REAL WORLD EVENT DISCUSSIONS

A thread for Democrats Only

POSTED BY: THGRRI
UPDATED: Thursday, July 24, 2025 10:16
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Sunday, June 22, 2025 9:05 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


Inequality, Part IV: Oligarchs

The rise of mega-fortunes

By Paul Krugman / Jun 22, 2025 at 5:33 AM

https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/inequality-part-iv-oligarchs

Share of the top 0.01% in total wealth, from the GC Wealth Project

https://wealthproject.gc.cuny.edu/wealth-inequality-trends/inequality-
trends/#countryview

Who said this?
Quote:
If there are men in this country big enough to own the government of the United States, they are going to own it; what we have to determine now is whether we are big enough, whether we are men enough, whether we are free enough, to take possession again of the government which is our own.
No, it wasn’t Bernie Sanders or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. It’s a quote from The New Freedom, Woodrow Wilson’s campaign platform in the 1912 presidential election.

Wilson was a vile racist, even for his time, and his reputation has suffered appropriately. But he was also a progressive on economic policy. And I’ve always been struck by the fact that in the early 20th century a politician could declare that great concentrations of wealth were a threat to democracy without being considered a radical, un-American Marxist. Wilson won that election!

Politicians, even progressives, are far more timid these days. Yet we are once again living in an era in which there are men big enough to own the U.S. government — and to a large extent they do. For a while Elon Musk exerted more power over the operations of the U.S. government than any cabinet member or elected official short of Donald Trump himself. Musk is currently on the outs, but the Trump administration is stuffed full of billionaires and people who take their marching orders from billionaires. Congress appears to be about to enact legislation, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, that billionaires love even though the broader public hates all its main provisions.

How did we get here?

This is my latest entry in a series of primers on inequality; here are Part I, Part II, and Part III. Today my focus will be on extreme wealth concentration — the rise of an American oligarchy. Beyond the paywall I will address the following:

1. Tracking the rise of extreme wealth

2. How did our modern oligarchs get so rich?

I’ll eventually want to talk about the political and social consequences of extreme wealth concentration, and how it undermines democracy. But that will have to wait for later posts.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Tuesday, June 24, 2025 11:01 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Looks like your garbage towelhead socialist Democrat won the NYC mayor primary.

NYC's only chance at saving itself now is if Adams wins as an independent, or the people of the city finally wake up and vote for the Republican.

Otherwise NYC is dead forever.

Good job, Democrats. You'll get what you deserve.



--------------------------------------------------

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon

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Thursday, July 3, 2025 6:42 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


The American polity is cracked, and might collapse. Canada must prepare

The U.S. is becoming increasingly ungovernable, and some experts believe it could descend into civil war. What should Canada do then?

By Thomas Homer-Dixon

Published December 31, 2021
Updated January 2, 2022

This article was published more than 3 years ago. Some information may no longer be current.

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/article-the-american-polity-is
-cracked-and-might-collapse-canada-must-prepare/

Thomas Homer-Dixon is executive director of the Cascade Institute at Royal Roads University. His latest book is Commanding Hope: The Power We Have to Renew a World in Peril.

By 2025, American democracy could collapse, causing extreme domestic political instability, including widespread civil violence. By 2030, if not sooner, the country could be governed by a right-wing dictatorship.

We mustn’t dismiss these possibilities just because they seem ludicrous or too horrible to imagine. In 2014, the suggestion that Donald Trump would become president would also have struck nearly everyone as absurd. But today we live in a world where the absurd regularly becomes real and the horrible commonplace.

Leading American academics are now actively addressing the prospect of a fatal weakening of U.S. democracy.

This past November, more than 150 professors of politics, government, political economy and international relations appealed to Congress to pass the Freedom to Vote Act, which would protect the integrity of US elections but is now stalled in the Senate. This is a moment of “great peril and risk,” they wrote. “Time is ticking away, and midnight is approaching.”

I’m a scholar of violent conflict. For more than 40 years, I’ve studied and published on the causes of war, social breakdown, revolution, ethnic violence and genocide, and for nearly two decades I led a centre on peace and conflict studies at the University of Toronto.

Today, as I watch the unfolding crisis in the United States, I see a political and social landscape flashing with warning signals.

