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Yahoo
12-05-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Public-Sector Workers Are Heroes, and Democrats Should Say So
Elon Musk has, if only by accident, done one good thing. He's made millions of Americans begin to realize that maybe some of the dedicated public servants who have ended up being caricatured as layabouts in the federal workforce do something vital after all. It's been a pet peeve of mine for about 20 years that Democrats have largely failed to defend the civil service. Back when I was at The American Prospect, co-founder Bob Kuttner wrote a piece during the 2004 election arguing that if John Kerry won, he should highlight one federal worker every month—a scientist, an engineer, an educator, what have you—and stand with that person at a press conference explaining how that person had, that month, saved taxpayers money or come up with some innovation that made life a little bit safer or better. It was a great idea then—and it's still there for the taking, J.B. Pritzker (or whomever). It would drive home a crucial point that your average person just doesn't understand: The public sector makes vast and vital contributions to the economy. They're just not as visible as private-sector contributions. Everybody understands what the private sector does. It builds things, it makes things, it innovates, it employs people. All that stuff is very visible. The public sector's contributions, though, are largely invisible. The public sector contributes to the economy by preventing bad things from happening. The most obvious example here is the Federal Aviation Administration. There are 45,000 domestic flights a day in the United States. About 99.999 percent of them reach their destinations safely. But drop that to 98.5 percent, and we have 675 airplane crashes a day. No one would get on a plane. The economy would grind to a halt. Expand that out to meat inspection, drug safety, floodplain management, highway safety, various forms of consumer protection, the safeguarding of forests and agriculture—a major crisis in any one of these areas would have profound economic and public safety consequences. There would be screaming headlines about disaster and death. But by and large, these things don't happen. Those stories don't get written. And that's because the people of the federal government are there, manning their posts and keeping watch. The unhappy irony for these faceless protectors of the common weal, which is exploited by right-wing politicians and shock-jocks and so forth, is that they make the news only on the very rare occasions that something goes wrong. They are, as author David Zweig celebrated, the Invisibles—the people whose excellence is measured by the fact that you never learn their names, never know what they're doing to keep the world spinning. As Mary Boyle, a Democratic commissioner on the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC), told me over the weekend: 'We always say, we're doing our job the best we can when no one knows we've stopped something.' I quote Boyle for a reason. Last Thursday, after working at the commission for 15 years and serving as a commissioner for the last three, she was abruptly fired. Boyle told me that a couple of DOGE boys showed up at the offices Thursday afternoon. Shortly thereafter came an email from the acting chair, a Republican, asking the commissions to agree to a dose of DOGE oversight. At 6 p.m. that evening, she said no, she wouldn't support that. At 6:45, an email came from the White House informing her of her termination (I should say that Boyle is a friend, and the wife of Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne). 'It was clearly just a set-up for us to say no,' she told me. The CPSC is a perfect example of how the public sector makes valuable but invisible contributions to the economy and to people's lives. Until 2008, baby products in the United States underwent no safety review. That year, the commission worked on a bipartisan basis to establish safety standards for car seats, cribs, and the like. The result, Boyle said, has 'clearly been a decline in injuries and deaths.' Similarly, the commission regulated those powerful fidget-toy magnets (sometimes called Buckyballs, for Buckminster Fuller), which caused injury and occasional death to children who swallowed them. Before regulation, CPSC estimated that there were 2,300 emergency room visits a year related to ingestion of these devices. After regulation, that dropped to 1,300. World-changing? Maybe not. But to those 1,000 parents who didn't spend a freaked-out night in an emergency room wondering if their kid was going to die, I'd say their work is pretty important. This week, the Trump administration is finally going after an executive branch agency the right has hated since the day of its creation: the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, or CFPB, the brainchild of Elizabeth Warren. A document began circulating last Friday, which was slated to be published in the Federal Register today (I have a copy, but it's a pdf and isn't linkable), from acting CFPB chair Russell Vought (Mr. Project 2025), ordering the bureau to dial back on nearly 70 pro-consumer opinions and guidances it has issued in recent years. The bureau, Vought wrote, 'is reducing its enforcement activities in light of President Trump's directives to deregulate and streamline bureaucracy.' I talked over the weekend with a Biden-era bureau official, to whom two of these new edicts especially stood out. One was a 2022 CFPB guidance concerning nursing home debt. When a resident dies, nursing home corporations sometimes track down other family members to pay any debt, often in aggressive ways. This harassment is illegal, under a 1987 law (it's all explained here). Another was an effort by the CFPB to crack down on predatory lending to members of the country's armed services, who are surprisingly frequent victims of this unscrupulous practice. In other words: Donald Trump is telling corporations that they can resume screwing over dying old people, and people who wear the country's uniform. 'It's open corruption,' the Biden-era official said. 'They're just saying, 'We don't really give a shit about people.'' It's high time the Democrats pick up my old colleague Kuttner's idea of celebrating federal workers. Given Musk and DOGE's unpopularity, the opportunity is there in a way it's arguably never been in my adult lifetime (which roughly coincides with Ronald Reagan's attacks on the government) for Democrats to shift public opinion and get people to see that they should be glad that dedicated and honorable people like Mary Boyle are looking out for their interests, and that Trump and Vought and their minions are creating a country in which more military people will get ripped off and more babies will die.
