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Beth Macy Goes Home Again

November 17, 2025 – 11:23 am

The author of Dopesick goes back to her small Ohio home town and wonders: Could a troubled teen do today what she did decades ago? Maybe. But the hurdles to jump are higher now.

In the Broadway musical A Little Night Music, a minor character sings a poignant song about hope and hopelessness in the serving class. In “The Miller’s Son“, the verses argue with the chorus, as a kitchen maid alternately dreams of a better life and realizes that the only pleasures available to her are momentary ones that lead nowhere.

Her opening thought is that “I shall marry the miller’s son, pin my hat on a nice piece of property.” Each verse lets the fantasy run a little wilder: “I shall marry the businessman, five fat babies and lots of security”, and then “I shall marry the Prince of Wales, pearls and servants and dressing for festivals.” Of course, if the pleasures of the moment lead to a pregnancy, none of that is possible. But was it ever possible? She ends by bitterly repeating “I shall marry the miller’s son”, recognizing that for her such a match is no more likely than the Prince of Wales.

Beth Macy is 60-something now. She came from a poor family with an alcoholic father in the small town of Urbana, Ohio. She studied hard in school and was a good if unspectacular student. She went to college on a Pell Grant, became a journalist, and (eventually) an author of several best-selling books — one of which, Dopesick, about how corporate greed led to an opioid crisis in small-town America, was made into an Emmy-winning miniseries.

Her life, from one point of view, is the quintessential American rags-to-riches story we like to tell children: Work hard, don’t give up, and you can make something of yourself, no matter how unlikely that may seem at the moment. Abe Lincoln went from a log cabin to the White House; you can too.

But in her new book Paper Girl, Macy goes back to Urbana and (over a period of years) interviews everyone from her relatives to troubled high school students to the mayor. The main question on her mind: Is the path that she walked still open today? Along the way she learns a lot about hopelessness in the White working class, its turn to the political right, and political polarization in general.

Getting a degree. The quick answer to Macy’s original question is: The path is still open, but much narrower and more treacherous than it was in her day.

She follows several of Urbana’s young people who grew up in difficult circumstances, and runs into the same story again and again: They have the talent and ambition to get out of poverty and possibly make it in the wider world, teacher and other mentors are rooting for them, but something comes up. Juggling a job, school, and ongoing family trauma gets to be too much. Or some close relative needs care and has no one else to provide it. Or maybe it’s something as simple as a car repair they have no money to cover; the fifty miles to the state university turns into an insurmountable obstacle.

Almost as bad as the immediate problems is the fatalism they lead to: Of course something would come up. People don’t actually walk the path to education or training and a secure future any more. It was never in the cards for them to marry the miller’s son.

What reminded me of “The Miller’s Son” was how the get-educated path can sound just as improbable as the make-the-NBA or become-a-rap-star path. People have done it, but could you do it? Is it worth making sacrifices (and asking others to make sacrifices for you) to keep that dream alive?

Politics. So what changed between the 1970s and 80s and the 2020s? Part of it is political: As a society, we stopped investing in education. When Macy got her Pell grant, it was a free ticket to college, but it no longer is. Once, Pell grants were how we made real the promise of America, and we told ourselves (truthfully) that a college grad’s increased lifetime earnings would lead to income tax payments that more than reimbursed the government for its generosity. But during the miserly years of the Reagan revolution (and Clinton’s ratification of much of that course change), poor young people in college became just another kind of welfare queen.

And as federal support was drying up, colleges themselves have gotten more expensive, largely because states pay a much smaller part of the costs of their state university systems. Financial aid shifted from grants to loans, so that a graduate might start a career with six-figure debts. And if you didn’t graduate — if, say, something came up that knocked you out of college — you’d have almost as much debt but not the degree to help you pay it off.

Piling on further, the degree itself is not worth as much in the job market. Even a STEM degree might not help you if the job market is looking for some other kind of STEM degree the year you graduate. (For example, the freshmen who chose a computer science major four years ago may not have realized they’d have to compete with AI algorithms for entry-level jobs.)

I’m not sure anybody is asking this question, but they should: What kind of program would it take to make the promise of America real today?

Family. Macy quickly notices the symptoms that students’ lives have changed: High school graduation rates are down. Attendance is down. Ohio’s liberalized homeschooling laws make even those numbers look better than they actually are, as parents who can’t get their children to school and are sick of dealing with truant officers sign a paper saying their child is being homeschooled. No one checks that the child is actually getting an education.

Meanwhile, public schools are losing funds to Ohio’s private-school voucher program, which makes private schools less expensive for the well-off without truly making them accessible to the poor.

Of course, homeschooling only works if home is working. And here we run into the opioid crisis Macy chronicled in Dopesick. She tells stories of teens who either couchsurf or are homeless through high school, because one parent is a drug addict and the other is in jail. It’s hard to say whether there is more sexual abuse than in Macy’s teen years, but there is certainly a lot of it. Paying attention to trigonometry or Shakespeare is probably not at the forefront of many students’ minds.

Many teachers, counselors, and coaches try to step into the breach, but it’s too much for them. A gay man who runs a teen center wrangled a grant out of the state, but couldn’t get the local government to sign off on it because of homophobic fears that he was “recruiting” teens into the gay lifestyle.

Community. In Macy’s day, Urbana was a more integrated community, at least in the sense of class. One way she coped with her dysfunctional family was by spending a lot of time with friends whose families were thriving. But increasingly, Urbana is siloed into the haves and have-nots.

Urbana is basically the country club and the ghetto, and neither group has any idea that the other group exists.

So a present-day Beth Macy may not know about those thriving families or be invited into their homes. She might not hear friends’ professional-class dreams and wonder “Why not me?”

A journalist herself, who began her career writing features about local characters for local newspapers, Macy sees great significance in the decline of local journalism: Urbana’s main local news outlets are Facebook pages and advertising sheets that publish press releases rather than news stories. How do Urbana’s people hear about folks unlike themselves? How do they find out about events happening outside their silo?

The results are twofold: On the one hand, Urbana’s citizens have lost their town as a source of identity, causing them to seek identity in politics or religion. On the other, they have lost a sense of their fellow citizens as Us, and have a corresponding willingness to accept conspiracy theories about Them.

Polarization. Urbana, and in particular its working-class population, is among the victims of globalization. The family business that once was the town’s major employer was long ago sold off, and most of its jobs have gone overseas. When Bill Clinton was pushing NAFTA and similar once-Republican free-trade policies, the promise was that new jobs would replace the old jobs, and that the overall benefit to the American economy would allow us to invest in retraining the displaced workers.

That never worked out. The new jobs weren’t where they needed to be, and the retraining rarely prepared the displaced workers adequately. Most of them wound up working in places like WalMart and never regaining the financial stability the old jobs had offered. Many found ways to retire early or claim disability.

So when Trump tells such people that they’ve been forgotten, he’s not wrong. Much of what he tells them after that is false; the Haitians in nearby Springfield were never eating the local dogs and cats. But having seen them and offered at least some explanation of their situation gets him in the door. When he offers to deport the immigrants who are “stealing their jobs”, that’s at least a plan of some sort.

Now connect that with the sense of hopelessness in the young people: They can’t hope to get the jobs their parents or grandparents had. Getting post-high-school training and going on to land the good jobs that still exist — that seems like a pipe dream, not a realistic plan. Parents can’t look forward to their children having a better life than they did.

One of the questions “Make America Great Again” always raises is “When was the great age that ‘again’ promises to restore?” The obvious answers raise issues of racism and sexism: Was America great during Jim Crow? Was it great when women couldn’t get a credit card without their husbands’ signature? When gays had to be in the closet? When?

And yes, MAGA has always been tainted by a background scent of bigotry. But fundamentally, “again” appeals to the feeling among White working-class families that Americans like them used to have hope. Those dim memories make them feel entitled to hope, and to recognize that they don’t have it now.

Someone must have taken it from them.

That’s the opening that Q-Anon and other conspiracy theories exploit. Macy recounts many conversations with relatives or high school friends who have bought some form of conspiracy theory. When Macy tries to offer facts, she is told “You can’t trust the media.” And she replies “But I am the media.” If this provokes any cognitive dissonance in people who ought to trust her, it’s not enough.

That disconnect is, I think, typical of the college/non-college divide. If you went to college, and even moreso if you went to graduate school, you have a sense of the accessibility of expertise. I may not know Anthony Fauci, for example, but I know biologists who understand infectious diseases. There was a point in my life where I could have gone into biology or climate science or a discipline at the center of some other alleged conspiracy. When would the conspirators have read me in? Why don’t my friends ever tell me about such moments?

But if you didn’t go to college, those disciplines may seem so distant that literally anything could be happening there.

Privilege. I think I also understand now why the MAGA working class is so hostile to any “woke” talk about White privilege or male privilege. Again, racism and sexism probably play some role, but maybe not the main role.

It’s always been the habit or ruling classes to rob Peter to pay Paul. If a ruling class has a debt, chances are it will steal from someone else to pay it, like the United States taking Liberia to offer to freed slaves. I mean, God forbid that those who profited from slavery should shoulder the cost!

Integration of public schools followed a similar pattern: Well-to-do Whites thrust that social experiment onto working-class Whites, while either moving to upscale suburbs or sending their own children to private schools.

So if recognition of privilege takes hold, who will be asked to pay the debt owed to the un-privileged groups? White or male MAGAts anticipate being handed the bill themselves, and not being able to pass it on to the billionaires. And they’re probably not wrong.

How to win them back? For too long, Democrats have tried to depend on Truth to win out: Climate change is real. Privilege exists. Immigrants benefit the economy. Cutting rich people’s taxes never works out for those who aren’t rich. And so on.

What we miss is that Truth will not win out if the Truth is hopeless. If the Truth is: “You’re screwed. Try to get used to it”, that Truth will not win elections for us, even if the other party offers transparent nonsense.

We need to recognize the hopeless parts of America and begin speaking to them. We need to begin offering plans for them and their children and their communities to have futures they can believe in.

By weeklysift | Posted in Articles | Also tagged books, economics | Comments (13)

What to make of Charlie Kirk

September 29, 2025 – 11:37 am

In response to Charlie Kirk’s murder, most coverage has fit into one of two polarized bins:

Kirk was a saint, a free-speech warrior, someone who believed in talking to opponents and practicing politics “the right way“.
Collections of quotes that paint Kirk as a hate-monger promoting bigotry of all sorts: racism, sexism, Islamophobia, anti-LGBTQ, and so on.