I’m not surprised by what’s happening there – not at all. During my graduate work in the United States in the 1980s, I sometimes listened to Rush Limbaugh, the right-wing radio talk show host and later television personality. I remarked to friends at the time that, with each broadcast, it was if Mr. Limbaugh were wedging the sharp end of a chisel into a faint crack in the moral authority of U.S. political institutions, and then slamming the other end of that chisel with a hammer.

In the decades since, week after week, year after year, Mr. Limbaugh and his fellow travellers have hammered away – their blows’ power lately amplified through social media and outlets such as Fox News and Newsmax. The cracks have steadily widened, ramified, connected and propagated deeply into America’s once-esteemed institutions, profoundly compromising their structural integrity. The country is becoming increasingly ungovernable, and some experts believe it could descend into civil war.

How should Canada prepare?

In 2020, president Donald Trump awarded Mr. Limbaugh the Presidential Medal of Freedom. The act signalled that Mr. Limbaugh’s brand of bullying, populist white ethnocentrism – a rancid blend of aggrieved attacks on liberal elites, racist dog-whistling, bragging about American exceptionalism and appeals to authoritarian leadership – had become an integral part of mainstream political ideology in the U.S.

But one can’t blame only Mr. Limbaugh, who died in early 2021, and his ilk for America’s dysfunction. These people and their actions are as much symptoms of that dysfunction as its root causes, and those causes are many. Some can be traced to the country’s founding – to an abiding distrust in government baked into the country’s political culture during the Revolution, to slavery, to the political compromise of the Electoral College that slavery spawned, to the overrepresentation of rural voting power in the Senate, and to the failure of Reconstruction after the Civil War. But successful polities around the world have overcome flaws just as fundamental.

What seems to have pushed the United States to the brink of losing its democracy today is a multiplication effect between its underlying flaws and recent shifts in the society’s “material” characteristics. These shifts include stagnating middle-class incomes, chronic economic insecurity, and rising inequality as the country’s economy – transformed by technological change and globalization – has transitioned from muscle power, heavy industry, and manufacturing as the main sources of its wealth to idea power, information technology, symbolic production and finance. As returns to labour have stagnated and returns to capital have soared, much of the U.S. population has fallen behind. Inflation-adjusted wages for the median male worker in the fourth quarter of 2019 (prior to the infusion of economic support owing to the COVID-19 pandemic) were lower than in 1979; meanwhile, between 1978 and 2016, CEO incomes in the biggest companies rose from 30 times that of the average worker to 271 times. Economic insecurity is widespread in broad swaths of the country’s interior, while growth is increasingly concentrated in a dozen or so metropolitan centres.

Two other material factors are key. The first is demographic: as immigration, aging, intermarriage and a decline in church-going have reduced the percentage of non-Hispanic white Christians in America, right-wing ideologues have inflamed fears that traditional U.S. culture is being erased and whites are being “replaced.” The second is pervasive elite selfishness: The wealthy and powerful in America are broadly unwilling to pay the taxes, invest in the public services, or create the avenues for vertical mobility that would lessen their country’s economic, educational, racial and geographic gaps. The more an under-resourced government can’t solve everyday problems, the more people give up on it, and the more they turn to their own resources and their narrow identity groups for safety.

America’s economic, racial and social gaps have helped cause ideological polarization between the political right and left, and the worsening polarization has paralyzed government while aggravating the gaps. The political right and left are isolated from, and increasingly despise, each other. Both believe the stakes are existential – that the other is out to destroy the country they love. The moderate political centre is fast vanishing.

And, oh yes, the population is armed to the teeth, with somewhere around 400 million firearms in the hands of civilians.

Some diagnoses of America’s crisis that highlight “toxic polarization” imply the two sides are equally responsible for that crisis. They aren’t. While both wings of U.S. politics have fanned polarization’s flames, blame lies disproportionately on the political right.

According to Harvard’s renowned sociologist and political scientist Theda Skocpol, in the early 2000s fringe elements of the Republican party used disciplined tactics and enormous streams of money (from billionaires like the Koch brothers) to turn extreme laissez-faire ideology into orthodox Republican dogma. Then, in 2008, Barack Obama’s election as president increased anxieties about immigration and cultural change among older, often economically insecure members of the white middle-class, who then coalesced into the populist Tea Party movement. Under Mr. Trump, the two forces were joined. The GOP became, Dr. Skocpol writes, a radicalized “marriage of convenience between anti-government free-market plutocrats and racially anxious ethno-nationalist activists and voters.”

