David K. Shipler's Blog, page 8

January 6 and the Hypocrisy of "Democracy"

                                                         By David K. Shipler 

                 Communist East Germany officially entitled itself the German Democratic Republic. The dictatorship of North Vietnam was named the Democratic Republic of Vietnam. North Korea is the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. And the Trump insurrectionists of January 6, 2021 executed their violence against Congress in the guise of protecting democracy.

                Democracy—that alluring concept, that aspiration, that illusion—is still a moral ideal, even among autocrats and would-be oppressors who wear it as an empty label. In the United States, moreover, the Constitution remains gospel, cited even by those who would shred its principles as fiercely as many religious zealots corrupt their holy texts.

                If the United States has a state religion, the late historian Robert Kelley used to say, it is constitutional democracy. That remains so. The very threats to constitutional democracy are being made in its name. The radical right mob that invaded the Capitol, seeking to keep Donald Trump in power, did not reject democracy; they fought for it, or so they believed, having accepted Trump’s lie that he had won the election. “Stop the Steal” became their mantra. They did not reject the Constitution; they claimed to defend it, even while attempting to sweep its provisions aside.

                The Republican Party, now a conduit for radical-right fantasies and dreams, pretends to bolster democracy while becoming the most formidable anti-democratic force in the United States. Instead of sobering the party, the January 6 assault emboldened Republican-controlled state legislatures to enact onerous restrictions on voting and—more menacing—disempower local officials who administer elections honestly. Election officials, facing death threats, leave their jobs, opening the field to the miscreants. “Election integrity,” the Republicans’ rationale, means the opposite. It sets the stage for elections that would be truly stolen.

                When words come to mean the opposite of themselves, when noble ideas are twisted into tools of their own demise, a society dives into a whirlpool. It is sucked down not just by legal mechanisms or institutional processes. Those are mere cover for the deeper currents of distrust and alienation, of humiliation and an angry sense of helplessness. Those, in turn, nourish a vulnerability to demagogues—not only Trump but Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity, and other propagandists—and a susceptibility to outlandish tales of malevolent conspiracy. Even if Trump disappeared tomorrow, those currents would still course through much of America.

                They thrive on a paucity of knowledge, an absence cultivated by inadequate schooling or, worse, the silencing of truth. In Russia today, the crimes of the Gulag prison camps under Stalin are again being whitewashed; in America today, the crimes of slavery and racism are being softened or ignored in Republican-dominated school districts. The civil virtues of constitutional rights are inadequately taught; the mechanisms of democratic government are rarely learned thoroughly.

                Nor does basic scientific understanding prevail. A selfish mutant of constitutional liberty—individualism over all--suffocates the common good. Science is overwhelmed by suspicion and distrust of government, of expertise, of inconvenient advice. Public health professionals devoted to saving lives fear for their own lives and flee from their positions—or are fired by Republican myth-makers.

                In short, by both the reactions to democracy and the reactions to the pandemic, large numbers of Americans—not all, to be sure—have been revealed as poorly educated in history, government, and science. The failure of schooling is a hallmark of a declining civilization.

People under stress have a natural aversion to the mess of democracy and its cacophony of competing opinions. They often search for a single story to animate and explain. That happens in war. It  happens in a pandemic. It has happened amid rapid change, now among working class whites who fear the country’s expanding pluralisms of race, ethnicity, sexual orientation. It has happened since the economic hardship of the 2008 Great Recession, when Americans who thought of themselves as solidly middle class tumbled into debt and joblessness. Ironically, many did not vote against the Republicans who caused their hardships by deregulating, enabling financial institutions to gamble loosely with good people’s money.

Vilification of the “other” is now so pervasive that Americans cannot talk to one another across the lines of disagreement. Not only do the barriers separate the right and the left, conservatives from progressives, but also honeycomb the more intimate political landscapes.

On the right, for condemning Trump and the insurrection, Representative Liz Cheney is denounced and rejected by other “conservatives.” What is it that they wish to conserve? On the left, even outside of Congress, self-righteous dogmatism often stifles communication among folks whose  agreement on broad reforms cannot seem to overcome lesser differences on racial injustice and brutal policing. We seem to need enemies within.

Democracy cannot survive with its citizens hunkered down behind their walls of hurt and outrage. It cannot survive in a media firestorm of lies, demonization, and disconnection from reality. It won’t be rescued by any demise of Donald Trump. If the people want another demagogue with the dexterity to touch their nerves of grievance, they will get one.

The United States has never had a perfectly democratic political system, as we all know. It enhances rural power in the Senate and via the Electoral College, which has the advantage of protecting a minority constituency—but at the price of blocking majority rule. It can be changed only by constitutional amendment, which would require more rural states to agree.

Suffrage has never been universal. The country was founded on an economy relying on bondage. Enslaved Black people had no vote, white indentured servants had no vote, women of all colors had no vote. The Civil War’s corrective, codified in constitutional amendments, was soon eroded by anti-Black laws championed in the South as the virtuous embodiment of state’s rights: poll taxes, absurd “literacy tests,” harassment, and the like. By and large, prisoners still have no vote, and they are disproportionately Black.

 The opponents of true democracy never rest. Both parties gerrymander districts to their advantage. Republicans are especially assiduous in disenfranchising Blacks and other likely Democratic voters.  They curtail mail-in ballots and drop boxes, switch polling places around, discount provisional ballots cast at the wrong place, purge voter rolls, bar ex-felons from voting, spread disinformation that unpaid fines or child support will be collected at the polls, and on and on. Many of their anti-democratic actions have been made possible by the Republican-dominated Supreme Court’s emasculation of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, which used to require Justice Department pre-clearance of changes in states in counties with a record of racial discrimination.

The beautiful idea of one citizen one vote, culminating in that election-day moment of complete equality, has not been a feature of American democracy. Let’s be honest. It is a wish, a dream, a myth, a goal. A worthy goal, but not one likely to be achieved by calling political violence and hatred “democracy.” Cheapening the vocabulary used to communicate impairs communication.   

The United States has too many citizens who do not care enough about democracy in its truest form, do not accept its creative disorder, or do not want it if it means that they cannot always win. They are being armed from an arsenal of resentments. January 6, 2021 was just the beginning.    

Putin, Emotional Chess Master

 By David K. Shipler 

                You can almost picture Vladimir Putin, perpetual president of Russia, hunched over a chess board the shape of Europe, divining strategies many steps ahead of his fractious, ambivalent opponents. A gas pipeline here, troops and tanks there, propaganda everywhere to set the stage for the twenty-first century’s Great Russian Expansion.