Neither struck me as the whole story, so I challenged myself to form an independent opinion about Kirk. I listened to his wife’s eulogy for him, I watched most of his conversation with Gavin Newsom, I read as much of his book The MAGA Doctrine as Amazon would show me for free, and I looked for anybody else who had a view of him deeper than a partisan knee-jerk.

This is where I’ve gotten to. Unsurprisingly, I wind up mostly on the cynical side.

In Erika Kirk’s speech, I mainly heard standard Christian evangelism not all that different from what Billy Graham was saying half a century ago: Americans are in a spiritual crisis that can only be solved by turning their lives over to Jesus and living according to traditional gender roles that I don’t recall Jesus ever advocating. Kirk’s brand of Christianity was mostly Christian Nationalism, which I (and many others) believe is a perversion of Jesus’ message.

(For those of you without a Christian education, Jesus had a lot to say about feeding the poor, healing the sick, and living your life according to compassion rather than rules. The gospels paint his opponents the Pharisees as the strict rule-followers. A few years ago, I wrote a post about where I think Christianity went wrong. Later I turned it into a sermon at a Unitarian Universalist church. The sermon is a little better, in my opinion.)

Kirk and Newsom talked amicably (to the point that I was getting angry with Newsom for not challenging some very questionable assertions). Here, the evangelism played a very small role: This was two political operators comparing notes. Still, I heard Kirk’s voice and heard him speak for himself; we should all do that before we pass judgment on people.

The MAGA Doctrine is Kirk’s 2020 take on Trumpism, though I’ve seen no sign that he ever revised his the worshipful view it presents. His political worldview, to me, feels based in resentment: Both political parties are presented as uncaring, and Trump is the revenge of the neglected voter. There is a whiff of traditional conservative rhetoric: small government, individual freedom, and so on. But it’s hard to take seriously given that Kirk stuck by Trump even as Trump was expanding government power and concentrating it in an autocratic presidency. As with so many conservatives, Kirk’s idea of “freedom” was freedom for people like himself, not freedom for everybody.

One thing Kirk was very good at — and this is where all those objectionable quotes come from — was trolling people like me. He played the game of making people angry, then painting himself as the victim of that anger. (And ultimately, he did become the victim of someone who felt trolled. “I had enough of his hatred,” the accused shooter texted to a friend.)

Another thing Kirk was good at was getting funding from the very rich. Erika made a point of how little he had when he started his crusade to win young Americans for Christ (and later Trump), but Turning Point has never lacked for funding. Charlie got his first $50K at age 20 from the multimillionaire Dunn family. He soon attracted the attention of billionaire Foster Friess, and he was on his way. The Dunns eventually contributed millions. The Bradley Impact Fund gave TPUSA $8 million in 2023, and millions more came from a fund connected to Home Depot founder Bernie Marcus.

The ValueWalk website recently estimated Kirk’s net worth at $12 million, including a $4.5 million mansion in Scottsdale.

People sometimes wonder why there’s no Charlie Kirk of the Left. Well, money is one big reason: It’s hard to picture an 20-year-old liberal or socialist running into somebody at a conference and walking away with the funding to start a national organization, much less get rich in the process.

The Voice of Reason blog had an even more cynical take on Kirk’s entrepreneurial nature, painting him as a front for older, richer men.

Here is what really happened. In 2012, a 72-year-old Tea Party activist named Bill Montgomery heard Kirk give a talk at a small local event. Montgomery took one look at this kid with ambition in his eyes and told him to skip college and start an organization. Within weeks, Turning Point USA was born. Montgomery wasn’t just a mentor. He was the co-founder, treasurer, and strategist. In plain English: Kirk didn’t invent Turning Point USA. He was recruited into it by an older political operative who saw in him a useful mouthpiece.

Then came the money. Kirk didn’t scrape together pennies from bake sales. He stalked the Republican National Convention in Tampa in 2012 memorizing donor faces. That’s how he buttonholed multimillionaire Foster Friess, pitched him, and walked away with a five-figure check. Add in Bruce Rauner, the future governor of Illinois, and the DeVos family, and suddenly this “teenage entrepreneur” had more capital than most actual start-ups. By 2016, Turning Point’s budget had ballooned from $50,000 to over $5 million. That doesn’t happen because of hustle. That happens because deep-pocketed billionaires decide you are worth buying.

Amanda Marcotte doubts that Erika can keep TPUSA rolling, because so much of Charlie’s following was based on misogyny.

Charlie Kirk was an aspirational figure for his male audience. They wished they could go on campuses and condescend to cute girls, but they knew — they continue to know — that wouldn’t go well for them. They’d get ignored, mocked or worse, have campus security called on them. Charlie Kirk, though, had the charisma, money and organization to tilt the field so that he “won” every encounter — even though the kids that approached him usually had better arguments. He offered a fantasy of male domination. His audience will never accept a woman in this fake “alpha male” role.

Numerous people noted the similarities between Stephen Miller’s speech at Kirk’s memorial service and the one Joseph Goebbels gave to honor Nazi martyr Horst Wessel.

By weeklysift | Posted in Articles | Also tagged christianity, religion | Comments (4)

Yes, he does think you’re stupid

July 21, 2025 – 10:09 am

Democrats should avoid the substance of the Epstein controversy and focus on a single point: If his supporters feel Trump is insulting and disrespecting them, they’re right. The best thing that could come from this episode is if they begin to question the other “hoaxes” and “fake news” Trump has sold them on.

Yes, he does think you’re stupid. He always has.

That’s the only Democratic/liberal message that seems useful to me here. Trump ran on a promise to release the Epstein Files. It was key to promoting his image as the man who would finally stand up to the the Deep State and end the ability of privileged elites to do whatever they want with impunity. His Justice Department repeatedly teased his base with the notion that major revelations were coming soon. The holy grail of the Epstein conspiracy theory — the client list, the names of the powerful men who allegedly abused Epstein’s harem of underage girls — was on Pam Bondi’s desk, awaiting her review.

And then: Never mind. There never was a client list. Epstein’s death in prison was just the suicide that authorities had always claimed. Nothing suspicious about it. Nothing to reveal. Just: Move on everybody. Go back to talking about tax cuts or mass deportation or Joe Biden’s dementia. (A good summary of the contradictions between these official announcements and DOJ’s previous statements is in Senator Durbin’s letter to Attorney General Bondi.)

Trump has seemed surprised, offended, and then angry when his supporters did not do as they were told. The whole Epstein conspiracy theory, he now claims, was concocted by Democrats. It’s a “hoax” that only “stupid” and “foolish” Republicans fall into.

This time, though, the base isn’t falling into line. Two weeks have gone by, and still MAGA World is roiled by the controversy. Trump has tried to placate them by having Pam Bondi ask a judge to release the grand jury files from the Maxwell trial, but that’s unlikely to satisfy anyone: It will take time, the judge will likely say no, and even if he said yes, the information presented to the grand jury was aimed at Epstein and his partner Ghislaine Maxwell, who is currently in jail. If a client list exists, it wouldn’t be there.

The Trump administration has much more extensive information now, and could release it quickly. It just chooses not to.

This MAGA infighting seems like a godsend to Democrats, but it’s a tricky gift to open. Democrats have never bought into the Epstein conspiracy theory, which was rooted in the idea that Epstein’s fabled client list would be full of high-ranking Democrats and the liberal Hollywood elite. (It’s related to the Pizzagate theory that connected Hillary Clinton to a network that trafficked missing children for sexual exploitation.)

One thing Democrats lack these days, at least among the voters who shifted from Biden in 2020 to Trump in 2024, is authenticity. Championing the Epstein theory won’t help, because Democrats can’t do it authentically. (I know I can’t.)

I can’t even authentically call for DOJ to release its files. There’s a reason Merrick Garland never did: DOJ has terrifying investigative power, and a corresponding responsibility not to abuse that power. DOJ policy is to release the information it collects only in indictments and trials. It releases information to prosecute crimes, not to defame people that it can’t prove a case against.

That would be a terrible policy to reverse, especially in the Trump era. DOJ exists to enforce the law, not to keep the public informed.

Congressional investigation, though, is an avenue to inform the public. It would be entirely appropriate for a congressional committee to inquire about the strange contradictions in the administration’s public statements, or for Congress to appoint a commission to inquire.

But that’s as far as I think Democrats should go: Call for investigating the contradictions, not for investigating the conspiracy theory itself. If Republicans are willing to take the lead on a deeper investigation, fine. But that’s not for us to do.

One thing we can do, though, is validate the outrage felt among the MAGA rank-and-file: Yes, he does think you’re stupid. He thinks he can tell you up is down and you’ll start repeating it. He’s been doing it for years. Maybe this is a moment for you to re-evaluate many things.

That’s the point I think Democrats, liberals, and anybody else trying to turn the tide of fascism should emphasize. Not some Epstein conspiracy theory of our own. Not even the demand for DOJ to release the files. It seems obvious Trump has something to hide here, but I wouldn’t even dwell on that.

But Trump has always counted on his ability to influence the thinking of his followers. He has been uncanny in knowing how to wave a red flag, change the subject, or make himself the victim. This time, though, his Jedi mind tricks aren’t working. Even the magic word “hoax” is failing to make his followers go glassy-eyed and get back in line. All over MAGA, people are thinking about the Epstein Files and thinking, “I don’t care what he said. Those are the droids I’m looking for.”

But if members of his cult have briefly stepped outside his mind control, encourage them to stay there. If you don’t believe him when he says the Epstein stuff is a “hoax”, maybe you should re-examine all the other “hoaxes” he has claimed, from climate change to the well-established facts that Biden won the 2020 election and Russia interfered in Trump’s favor in 2016.

Most MAGA folks won’t do this re-examination, because are in fact the sheep Trump believes they are. But a few will. Jess Piper, who lives in Trump country, argues that they will never be converted into Democratic voters, and she’s probably right. But if they just lose their enthusiasm and decide to sit out future elections, that could make a difference.

By weeklysift | Posted in Articles | Also tagged Trump administration | Comments (11)

The Rot Goes Deeper Than Trump

June 29, 2025 – 10:30 pm

Just winning the next set of elections won’t fix the underlying problems.