Yahoo
01-04-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Opinion - Social Security isn't the third rail of American politics any more
It seems the Trump administration is doing no better getting its story straight about Social Security than managing the agency itself. The president has said many times, without qualifiers, that he is 'not going to touch Social Security.' But almost daily, others on his team are saying otherwise — and unlike the president, they are adding qualifiers and contingencies and scenarios in which Social Security would indeed be touched. Team Trump seems to have concluded that Social Security is no longer the 'third rail of American politics' — that they can touch it and live to tell the tale. It will be up to voters to prove them wrong. The administration is offering a bargain, designed to minimize blowback as it weakens Social Security: We will protect what older Americans are now getting, they wink, if those Americans don't make a fuss about cutting future benefits for the young and the undeserving. We can see a hint of that strategy in the March 17 statement from Karoline Leavitt, the president's press secretary, when she said, 'Any American receiving Social Security benefits will continue to receive them.' Then, on March 21, Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick suggested that anyone complaining about an interruption in their Social Security benefits must be a 'fraudster.' Fraudsters, Lutnick observed, 'always make … the loudest noise, screaming, yelling, and complaining,' To the murmured agreement of his podcast host, Lutnick added, 'Anyone whose been in a payment system knows the easiest way to find a fraudster is to stop payments and listen.' There you have it — a framing that allows Lutnick and his colleagues in the Trump administration to say they do not intend to cut Social Security while devising plans to undermine it and shake the faith of the millions of Americans who depend on it. One way to do so is to make dealing with the Social Security Administration as painful as dealing with the Department of Motor Vehicles or your local cable television provider. Robert Kuttner, co-founder of The American Prospect, calls it 'pure mischief, intended to weaken a widely appreciated and efficient public system that Elon Musk has disparaged as a Ponzi scheme.' Doing so will turn Social Security into a 'soft target' by tarnishing its reputation and getting the public ready when they eventually talk about privatizing Social Security. And last month, Frank Bisignano, nominated to head the Social Security Administration, echoed President Trump's March 4 speech to Congress, where he went on at length about 'shocking levels of incompetence and probable fraud in the Social Security program for our seniors.' While Bisignano, describing himself as 'fundamentally a DOGE person,' said his 'objective isn't to touch benefits … there is going to be fraud, waste and abuse in there.' Those warnings are the administration's way of changing how Americans think of Social Security — not as an earned benefit program but as a part of the welfare system. Historians remind us that the New Dealers who created Social Security fought hard against such a portrait. They succeeded by connecting it to a longstanding American commitment to disaster relief, with the disaster being elderly people living in misery. Trump and his allies want to undo that legacy and associate Social Security with all the negative connotations that accompany being on welfare— a modern version of Ronald Reagan's attack on 'welfare queens' that blames illegal immigrants for society's ills. Trump highlighted that connection throughout last year's presidential campaign, blaming Democrats for endangering Social Security and Medicare 'by allowing the INVASION OF THE MIGRANTS.' That is why, at the end of his remarks about Social Security during his podcast interview, Lutnick promised that the administration would not 'take one penny from someone who deserves Social Security.' The American people should not take his word for it. Austin Sarat is the William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Jurisprudence and Political Science at Amherst College. Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
Yahoo
05-03-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
How Trump's "bad manners undermine his geopolitics"