He is a skillful player. He reads the other side, detects its weakness, studies its patterns of resolve and hesitation. He appears coldly rational. Yet some who watch him closely see something beyond careful calculation. That is especially so when the issue is Ukraine, now in his military’s crosshairs.

“Putin’s attachment to Ukraine often takes on emotional, spiritual, and metaphysical overtones.” write Eugene Rumer and Andrew S. Weiss at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Alongside his tangible geopolitical concerns, they believe, he is driven by the personal compulsions of historical fabulation and ethereal bonds to a land that he denies constitutes a country. Its capital, Kyiv, was the center of the Slavic state Rus a millennium ago. Its size places it second only to Russia in Europe. Its historic kinship with Russia is exaggerated by the Russian leader to justify making it the target of a sacred claim.

This year is the thirtieth anniversary of the collapse and breakup of the Soviet Union into fifteen countries along the lines of its fifteen republics, including Ukraine. Imagine the trauma—as if the United States fragmented into fifty independent nations, with a searing loss of dignity and global standing. Putin calledthe Soviet breakup “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century.” Rumer and Weiss see him impelled to retake the prize of Ukraine to burnish his legacy.

 â€œNo part of the Russian and Soviet empires has played a bigger and more important role in Russian strategy toward Europe than the crown jewel, Ukraine,” they note in their essay. “The country is essential to Russian security for many reasons: its size and population; its position between Russia and other major European powers; its role as the centerpiece of the imperial Russian and Soviet economies; and its deep cultural, religious, and linguistic ties to Russia, particularly Kyiv’s history as the cradle of Russian statehood.”

 Washington policymakers gave no hint of understanding any of that when they moved to fill the power vacuum left by the Soviet collapse. Unlike Putin, they did not read the other side. As the Moscow-led Warsaw Pact disintegrated, its East European members eagerly courted membership in the opposing military alliance—the American-led North Atlantic Treaty Organization. And NATO, pledged to defend any member subjected to attack, gladly picked them up one by one, trophies of the West’s supposed victory in the Cold War.

Every one of the Soviet “satellites” joined the Atlantic alliance, plus Albania; the separate countries of the former Yugoslavia; and three former Soviet republics: Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. Two other former Soviet republics were given a promise of eventual membership that was vague—but threatening, in Russia’s view. They were Georgia and Ukraine. So, a shrunken Russia found itself confronted by an adverse military alignment right on its borders.

Americans are relatively ahistorical compared with other nationalities. Despite current jockeying over how American history is taught in schools, the country is still young enough to be mostly tone-deaf to echoes from the past that resonate elsewhere. But tuning in is required to understand Russia and, therefore, Putin.

History has shaped Moscow’s fixation on a territorial obsession that might seem anachronistic in an age of intercontinental ballistic missiles. The fear of encirclement and invasion has deep roots, and the virtue of geography, of “strategic depth,” has animated policy since Napoleon’s failed invasion in the nineteenth century and Hitler’s in the twentieth. Hence, the buffer against NATO that the Soviet Union treasured in its dominance over Poland, Hungary, East Germany, Romania, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia.

Since NATO’s expansion eliminated that strategic depth along much of Russia’s western border Moscow’s alarm was hardly astonishing.

Indeed, in 2008, when President George W. Bush pressed to bring Ukraine and Georgia into NATO, the proposal was blocked by wiser allies and the U.S. intelligence community, according to Fiona Hill, a former American intelligence officer. The compromise: promise Ukraine and Georgia eventual NATO membership but not immediately. Putin “has been trying to shut that door ever since,” Hill toldThe New York Times.

Doing so must look increasingly urgent to the Kremlin. Ukraine is not a member, but it is considered a partner, now receiving the fourth-largest American military aid package in the world, after Israel, Egypt, and Jordan. Nevertheless, arming Ukraine is a paradox, for it is not enough to deter, only to inflame.

So Putin plays as if he does not anticipate a war with the West, even if he invades with the tens of thousands of troops he has amassed on Ukraine’s border. He is surely correct. He might also reasonably wonder whether NATO would even go to war to protect one of its small members, such as Estonia. That lack of credibility has been one price of the NATO expansion.

How Putin regards President Biden’s threat of economic sanctions is a question. Russia weathered earlier sanctions for seizing the Crimean peninsula from Ukraine in 2014 and for sending irregulars to take eastern parts of the country. Perhaps mistakenly, Putin also tolerated the backlash from inside Ukraine as the national sentiment swerved sharply toward the West. The Russian leader knows better how to bludgeon than to woo.

His game might reach beyond Ukrainian territory. Clearly, he seeks to demonstrate that Russia is to be taken seriously, not marginalized on the world stage. He might want to exacerbate Biden’s appearance of weakness—weak in the chaotic U.S. exit from Afghanistan, weak in his own Democratic Party, weak in his inability to guide his polarized country toward domestic policies concerning health, climate, and social welfare.

As Putin thinks beyond his next move, he is turning a defensive posture into an offense. He brandishes his military threat to cow Washington into relinquishing any design on Ukraine as a NATO asset. As he guesses at his opponent’s response, he appears willing to lose a few pawns or a bishop and rook for the ultimate gain.

Chess is an imperfect metaphor, because emotion doesn’t usually figure into the game. Pride, dignity, humiliation, and the wages of history ought not influence the hand that moves the pieces. Hubris or anxiety can lead to miscalculation.

Yet the likely outcome can be found in the language. The Russian word for chess is shachmaty, derived from the Persian shah (king) and mat (helpless). In English, we say “checkmate.” Putin appears positioned to inflict helplessness. 

                Previously published in the Washington Monthly

The Secret Taiwan-Texas Deal

 

By David K. Shipler 

                Thanks to Russian hackers, we have a transcript of a startling portion of President Joe Biden’s video conversation last night with Chinese President Xi Jinping:

                Xi: Joe, as you know, I was honored recently to be elevated in history to the esteemed stature of our Communist Party’s two great leaders, Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping. This act signifies one of our most envied powers: to rewrite history. Leaders all over the world wish they could do it.

                Biden: Yes, I noticed, but we Americans don’t envy that at all. We like our history plain and truthful.