Now, adopting Mr. Limbaugh’s tried-and-true methods, demagogues on the right are pushing the radicalization process further than ever before. By weaponizing people’s fear and anger, Mr. Trump and a host of acolytes and wannabees such as Fox’s Tucker Carlson and Georgia Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene have captured the storied GOP and transformed it into a near-fascist personality cult that’s a perfect instrument for wrecking democracy.

And it’s not inaccurate to use the F word. As conservative commentator David Frum argues, Trumpism increasingly resembles European fascism in its contempt for the rule of law and glorification of violence. Evidence is as close as the latest right-wing Twitter meme: widely circulated holiday photos show Republican politicians and their family members, including young children, sitting in front of their Christmas trees, all smiling gleefully while cradling pistols, shotguns and assault rifles.

Those guns are more than symbols. The Trump cult presents itself as the only truly patriotic party able to defend U.S. values and history against traitorous Democrats beholden to cosmopolitan elites and minorities who neither understand nor support “true” American values. The Jan. 6 storming of the U.S. capitol must be understood in these terms. The people involved didn’t think they were attacking U.S. democracy – although they unquestionably were. Instead, they believed their “patriotic” actions were needed to save it.

Democracy is an institution, but underpinning that institution is a vital set of beliefs and values. If a substantial enough fraction of a population no longer holds those beliefs and values, then democracy can’t survive. Probably the most important is recognition of the equality of the polity’s citizens in deciding its future; a close runner up is willingness to concede power to one’s political opponents, should those equal citizens decide that’s what they want. At the heart of the ideological narrative of U.S. right-wing demagogues, from Mr. Trump on down, is the implication that large segments of the country’s population – mainly the non-white, non-Christian, and educated urban ones – aren’t really equal citizens. They aren’t quite full Americans, or even real Americans.

This is why Mr. Trump’s “Big Lie” that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from him – a falsehood that nearly 70 per cent of Republicans now accept as true – is such potent anti-democratic poison. If the other side is willing to steal an election, then they don’t play by the rules. They’ve placed themselves outside the American moral community, which means they don’t deserve to be treated as equals. There’s certainly no reason to concede power to them, ever.

Willingness to publicly endorse the Big Lie has become a litmus test of Republican loyalty to Mr. Trump. This isn’t just an ideological move to promote Republican solidarity against Democrats. It puts its adherents one step away from the psychological dynamic of extreme dehumanization that has led to some of the worst violence in human history. And it has refashioned – into a moral crusade against evil – Republican efforts to gerrymander Congressional districts into pretzel-like shapes, to restrict voting rights, and to take control of state-level electoral apparatuses.

When the situation is framed in such a Manichean way, righteous ends justify any means. One of the two American parties is now devoted to victory at any cost.

Many of those with guns are waiting for a signal to use them. Polls show that between 20 and 30 million American adults believe both that the 2020 election was stolen from Mr. Trump and that violence is justified to return him to the presidency.

In the weeks before the November, 2016, U.S. election, I talked to several experts to gauge the danger of a Trump presidency. I recently consulted them again. While in 2016 they were alarmed, this last month most were utterly dismayed. All told me the U.S. political situation has deteriorated sharply since last year’s attack on Capitol Hill.

Jack Goldstone, a political sociologist at George Mason University in Washington, D.C., and a leading authority on the causes of state breakdown and revolution, told me that since 2016 we’ve learned that early optimism about the resilience of U.S. democracy was based on two false assumptions: “First, that American institutions would be strong enough to easily withstand efforts to subvert them; and second, that the vast majority of people will act rationally and be drawn to the political centre, so that it’s impossible for extremist groups to take over.”

But especially after the 2020 election, Dr. Goldstone said, we’ve seen that core institutions – from the Justice Department to county election boards – are susceptible to pressure. They’ve barely held firm. “We’ve also learned that the reasonable majority can be frightened and silenced if caught between extremes, while many others can be captured by mass delusions.” And to his surprise “moderate GOP leaders have either been forced out of the party or acquiesced to a party leadership that embraces lies and anti-democratic actions.”