On a fundamental level, politics is a system of relationships and power. Donald Trump, who is America's first elected autocrat, promised to disrupt and smash those relationships and norms in service to his revolutionary project to 'Make America Great Again.' Domestically, Trump has launched a shock and awe campaign against America's democracy, its institutions, the Constitution, and the rule of law. The relationships, norms, and consensus that has structured American politics and society since the 1940s and the New Deal through the 1960s and the Great Society and the civil rights movement(s) to the Age of Trump are being tested and broken. Internationally, for 80 years, the United States has been the leader of 'the free world' and a global coalition and system of alliances and partnerships that emerged with the end of World War II and the beginning of the Cold War. The centerpiece of the American-led international order is the North American Treaty Organization (NATO), one of the most successful organizations in modern world history. Trump's shock and awe campaign is global. He has been president for seven weeks and he is attempting to turn, quite literally, the international order upside down. In a meeting last Friday at the White House, Trump tried to publicly humiliate Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy by basically demanding that he beg for continued American assistance in that country's freedom struggle against Russian aggression. At The American Prospect, Robert Kuttner condemns Trump's treatment of Zelenskyy as an act of political thuggery: What actually occurred, of course, was that Trump and his henchmen made Zelensky a Mafia-style offer he couldn't refuse. Give the U.S. rights to Ukraine's minerals, and maybe the U.S. would guarantee Ukraine's sovereignty, but maybe not. Zelensky was lured to Washington on the pretense that he was coming to negotiate the final details. But that was a ruse. Instead, Trump put Zelensky in front of the cameras, the better to humiliate him. (When were delicate agreements ever negotiated in front of the media?) When Zelensky wouldn't play, Trump and Vance accused him of disrespect. As an earlier Don put it: "Now you come and say, 'Don Corleone, give me justice.' But you don't ask with respect. You don't offer friendship." Does the current Don appreciate who he is channeling? Maybe so. In her newsletter 'Letters From an American', historian Heather Cox Richardson located Friday's events in the larger context of the Age of Trump and its assault on normalcy: John Simpson of the BBC noted recently that 'there are years when the world goes through some fundamental, convulsive change.' Seven weeks in, he suggested, 2025 is on track to be one of them: 'a time when the basic assumptions about the way our world works are fed into the shredder.'… The abandonment of democratic principles and the democratic institutions the U.S. helped to create is isolating the United States from nations that have been our allies, partners, and friends. On Monday, Trump announced that military aid for Ukraine will be 'temporarily' suspended. This is a way to force Ukraine to negotiate from a position of weakness with Russia. At the Atlantic, David Frum plainly states the obvious: '...Trump and Vance have revealed to Americans and to America's allies their alignment with Russia, and their animosity toward Ukraine in general and its president in particular. The truth is ugly, but it's necessary to face it.' Many political experts are concerned that Trump's dressing down of Zelenskyy and growing embrace and admiration of Putin and other autocrats signals how Trump may go so far as to withdraw the United States from NATO. Until very recently, such an action was deemed unimaginable by the 'conventional wisdom.' Trump, like other authoritarian populists and demagogues, has no use for the 'conventional wisdom' and other norms. Such leaders bend reality to fit their needs and wants. In an attempt to gain some perspective on these disorienting and surreal events and a world that feels like it is increasingly teetering on the edge of war and other armed conflicts and general chaos, I recently spoke with Robert D. Kaplan. He is the bestselling author of 23 books on foreign affairs and travel translated into many languages, including "The Loom of Time," "The Good American," "The Revenge of Geography," "The Coming Anarchy" and "Balkan Ghosts." His new book is "Waste Land: A World in Permanent Crisis." Kaplan holds the Robert Strausz-Hupé Chair in Geopolitics at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. He reported on foreign affairs for The Atlantic for many years, and is a former member of the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board and the Chief of Naval Operations Executive Panel. Donald Trump recently 'hosted' a White House meeting with Ukraine's leader Volodymyr Zelenskyy. To describe what transpired as a disaster for global democracy and America's leadership role in the world would be a great understatement. What did you see? New York Times columnist Ross Douthat correctly labeled President Donald Trump as a leader who strips away pretenses. That was on full display when Trump and Vice President JD Vance humiliated Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelensky in front of the media during an Oval Office meeting. But as Douthat knows, some pretense is always necessary to grease the wheels of personal relations, especially of diplomacy. Just imagine how George H. W. Bush and James Baker, or to be bipartisan, how Bill Clinton and Al Gore would have handled such a meeting. They would have been all smiles before the television cameras, but then in private, would have administered to Zelenskyy some very tough love, all the while