                Xi: Oh, do you? I have been admiring the skill of your Republicans in rewriting your history of racial oppression to indoctrinate children in the phony purity of your past. And this, just at the time when you accuse us of oppressing some of our people! That’s called hypocrisy, Joe.

                Biden: Look, man, that’s a long discussion that has nothing to do with our agenda. Let’s get down to the issues. Taiwan is next on the list.

                Xi: Exactly. Taiwan is my subject here. I have a bold idea, which I hope you’ll accept. Taiwan is a thorn in my side—not really part of my empire, not really independent, constantly making breakaway noises, and full of so-called democrats who love chaotic debate and discord. And who, by the way, will never rewrite history properly.

                Biden: So why don’t you just let Taiwan be Taiwan?

                Xi: Even better, let me give Taiwan to you.

                Biden: Huh?

                Xi: Give it away. Then I won’t have to worry over it all the time. It’s really a pain. But I want something in exchange.

                Biden: This is ridiculous.

Xi: You won’t think it’s ridiculous when you hear my proposal. You give me Texas.

Biden: [A funny noise that sounds like a snort, then a burble, then a chortle.] Wow, man, what an idea! We get Taiwan’s economy and great restaurants, and you get—hey, Texas is a bit recalcitrant. You sure you want it?

Xi: We have been studying Texas. The governor there claims to love individual liberty, but our autocracy experts can sniff out wannabe authoritarians. Greg Abbot would be our collaborator as much as Carrie Lam. And the rest of the Republicans, who still love incipient dictators like Trump, who just need to be flattered to become our lapdogs. And who don’t like free elections. And who don’t like public health—think Wuhan, Joe. They’ll fit right in.

Biden: Well, I don’t know about that. They’re pretty difficult people.

Xi: We have ways of taking care of difficult people.

Biden: But they have lots of guns.

Xi: Guns we can turn to our own use. All those swaggering cowboys looking for enemies, perfect matches with our Guoanbu agents. They’ll love each other. Brotherly love, Joe, a real peacemaking mission.

Biden: Hmmm. You know about our independent judiciary, right? Not exactly your style.

Xi: [Huge guffaw.] Independent? Come on, Joe, you don’t have to do propaganda with me. When was the last time you saw a Republican judge rule for the little guy? No, no danger there. I like their impulse to defer to the established authority. And we will be the established authority!

Biden: What about the judges who go against you?

Xi: Ask me that in a few months, and I’ll ask you back: What judges? Where are they?

Biden: I’ll admit, it’s an appealing idea. No more Greg Abbot, no more Ted Cruz, thirty-eight fewer electoral votes. And we get some great Chinese restaurants. But you get all that oil. What do we do for oil?

Xi: Switch to solar and wind, Joe! It’s what you’ve been campaigning for. We’ll just force you to make it happen!

Biden: Yeah, sounds good. But what about the border between Texas and the US? And how do I sell this to the American people?

Xi: Easy, Joe. You tell them you’ll build a wall around Texas, and that China will pay for it. 

  This is satire. It’s all made up, a disclosure made necessary by the absurdity of current reality, which prevents lots of people from telling the difference between truth and fiction.

Biden���s Housing Plan as a Key to Children���s Futures

 

By David K. Shipler 

                Let���s assume that Senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema are decent people, not callous to children in poverty. That would mean that they���re merely clueless. They are not connecting the dots. As they insist on slashing President Biden���s proposed $322 billion in housing subsidies, they cannot possibly understand how much lifelong damage that will do to kids.

                 Biden and the Democratic leaders are trying to break a key link in the chain reaction of poverty. Housing is that link. Without government aid, high rents leave less money for food, leading to malnutrition, parental stress, and disrupted living, all of which can impair brain development in young children. The scientific and social research has been clear on this for decades. Yet the connections are rarely recognized by legislators and officials���and journalists as well���who persistently treat each problem and government program as separate and distinct, with little regard for the web of interactions among the hardships that struggling families face.

                In many parts of the country, the private housing market is brutal for low-wage workers. Nationwide, households in the bottom 20 percent spenda median 56 percent of their income on rent.  The rest of their monthly funds are committed to paying for electricity, water, phone, heat, car loans, and the like. What they can shrink is the part of their budget for food. And without proper nutrition during critical periods of early life, children suffer cognitive impairment that is not undone even if food security is later restored. [See A Hungry Child���s First Thousand Days in Washington Monthly.]

                Stress is also a factor in brain development, researchers have found. Even if a family doesn���t become homeless but lives with constant tension over paying the rent and other bills, the anxiety can be absorbed by children, both in utero and after birth. Imagine���if you can���the anxiety of parents who have too little food for their children, for feeding offspring is a most elemental instinct and duty.

Furthermore, children���s biological and mental health is damaged when families have to move repeatedly or reside in poor housing with lead in the water from old pipes, roaches and mold that trigger asthma attacks, and overcrowding that causes household friction.

                The study of stress has been a significant addition to the understanding of the environmental impacts on the brain, to the point where the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) devotes an entire websiteto updating research on risks and prevention. In its list of what scientists in a seminal study call Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs), the CDC includes housing issues along with more obvious traumas such as suffering neglect and witnessing violence or suicide.

                 Actual brain chemistry and architecture can be affected by ���families with caregivers experiencing high levels of parenting stress or economic stress,��� the CDC reports, ���communities with unstable housing and where residents move frequently,��� or ���where families experience food insecurity.��� On the contrary, protective factors include ���communities with access to safe, stable housing.���

It would be nice if Manchin and Sinema would read and respect their own country���s expertise. Sinema labels herself a former social worker. It���s hard to imagine any social worker with proper training and credentials failing to grasp these pernicious risks to children���s futures.

                Specialists identify three types of stress: positive, tolerable, and toxic. The response to each of these determines its longterm effects. A certain amount of transitory stress is necessary to healthy development, according to Harvard���s Center on the Developing Child. ���Some situations that might trigger a positive stress response are the first day with a new caregiver or receiving an injected immunization.���

                Tolerable stress���a death in the family or a natural disaster���can elevate alert levels for a longer period, but ���if the activation is time-limited and buffered by relationships with adults who help the child adapt, the brain and other organs recover from what might otherwise be damaging effects.���

Toxic stress, which can include prolonged economic hardship, occurs when the body���s stress response is activated for an extensive period without adequate adult support. That ���can disrupt the development of brain architecture and other organ systems, and increase the risk for stress-related disease and cognitive impairment, well into the adult years,��� the Harvard center notes. Diabetes, heart disease, depression, substance abuse, and developmental delays may result.