Zohran Mamdani’s surprise victory in New York City’s mayoral primary, and his probable ascension to the office itself, sent shock waves through the Democratic Party and reopened many longstanding debates. Maybe the word “socialist” isn’t as toxic as many think it is. Maybe the party needs younger, newer faces. Maybe a positive vision is at least as important as standing against Trump. Maybe being Muslim or pro-Palestine does not alienate potential Democratic voters. And so on.

Those are all worthwhile points to discuss, but I worry that they all revolve around a goal — taking power back from Trump and the MAGA congressmen who hold it now — that is necessary but not sufficient to save American democracy. Too easily, we get lost in the search for a new face or a new slogan or even new policies, but lose sight of the deeper problems that allowed Trump to come to power in the first place.

Remember, we beat Trump soundly in 2020. His ego will never let him admit it, but Trump got his butt kicked by Joe Biden, to the tune of more than 7 million votes. Beating Trump is not an unsolvable problem, and we don’t have to convert the MAGA cultists to do it. All we have to do is win back the voters who already voted against Trump in 2020.

But beating Trump did not end the threat then, and it won’t do it now either. We need to understand why.

Donald Trump, in my opinion, is not some history-altering mutant, like the Mule in Asimov’s Foundation trilogy. I think of him as an opportunist who exploited rifts in American society and weak spots in American culture. He did not create those rifts and weak spots, and if all we do is get rid of Trump, they will still be there waiting for their next exploiter.

I do not have solutions for the problems I’m pointing to, but I think we need to keep them in our sights, even as we look for the next face and slogan and message.

The Rift Between Working and Professional Classes. All through Elon Musk’s political ascendancy, I kept wondering: How can working people possibly believe that the richest man in the world is on their side? Similarly, how can people who unload trucks or operate cash registers imagine that Donald Trump, who was born rich and probably never did a day of physical labor in his life, is their voice in government?

The answer to that question is simple: The people who shower after work have gotten so alienated from the people who shower before work that anyone who takes on “the educated elite” seems to be their ally. In the minds of many low-wage workers, the enemy is not the very rich, but rather the merely well-to-do — people with salaries and benefits and the ability to speak the language of bureaucracy and science.

Actual billionaires like Musk or Trump or Jeff Bezos or Mark Zuckerberg are so distant that it’s hard to feel personally threatened by them. But your brother-in-law the psychologist or your cousin who got an engineering degree — you know they look down on you. Whenever they deign to discuss national affairs with you at all, it’s in that parent-to-child you-don’t-really-understand tone of voice. And let’s not even mention your daughter who comes home from college with a social justice agenda. Everything you think is wrong, and she can’t even explain why without using long words you’ve never heard before. Somebody with a college degree is telling you what to do every minute of your day, and yet you’re supposed to be the one who has “privilege”.

The tension has been building for a long time, but it really boiled over for you during the pandemic. You couldn’t go to work, your kids couldn’t go to school, you couldn’t go to football games or even to church — and why exactly? Because “experts” like Anthony Fauci were “protecting” you from viruses too small to see. (They could see them, but you couldn’t. Nothing you could see interested anybody.) Then there were masks you had to wear and shots you had to get, but nobody could explain exactly what they did. Would they keep you from getting the disease or transmitting it to other people? Not exactly. If you questioned why you had to do all this, all they could do was trot out statistics and point to numbers. And if you’ve learned anything from your lifetime of experience dealing with educated people, it’s that they can make numbers say whatever they want. The “experts” speak Math and you don’t, so you just have to do what they say.

Here’s why this is such a big problem for democracy, and how it turns into a liberal/conservative issue: Ever since the progressive era and the New Deal, the liberal project has been for government to take on issues that are too big and too complex for individuals to handle on their own. When you buy a bag of lettuce at the grocery store, how do you know it isn’t full of E coli? Some corporation has a dump somewhere upstream from you, so how can you tell what dangerous chemicals might be leeching into your water supply? How do you know your workplace is won’t kill you or your money is safe in a bank? What interest rates and tax/spending policies will keep the economy humming without causing inflation? Stuff like that.

The conservative answer to those questions is to trust corporations to police themselves subject to the discipline of the market. (So if the lettuce producers keep selling E-coli-spreading produce, eventually people will catch on and stop buying from them and they’ll go out of business.) Historically, that solution has never worked very well. Corporations are too rich and too clever and too chameleon-like for market discipline to keep them in line. But we’ve had regulations for over a century now, so most of the bad-example history happened a long time ago. (We wouldn’t have OSHA today without the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire.) The only people who still remember it are themselves experts of some sort.

The liberal alternative is to have what has come to be called an “administrative state”. The government runs a bunch of three-letter agencies — FDA, EPA, SEC, CDC, FCC, and so on, with an occasional four-letter agency like OSHA or FDIC thrown in. These agencies keep track of things no individual has the resources to keep track of, and they hire experts who spend their lives studying things most of us only think about once in a while, like food safety or how much cash banks should keep on hand to avoid runs or what kind of resources need to be stockpiled to deal with hurricanes.

And the liberal administrative state works like a charm as long as two conditions hold:

The experts are trustworthy.
The public trusts them.

It’s not hard to see that there are problems with both of those propositions. In his 2012 book The Twilight of the Elites, Chris Hayes outlined the ways that the expert class has become self-serving. In theory, the expert class is comprised of winners in a competitive meritocracy. But in practice, educated professionals have found ways to tip the balance in their children’s favor. Also, the experts did not do a good job running the Iraq or Afghanistan wars, and they failed to foresee the economic crisis of 2008. When they did notice it, they responded badly: Bankers got bailed out while many ordinary people lost their homes.

And then there’s the challenge of globalism: It was supposed to benefit everybody, but in practice, working-class people lost good jobs while professional-class people got cheap products made overseas.

On the public-trust side, people have been too willing to believe conspiracy theories about perfectly legitimate things like the Covid vaccine. Trump’s slashing of funding for science and research is a long-term disaster for America, and his war against top universities like Harvard and Columbia destroys one of the major advantages the US has on the rest of the world. But many cheer when revenge is taken on the so-called experts they think look down on them.

In a series of books, most recently End Times, Peter Turchin describes two conditions that historically have led to social unrest, revolution, or civil war: popular immiseration and elite overproduction. In other words: Ordinary people see their fortunes declining, and the elite classes expand beyond the number of elite roles for them to fill. (Think about how hard it is for recent college graduates to find jobs.) So there are mobs to lead, and dissatisfied members of the would-be ruling class trained and ready to lead them.

Truth Decay. Democracy is supposed to work through what is sometimes called “the marketplace of ideas”. Different interest groups have their own self-interested spin, but when people with a variety of viewpoints look at the facts, truth is supposed to win out.

If you are younger than, say, 40, you may be surprised to realize how recently that actually worked. There have always been fringe groups and conspiracy theorists, but there were also powerful institutions dedicated to sorting out what really happened and how things really happen. The two most important of those institutions were the press and the scientific community.

Those two institutions still exist, and (with some exceptions) still pursue capital-T Truth. But they have lost their reality-defining power. (Part of the problem is that journalists and scientists are part of the expert class that working people no longer trust.) No current news anchor would dare end a broadcast with “And that’s the way it is”, as Walter Cronkite did every day for decades. And no scientific study, no matter how large it is or where it was done, can settle the questions our society endlessly debates.

So: Is global warming really happening, and do we cause it by burning fossil fuels? The scientific community says yes, and the experts whose livelihoods depend on the answer (like the ones in the insurance industry) accept that judgment. But the general public? Not so much, or at least not enough to commit our country to the kind of changes that need to happen.

Was the Covid vaccine safe, and did it save millions of lives worldwide? Do other vaccines (like the ones that all but wiped out measles and smallpox) bring huge benefits to our society? Again, the scientific community says yes. But that answer is considered sufficiently untrustworthy that a crank like RFK Jr. can get control of our government’s health services and put millions of lives at risk.

Did Trump lose in 2020? By the standards of objective journalism, yes he did. He lost soundly, by a wide margin. The diverse institutions of vote-counting, spread through both blue states and red ones like Georgia and (then) Arizona, support that conclusion. Every court case that has hung on the question of voter fraud or computer tampering has come out the same way: There is no evidence to support those claims. Fox News paid Dominion Voting Systems $787 million rather than argue that it could have reasonably believed Dominion’s vote-counting machines were rigged. (Not that they were rigged, but that there was any reasonable doubt about their accuracy.)

But none of that matters. No institution — not even one Trump cultists establish themselves, like the audit of Arizona’s votes — can declare once and for all that Trump lost.

Loss of Depth. Along with the lost of trust in experts and the inability of American society to agree on a basic set of facts, we are plagued by a loss of depth in our public discussions. It’s not just that Americans don’t know or understand things, it’s that they’ve lost the sense that there are things to know or understand. College professors report that students don’t know how to read entire books any more. And we all have run into people who think they are experts on a complex subject (like climate change or MRNA vaccines) because they watched a YouTube video.

Levels of superficiality that once would have gotten someone drummed out of politics — Marjorie Taylor Greene confusing “gazpacho” with “Gestapo” comes to mind — are now everyday events.

Empathy is out. Assholery is in. Remember George W. Bush’s “compassionate conservatism“? The idea in a nutshell was that if conservative policies produced a more prosperous society, the rising tide might lift more people out of poverty than liberal attempts to help people through government programs. Things never actually worked out that way, but the intention behind the phrase was clear: Conservatives didn’t want to be seen as selfish or heartless bad guys. They also want a better world, they just have a different vision of how to get there.

Later Republican candidates like John McCain and Mitt Romney worked hard to build images as good, decent men, reasonable and courteous to a fault. If the policies they supported might lead to more poverty, more suffering, or even more death, that was lamentable and surely not what they intended.

But in 2018, The Atlantic’s Adam Serwer made a shocking observation about the first Trump administration: The Cruelty is the Point. MAGA means never having to say you’re sorry. If people you don’t like are made poorer, weaker, or sicker — well, good! Nothing tastes sweeter than liberal tears.