remaining respectful. The Friday meeting demonstrated the Full Trump, a leader whose basic conception of geopolitics is defensible, but whose manners are deplorable. And the bad manners undermine his geopolitics. I would go further: the bad manners of this administration are indications of the decadence and decline of the West in general. As for Zelensky's dark outfit, which Trump felt the need to criticize as being 'disrespectful,' it signifies that he leads a nation at war. When we talk about a 'global order' what do we mean? The global order is an aspirational term. It doesn't really exist. Basic order in each region is maintained by a balance of military and economic power. A rules-based order aspires to maintain peace through rules and negotiation. Like the American superpower or not, when it existed during the heyday of the postwar world it did not do a bad job in maintaining a semblance of order. Your new book is 'Waste Land: A World in Permanent Crisis.' Please elaborate on this 'waste land.' Waste Land is the title of my new book, which is based on the great modernist poem by T. S. Eliot, 'The Waste Land,' published in 1922. It is a poem of abstract horror that deals in cultural and political fragmentation. I think it's bleak yet hopeful landscape captures well the turmoil of our world. Anarchy is the opposite of hierarchy. Without some form of hierarchy in our political and social relations, there is no order. And without order, there can be no freedom. That's why we must always fear anarchy. Are we experiencing a global paradigm shift? Is it that dramatic and not incremental? Yes, we are experiencing a paradigm shift, from a postwar world defined by the political and military arrangements that followed World War II and which continued for some decades after the end of the Cold War. That paradigm featured a grand alliance between the United States and Europe. We may now be entering an era of regional hegemons: the United States, China, and Russia, in which Europe will be challenged by Russia without the United States providing the level of defense it used to. Many experts on history, foreign affairs, international relations, military affairs, and politics more broadly are of the mind that the United States increasingly resembles Germany before its democracy fell in the early 1930s. Your thoughts? The Weimar Republic, as I argue in my new book, was a far-flung world of permanent crisis, where little got resolved, just like our world today. The Weimar Republic ended with Hitler in power. Such a thing will not happen in our world, which is too big for a single sinister dictator. Weimar almost succeeded. It did not have to end the way it did. There was much hope in Weimar, as there still is in our world today. History is driven not only by vast impersonal forces like geography and economics but also by contingency, that is, the individual actions of men and women. That means moral responsibility. We must always keep that in mind. How would you assess the relationship between the United States and NATO at present? The relationship between the United States and NATO is worse than at any time since NATO was founded following World War II. After the Cold War ended, quite a few intellectuals assumed that NATO would disband. But it didn't, because it was a military alliance of many of the world's richest and most educated countries with incredible organization and protocols built up over decades. You don't throw such a thing overboard. It's too valuable. Yet that is what the Trump administration is, in effect, seeking to do. It's madness. Allies allow you to project power while husbanding your own resources. And a venerable allied military organization is the best of all worlds. NATO could come in very handy as a deterrent against Russia in the coming months and years, since any peace between Russia and Ukraine is going to be very tenuous and unstable. We are facing the most unstable period in European history since 1945, and NATO is the ultimate stabilizer. If the world is teetering on a return of great power conflicts, how do the multinationals, the megacorporations, and other powerful and extremely wealthy and influential forces – who have their own private militaries or can hire them easily — play in the story? Never has there been such a collusion of extreme wealth and political power as exists now in the Trump Administration. The great, late Harvard political scientist Samuel Huntington wrote that what ultimately makes America great is not its people or its geography, but its institutions, with their separation of powers. This collusion of wealth and power is now undermining the independence of regulatory agencies, and thus of our institutions. For decades going forward, historians will focus on the photo at Trump's second inauguration, with his family surrounded by the tech moguls: wealth and power, a picture is worth a thousand words. I believe in real security, which means taking care of the domestic front first. This involves such things as expanding social democracy and protecting the country's