                The biological chemistry is no mystery. ���When a child experiences toxic stress,��� according to pediatrician Kari Phang, ���the Hypothalamic Pituitary and Adrenal (HPA) hormone axis is over-activated. This results in blood levels of the stress hormone cortisol being higher which can result in long term changes in inflammation and immunity. Studies have shown associations between toxic stress and changes in brain structure. The consequences of this can include more anxiety as well as impaired memory and mood control. Toxic stress responses can also include changes in gene expression, meaning which genes in your DNA are turned on or off.���

                Since housing is a major factor in stress-producing hardships, increasing subsidies is an important part of the Biden administration���s proposal in its $3.5-trillion social spending bill���which won���t be enacted thanks to Manchin and Sinema and the Senate Republicans. Of the $322 billion in proposed housing subsidies, $200 billion would go for the federal program of vouchers that about two million poor families now use to pay part of their rent. It is a sad but undeniable fact that America���s vaunted free-market economy alone does not enable low-wage workers enough income to live healthy lives, emotionally or physically.

                Glenn Thrush reports in The New York Times that the funds would add 750,000 families to the program, going part way to alleviating a waiting list so enormous that some local authorities have stopped taking new applicants. You have to wait to get on the waiting list. But even that additional aid would barely make a dent, since limited funding leaves an estimated 16 million eligible households unable to get rental assistance, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

                Manchin, Sinema, and their short-sighted colleagues are wielding their devastating axes against the powerless people who depend on government lifelines. As Thrush points out, housing subsidies are vulnerable to cuts because they enjoy less popular support than programs benefitting the middle-class as well as the poor: pre-school education, health care, community college.

                This blindness to the harm inflicted on children displays the country���s poverty���its poverty of understanding.

            Previously published in the Washington Monthly.

Biden’s Housing Plan as a Key to Children’s Futures

 

By David K. Shipler 

                Let’s assume that Senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema are decent people, not callous to children in poverty. That would mean that they’re merely clueless. They are not connecting the dots. As they insist on slashing President Biden’s proposed $322 billion in housing subsidies, they cannot possibly understand how much lifelong damage that will do to kids.

                 Biden and the Democratic leaders are trying to break a key link in the chain reaction of poverty. Housing is that link. Without government aid, high rents leave less money for food, leading to malnutrition, parental stress, and disrupted living, all of which can impair brain development in young children. The scientific and social research has been clear on this for decades. Yet the connections are rarely recognized by legislators and officials—and journalists as well—who persistently treat each problem and government program as separate and distinct, with little regard for the web of interactions among the hardships that struggling families face.

                In many parts of the country, the private housing market is brutal for low-wage workers. Nationwide, households in the bottom 20 percent spenda median 56 percent of their income on rent.  The rest of their monthly funds are committed to paying for electricity, water, phone, heat, car loans, and the like. What they can shrink is the part of their budget for food. And without proper nutrition during critical periods of early life, children suffer cognitive impairment that is not undone even if food security is later restored. [See A Hungry Child’s First Thousand Days in Washington Monthly.]

                Stress is also a factor in brain development, researchers have found. Even if a family doesn’t become homeless but lives with constant tension over paying the rent and other bills, the anxiety can be absorbed by children, both in utero and after birth. Imagine—if you can—the anxiety of parents who have too little food for their children, for feeding offspring is a most elemental instinct and duty.

Furthermore, children’s biological and mental health is damaged when families have to move repeatedly or reside in poor housing with lead in the water from old pipes, roaches and mold that trigger asthma attacks, and overcrowding that causes household friction.

                The study of stress has been a significant addition to the understanding of the environmental impacts on the brain, to the point where the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) devotes an entire websiteto updating research on risks and prevention. In its list of what scientists in a seminal study call Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs), the CDC includes housing issues along with more obvious traumas such as suffering neglect and witnessing violence or suicide.

                 Actual brain chemistry and architecture can be affected by “families with caregivers experiencing high levels of parenting stress or economic stress,” the CDC reports, “communities with unstable housing and where residents move frequently,” or “where families experience food insecurity.” On the contrary, protective factors include “communities with access to safe, stable housing.”

It would be nice if Manchin and Sinema would read and respect their own country’s expertise. Sinema labels herself a former social worker. It’s hard to imagine any social worker with proper training and credentials failing to grasp these pernicious risks to children’s futures.

                Specialists identify three types of stress: positive, tolerable, and toxic. The response to each of these determines its longterm effects. A certain amount of transitory stress is necessary to healthy development, according to Harvard’s Center on the Developing Child. “Some situations that might trigger a positive stress response are the first day with a new caregiver or receiving an injected immunization.”

                Tolerable stress—a death in the family or a natural disaster—can elevate alert levels for a longer period, but “if the activation is time-limited and buffered by relationships with adults who help the child adapt, the brain and other organs recover from what might otherwise be damaging effects.”

Toxic stress, which can include prolonged economic hardship, occurs when the body’s stress response is activated for an extensive period without adequate adult support. That “can disrupt the development of brain architecture and other organ systems, and increase the risk for stress-related disease and cognitive impairment, well into the adult years,” the Harvard center notes. Diabetes, heart disease, depression, substance abuse, and developmental delays may result.

                The biological chemistry is no mystery. “When a child experiences toxic stress,” according to pediatrician Kari Phang, “the Hypothalamic Pituitary and Adrenal (HPA) hormone axis is over-activated. This results in blood levels of the stress hormone cortisol being higher which can result in long term changes in inflammation and immunity. Studies have shown associations between toxic stress and changes in brain structure. The consequences of this can include more anxiety as well as impaired memory and mood control. Toxic stress responses can also include changes in gene expression, meaning which genes in your DNA are turned on or off.”

                Since housing is a major factor in stress-producing hardships, increasing subsidies is an important part of the Biden administration’s proposal in its $3.5-trillion social spending bill—which won’t be enacted thanks to Manchin and Sinema and the Senate Republicans. Of the $322 billion in proposed housing subsidies, $200 billion would go for the federal program of vouchers that about two million poor families now use to pay part of their rent. It is a sad but undeniable fact that America’s vaunted free-market economy alone does not enable low-wage workers enough income to live healthy lives, emotionally or physically.