We can hear the spectacle of cruel laughter throughout the Trump era. There were the border-patrol agents cracking up at the crying immigrant children separated from their families, and the Trump adviser who delighted white supremacists when he mocked a child with Down syndrome who was separated from her mother. There were the police who laughed uproariously when the president encouraged them to abuse suspects, and the Fox News hosts mocking a survivor of the Pulse Nightclub massacre (and in the process inundating him with threats), the survivors of sexual assault protesting to Senator Jeff Flake, the women who said the president had sexually assaulted them, and the teen survivors of the Parkland school shooting. There was the president mocking Puerto Rican accents shortly after thousands were killed and tens of thousands displaced by Hurricane Maria, the black athletes protesting unjustified killings by the police, the women of the #MeToo movement who have come forward with stories of sexual abuse, and the disabled reporter whose crime was reporting on Trump truthfully. It is not just that the perpetrators of this cruelty enjoy it; it is that they enjoy it with one another. Their shared laughter at the suffering of others is an adhesive that binds them to one another, and to Trump.

In the second Trump administration, this tendency has become even more blatant. Consider:

Pete Hegseth marked Pride Month by renaming the only Navy ship named for a gay man.
After California Senator Alex Padilla was wrestled to the ground and handcuffed for attempting to ask Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem a question, Vice President J. D. Vance referred to Padilla as “José”, a reference to José Padilla, who is a convicted terrorist.
After admitting in court that deporting Kilmar Abrego Garcia to a gulag in El Salvador was an “administrative error”, the Trump administration kept him there until they could gin up a criminal case against him. Now they are preventing his release from the criminal charge by threatening to re-deport him somewhere else. And they have assembled testimony against him by making deals with criminals who have done things far worse than Garcia is accused of.
Trump referred to Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau as “Governor … of the great state of Canada“.
Associated Press reporters have been banned from the Oval Office and Air Force One because AP still calls the Gulf of Mexico by its true name rather than the idiotic name Trump made up for it.

I could go on. It’s hard to look at any list of recent Trump administration actions without concluding that these people are trying to be assholes. It’s not an accident. It’s not a side effect of something else. The assholery is the point.

You might think this intentional assholery would get Trump in trouble with his Evangelical Christian base, because — I can’t believe I have to write this — Jesus was not an asshole. Jesus preached compassion and empathy.

But Evangelicals are making this work out by turning their backs on the teachings of Jesus. Recent books like The Sin of Empathy and Toxic Empathy explain how empathy is a bad thing — precisely because it might cause you to regret the pain that the policies you support inflict on other people.

Where does a recognition of these issues leave us? Don’t get me wrong. I would like nothing better than for a Democratic wave to sweep the 2026 midterms and then give us a non-MAGA president in 2028. But that is the beginning of the change we need, not the end.

What America needs runs far deeper than a new set of political leaders. We need some sort of spiritual or cultural reformation, one that rededicates Americans to the pursuit of truth and the responsibility to be trustworthy. It would cause us to care about each other rather than rejoice in each other’s pain. It would start us looking for leaders who bring out the best in us rather than the worst.

How do we get that reformation started? I really have no idea. I just see the need.

By weeklysift | Posted in Articles | Also tagged democracy, religion | Comments (21)

The Court fails transgender youth

June 23, 2025 – 9:12 am

Equal protection of the laws isn’t what it used to be.

After the 13th Amendment freed the slaves, the nation passed a 14th Amendment to make sure the freed slaves would have rights under the law. It promised every person “the equal protection of the laws”.

It didn’t work, at least not at first. The Supreme Court interpreted that Equal Protection Clause narrowly, and so states were able to pass Jim Crow laws that forced Black Americans to live under a different legal regime entirely. Plessy v Ferguson established the principle of “separate but equal” treatment, where “separate” rules and facilities for Blacks and Whites were very real, but “equal” could be winked at.

In the 20th century, though, the Equal Protection Clause was gradually reinterpreted to mean something very important. There are a number of complicated doctrines that implement this idea, but the underlying concept is simple: If the law treats you differently than it treats someone else, there has to be a reason for it. And the reason can’t just be that the people who make the laws don’t like you.

There has seldom been a more obvious violation of this principle than the recent run of state laws that ban gender-affirming care for trans youth. One such law is Tennessee’s “Prohibition on Medical Procedures Performed on Minors Related to Sexual Identity, Senate Bill 1 (SB1)“. Ostensibly, the law intends “to protect the health and welfare of minors”. The law bans a number of treatments that major medical organizations (“American Academy of Pediatrics, American Medical Association, American Psychiatric Association, American Psychological Association, and American Academy of Child Adolescent Psychiatry” according to Justice Sotomayor’s dissent) recommend for young people experiencing gender dysphoria, i.e., the feeling that the sexual characteristics of their physical body are at odds with their inner sense of who they are.

Legislatures typically have wide latitude to permit or ban medical procedures according to their assessment of patient safety. But the smoking gun here is that the procedures are banned only when used to treat trans youth, only

when these medical procedures are performed for the purpose of enabling a minor to identify with, or live as, a purported identity inconsistent with the minor’s sex or treating purported discomfort or distress from a discordance between the minor’s sex and asserted identity.

Using say, puberty-blocking drugs or gender-related hormones like testosterone or estrogen, is perfectly fine and safe for any other purpose parents and physicians might have in mind. But not that one.

Keep in mind here that the affected population — families of trans youth — did not ask for this “protection”. To the best of my knowledge, none of them came to the legislature and said “I want the state to make my child’s medical decisions.” To the contrary, three such families sued to block the law, and countless others are leaving Tennessee (and other states with similar laws) so that they will be free to decide for themselves how to handle what everyone recognizes is a difficult situation.

The push for SB1 came instead from people opposed on principle to the existence of trans people, usually for religious reasons. The purpose is to act on trans youth and their families, not for them. The law itself says:

This state has a legitimate, substantial, and compelling interest in encouraging minors to appreciate their sex, particularly as they undergo puberty.

In other words, Tennessee claims a “compelling interest” in convincing trans youth that they are wrong. Their sex is their sex, and they just need to get used to it.

Anyone who has listened to the public debate over such laws has to realize that the laws are motivated by a desire to make life harder for families of trans youth. If the families choose to remove their children from the state by moving, or the children decide to remove themselves from life by committing suicide, this is not necessarily considered a bad outcome. Obviously, the Tennessee legislature does not intend to offer trans youth “the equal protection of the laws”. SB1’s intention is to bludgeon trans youth, not protect them.

The question for the courts, then, should be how to extend equal protection in a coherent way. Precedents offer clear paths. Typically, these precedents involve the most obvious instances of laws being used against disadvantaged groups: race and sex. Laws that turn on issues of race or sex are given “heightened scrutiny” by the courts, because apparent justifications for the laws have so often turned out to be pretexts for hostile discrimination.

Justice Sotomayor’s dissent in this week’s case (US v Skrmetti, decided Wednesday) outlines how to use the precedents involving sex.

What does [application of SB1] mean in practice? Simply that sex determines access to the covered medication. Physicians in Tennessee can prescribe hormones and puberty blockers to help a male child, but not a female child, look more like a boy; and to help a female child, but not a male child, look more like a girl. Put in the statute’s own terms, doctors can facilitate consistency between an adolescent’s physical appearance and the “normal development” of her sex identified at birth, but they may not use the same medications to facilitate “inconsisten[cy]” with sex . All this, the State openly admits, in service of “encouraging minors to appreciate their sex.”

But the conservative justices (Roberts writing the majority opinion, plus concurrences by Thomas, Alito, and Barrett) resist not just the characterization of this case as hinging on sex, but also the idea that any injustice is occurring at all: There is nothing about discrimination against trans people that makes laws about them suspect, and so the Court has no excuse to go probing into the motives of the legislature. Courts should apply only “rational basis” review of SB1, requiring only that the legislature offer some rational connection between its actions and some legitimate government purpose. Protecting minors from a possibly dangerous medical procedure is a rational purpose, and so the Court need not look more closely at whether that explanation is a pretext for hostile discrimination. (In fact, the conservative justices dare not look closer, because the proffered explanation is obviously a pretext.)

There is a standard argument for justifying this kind of discrimination, and it has been used many times in the past: You examine previous suspect classes and draw your lines so that those issues appear not to apply. So, for example, laws banning interracial marriage were once not seen as racially discriminatory, because neither Blacks nor Whites could marry a person of a different race. Laws against same-sex marriage didn’t discriminate on the basis of sex, because neither men nor women could marry a person of the same sex. And so on. In retrospect, such arguments are transparent rationalizations for hostile discrimination, but that doesn’t stop judges from continuing to use them. Justice Roberts writes for the majority:

Neither of the above classifications [in SB1] turns on sex. Rather, SB1 prohibits healthcare providers from administering puberty blockers and hormones to minors for certain medical uses, regardless of a minor’s sex. … SB1 does not mask sex-based classifications. For reasons we have explained, the law does not prohibit conduct for one sex that it permits for the other. Under SB1, no minor may be administered puberty blockers or hormones to treat gender dysphoria, gender identity disorder, or gender incongruence; minors of any sex may be administered puberty blockers or hormones for other purposes.

So the law doesn’t discriminate against transgender youth, it just separates out the medical conditions that define transgender youth. It protects youth against the risks of such treatments, but only if they seek those treatments for a purpose unique to trans people.

When the Equal Protection Clause was being explained to me years ago, the following example was given: What if a law banned yarmulkes, the skull caps typically worn by Jewish men? You could argue that such a law isn’t religious discrimination, because it applies universally: Neither Jews nor Gentiles can wear yarmulkes. But of course, only Jews want to wear yarmulkes. So a law against yarmulkes is religious discrimination against Jews.

Sotomayor observes:

nearly every discriminatory law is susceptible to a similarly race- or sex- neutral characterization. A prohibition on interracial marriage, for example, allows no person to marry someone outside of her race, while allowing persons of any race to marry within their races.

The religious right is targeting other applications of the Equal Protection Clause, beginning with same-sex marriage. So it seems likely we will be hearing the same rationalizations again soon.

By weeklysift | Posted in Articles | Comments (6)

How Do Things Change?

February 10, 2025 – 10:30 am

a tentative start to a historical investigation

Last week I argued that mere election tactics — a more attractive candidate, some new slogans, a better framing of the issues — will not be enough to overcome the MAGA movement in the long run. (We defeated them soundly in the elections of 2018 and 2020, but MAGA showed amazing resilience.) MAGA itself is not just an unfortunate convergence of political forces, it is a cultural movement of some depth. Defeating it will require a counter-movement.