manufacturing and industrial base. Part of this real security also means nurturing and protecting pluralism and multiracial democracy so that the American Dream is real on both sides of the color line, which makes America stronger and more prosperous. As I see it, real security also means ensuring that the United States is the most powerful nation on the planet and can protect its interests and project power abroad — not just militarily — in a way that deters the rise of peer competitors and conflict. Is that an obsolete view? What you are describing is basically the grand strategy of the United States for decades now. The argument has been over how best to achieve it. The American military has historically been the best in the world because it draws its officer corps, and particularly its NCOs (noncommissioned officers), from all classes and races of the country. A fairer society will also be the most militarily dynamic. So, there is no contradiction between a more liberal society at home and a more powerful country abroad. The two go together. And we will need both elements to navigate a more unstable, bleaker, anarchic world. Public opinion polls and other research have consistently shown that the average American is very ignorant about global politics. Given your warnings about a "waste land' with its anarchy and chaos, how would this impact the average American when they are so preoccupied with basics such as inflation and the cost of eggs? The world is more tightly wound and claustrophobic than ever. For example, a war in the Pacific would adversely affect the retirement accounts of all Americans, as it would involve the world's largest economies in high-tech conflict. No American can afford to turn their head away from the outside world right now.
New York Times
12-02-2025
- Politics
- New York Times
Christopher Jencks, a Shaper of Views on Economic Inequality, Dies at 88
Christopher Jencks, a highly regarded sociologist who helped transform public and expert opinion on complex policy issues like homelessness, income inequality and racial gaps in standardized testing, died on Saturday at his home in Lexington, Mass. He was 88. His wife, the political scientist Jane Mansbridge, said the cause was complications of Alzheimer's disease. Mr. Jencks had an unconventional background for an academic social scientist: He had an undergraduate degree in English literature, followed by a stint as an opinion journalist, and despite holding an endowed chair in sociology at Harvard, he never earned a doctorate. If anything, that background seemed to help him. In books and articles, he wrote clear, concise sentences backed by finely honed data, presenting arguments that cut to the quick of policy debates, often in novel ways that defied traditional left-right divisions. His 1994 book, 'The Homeless,' is a case in point. In a mere 176 pages, including endnotes, he offered a dramatically lower estimate of the country's homeless population than what was assumed at the time: less than 300,000, versus the accepted estimate of up to 3 million, a number, he said, that had been inflated to draw attention to the issue. He then walked through the reasons homelessness was rising — including cuts to social services and the closing of mental institutions — following this explanation with a suite of often surprising prescriptions, including bringing back 'Skid Row' neighborhoods. His 1972 report, 'Inequality: A Reassessment of the Effect of Family and Schooling in America,' written with seven associates at Harvard, did something similar with education, drawing on reams of data amassed during the 1960s to show that, contrary to many policymakers' hopes, there were limits to what education reform could do to lessen income inequality. The book was widely hailed, and just as widely misread; he was not arguing against education, as some thought, but rather showing its limits in the inequality debate. Instead, he argued for much more direct and significant policies, like tax credits and other income supports. Mr. Jencks also proved refreshingly willing to change his mind when the situation changed. By the 1990s, he had shifted his position on education somewhat; as manufacturing jobs declined and the demand for skilled workers grew, the benefits of education, he said, had become more pronounced. Though he joined Harvard as a lecturer in 1967 and spent the rest of his career in academia, he kept a foothold in journalism. In 1973, he helped found Working Papers for a New Society, a wonky periodical dedicated to sifting through the successes and failures of Lyndon B. Johnson's Great Society. In 1990, he and several other journalistically inclined social scientists founded The American Prospect, a left-of-center magazine; with Kathryn Edin, he wrote one of its first feature articles. That article, 'The Real Welfare Problem,' was vintage Jencks. It grew out of an observation by Dr. Edin, who had been his graduate student, about the large number of aid recipients who worked under the table to make ends meet. As the writers showed through meticulous analysis, the problem was not greedy welfare cheats but a pernicious aspect of the system: It paid too little, and cut that support further as soon as people looked for other means of income. That insight did much to frame the debate over welfare reform in the 1990s. 