the GEC had no operations inside the U.S.

At the same time, cuts to USAID and other programs have abruptly reduced funding for some independent media and Russian-opposition media. The planned cuts to Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, if not stopped by the courts, will destroy one of the few outside sources of information that reaches Russians with real news about the war. Should all of these changes become permanent, the U.S. will no longer have any tools available to communicate with the Russian public or counter Russian propaganda, either inside Russia or around the world.

Listen: Trump’s betrayal of Ukraine

Inside the United States, Russian propaganda is most loudly and effectively promoted by appointees of the U.S. president. Steve Witkoff, the real-estate developer who became Trump’s main negotiator with Russia despite having no knowledge of Russian history or politics, regularly echoes false Russian talking points and propaganda. He has repeated Putin’s view, which he may have heard from the Russian president himself, that “Ukraine is just a false country, that they just patched together in this sort of mosaic, these regions.” Witkoff has also seemed to agree with Putin that Ukrainian territories that voted for independence from Moscow in 1991 are somehow “Russian.”

By accepting disputed claims as fact, Witkoff is also helping Putin continue his war. In order to keep Russians onboard, to create divisions among Ukraine’s allies, and maybe even to build doubts inside Ukraine itself, Putin needs to portray the Ukrainian cause as hopeless and to describe the Ukrainian “demands” as unreasonable. He has to hide the most basic facts about this war: that he began it, that he has killed hundreds of thousands of people in pursuit of it, and that his goal, again, is to destroy or decapitate all of Ukraine. Witkoff helps make these falsehoods easier to sustain, in Russia, in the U.S., and in Europe.

Add all of these things together, and they are something more than just a pattern. They are a set of incentives that help persuade Putin to keep fighting. Sanctions are disappearing, weapons are diminishing, counterpropaganda is harder to hear. All of that will encourage Putin to go further—not just to try to defeat Ukraine but to divide Europe, mortally damage NATO, and reduce the power and influence of the United States around the world.

Europe, Canada, and most of the rest of the democratic world will continue to back Ukraine. As I have written before, Ukrainians will continue to innovate, to build new kinds of automated weapons, new drones, new software. They will continue to fight, because the alternative is the end of their civilization, their language, and, for many of them, their lives.

The Ukrainians could still win. A different set of American policies could help them win faster. The U.S. could still expand sanctions on Russia, provide ammunition, and help the Ukrainians win the narrative war. The administration could stop the fighting, the missile attacks, and the lethal drone swarms; it could stop the pointless deaths that Trump has repeatedly said he opposes. By choosing to back Russia, the U.S. will ensure that the war continues. Only by backing Ukraine is there hope for peace.

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Masters of Deceit

As Laura Thornton of the McCain Institute commented in the Post recently, “.  . . the Russian Orthodox churches–which they say take orders from the Kremlin, spread Russian disinformation and provide cover for Russian spies–are allowed to operate in [Ukraine].”   The alliance of the Russian Orthodox Church and the Soviet government is one of the great modern betrayals of Christianity.

Vladimir Putin has manipulated Orthodox Christians in Russia to believe he is a crusader for Christian causes like the purity of gender and the immorality of abortion, which makes his war of aggression in Ukraine a moral one. His participation in the culture wars is no more than a ruse for gathering international support for Russia’s imperialism. As Anne Applebaum wrote in Autocracy Inc. It is

Putin’s way of building alliances between his domestic audiences and his supporters in Europe and North America,  where he has a following on the authoritative far right, having convinced some naive conservatives that Russian is a “white Christian state.” (p. 76)

Christians in the United States are truly deceived if they think that Putin has adopted the Orthodox faith other than to manipulate other religions to support his aggression in Europe. The former KGB agent is an expert in disinformation. As Jesus once said, “False messiahs and false prophets will appear and produce signs and omens, to lead astray, if possible, the elect” (Mark 13:22). Too many of us have become toxically suspicious of our own political leaders, yet completely gullible to tyrants, such as Putin and Viktor Orban, who follows the same playbook.

We need to listen to journalists with first-hand knowledge of conditions in these autocracies–such as Thornton and Anne Applebaum, who is a Pulitzer Prize winner.  These writers have no political stake in attracting a following. If they warn us of the true conditions in Russia and Hungary we should listen. Applebaum writes,

In reality, Russia has a  very low church attendance, legal abortion, and a multi-ethnic population containing millions of Muslim citizens. The autonomous region of Chechnya, which is part of the Russian Federation, is governed by elements of sharia law and has arrested and killed gay men in the name of Islamic purity. The Russian state harrasses and represses many forms of religion outside the state-sanctioned Russian Orthodox Church, including evangelical Protestants. (p. 76)

It is sad to hear the churches become the megaphone of propaganda, as the Russian Orthodox church has become. In the United States Franklin Graham (evangelist son of Billy Graham), Tony Perkins (Family Research Council), and Pat Buchanan (religious politician/ journalist) have come out in support of the Russian moral agenda.  Unfortunately this support bleeds over to a rejection of America’s support of Ukraine.  Putin’s strange brew of religion and politics has infected America’s culture wars. Ukraine has become a casualty of that war.

In my teenage years Russia was regarded as a godless nation associated with Marxism. Later Ronald Reagan echoed the sentiment that the Soviet Union was not only a political, but a religious and moral threat to America. It is possible we exaggerated the religious intentions of the Communist dictators, trying to demonize them, but we were able to separate the propaganda from the reality of Soviet aggression.

Too many Christians are now duped by the propaganda of Vladimir Putin and his allies in the Russian Orthodox Church. We see them as allies in our own political causes and fail to see their persecution of religions in their own country. We have turned a blind eye to their aggression in Ukraine thinking Russia is a force of religious purity. We need to see the unholy alliance of the Orthodox church and Putin for what it is: a political campaign against all dissent, including religious dissent. That kind of oppression should repel us, regardless of our political or religious convictions.