The 2024 campaign showed that the counter-movement can’t just be a reversion to some prior status quo. My assessment of how the Harris campaign failed is that Trump managed to tag Harris as the candidate of the status quo and present himself as the candidate who will shake things up. [1]

Harris’ problem was that (as a whole) the status quo is not working for many Americans. I listed a number of ways that things are not working, but fundamentally they boil down to this: It gets harder and harder to plan for a successful life with any confidence that your plan will succeed. Far too many Americans feel that the system is stacked against them, and that simply trying harder is not the answer.

Rather than present any coherent program, Trump has responded to the public’s justified anxiety with scapegoating and nostalgia: Immigrants, foreigners, minorities, and people who rebel against their assigned gender roles are the problem, and we should look to the greatness of America’s past — now, apparently, the high tariffs of the 1890s — for our salvation. To the extent that he has a plan — like ignoring climate change and reverting to the fossil-fuel economy of the 20th century — it is likely to be counterproductive.

But “don’t do that” has turned out to be an unpersuasive message for the Democrats. It worked when Trump was in office, actively doing unpopular things. But as soon as he was defeated, nostalgia renewed its charms. To a large extent, Trump’s 2024 message was that electing him would make it 2019 again, and all the disruption of the Covid pandemic (including the parts he brought on himself) would be behind us.

But realizing that we need a deeper movement is not the same as having one, or even knowing what it would be or how it might come together.

With that question in mind, I’ve been looking at history. Despite recently being idealized as the new “again” in Make America Great Again, the late 1800s were a low point in American history, dominated by the robber barons of the Gilded Age. Industry after industry was reorganizing as a monopolistic trust with the power to maximally exploit both workers and consumers. It was a hard time both for urban factory workers and rural small farmers.

Somehow, things got better: Antitrust laws got passed. Governments began to regulate working conditions, product safety, and child labor. Standard Oil was broken up. Unions began to win a few battles. And the gap between rich and poor narrowed. The New Deal was unthinkable in 1880, but by the 1930s it was popular. This was a profound change in what David Graeber referred to as “political common sense“. How did it happen?

A friend recommended a place to start: The Populist Moment by Lawrence Goodwyn. The book was published in 1978, so to the extent that it says something about the present day, either about MAGA or how a democratic movement might oppose it, that message arises naturally from the history, and not from some pro- or anti-Trump bias of the author. [2]

What was Populism? These days, MAGA and similar neo-fascist movements in other countries are often described as “populist”, but the version in the late 1800s was quite different. There is a surface similarity — in each case, large numbers of working class people found themselves resisting their era’s educated consensus — but from there things diverge fairly quickly.

In the 19th century, farming was still the largest American occupation, employing over half the labor force as late as 1880. But the system was stacked against small farmers in two ways: First, farmers with no capital beyond their land found themselves at the mercy of “furnishing merchants”, who would lend money for them to plant a crop (and survive through the growing season) in exchange for a contract on the harvest. Once he had contracted with a furnishing merchant, the farmer was stuck with that merchant, and would typically end up both paying high prices for his supplies and receiving a low price for his crop. [3]

But second, that long-term situation was made much worse by post-Civil-War monetary policy. The Civil War had been financed in part by printing paper currency, known as “greenbacks“. That had caused inflation during the war, and the prevailing economic wisdom of the time was that the dollar needed to be made “sound” again. In other words, the greenbacks had to be withdrawn from circulation, so that all US money could be redeemable for gold again. (Greenbacks became fully convertible to gold in 1878.)

In modern terms, the government’s policy was to shrink the money supply. If expanding the money supply had caused inflation, shrinking it could be counted on to achieve deflation; i.e., prices would come back down.

if you think like a consumer, deflation sound great. (Just last fall, that’s what Trump was promising his voters: “Prices will come down. You just watch: They’ll come down, and they’ll come down fast.”) But now imagine being a farmer who is counting on selling his wheat or cotton at the end of the season: You bought and borrowed when prices were high, and now you have to sell when prices are lower. The result was that large numbers of farmers were failing to clear their debts. Every year, many would lose their land and wind up as sharecroppers or worse.

The conventional wisdom of the time was that, sure, times were hard. But the “sound dollar” had to be restored, so farmers would just have to become more efficient. If some had to go broke in the process, well, that’s capitalism for you. Creative destruction and all that.

At some point, though, farmers began to realize that this wasn’t a story of individual failure, but of a badly structured system. And some postulated a solution: Farmers could cooperate rather than compete. They could form “farmer alliances” to pool their resources, negotiate for common supplies, and market their crops collectively.

Through the 1870s and 1880s, farmer alliances played a game of escalating pressure with the merchants and banks. Initial co-op successes would lead to new merchant strategies to freeze the co-ops out of the market, resulting in some larger co-op plan. The ultimate trump card was played by the system’s last line of defense, the bankers: Banks would take mortgages on individual farms (the old model), but they would loan nothing to a co-op backed by the land of its members.

Watching the more prosperous classes act in concert to thwart their plans radicalized the farmers and made them turn to politics. They created the People’s Party, whose presidential candidate carried four western states in the 1892 election. The party was organized around a platform, some of which was achieved decades later, but much of which might still be considered radical today. It wanted a revision of the banking system that would orient it toward the interests of “the producing classes” rather than “the money trust”. It wanted a flexible money supply (which we have today) rather than a gold standard. And it wanted government ownership of the railroads and other essential utilities that could be manipulated against working people by monopolies and trusts.

Ultimately, the People’s Party supported the Democratic candidate, William Jennings Bryan, in 1896, and then faded into insignificance.

So Populism was a failure in the sense that it never achieved power. But David Graeber once said that “one of the chief aims of revolutionary activity is to transform political common sense”. By that standard, Populism was more successful. [4]

Partisanship. The People’s Party ran into partisan loyalties that were left over from the Civil War and generally had more to do with identity than with life experience. If you were a White Southern Protestant or a Northern urban Catholic, then you were a Democrat. But if you were a Northern Protestant or a Southern Negro, you were Republican. Those loyalties were hard to break, and each party charged that the Populists were really agents of the other party. “Patriotism” meant faithfulness to the team your people played on during the War.

How movements happen. Goodwyn has a lot to say about this, and argues against the view that protest movements arise naturally during “hard times”. History, he says, does not support this.

“The masses” do not rebel in instinctive response to hard times and exploitation because they have been culturally organized by their societies not to rebel. They have, instead, been instructed in deference.

He points to parallel ways this worked in his own day on both sides of the Iron Curtain. (This is 1978, remember.)

The retreat of the Russian populace represents a simple acknowledgment of ruthless state power. Deference is an essential ingredient of personal survival. In America, on the other hand, mass resignation represents a public manifestation of a private loss, a decline in what people think they have a political right to aspire to — in essence, a decline of individual political self-respect on the part of millions of people.

He then asks the billion-dollar question:

How does mass protest happen at all then?

Which he then proceeds to answer: There are four stages:

forming: the creation of an autonomous institution where new interpretations can materialize that run counter to those of prevailing authority
recruiting: the creation of a tactical means to attract masses of people
educating: the achievement of a heretofore culturally unsanctioned level of social analysis
politicizing: the creation of an institutional means whereby the new ideas, shared now by the rank and file of the mass movement, can be expressed in an autonomous political way.

And he notes that “Imposing cultural roadblocks stand in the way of a democratic movement at every stage of this sequential project.”

For the populist movement, the first stage was the creation of farmers’ alliances. After years of experimenting, the farmers alliances came up with a mass recruitment model: large-scale cooperatives that farmers could join in hopes of getting cheaper supplies, better crop prices, and various other benefits. Then the co-ops themselves became educating institutions that taught farmers how the monetary system tilted the playing field against them, and how an alternative system might work. And finally the People’s Party itself provided an electoral outlet.

How well the People’s Party did in various states corresponded to how well the previous stages had taken hold.

In the 20th century, labor unions played a similar role to the co-ops: Masses of workers would join a union in hope of getting better pay and improved working conditions. And the union would then educate them in the issues relevant to their situation. [5]

MAGA. It’s worth considering how Goodwyn’s model applies to MAGA. You wouldn’t expect it to fit perfectly, because fundamentally MAGA isn’t a democratic movement. There has always been big money behind it, and the grassroots aspects, while genuine in some sense, also include quite a bit of astroturf. [6]

However, there are a number of parallels. The initial hurdle MAGA faced was getting its working-class foot-soldiers to believe in themselves rather than be intimidated by experts like economists, climate scientists, and medical researchers. The internet has undoubtedly made this easier, but the validation of “doing your own research” was also key.

And what was the recruiting institution that could attract masses of people and educate them in the new way of looking at the world? Evangelical churches. People came to them for the variety of reasons that always attract people to churches, and usually not for political indoctrination. But once there, they could be taught that elite scientists (like those promoting anti-Genesis ideas of evolution) were agents of the Devil. Their sense of grievance could be raised and sharpened, and the whole idea of a fact-based or reason-based worldview could be undermined. You might join because you enjoyed singing in the choir, but after a few years you were ready to believe that DEI was an anti-White conspiracy, or that economic malaise was God’s punishment for tolerating gay marriage and trans rights. You were ready to march for Trump.

Counter-movement. The lack of an obvious recruiting-and-educating institution is an obvious hole in the formation of an anti-MAGA counter-movement. Conservatives seem well aware of possible avenues — like the universities, a revitalized union movement, or even charitable activities like refugee resettlement or soup kitchens — and are committed to shutting them down.

Conversely, this is why a number of left-leaning voices (Perry Bacon, for one) are encouraging their listeners to connect with institutions where they can meet with like-minded folks.

I find the historical pattern evocative, even if I can’t immediately see how to implement it: The recruiting-and-educating institutions offer a very simple practical advantage: higher wages, say, or better crop prices. But by engaging in the institution’s core activity, people begin to see the oppressive forces arrayed against them, and begin to radicalize.

[1] And indeed, he is shaking things up. In my opinion, however, the parts of the status quo he is attacking are the best parts: the rule of law, the separation of powers, and the independence of federal institutions like the Department of Justice and the military, just to name a few.