'Most people assume that low benefits just force recipients to live frugally,' they wrote. 'But low benefits have another, more sinister effect that neither conservatives nor liberals like to acknowledge: they force most welfare recipients to lie and cheat in order to survive.' Christopher Jencks was born on Oct. 22, 1936, in Baltimore. His parents initially chose to forgo a middle name for him, then changed their minds and gave him 'Sandys,' a pluralized version of a childhood nickname. His father, Francis, was an architect, and his mother, Elizabeth (Pleasants) Jencks, oversaw the household. The Jencks were wealthy, and Christopher was educated at expensive private schools, including Phillips Exeter, from which he graduated in 1954. He earned an English degree from Harvard in 1958 and a master's degree in human development from the Harvard Graduate School of Education in 1959. Moving to Washington, he wrote for and helped edit The New Republic and was a fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies, a left-leaning think tank. His first two marriages ended in divorce. In addition to Dr. Mansbridge, whom he married in 1976, he is survived by their son, Nat; their grandson; and a brother, Stephen. Mr. Jencks moved to Northwestern University in 1979 and returned to Harvard in 1996. He retired in 2016. Though he retained a willingness to buck liberal orthodoxies where the data demanded it, Mr. Jencks remained at heart a believer in the need for large-scale government interventions to alleviate inequality. He insisted that, in the main, the War on Poverty had worked, even as many liberals in the 1980s and '90s were turning against such programs. The problem, he said, was one of perception: People expected wealth-transfer programs, like Medicaid and Aid to Families With Dependent Children, to solve a host of social ills, not just eliminate income disparities — something they were unable to do. 'The remedies for crime and family breakdown lie much deeper, requiring changes in the fundamental character of our society, not just a few innovative government programs,' Mr. Jencks said in a 1996 speech at the American Enterprise Institute. 'But that is a story for another time.'
Yahoo
09-02-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Donald Trump's chaos strategy: Why Americans continue to fall for his game of distraction
President Trump and his MAGA Republicans and their forces are smashing American democracy, the Constitution, the rule of law, the institutions and norms. Trump has enacted over 50 executive orders since Jan. 20, the most in a president's first 100 days in more than 40 years. Some of the most egregious ones are blatantly unconstitutional and violate current law. It has only been three weeks since Trump returned to power; these are the good times compared to what will come next. Be very wary of any political observer or other public voice — or anyone else — who suggests that Trump and his MAGA movement are losing, in disarray, ineffective or somehow confused or weak. Such people are seeing what they want to see and not what is actually happening. Donald Trump and his MAGA movement's strategy is chaos. Moreover, that chaos is in service to their shock and awe strategy to end America's pluralistic democracy and to replace it with a form of autocracy if not outright fascism modeled on Viktor Orbán's Hungary or Vladimir Putin's Russia with Trump as de facto leader for life. As Harold Meyerson observes in The American Prospect, 'As to the wider world, if we ever sought to be that beacon on the hill, we're now the bully on the hill. America, Trumpified.' America's center is rapidly collapsing, and it has not been very difficult for Trump and the MAGA movement and the other fascists and authoritarians to break it. During these last three weeks, I have been repeating aloud, on the bus, during my walks, and at random times throughout the day, William Butler Yeats' poem 'The Second Coming,' particularly his warning that 'the centre cannot hold": Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity. Surely some revelation is at hand; Surely the Second Coming is at hand…. At the root of Trumpism and American fascism's quick ascendance, and the pitiful resistance to it, is a profound failure of imagination. The phrase 'failure of imagination' can trace its popular use in the United States to the Apollo 1 disaster and testimony by astronaut Col. Frank Borman. As depicted in the 1998 TV miniseries 'From the Earth to the Moon', Borman told Congress that: A failure of imagination. We've always known there was the possibility of fire in a spacecraft. But the fear was that it would happen in space, when you're 180 miles from terra firma and the nearest fire station. That was the worry. No one ever imagined it could