Mr. Trump’s electoral loss has energized the Republican base and further radicalized young party members. Even without their concerted efforts to torque the machinery of the electoral system, Republicans will probably take control of both the House of Representatives and Senate this coming November, because the incumbent party generally fares poorly in mid-term elections. Republicans could easily score a massive victory, with voters ground down by the pandemic, angry about inflation, and tired of President Joe Biden bumbling from one crisis to another. Voters who identify as Independents are already migrating toward Republican candidates.

Once Republicans control Congress, Democrats will lose control of the national political agenda, giving Mr. Trump a clear shot at recapturing the presidency in 2024. And once in office, he will have only two objectives: vindication and vengeance.

A U.S. civil-military expert and senior federal appointee I consulted noted that a re-elected president Trump could be totally unconstrained, nationally and internationally.

A crucial factor determining how much constraint he faces will be the response of the U.S. military, a bulwark institution ardently committed to defending the Constitution. During the first Trump administration, members of the military repeatedly resisted the president’s authoritarian impulses and tried to anticipate and corral his rogue behaviour – most notably when Joint Chiefs Chairman General Mark Milley, shortly after the Capitol insurrection, ordered military officials to include him in any decision process involving the use of military force.

But in a second Trump administration, this expert suggested, the bulwark could crumble. By replacing the civilian leadership of the Department of Defense and the Joint Chiefs with lackeys and sycophants, he could so infiltrate the Department with his people that he’ll be able to bend it to his will.

After four years of Mr. Trump’s bedlam, the U.S. under Mr. Biden has been comparatively calm. Politics in the U.S. seems to have stabilized.

But absolutely nothing has stabilized in America. The country’s problems are systemic and deeply entrenched – and events could soon spiral out of control.

The experts I consulted described a range of possible outcomes if Mr. Trump returns to power, none benign. They cited particular countries and political regimes to illustrate where he might take the U.S.: Viktor Orban’s Hungary, with its coercive legal apparatus of “illiberal democracy”; Jair Bolsonaro’s Brazil, with its chronic social distemper and administrative dysfunction; or Vladimir Putin’s Russia, with its harsh one-man hyper-nationalist autocracy. All agreed that under a second Trump administration, liberalism will be marginalized and right-wing Christian groups super-empowered, while violence by vigilante, paramilitary groups will rise sharply.

Looking further down the road, some think that authority in American federalism is so disjointed and diffuse that Mr. Trump, especially given his manifest managerial incompetence, will never be able to achieve full authoritarian control. Others believe the pendulum will ultimately swing back to the Democrats when Republican mistakes accumulate, or that the radicalized Republican base – so fanatically loyal to Mr. Trump – can’t grow larger and will dissipate when its hero leaves the stage.

One can hope for these outcomes, because there are far worse scenarios. Something resembling civil war is one. Many pathways could take the country there – some described in Stephen Marche’s new book The Next Civil War: Dispatches from the American Future. The most plausible start with a disputed 2024 presidential election. Perhaps Democrats squeak out a victory, and Republican states refuse to recognize the result. Or conversely, perhaps Republicans win, but only because Republican state legislatures override voting results; then Democratic protestors attack those legislatures. In either circumstance, much will depend on whether the country’s military splits along partisan lines.

But there’s another political regime, a historical one, that may portend an even more dire future for the U.S.: the Weimar Republic. The situation in Germany in the 1920s and early 1930s was of course sui generis; in particular, the country had experienced staggering traumas – defeat in war, internal revolution and hyperinflation – while the country’s commitment to liberal democracy was weakly rooted in its culture. But as I read a history of the doomed republic this past summer, I tallied no fewer than five unnerving parallels with the current U.S. situation.

First, in both cases, a charismatic leader was able to unify right-wing extremists around a political program to seize the state. Second, a bald falsehood about how enemies inside the polity had betrayed the country – for the Nazis, the “stab in the back,” and for Trumpists, the Big Lie – was a vital psychological tool for radicalizing and mobilizing followers. Third, conventional conservatives believed they could control and channel the charismatic leader and rising extremism but were ultimately routed by the forces they helped unleash. Fourth, ideological opponents of this rising extremism squabbled among themselves; they didn’t take the threat seriously enough, even though it was growing in plain sight; and they focused on marginal issues that were too often red meat for the extremists. (Today, think toppling statues.)