Trump’s attacks on what he calls “the Deep State” are telling. If you know any federal employees, you probably understand that there is a Deep State, but it’s not the monster Trump paints it as.

The Deep State consists of federal workers who are more committed to the mission of their agencies than they are to the current administration. So career EPA officials will resist a president who wants to harm the environment, career prosecutors will drag their feet about harassing the current administration’s political enemies, career public health officials will do their best to support best practices against pressure from above, and so on. To the extent that the agencies are well set up and well motivated, their employees’ loyalty to the agency mission is a good thing, not a bad thing.

[2] Populism is literally just a place to start. I’m going to be delving into other aspects of the 1870-1941 period in future posts.

[3] Something similar happened to miners and factory workers who were paid in vouchers that could only be redeemed at company-approved merchants, who used that monopoly power to drive workers ever deeper into debt. As 16 tons puts it “I owe my soul to the company store.”

[4] Another movement that benefits from Graeber’s political-common-sense standard is the French Revolution. It is frequently judged a failure (especially by comparison to the American Revolution) because it didn’t achieve a lasting Republic, but instead devolved into the Reign of Terror and the dictatorship of Napoleon. However, the French Revolution changed political history. Before the revolution, absolute monarchy was still seen as a valid and plausible form of government. Afterwards, it wasn’t. The Czars of Russia might hang on for another century or so, but the writing was on the wall.

[5] It is unfortunate that farmers alliances and labor unions didn’t peak at the same time. Combined, they might have achieved significant political power.

[6] MAGA precursors, like the John Birch Society and the Tea Party, always had wealthy donors. You can see the pattern in present-day groups like Moms for Liberty. While there are indeed concerned moms in Moms For Liberty, the group’s expansion has been greased by professional consulting and seed money from wealthy establishment groups like the Heritage Foundation.

By weeklysift | Posted in Articles | Also tagged democracy, politics | Comments (9)

Should Democrats Abandon the Trans Community?

November 25, 2024 – 9:23 am

If we run away, how far will we have to go?

During the stretch run of the presidential campaign, $37 million worth of Trump ads connected Kamala Harris to trans people, especially transwomen and transwoman athletes. It’s hard to know whether those ads decided the election, but it’s not crazy to imagine that they did. This has started a debate among Democrats about how to handle trans-rights issues going forward.

Republicans sense an advantage, so they will make sure those issues don’t go away any time soon. Congresswoman Nancy Mace (R-SC) responded to Delaware electing transwoman Sarah McBride to Congress by proposing a bill to keep her out of women’s bathrooms and locker rooms in the Capitol. [1] WaPo’s Matt Bai laid out how this political trick works:

First, you single out someone transgender for unprompted cruelty. … Then you sit back and wait for Democrats to do the decent thing, which is to stand up for the right of any American to be left alone. At which point, Republican leaders step in to say, as House Speaker Mike Johnson did, that they’re “not going to engage in silly debates about this,” as if it were Democrats and not Republicans who are so obsessed with trans rights that they can’t stop thinking about who’s in the next stall.

Talk about obsessed: Of the current posts on Mace’s X-timeline, 76 of the first 79 are about her bathroom bill. All since November 20.

Bai’s model certainly captures how the issue played out in the recent campaign, as M. Gessen (who identifies as trans) observed:

In the wake of an election in which Donald Trump stoked fear about trans people — as in the much-discussed ad that warned “Kamala is for they/them. President Trump is for you” — Democrats are now debating how much the issue of trans rights hurt them and how fast they should retreat from it. Which is remarkable, because throughout her brief campaign, Kamala Harris was all but silent on the subject. It’s not clear how much further Democrats could actually retreat.

Unfortunately, the answer to that question is obvious: Democrats could get on board the anti-trans train and start their own fear-mongering about trans people. My Congressman, Seth Moulton [2], is showing the way:

I have two little girls, I don’t want them getting run over on a playing field by a male or formerly male athlete, but as a Democrat I’m supposed to be afraid to say that.

This is a tactic I remember well from junior high: If kids are picking on you for looking gay, find some kid who looks gayer and beat him up. Don’t stand up to cruelty, just make sure you’re on the inflicting side rather than the suffering side.

But while you’re doing that, make sure you don’t look cruel. So Moulton, who (like me) enjoys almost every kind of privilege American culture offers, is the victim here: People like him are “afraid” of the Big Bad Trans Community. But Seth himself is one of the few Democrats courageous enough to join in the smear against transathletes. He knows that the number of transathletes in women’s sports is vanishingly small [3], that identified-male-at-birth kids who have taken puberty blockers don’t have significant physical advantages over identified-female-at-birth kids, and that the only way Trump managed to find an example in the news that he could use to smear transathletes was to lie about a female Algerian boxer in the Olympics. But never mind that. His little girls are in danger and require his protection.

That’s how the game is played: Don’t attack. Just invent a “threat”, pin it on the target group, and then “defend” against that threat. You know: “They’re eating the dogs, they’re eating the cats.“

So let’s not kid ourselves about what the choice is. Democrats can’t just “stop spending so much time talking about trans issues”, because we never did that. Whatever we say or do, Republicans are going to try to connect us to the trans community. The only way out of that box is to actively join the lynch mob.

Is that really what you want to do?

Josh Marshall offers a historical parallel: the 2004 election, when George W. Bush won reelection over John Kerry. Like 2024, 2004 was a very discouraging election for liberals. Bush had won in 2000 despite losing the popular vote, so it was easy to look on his administration — torture, war based on lies, etc. — as an aberration. America wasn’t really like that. But then he got over 50% of the vote in 2004 (the only Republican to do so in the 21st century), so Democrats had a lot of soul-searching to do.

There’s at least a decent argument that Democrats lost the 2004 election over gay marriage. It certainly wasn’t the biggest issue. But Republicans, cynically and shrewdly, got state ballot initiatives banning gay marriage on the ballot in a number of key states. Ohio seemed like the keyest. … Who knows whether it actually turned the election. But it’s not a far-fetched argument given how close the result was. There’s no question that substantial majorities of voters opposed same-sex marriage rights at the time, though of course support varied from more liberal to more conservative states. …

I don’t think you get to the Obergefell decision in 2015 without 2004 or the whole range of marriage equality activism in the first years of this century. In fact, I’m also certain you don’t. And I guarantee it was an albatross and super annoying to tons of Democratic elected officials. It’s possible it cost Democrats the 2004 election. It generated all sorts of agita and in many cases anger that LGBT activists were pushing the envelope so hard.

Marshall allows that the parallel isn’t perfect, but it’s also not totally off-base. Neither is the comparison to civil rights in the 1960s — Marshall didn’t go there — when there were literal race riots in cities all over the country. Nixon won in 1968 largely because he could pose as the law-and-order candidate who would stand up to Black activism.

Once in a while, there’s going to be a political price to pay for refusing to beat down on whatever group is unpopular at the moment. We can’t ignore that price, but going the other way has a price as well.

One thing the gay-marriage comparison suggests is that we have no idea how trans issues will play in 2028 and beyond. Most voters in 2004 based their same-sex marriage opinion on ignorance: They did not know any gay couples with a public long-term commitment, so they had no basis on which to judge claims that same-sex marriage would lead to “the fall of Western Civilization itself“. Same thing now: Most Americans don’t know any openly trans people, so they’re easy to demonize.

A few years down the road, most Americans probably will know at least one or two such people, plus a handful of trans celebrities. [4] The conversation may be very different by then.

[1] In the WaPo, Style (not Politics) columnist Monica Hesse wonders if Mace knows how women’s bathrooms work.

Just so we’re all on the same page, here’s how public bathrooms work for women: Each restroom is cordoned off into multiple private stalls. Each stall has its own door, which fully shuts and locks. Each door either goes all the way to the ground or — more commonly — stops approximately 12 inches from the floor. This is not an open-plan urinal situation, is what I’m saying. This is a situation in which the most flesh anyone typically sees is a scandalous, tawdry swath of … ankle.

If, somehow, a sex pest were to infiltrate a women’s room and do something creepy — like attempting to spy under a stall — then the women using the restroom would and should call security to have the sex pest removed. That would be true whether the culprit was a cis woman, a trans woman, a man or six koalas in a trench coat. Creepy behavior should be policed; mere existence should not.

If Mace’s bill passes, though, it becomes someone’s job to check up on the genitalia of restroom users. The government itself becomes the “sex pest”.

[2] If you’re a Democrat who believes in human rights, including trans rights, and you’re thinking of running against Moulton in MA-6, please put me on your mailing list. I’ve been a very reluctant Moulton voter ever since he challenged Nancy Pelosi for Speaker in 2018. Politico wrote that Moulton looked like “a mansplaining young punk taking down a vastly more experienced woman”, which is generally how I see him. (I understood why Pelosi faced criticism from the left, even though I disagreed with that criticism. But that’s not where Moulton was coming from. He just wanted to be important.)

Moulton’s anti-trans turn has to be about his larger ambitions, because it isn’t forced by any local political necessity. Republicans didn’t even bother to field a candidate in MA-06 this year, so Moulton won with 97% of the vote.

[3] Apparently, one of those rare transathletes is on the women’s volleyball team at San Jose State. The WaPo outlines the current controversy there, as some schools are refusing to play against the Spartans. The article notes that the player meets the NCAA requirements for transwomen athletes (one year of testosterone suppression treatment), and quotes a rival athletic director:

I do think it is important to note, we have played against this athlete for the past two seasons and our student-athletes felt safe in the previous matches. She is not the best or most dominant hitter on the Spartans team.

[4] Slowing this process down is the core reason Republicans want to ban books like Gender Queer, a memoir that I learned a lot from. If you read such books, or attend plays like Becoming a Man, you may begin to think of people with nontraditional gender identities primarily as people. That will make it harder for Republicans to use fear to manipulate you.

By weeklysift | Posted in Articles | Also tagged gender, lgbtq, trans, transgender | Comments (9)

Harris lost the war of “ambient information”

November 18, 2024 – 9:05 am

The kinds of lessons Democrats are learning from the 2024 election may not matter any more.

A post-election article I found very challenging and important is “Republican Victory and the Ambience of Information” by Nathan Heller in The New Yorker.