                Glenn Thrush reports in The New York Times that the funds would add 750,000 families to the program, going part way to alleviating a waiting list so enormous that some local authorities have stopped taking new applicants. You have to wait to get on the waiting list. But even that additional aid would barely make a dent, since limited funding leaves an estimated 16 million eligible households unable to get rental assistance, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

                Manchin, Sinema, and their short-sighted colleagues are wielding their devastating axes against the powerless people who depend on government lifelines. As Thrush points out, housing subsidies are vulnerable to cuts because they enjoy less popular support than programs benefitting the middle-class as well as the poor: pre-school education, health care, community college.

                This blindness to the harm inflicted on children displays the country’s poverty—its poverty of understanding.

            Previously published in the Washington Monthly.

America's Callous Border

 

By David K. Shipler 

                Several years ago, a gray-haired passport control official at Heathrow Airport in London, noting “writer” under “occupation” on my landing card, asked me what I wrote. I was finishing a book on civil liberties, I told him, with a chapter on immigration. That caught his interest. He leaned forward, glanced around, lowered his voice and said, “I loathe borders.”

    Funny line of work you’re in, I said. We shared a chuckle, he stamped my passport, and I crossed the border that he loathed.

                We have nation states, and so we have borders. Dictatorships need them to keep people in, lest their countries be drained of the talented and the aspiring. Democracies need them to keep people out—often those with talent and aspiration who are fleeing to safety and opportunity. So far, the United States is lucky enough to be the latter. So far.

                When desperate fathers and mothers are drawn with admiring naïveté to the beacon of America, when they carry their children through months of torment by mountain jungles and predatory gangs, when their courage and towering fortitude set them apart from the masses, shouldn’t they be embraced when they reach the final border of a nation of fellow immigrants that touts its compassion and humanity?

                Cut through the crazy tangle of immigration laws, regulations, and inconsistent enforcement to the essential ethic, and the answer is an obvious yes. But the obvious is not obvious in the White House or in the Department of Homeland Security or in the ranks of the beleaguered Border Patrol, whose horsemen scramble, as if herding cattle, to intercept frantic Haitians wading from the Rio Grande onto the banks of freedom and promise.

                Instead, a new torment is found: Haitians with enough grit to leave their country a decade or so ago and build lives on the margins in Brazil, Chile, and elsewhere are taken from their first steps onto U.S. soil and summarily—summarily, without due process—deported. And where to? To Haiti, a failed state where many have long since lost family or work or even places of shelter. To Haiti, which has collapsed into such violence and disarray that the State Department warns Americans on its website: “Do not travel to Haiti due to kidnapping, crime, civil unrest, and COVID-19.” 

                What is wrong with the air in the White House? Is there not enough oxygen? What accounts for the impaired thinking that seems to transcend administrations, from Republican to Democratic. Where is the regard for human dignity? Why is it so often absent in the calculations that create policy?
                Donald Trump wore callousness on his sleeve and was proud of it. His base hooted its applause at his vilification of Mexican immigrants as rapists and drug dealers. By contrast, Joe Biden wears a badge of empathy. His mantra is compassion. “Horrible” and “outrageous” were the words he foundto describe the photographed attacks on Haitians from horseback. He halted the use of horses and vowed that agents responsible “will pay.” He also said, “It’s simply not who we are.”

                But it is who we are. The images have been compared to old photos of white overseers on horseback commanding enslaved Blacks in the fields. The Border Patrol in cowboy hats have been compared to Texas Rangers “who were celebrated for their excellent ‘tracking skills’ that were put to use to hunt and capture enslaved people,” said historian Monica Martinez of the University of Texas.

                These are compelling analogies with painful resonance. They are also flawed as parallels, for the Black migrants at the border are not slaves. They are clamoring to be here, crossing illegally, seeing the border as a threshold. They were not brought here in chains against their will. Some are being removed in chains against their will.

Nevertheless, in a sense they are enslaved by their blackness. If white Canadians tried this up north, does anybody truly believe that they would be treated as the Black Haitians are? Animating America’s conscience should not require reaching back to the sin of slavery. The present ought to be enough.

Our borders always put our split personality on display: We are cruel and welcoming, hateful and helpful, defined by doors closed at times to entire ethnic groups and then opened to invigorate the nation with willing hands and vital contributions.

                In fact, if the country is not sufficiently moved by simple morality, then it might consider self-interest. The U.S. population growth rate has been falling steadily since 2008, dropping to a mere 0.58 percent from 2020 to 2021. Many regions lack skilled workers, as homeowners and small business owners and even hospitals can testify from trying to hire carpenters, plumbers, electricians, welders, mechanics, and nurses. We should have winced when one Haitian deportee was quoted as describing himself as a welder and carpenter.

                 Using abuse to manipulate determined people did not work under Trump—a lesson that Biden and his advisers might have learned. Trump’s administration separated children from their parents at the border, his aides reasoning that families heading north would get the message and—what?--abandon their fortitude and survival instincts, turn around, and head back to life-threatening misery?

                So, too Biden officials are reportedly figuring that tossing Haitian expatriates into Haiti’s maelstrom will dissuade others from coming. In other words, don’t be humane, and folks will give up. But they won’t give up. They will still roll the dice, because there’s always a chance, especially since some are being allowed to stay, at least for a while, pending proper examination of their asylum claims as the law requires. When your ship has sunk, you don’t stop clinging to a piece of flotsam just because some shipmates have slipped off into the sea.

                What the Biden White House needs is somebody in an influential position who has made this journey, who has shepherded family and children through jungles and ganglands to reach this supposedly promised land. That official might bring to the Oval Office a glimmer of understanding and respect for the force of personality and perseverance that drive a person toward our callous border.  

California's Next Step (I'm Kidding)

 

By David K. Shipler 

                Now that Californians have crushed Republicans’ effort to recall Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom (with 63.9 percent of the votes at last count), maybe the left ought to try what the right has done in Texas: Let anyone sue anyone who helps anyone do something you don’t like. In the case of Texas, it’s getting an abortion.

Imagine if liberal California—or New York, or the District of Columbia, for example—did the same on issues dear to the hearts of “progressives.” The Texas law recently enacted by radical Republicans allows anyone in the entire country to bring a civil suit against anyone in the state who helps a woman exercise her constitutional right to abortion after a fetal heartbeat is detected. Any bounty hunter who wins in court gets $10,000 plus legal fees from the suit’s target, whether doctor, nurse, receptionist, or possibly the Uber driver who takes the woman to the clinic.