happen on the ground. If anyone had thought of it, the test would've been classified as hazardous. But it wasn't. We just didn't think of it. Now whose fault is that? Well, it's North American's [the capsule manufacturer] fault. It's NASA's fault. It's the fault of every person who ever worked on Apollo. It's my fault. I didn't think the test was hazardous. No one did. I wish to God we had. The failure of imagination that allowed Donald Trump and the MAGA movement to ascend to power is of a different type. It was wholly predictable. Trump and his agents were direct, vocal, and public in their plans to make him the country's first elected dictator on 'day one' and to launch a revolutionary project to return the country to the Gilded Age, if not before, and the types of destruction it would necessitate as the rights and freedoms of entire groups of Americans are taken away, the social safety net is further gutted, and the plutocrats and kleptocrats and White Christian Nationalists and other White racial authoritarians are given free rein over American life. In many ways, the failure of imagination by the country's 'responsible' political leaders, the mainstream news media and the American public that empowered Trump and MAGA's ascendance is willful and negligent. For years, these so-called responsible voices repeatedly proclaimed that Donald Trump was done for after his first term in office after a coup attempt on Jan. 6, twice impeached, multiple criminal and civil trials, a botched COVID response and an economy left in tatters. That did not happen. These same 'responsible' and 'mainstream' voices also declared that there was no way that the Republican Party would nominate Trump to be its candidate in 2024, he is damaged goods with too much baggage, and the 'adults in the room' would step in and rise to the occasion. Again, this did not happen. Donald Trump and his MAGA movement, almost quite literally, own today's Republican Party and 'conservative' and larger right-wing movement. Throughout the Trumpocene, these 'reasonable' and 'mainstream' voices were confident that 'the walls were closing in' and heroes would rise, like in an old Hollywood movie, to vanquish the bad guy and save the day. First, it was Special Counsel Robert Mueller. Then the hero was Attorney General Merrick Garland. Then it was Special Counsel Jack Smith. The state prosecutors and attorney generals would supposedly be a heroic firewall and last line of defense against Donald Trump and his perfidy. The walls never did close in. Trump would become more popular following his prosecutions and trial(s) than before. Trump now wears 'felon' as a badge of honor and courage, one that his MAGA followers and other Americans who are disgusted with the system flock to. These 'mainstream' and 'reasonable' voices — especially the mainstream liberals and progressives — were mostly exuberant that Kamala Harris replaced Joe Biden in the 2024 election. To them, Harris was a historic and compelling leader. She would be the first Black woman to be President of the United States. She is a committed public servant, magnetic, charismatic, compelling, and would attract young voters and college-educated white women who want to defend their reproductive rights and freedoms. The vibes! The brat energy! Beyonce and Taylor Swift and other celebrities are on Kamala Harris' side! How can Donald Trump with his Village People "YMCA" dance, podcasts, the "manosphere" and professional wrestling and MMA fighters stop Kamala Harris and the Democrats? Impossible! These 'mainstream' and 'reasonable' voices concluded that Donald Trump's Madison Square Garden and how it channeled the infamous American Nazi rally of 1939 was a 'disaster' and would lead to his defeat. I warned, however, that Trump's MSG rally was actually a genius strategic and tactical move that made his MAGA people feel seen, as he was so bold as to launch a version of a military raid behind enemy lines in a solidly blue state and the Democratic Party stronghold of New York City. Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans went on to easily defeat Harris and take control of all three branches of government. The fabled blue wall was easily pierced and then shattered. The Democratic Party's base did not show up to vote. A majority of white women, again, supported Trump. Trump's coalition grew and now includes a large number of Hispanics and Latinos — even as he threatened mass deportations against their community. Trump expanded his base of support in New York — as I warned and predicted — among a range of groups, including Hispanics and Latinos. A new poll from Quinnipiac University shows that the Democratic Party's favorable rating is 31 percent. 