Heller begins with an observation I keep banging my head against: All those accounts where Harris lost because she didn’t do something — almost invariably she did do the thing they’re claiming she didn’t do. She talked about kitchen-table issues, she had detailed policy proposals, she gave interviews, she reached out to every kind of voter, and so on. She raised money, she advertised, she had a great ground game. But for some reason the things she said and did didn’t register with some large chunk of the electorate.

This seems to me like the central problem for Democrats to wrestle with. Sure, work on the Party’s message, work on the outreach to Latino men, come up with more popular policies. But none of that is going to matter if your great message describing your great policies goes in one ear and out the other.

But why would it do that?

On the other hand, Trump seemed to do everything wrong. His campaign speeches were boring and largely unwatchable. He didn’t have a ground game to speak of. Any policy ideas — there weren’t many of them — were vague. (Does he want a 10% tariff or 20%? It seems like that should matter.)

Trump’s speeches at rallies, many people noticed, had a curious background-music quality: they went on forever, aimlessly, and people would come and go at will. The actual speeches didn’t seem to matter; they existed simply to set a vibe and keep certain broad suggestions (immigration big problem! Biden Administration so corrupt!) drifting into the ether. … Planting ideas this way isn’t argument, and it’s not emotional persuasion. It’s about seeding the ambience of information, throwing facts and fake facts alike into an environment of low attention, with the confidence that, like minnows released individually into a pond, they will eventually school and spawn. Notions must add up to a unified vision but also be able to travel on their own, because that’s how information moves in a viral age.

… The communications researcher Pablo Boczkowski has noted that people increasingly take in news by incidental encounter—they are “rubbed by the news”—rather than by seeking it out. Trump has maximized his influence over networks that people rub against, and has filled them with information that, true or not, seems all of a coherent piece. This is the opposite of micro-targeting. The goal is for voters to meet ideas coming and going so often that those notions seem like common sense.

So when Harris described policies (or even Biden administration accomplishments) that benefit the working class, it didn’t register, because people “know” (from having run into the notion over and over again) that Democrats are elitists who look down on the working class. They didn’t listen, because they “knew” that Harris wasn’t talking to people like them.

Conversely, when Trump said immigrants were “eating the dogs … eating the cats”, maybe people eventually heard that this story was false. (Or maybe they didn’t.) But the idea that immigrants are causing problems all over the country was seeded. When you heard it again, you’d heard it before.

That’s how you wind up with a result like this: Harris won handily among people who were paying attention, but got clobbered among voters who just “knew things” without checking them out.

Heller points out that if you’re trying to seed the world with ambient information, it helps to have your own dedicated media organizations like Fox News, Truth Social, and ultimately X/Twitter, where your factoids can be repeated endlessly without contradiction. Democrats have the so-called “liberal” media, but the message discipline just isn’t there. As often as not, “liberal” outlets like the New York Times and Washington Post would pass along Trump-oriented ambience: Biden’s too old, the economy feels bad, Harris’ campaign doesn’t have enough substance, and so on.

In the old days, campaigns imagined that even fairly uninformed voters had an issue checklist: abortion, inflation, immigration, climate change, education, and so on. Just before the election, they’d find out which candidate agreed with them on those issues, and then vote for that candidate.

For a large (and probably growing) chunk of the electorate, that’s not what happens any more. This is how you wind up with results like we saw in Missouri: The same electorate that voted for Trump 59%-40% also passed ballot measures protecting abortion rights and raising the minimum wage.

What does happen is much harder to get your hands around. But we need to figure it out.

By weeklysift | Posted in Articles | Also tagged 2024 election | Comments (28)

MAGA’s Closing Argument: Dad’s Coming Home

October 28, 2024 – 9:18 am

If you can’t see any sense in the pro-Trump case, you’re looking at the wrong level.

“How can this election be close?”

It’s a cry of frustration I hear almost every day in one way or another, not just from Substack bloggers and TV talking heads, but also on social media and from personal friends.

Sure, there are about as many Republicans as Democrats in the country, and as many conservatives as liberals. But one of the two candidates is Donald Trump. I could easily imagine someone like Nikki Haley winning. But the case against Trump should be both obvious and compelling.

We all saw him raise a mob and send it to attack the Capitol in an attempt to overturn an election his own people told him he lost fair and square. We lived through his mismanagement of Covid, which led to hundreds of thousands of unnecessary American deaths. We see him day after day, rambling incoherently through interviews and unable to answer questions about the few policies he has proposed. We see key members of his first administration — like Chief of Staff John Kelly and JCS Chair Mark Milley — warn us that he is a fascist and should never again hold an office of public trust. We hear him repeat the words of past fascist leaders, telling us that his chosen scapegoats — immigrants, in preference to Hitler’s Jews (most of the time) — are “poisoning the blood of our country” and need to be rounded up by the millions. We hear him recite the eternal tropes of racism, claiming that immigrants have “bad genes” that make them criminals, but that he himself has “great genes” that make him smart. We hear him lie, virtually with every breath, about a bad economy, soaring crime, and an immigrant crime wave — none of which exist anywhere outside his imagination.

How is this election close? How is it still possible that he could win? Is half the country as far gone as Ruben Bolling’s version of Snoopy?

If you feel this frustration, imagine what it’s like for bloggers like me. Day after day, I motivate myself with this myth: If I could only explain things clearly enough, people would understand; and once they understood, the great majority of them would do the right thing. So the prospect of another Trump presidency doesn’t just make me fear for my country, it undermines my identity.

More and more it becomes apparent that the problem isn’t that half the country doesn’t understand. Many of them actively want a fascist government that will implement the cruelty they feel in their hearts. Many who aren’t openly rooting for that cruelty refuse to understand what Trump is, and no one can make them understand against their will. They will accept any excuse for his behavior, even excuses that shift from month to month and contradict the previous excuses.

Thank you for letting me get that out of my system. Now I can try to go back to being calm and reasonable.

A few weeks ago I took a long, leisurely driving trip from my home in Massachusetts out to west-central Illinois, where I grew up. I led a church service there, and then took a long, leisurely drive back. Along the way, I saw the lawn signs in neighborhoods very different from mine, and I heard campaign ads not just for the national race, but for a variety of close Senate races.

I think I understand something now.

Fantasies of crime. In the northwest neck of Pennsylvania, road closures threw me off of I-90 and sent me through a small town that sits between Cleveland and Buffalo, but is outside the orbit of either city. In a peaceful middle-class neighborhood I saw numerous yard signs that said

Trump safety
Kamala crime

I doubt the people who live in those houses are recent victims of crime or live in any realistic state of fear. I also doubt that they have looked very deeply into the crime problem nationally. If they had, they would know that crime has been dropping for decades, and was no better under Trump than under Biden and Harris. Crime briefly blipped upward during both the Trump and Biden years of the Covid pandemic, but in recent years the long-term decline has resumed.

Unlike many of the fantasy problems Trump presents in his speeches, he at least has proposed fantasy solutions to this one: deport all those brown people with criminality in their DNA, and stop making the police follow rules.

The trans “threat”. Trans people figure prominently in several of the ads I saw. One purported to compare the Trump military to the “woke” Harris military. The scenes representing Trump were of a drill sergeant screaming abuse at recruits. The ones representing Harris showed dancers of indeterminate gender. We are supposed to draw the “obvious” conclusions that these images are typical of Trump and Harris military policies, and that the abused recruits will perform better on the battlefield than the gender-fluid recruits.

An attack ad directed at Sherrod Brown said that he voted to allow men to compete in women’s sports. An anti-Harris ad said she supported paying for the sex-change operations of criminals in prison. It concluded “Kamala is for they/them. Trump is for you.” During the Olympics, Trump falsely said that a gold-medal-winning female boxer was a man who had “transitioned”, and implied that women competing against her were in danger. Republicans often attack the inclusion of transwomen in women’s sports by invoking the image of men beating up on women.

Again, these ads seem directed at people whose lives are not affected by the issues being raised. The Algerian boxer Trump attacked was not trans. The actual number of transwomen athletes in school sports is tiny — about 40 out of 500,000 NCAA athletes, according to one report — and no women’s league in any sport in the country is dominated by trans stars. The real stars of women’s sports — Caitlin Clark, for example, or Serena Williams — were identified as female at birth. Transwomen who have taken puberty-blocking drugs have only minor advantages over other high-school or college-age women. The problem of transwomen beating down “real” women is itself not real.

Of course, there is a real men-beating-women problem in our society, but Republicans do not seem concerned about it. Whenever proposed legislation would protect women — say, by closing the “boyfriend loophole” in laws the prevent domestic abusers from owning guns — the opposition will be almost entirely Republican.

Similarly, the number of trans soldiers in our military or trans inmates in our prisons is tiny. Kicking out the one or making the other pay for their own surgery is not going to perceptibly improve the daily lives of MAGA voters.

Immigrants “destroying our country”. The third major argument, which I hear more from Trump himself than in TV ads, is that immigrants are “destroying our country“. The examples Trump offers are horrifying: In Springfield, Ohio “They’re eating the dogs. They’re eating the cats.” Aurora, Colorado is a “war zone”, occupied by “an army of illegal alien gang members and migrant criminals from the dungeons of the third world”.

But none of that is true, and even local Republican officials push back against Trump’s false claims. Such lies can’t be aimed at winning votes in the communities he’s talking about, because local people can simply open their eyes and see that the world he’s describing isn’t real.

So the target audience must be elsewhere.

Something similar is going on in Trump’s rhetoric about American cities, especially major cities in key swing states: Milwaukee is “horrible”. Philadelphia is “ravaged by bloodshed and crime”. If Harris is elected, he claims, “the whole country will end up being like Detroit.” (Harris and Detroit struck back with this ad, about how the city has rebuilt itself: America will be like Detroit? “He should be so god damn lucky.”)

“These cities,” Trump said in a 2020 town hall. “It’s like living in hell.”

Those comments aren’t intended to earn votes in Milwaukee, Philadelphia, and Detroit — Democratic strongholds where people can simply open their eyes and see that on the whole life is not particularly hellish. Rather, they’re aimed at suburban and rural voters who never go to the cities because they believe terrible things about them.