The tactic is designed to remove the state as the enforcer and thereby befuddle the courts, which otherwise might enjoin government from putting the law into effect. That gave five anti-abortion Supreme Court justices just enough leeway to refuse to block the Texas law, even temporarily. So, let’s consider what the left might do in return.

First, California could pass a law allowing anyone who refused to be vaccinated against Covid to be sued by anyone anywhere in the country. Going unvaccinated is an obvious public health threat, and while legitimate medical and perhaps religious exceptions could be made, those refusing the shots incubate evolving variants and endanger children and the immunocompromised. Therefore, under the Texas formula, everyone has what judges call “standing” to sue.

Then, the hunt would be on. Waves of vaccine vigilantes could collect names. They could troll the internet for anti-vax postings, scour the streets of Orange County for signs of resistance, knock on doors to inquire with purported innocence. They could launch minor careers chasing down violators for $10,000 apiece.

Anti-vaxers might wriggle out of liability by rushing to get the shots, and maybe the law should let them off the hook if they rectify their behavior. Or, maybe not. An abortion cannot be reversed, obviously, and an offense against the public good is an offense at the time it’s committed, no matter the subsequent regrets.

Now, take gun possession. If California law permitted anyone in the country to sue anyone in California who had a gun, what a bounty that would bring. There are few threats to public health and common welfare more severe than guns, and all Americans have a standing interest in curtailing weapons proliferation. Again, a few exemptions might be in order: for those whose work poses a safety risk, for example, or hunters properly trained and licensed and limited to one non-automatic firearm apiece. But the masses of citizens do not need guns, and they ought to face that $10,000 hazard.

Conservatives will cry, “Second Amendment!” Yes, as interpreted oddly by a bare majority in a conservative court with convoluted grammatical sophistry that imagined an individual right in an amendment that mentions only “a well regulated militia.” But constitutional rights seem to come and go with the shifts in the political winds. There is also a constitutional right to abortion, established by the Supreme Court in Roe v. Wade, and that precious right is evidently about to go.

Although all the Republican-appointed justices pledged under oath at their confirmation hearings to respect judicial precedent, they now do otherwise. (The law has a word for that: perjury.)

Let’s pretend that the justices of the Supreme Court are principled, consistent, and transcend the country’s divisions rather than reflect them. Let’s see California or New York or D.C. or another courageous jurisdiction throw the right-wing’s tactics back at them. Would the Supreme Court conservatives block such laws of the liberals or let them take effect?

And if they were to take effect, as the Texas abortion law has been allowed to do, then what would we have? We would have vigilante, bounty-hunting civil suits against all manner of controversial policies. We would have an eroded rule of law, unpredictable enforcement by lynch mob, a debilitated judicial system, and a chaotic legal landscape.

That is why the title of this essay says, “I’m Kidding.” I do not want the left to use the same tactics as the right. I want the left to uphold the due processes of the judicial mechanism, even if Republican legislators and Republican judges do not. I do not trust zealots at either end of the political spectrum, and while the greatest danger to the democratic system in the United States is now posed by the radical right, autocratic intolerance can be found on the radical left as well. Republicans who invent ways to impede voting, undermine elections, evade judicial scrutiny, and undermine due process should be careful what they wish for. Two sides can play that game.

And the justices of the Supreme Court ought to be mindful that as they facilitate radical agendas, they risk their own authority. They have no battalions. They rely on the respect for their power inherent in the institutions and officials and citizens of the nation. Once their rulings become so ignoble as to be ignored, disobedience will grow and grow until it becomes a habit. Then we lose our Constitution, our law, and our reasonable expectation of order.

The Scars of 9/11

 

By David K. Shipler 

                About a dozen years after September 11, 2001, I asked a class of college undergraduates what they remembered about the attacks. They had been kids, and those who answered remembered most vividly their parents’ reactions, not their own. It was a fascinating illustration of one dynamic of trauma: the response of those around you figures into how you carry the injury forward. So it has been with the country’s behavior in the last twenty years.

                Chaya Roth, a Holocaust survivor whose mother and sister were repeatedly sheltered and saved by non-Jews as they fled across Europe, eventually recognized the healing effect of the courageous generosity—a post-traumatic syndrome of another kind. “That is why I never lost faith or hope in people,” she told me. “If one goes through difficult times, but comes out of these alive, it is because in the last analysis there was someone who provided help.”

                What has happened among Americans? Yes, at first we rallied in an uplifting sense of kinship. Three days after 9/11, as I drove to Kent State in Ohio for a colloquium on race, every American flag hanging from an overpass brought a rush of mournful pride, almost tears. At the university, during a small reception, a professor who was surely a star in her church choir suddenly began singing “America the Beautiful.” Some wept openly, others wept within, both in sorrow and in celebration of the bonds of harmony.

 And then? The administration of President George W. Bush, combined with local police departments across the country, proceeded to inflict damage on civil liberties that no subsequent president or Congress has been brave enough to repair. The FBI was instructed to investigate every citizen’s tip, no matter how ludicrous or obviously based on personal vendetta. One FBI agent told me that some of his colleagues shared his distaste for the strategy, worrying that innocents would be targeted.

As indeed they were. Muslims were surveilled, hounded, and jailed on the slimmest of pretexts, and held for months during slow-paced background checks that uncovered no terrorists but might naturally have sown the seeds of antipathy toward the United States. The consequences for those illegally in the country were so severe that abused wives feared calling the police, and some undocumented Pakistani residents fled from the US to Canada seeking asylum. When Canadian authorities couldn’t process them fast enough, they crammed into churches and homes in northern Vermont or took refuge in their own vehicles in the deep of winter.

The New York City Police Department began a years-long campaign of infiltration and surveillance of Muslim communities and mosques. The Denver Police Department expanded its practice of infiltrating and monitoring innocuous peace groups. Local authorities across the country, including the NYPD, as The New York Times recently reported, used the confluence of security fears and heightened technology to spread surveillance well beyond counter-terrorism and into investigations of common crime—in blatant violation of Americans’ Fourth Amendment right “to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures.”

Congress hastily passed the USA Patriot Act, which shot holes through statutory protections that had been enacted in the 1970s after revelations that the FBI, the IRS, the CIA, and other agencies had illegally spied and played dirty tricks on civil rights leaders, Black Panther members, antiwar activists, and others. The National Security Agency under Bush evaded even the loosest checks by avoiding the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to intercept Americans’ communications without warrants. And years after the acute phase of the terrorist threat had passed, Edward Snowden, an NSA employee, made public documentation showing the NSA vacuuming up so-called “meta-data”—phone numbers that connected with one another, including the dates and lengths of phone calls—to map Americans’ contacts.