57 percent of the people polled have an unfavorable view of the Democratic Party. By comparison, the Republican Party has a 43 percent favorability rating and 45 percent unfavorable. For more than eight years, the mainstream news media and political class and other 'reasonable' and 'responsible' political voices and leaders could have adapted to the rise of Trumpism, American neofascism and the authoritarian populist moment. Instead, they continued with a habitual failure of imagination and the American people — and their democracy and society and future and freedom — are being made to suffer and are greatly imperiled. This did not have to happen. In an essay in the Atlantic in May of 2024, Tom Nichols diagnosed and warned about the dangers of a failure of imagination and Donald Trump's return to power: Nostalgia and presentism are part of politics. But a second problem is even more worrisome: Americans simply cannot imagine how badly Trump's first term might have turned out, and how ghastly his second term is likely to be. Our minds are not equipped to embrace how fast democracy could disintegrate. We can better imagine alien invasions than we can an authoritarian America. The Atlantic tried to lay out what this future would look like, but perhaps even words can't capture the magnitude of the threat. When I was in high school and taking driver's education, our teachers would show us horrible films, with names like Death on the Highway, that included gory footage of actual car wrecks. The goal was to scare us into being responsible drivers by showing us the reality of being mangled or burned to death in a crash. The idea made sense: Most people have never seen a car wreck, and expanding our imaginations by showing us the actual carnage did, I suspect, scare some of us into holding that steering wheel at the steady 10-and-2 position….We just don't have a similar conceptualization for the end of democracy in America…. Trump's most alarmist opponents are wrong to insist that he would march into Washington in January 2025 like Hitler entering Paris. The process will be slower and more bureaucratic, starting with the seizure of the Justice Department and the Defense Department, two keys to controlling the nation. If Trump returns to office, he will not shoot democracy on Fifth Avenue. He and the people around him will paralyze it, limb by limb. The American public needs to get better at imagining what that would look like. In a 2016 interview with On the Media, Masha Gessen offered this direct warning about the extreme danger(s) of Donald Trump and the MAGA movement: We need to start imagining what happens if he becomes president. Now, the American system doesn't actually give the chief executive a lot of power. There is an intricate system of checks and balances that will force him to mobilize things through rhetoric. And that basically means, I think, that we have to start imagining witch hunts, we have to start imagining kind of wars at home. We have to start imagining what kind of groups he is going to start blaming for all his problems and all our problems, whether real or imaginary.' Gessen would be proven correct in ways far worse than perhaps even they imagined at time….My advice to the news consumer is - imagine the a recent conversation with me here at Salon, Norm Orstein issued this ominous warning: 'This is part of the biggest problem. We have lost our guardrails against autocracy. The press is pathetic. The Republicans running Congress are pathetic. The Supreme Court is in Trump's pocket. Civil society, starting with the business community, is worthless. Be afraid. Be very afraid.' At the Bulwark, Jonathan Last says this about America's failure of imagination and the worsening national emergency that is Trump's return to power and his shock and awe campaign against American democracy and society: And here's the point I want you to remember: When I say today, on January 27, that Trump's gangster government is going to end badly—maybe even very badly—it sounds crazy and hysterical. But if I described the state of affairs as they exist on January 27 to you twelve weeks ago, you also would have thought that I was crazy and hysterical. You would have said, 'I guess that's possible, but you're talking about something close to a worst-case scenario.' Yes, Putinism would definitely be a worst-case scenario. But we are living the worst-case scenario right now. Maybe in the future something will slide us down the scale to one of the lower-variant scenarios. That would be nice. I hope it happens. But right now we are on track to a dark place. Ultimately, Trumpism and American fascism and authoritarianism are a symptom and not the cause of much deeper and profound problems in American society and life. There were some voices, most notably Black and brown people and others who are not enamored with or blinded by America's various myths of its own exceptionalism and greatness and the permanence of its 'democracy', that saw the danger clearly because they were not blinded by Whiteness and its many small and big lies that in total created the failure of imagination that led to Trump and MAGA's triumphant return to power. Donald Trump's autocracy is not a hypothetical or possibility far off in the future. It is here and now and very real. America's crisis and failure of imagination has been subsumed by a horrible reality — one that is not going away anytime soon.