What’s going on? I set out to explain how this election can be close, and so far I haven’t. If you think of politics as being about problems and solutions, none of the arguments Trump and other MAGA Republicans are making add up. They are offering to solve problems their voters don’t have, and to protect them from people who do them no harm. (Trans people, for example, have issues with their own genders, not yours. Crime in Atlanta hurts Atlantans, not people in Marjorie Taylor Green’s district, where the largest city, Rome, has 37,000 people. If undocumented immigrants affect your life, it’s probably by picking the vegetables you eat or washing the dishes in your favorite restaurant.)

So how do all these arguments work? Why doesn’t it matter that so many of them are easily debunked? And how do they coalesce into a coherent whole? Fortunately, we don’t have to figure this out for ourselves, because we can call in a MAGA expert: Tucker Carlson. Speaking at a Trump rally in Georgia Wednesday, Tucker pulled it all together:

If you allow people to get away with things that are completely over the top and outrageous, if you allow your 2-year-old to smear the contents of his diapers on the wall of your living room and you do nothing about it, if you allow your 14-year-old to light a joint at the breakfast table, if you allow your hormone-addled 15-year-old daughter to, like, slam the door of her bedroom and give you the finger, you’re going to get more of it, and those kids are going to wind up in rehab. It’s not good for you and it’s not good for them.

No. There has to be a point at which Dad comes home. [loud cheering] Yeah, that’s right. Dad comes home, and he’s pissed. Dad is pissed. He’s not vengeful; he loves his children. Disobedient as they may be, he loves them, because they’re his children, they live in his house. But he’s very disappointed in their behavior, and he’s going to have to let them know: “Get to your room right now and think about what you did.”

And when Dad gets home, you know what he says? “You’ve been a bad girl. You’ve been a bad little girl and you’re getting a vigorous spanking, right now. And no, it’s not going to hurt me more than it hurts you. No, it’s not. I’m not going to lie. It’s going to hurt you a lot more than it hurts me. And you earned this. You’re getting a vigorous spanking because you’ve been a bad girl. And it has to be this way. It has to be this way, because it’s true. And you’re only going to get better when you take responsibility for what you did.”

That’s not said in the spirit of hate. It’s not said in the spirit of vengeance or bigotry. Far from it. It’s said in the spirit of justice, which is the purest and best thing there is. And without it, things fall apart. …

Not only do I think Donald Trump’s going to win, I think that the vibe shift has been so profound. … What you smell around you is the return of freedom, it’s the return of the country you grew up in. …

[The Democrats] need to lose. And at the end of all that, when they tell you they’ve won: No! You can look them straight in the face and say, “I’m sorry. Dad’s home. And he’s pissed.” [1]

How does that pull it all together? Most of us don’t parent teen-age girls we wish we could spank, so how does this little vignette capture why we should vote for Trump?

Let me explain: If you’re looking for the problems of ordinary American life, you’re looking in the wrong place. Trump is not talking about how you’re going to pay for college or find a job or afford a house or get healthcare or retire without starving. The problem his campaign is all about is on a different level altogether: You feel dislocated in today’s world.

That’s why his slogan is backward-looking: Make America Great Again. When is “again”? Back in July, the folks at Salon posed that question to people at the Republican Convention:

What we found is that, whether they’re 30 or 70 years old, the typical RNC attendee thinks America was “great” when they were kids. They believe America lost its way coincidentally right at the time they were maturing into adulthood.

For whatever reason, they now find themselves living in a world very different from “the country you grew up in”. Maybe it’s all the people chattering in languages they don’t understand. Maybe it’s being told that it’s racist or sexist to talk the way they’ve always talked. Maybe it’s having to deal with people who don’t look like either men or women to them, and being told that they’re the problem when they can’t keep track of which name or pronoun to use. Maybe it’s not being able to assume that everybody’s Christian or heterosexual, or not knowing what’s funny now, or hearing music that doesn’t sound like music. Maybe it’s not being able to get a real person on the phone, or receiving 100 pieces of junk mail for every letter they actually want, or dealing with women who earn more than men. Maybe it’s not recognizing half the countries on the globe or being reminded about George Washington’s slaves or hearing “land acknowledgements” about the Native Americans who once occupied the property where they live.

The core MAGA message is that all these problems are really one problem: The world feels wrong now, because people don’t know how to behave.

All the apparent problems Trump talks about are just symbols, just ways to get his hands around this larger, more ineffable problem. Illegal immigrants, terrorists, criminals, transsexuals, women who get abortions — they’re all just people who don’t know how to behave. And that’s why it doesn’t matter if he’s making up his facts or that some particular thing never really happened. People don’t know how to behave, and they make the whole world feel weird and scary That’s real.

Similarly, all the solutions he talks about are really just symbols of one solution: We need to put somebody in charge who will be strong enough to make people behave.

That’s what Tucker spelled out: Dad needs to come home, the old-fashioned kind of Dad who yells and judges and punishes. He’ll tell the bad kids they’re bad, and he’ll keep spanking them hard until they learn to be good.

And then America will be great again, like it was when all of us were children.

[1] This clip got a lot of play on social media and elsewhere, but most of the response focused on the spanking-little-girls aspect and ignored the fascist threat at the end: Even if Kamala Harris wins, MAGA will try to install its strongman.

By weeklysift | Posted in Articles | Also tagged 2024 election, Donald Trump, kamala-harris | Comments (16)

Mifepristone, round 2

October 21, 2024 – 8:59 am

A previous lawsuit to ban the drug used in about half of all US abortions failed at the Supreme Court for technical reasons. But a new suit fixes those problems. It also introduces some truly weird and creepy arguments. Is it really a problem if a state’s teen pregnancy rate gets too low?

Back in June, a lawsuit asking federal courts to ban the abortion drug mifepristone was thrown out unanimously by the Supreme Court on technical grounds: The plaintiffs (mainly physicians who don’t prescribe the drug) were not sufficiently affected by mifepristone’s availability to have standing to sue. So the Court never got to the heart of the case: whether the FDA was right to declare the drug safe to use.

Naturally, that couldn’t be the end of the story, so the anti-abortion forces are back with a new suit. This time three states — Kansas, Missouri, and Idaho — are suing the FDA, attempting to reverse the FDA’s approval of mifepristone for pregnancies of 7-10 weeks. And of course the suit has been filed in Amarillo, Texas (which has no connection to either the FDA or the plaintiff states) because that’s where the plaintiffs can be guaranteed to get the most anti-abortion federal judge: Matthew Kacsmaryk, who somehow failed to see the problems with the first suit. (Anti-abortion radicals Sam Alito and Clarence Thomas could see the standing issue, but not Kacsmaryk.)

The current suit has a much better standing argument: Missouri and Idaho have “almost completely banned” abortion, but their residents sometimes get mifepristone from another state. (Abortion is legal up to 22 weeks in Kansas, so I’m not sure why it joined the suit.) They then return home to use the drug, and if there are complications they may wind up in some home-state emergency room, where Medicaid may wind up paying the bill. This costs the states money, so they have suffered an injury the courts can redress.

But in addition to that reasoning, the lawsuit also includes some weird and creepy stuff, if you read deep enough into it.

Defendants’ [i.e., the FDA’s] actions are causing a loss in potential population or potential population increase. Each abortion represents at least one lost potential or actual birth. … Defendants’ efforts enabling the remote dispensing of abortion drugs has caused abortions for women in Plaintiff States and decreased births in Plaintiff States. This is a sovereign injury to the State in itself [due to] “diminishment of political representation” and “loss of federal funds”.

OK, we get it: Missouri and Idaho have reasons to want to increase their populations, and the FDA is interfering with their power to force unwilling women be their brood mares. How dare the Feds violate states rights like that?

And then it gets even a little creepier: A study has shown that birth rates increase the further that a woman has to drive to get an abortion, and that teen-age women (15-19) should be especially affected by this. (I suspect that’s because the younger ones can’t drive and the older ones probably don’t have their own cars.) But the recent bans are not raising the teen birth rate the way they ought to.

When data is examined in a way that reflects sensitivity to expected birth rates, these estimates strikingly “do not show evidence of an increase in births to teenagers aged 15-19,” even in states with long driving distances despite the fact that “women aged 15-19 … are more responsive to driving distances to abortion facilities than older women.” The study thus concludes that “one explanation may be that younger women are more likely to navigate online abortion finders or websites ordering mail-order medication to self-manage abortions. This study thus suggests that remote dispensing of abortion drugs by mail, common carrier, and interactive computer service is depressing expected birth
rates for teenaged mothers in Plaintiff States, even if other overall birth rates may have been lower than otherwise was projected.

So in particular, the FDA is interfering with the states’ right to make teenage girls be their brood mares. I can’t emphasize this enough: One “injury” Missouri and Idaho complain about is that their teen birth rates are too low.

And there’s one set of girls the suit calls special attention to: those in the foster care system, who might be able to sneak out and get mifepristone somehow or have it mailed to them.

As a result of Defendants’ actions, Plaintiffs have suffered injury to their sovereign interests in enacting and enforcing their laws. Defendants … seek to displace and nullify the States’ state-law parental rights of notice and consent for abortions for teen girls in foster care.

Just picture this for a second: A girl for one reason or another has lost her birth parents. Maybe they died, or maybe they misparented in some way that caused the state to take the girl away. Either way, there’s bound to be some trauma involved.

Traumatized girls sometimes take foolish risks, and it’s also possible they might be sexually abused by a foster parent or by some other adult their foster parents didn’t watch closely enough. So unwanted pregnancies happen, and Missouri’s abortion ban has no rape or statutory rape exception. But the girl is so desperate and so determined to end the pregnancy that she might figure out how to do something about it. Being such a loving parent, however, the state wants to thwart that desire, make her carry a pregnancy for nine months, and then give birth to a child she doesn’t want.

I think if I had gone through something like that, I might be a serial killer.

What lovely, God-fearing states you’ve got there, Missouri and Idaho. (And I still can’t figure out what Kansas is doing.)

By weeklysift | Posted in Articles | Also tagged abortion | Comments (13)

The Weekly Sift

Tag Archives: culture wars

Beth Macy Goes Home Again

What to make of Charlie Kirk

Yes, he does think you’re stupid

The Rot Goes Deeper Than Trump

The Court fails transgender youth

How Do Things Change?

Should Democrats Abandon the Trans Community?

Harris lost the war of “ambient information”

MAGA’s Closing Argument: Dad’s Coming Home

Mifepristone, round 2

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