Some of those abuses have been curtailed—Congress modified the meta-data collection two years after Snowden’s revelations. But the information on Americans’ contacts internationally can still be stored, and many other powers to conduct surveillance remain. One of Barack Obama’s most serious faults as president was his failure to reform the post-9/11 surveillance state.

He did issue an executive order barring torture, which appears to have stopped it. But he did not support the prosecution of CIA agents and contractors who, under Bush, had tortured terrorism suspects in “black sites” around the world. (One of Obama’s aides told a reporter that he did not want prosecutions that would risk provoking a rogue CIA!) 

Obama also tried to close the US military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where hundreds were incarcerated after being swept up in Afghanistan and elsewhere. They had been summarily designated “enemy combatants” by Bush officials who created novel military commissions to conduct trials. But Congressional Republicans and some Democrats blocked the prisoners’ transfer to civilian jurisdiction on the mainland, arguing that they might escape, that courthouses might become terrorist targets, that the military commissions would deliver more punishing justice. From politicians who beat their chests in macho posturing, it was a remarkable display of fear and cowardice.

Furthermore, from self-styled patriots, it was a surprising gesture of shame in the federal courts, the crown jewel in the American system of jurisprudence. Those civilian courts by now, twenty years later, would surely have tried and sentenced to death the accused 9/11 mastermind, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, and other plotters. Instead, they languish in Guantanamo at enormous taxpayer expense, their cases are entangled in endless litigation over the military commissions’ unjust procedures.

In short, the rule of law, so central to the American ideal, was stripped away by “conservatives” who have yet to see clearly what is worth conserving in their country. Under Bush, two Americans and one legal resident were even seized by the military as enemy combatants, a status that did not stand in the end. But if it had, they would have been subject to indefinite imprisonment without trial.

Outside of government, the 9/11 attacks also gave rise to a cottage industry of extremist bigots who conducted sophisticated on-line smear campaigns against Islam and all adherents, calling every mosque or Islamic center in the US a front for the Muslim Brotherhood and the terrorist organization Hamas. This might have looked like a fringe movement, but under Donald Trump, some of its supporters moved into positions of power. Acting on the currents of xenophobia running through parts of his base, Trump fueled the hatred and barred entry to the US from a group of Muslim countries, without specifying any particular individuals as posing threats.

The wars triggered by the 9/11 attacks—in Afghanistan and Iraq—were bungled, prolonged, and conducted without what wars require: commitment and sacrifice by the broad American public. Without a war tax, without a military draft, the burdens were borne by a tiny fraction of Americans and their families. The dead, both here and there, leave permanent scars. The survivors’ physical and mental injuries now enter a legacy of harm.

In the ugly exit from Kabul, too, Americans have left behind their reputation, their honor, and their compassion. Even President Joe Biden, who tries to wear compassion on his sleeve, expressed practically none for the terrified Afghans who clamored to leave at the end.

It is as if 9/11 made us stupid, impractical, and amoral. Osama bin Laden could not possibly have imagined such a success when he arranged for airliners to strike the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and presumably the Capitol. The last was foiled by passengers who took over the cockpit and crashed the plane in Pennsylvania.

The Capitol was saved. Its august steps then became the stage for virtually the entire Congress, Republicans and Democrats, to stand and sing “God Bless America”—together. As the PBS Frontline documentary this week portrayed, however, that scene is now juxtaposed with another: Congress and the Capitol in defiant harmony in 2001, against Congress and the Capitol under attack in 2021—on January 6, from within America, which God apparently has yet to bless.

Years hence, Americans too young to have been shaken by the attacks of 9/11 will know only the lasting reactions of their leaders and fellow citizens. They will not be comforted.

The American Dream of Absolutism

 

By David K. Shipler 

                A crucial feature of the Soviet Union’s dictatorship was its enforcement by peers. Your co-workers, your schoolmates, the fellow members of your local Communist Party committee or Komsomol (Communist youth organization) were primed to call you to account if you deviated from the norm. If you went to church regularly, your Komsomol committee might hold a meeting to denounce you. If you went farther and made “anti-Soviet” statements—criticizing government policy or advocating democratic reforms—your peers in Komsomol might be assembled for a vote to expel you, which would handicap your future job prospects. In the post-Stalin era, imprisonment was usually reserved for the most stubbornly outspoken; less dramatic disobedience could be curtailed by lesser means.

 It was not an airtight system. It aspired to totalitarianism but fell short. It contained eddies of quiet noncompliance, which allowed small pools of independent thinking. But orthodoxy had power, wielded both vertically from the top down, and also horizontally in a milieu of conformity. As a result, most Soviet citizens acquiesced politically and never bumped up against the hard limits of dissent. Newspaper editors, for example, rarely had to be confronted by the censors; writers and their bosses internalized the restrictions, even endorsed them, and so knew the comfortable scope of the permissible.

                That is approximately what the Republican Party appears to strive for in 2021, not only in the party organization itself but in the broader society. It is a new American Dream, aspiring to a comprehensive, unitary way of thinking about history, culture, law, politics, science, religion, and race. The odd thing is that it is pursued in the guise of individualism, touting the preeminence of personal free choice, while in fact it is driven by just the opposite—the thrust of group-think.

                This horizontal enforcement is a hallmark of the emerging Republican strategy. A catechism of professed beliefs is monitored for irreverence, and the punishment is akin to excommunication. Absolutism is required: adore Donald Trump, reject the 2020 election as stolen, dismiss the January 6 insurrection as insignificant, refuse to investigate it.

Peer policing has also been introduced outside the Republican Party ranks: The majority-Republican legislature in Texas recently empowered private citizens anywhere to sue abortion providers in the state over real or imagined violations of restrictive anti-abortion laws. The tactic is a ploy to make the laws harder to block in the courts, where government is typically the target of lawsuits by pro-choice advocates. Here, government would not be the enforcer; any citizen might be. But the tactic has large implications, for any citizen who wins a suit gets a $10,000 award. That creates a population of bounty hunters, diffusing power into a miasma of unaccountability, and it encourages informers, just as dictatorships do.

It is an example of Republican hostility to pluralism, to the robust debate of ideas that fuels American democracy. Recent legislative bans on public schools’ teaching critical race theory are methods of censoring the truthful history of racial bias and discrimination. Tennessee’s prohibition against health officials’ informing adolescents about COVID vaccines effectively censors scientific knowledge and stifles best medical practices. The anti-vaccine movement fostered by Republican officials and their talk-show disciples sacrifices the common good on the altar of individual freedom.

On the surface, that resistance to the collective demand looks as if it stands at the opposite end of the spectrum from Soviet Communism’s collectivist ethic. But look more closely. The mantra of individual free choice is a deception when you are manipulated by the conservative right into a collective of another kind: the subculture of alienated doubters who feel a sense of belonging to a group that fancies itself as smarter than the “experts” who have researched and developed and tested vaccines. “I Love My Country But I Fear My Government,” reads a bumper sticker on a pickup truck in Maine.

Distrust of government, of any establishment except one worshiping Trump, qualifies you for trusting membership in associations of the alienated, even if those groups exist only online. Can anyone really argue that Republicans falling in line are models of individualism?

Right-wingers who are accused of smothering respectful discourse often resort to whataboutism—what about those on the left who cancel white professors and others for racist or sexist remarks, or who fail to utter mea culpas of white guilt? Isn’t that a suppression of speech and an attack based on skin color? Isn’t that the product of herd mentality and mob thinking?

It goes without saying that intolerance and absolutism can be found at many points on the political spectrum, including the liberal end. But the claim of moral equivalency between the right and the left is a canard. Only one of the two major political parties in the United States has become a conduit of far-right conspiracy theories and apocalyptic yearnings. Only one party’s legislators are busily corrupting state electoral mechanisms, both by impeding voting and disarming and threatening principled officials and volunteers who count the ballots. It appears that the Trump Republicans’ election challenges of 2020 were merely a dry run that exposed the system’s pressure points. In state after Republican-led state, the bulwarks against rigged and fraudulent elections are being undermined.

                When people are asked if they fear the loss of pluralistic democracy, many comfort themselves by citing history--the periods of strife and oppression that the country visited upon itself, and yet managed to survive. The massacres and exiles of Native Americans. Slavery. The Civil War. Racial segregation. The McCarthy-era’s witch hunts. The twisted white faces of hatred that greeted little Black children being escorted into integrated schools. Cold War surveillance and political arrests. The anguished polarization over the Vietnam War. And numerous other self-inflicted heartaches along the way. America is resilient, it is said, and Americans are deeply decent, devoted to country and freedom. We will come through this time, too.

That answer has the allure of complacency and the danger of error. It is time for all Americans who cherish democracy to emerge from their shadow of disbelief.

The Republicans' Pro-Poverty Program

                                                             By David K. Shipler

                An irony of Donald Trump’s appeal to struggling, working-class Americans is his party’s complete indifference to their financial hardships. Wherever government can rescue people with direct cash assistance, Republicans are opposed. Wherever government can expand proven programs of aid—in health care, housing, food, day care--Republicans are opposed. See now how some Republicans are coming around to a thinly bipartisan infrastructure bill aimed at only things—bridges, highways, and the like—but are apoplectic over President Biden’s bill to help people. Things vs. people: no contest among the people’s representatives in the Republican Party.

                That coldness is compounded by uninformed moral judgments against those near the bottom. They have long been smeared by conservative Republicans as lazy, undeserving, and unlikely to strive upward without negative incentives—in other words, a whip at their backs.

Punitive provisions are almost invariably woven into Republican-sponsored policy. Assume that they don’t want to work, so cut off their $300-a-week cushion in unemployment benefits. Blame them for not taking low-wage jobs that can’t support their families, yet adamantly oppose raising the federal minimum wage to make those jobs worth having. Condition certain benefits on proof that they seek work or job training, pass drug tests, and avoid arrest—stipulations not made when the affluent get government subsidies and tax breaks such as the home mortgage interest deduction.

                Americans generally, even those technically below the official poverty line, don’t want to think of themselves as “poor,” since the society inflicts shame on the deprived. And those just above poverty, including many of Trump’s white supporters who are highly vulnerable to financial disruption, don’t display much empathy for those a notch or two beneath them. But they should, as many fell into disastrous misfortune during the pandemic and might well press the Republicans they elect to give them something back in return for their votes. 

                You might think that a crisis would galvanize the political class into smart, far-reaching action. That would be so if the United States were governed rationally. But tribalism, symbolism, and ideological rigidity have come to dominate this beacon of democracy. So, just as the repeated slaughters of schoolchildren make no dent in Republicans’ iron repudiation of even the most reasonable controls on guns, the mob shutdown of Congress makes no inroad into the Republican side of Congress itself, entangled as it is in a Soviet-style denial of what all Americans saw with their own eyes on January 6. This new Republican Party could teach the Communist Party a good deal about the manipulation of history.

Like mass shootings and the Capitol assault, the pandemic has failed to prompt Republican rethinking. Determined to block any Biden success and to resist enlarging government’s role in society, the party apparatus remains unmoved by the suffering exacted on millions of their countrymen as Covid wiped out jobs, wages, nutrition for poor children, and higher education for those in or near poverty.

Aside from being inhumane, the Republican policy is also bad economics. This time of historically low interest rates is the opportune moment to borrow to repair and rebuild. And even by the least altruistic, most self-interested calculations, Republicans who think they understand economics might be expected to see the virtue in looking ahead far enough to invest in a population whose health and skills will determine America’s global competitiveness in a technological future. The capabilities of large parts of the labor force are nothing to brag about.

Not all Democrats are perfectly pure in this realm, obviously, nor are all Republicans monstrous. But each party’s center of gravity weighs on different sides of a serious ideological divide over how much government should intervene in the country’s economy.

The clash plays out in tax law, with Republicans preferring breaks for corporations on the theory that prosperity at the top trickles down to those below. If that were so, poverty would practically disappear in a robust economy. Instead, the rates diminish, but severe deprivation persists among millions, many of whom feel no change at all while the wealthy watch their stock portfolios blossom.

 Vivid ideological disagreements also shape debate over regulating the private sector through worker, consumer, and environmental protections. Trump’s administration dismantled many of those regulations, to the delight of business interests; many are being restored under Biden.

Similarly, the parties exhibit an acerbic distaste for each other’s views on government’s role in providing social welfare benefits. That difference goes to the essence of what liberals vs. conservatives see as the ideal society.

One thing that both sides might agree on is that the United States in 2021 is far from an ideal society.