To my mind, though, the fifth parallel is the most disconcerting: the propagation of a “hardline security doctrine.” Here I’ve been influenced by the research of Jonathan Leader Maynard, a young English scholar who is emerging as one of the world’s most brilliant thinkers on the links between ideology, extremism and violence. In a forthcoming book, Ideology and Mass Killing, Dr. Leader Maynard argues that extremist right-wing ideologies generally don’t arise from explicit efforts to forge an authoritarian society, but from the radicalization of a society’s existing understandings of how it can stay safe and secure in the face of alleged threats.

Hardline conceptions of security are “radicalized versions of familiar claims about threat, self-defence, punishment, war, and duty,” he writes. They are the foundation on which regimes organize campaigns of violent persecution and terror. People he calls “hardliners” believe the world contains many “dangerous enemies that frequently operate in and through purported ‘civilian’ groups.” Hardliners increasingly dominate Trumpist circles now.

Dr. Leader Maynard then makes a complementary argument: Once a hardline doctrine is widely accepted within a political movement, it becomes an “infrastructure” of ideas and incentives that can pressure even those who don’t really accept the doctrine into following its dictates. Fear of “true believers” shifts the behaviour of the movement’s moderates toward extremism. Sure enough, the experts I recently consulted all spoke about how fear of crossing Mr. Trump’s base – including fear for their families’ physical safety – was forcing otherwise sensible Republicans to fall into line.

The rapid propagation of hardline security doctrines through a society, Dr. Leader Maynard says, typically occurs in times of political and economic crisis. Even in the Weimar Republic, the vote for the National Socialists was closely correlated with the unemployment rate. The Nazis were in trouble (with their share of the vote falling and the party beset by internal disputes) as late as 1927, before the German economy started to contract. Then, of course, the Depression hit. The United States today is in the midst of crisis – caused by the pandemic, obviously – but it could experience far worse before long: perhaps a war with Russia, Iran or China, or a financial crisis when economic bubbles caused by excessive liquidity burst.

Beyond a certain threshold, other new research shows, political extremism feeds on itself, pushing polarization toward an irreversible tipping point. This suggests a sixth potential parallel with Weimar: democratic collapse followed by the consolidation of dictatorship. Mr. Trump may be just a warm-up act – someone ideal to bring about the first stage, but not the second. Returning to office, he’ll be the wrecking ball that demolishes democracy, but the process will produce a political and social shambles. Still, through targeted harassment and dismissal, he’ll be able to thin the ranks of his movement’s opponents within the state – the bureaucrats, officials and technocrats who oversee the non-partisan functioning of core institutions and abide by the rule of law. Then the stage will be set for a more managerially competent ruler, after Mr. Trump, to bring order to the chaos he’s created.

A terrible storm is coming from the south, and Canada is woefully unprepared. Over the past year we’ve turned our attention inward, distracted by the challenges of COVID-19, reconciliation, and the accelerating effects of climate change. But now we must focus on the urgent problem of what to do about the likely unravelling of democracy in the United States.

We need to start by fully recognizing the magnitude of the danger. If Mr. Trump is re-elected, even under the more-optimistic scenarios the economic and political risks to our country will be innumerable. Driven by aggressive, reactive nationalism, Mr. Trump “could isolate Canada continentally,” as one of my interlocutors put it euphemistically.

Under the less-optimistic scenarios, the risks to our country in their cumulative effect could easily be existential, far greater than any in our federation’s history. What happens, for instance, if high-profile political refugees fleeing persecution arrive in our country, and the U.S. regime demands them back. Do we comply?

In this context, it’s worth noting the words of Dmitry Muratov, the courageous Russian journalist who remains one of the few independent voices standing up to Mr. Putin and who just received the Nobel Prize for Peace. At a news conference after the awards ceremony in Oslo, as Russian troops and armour were massing on Ukraine’s borders, Mr. Muratov spoke of the iron link between authoritarianism and war. “Disbelief in democracy means that the countries that have abandoned it will get a dictator,” he said. “And where there is a dictatorship, there is a war. If we refuse democracy, we agree to war.”

Canada is not powerless in the face of these forces, at least not yet. Among other things, over three-quarters of a million Canadian emigrants live in the United States – many highly placed and influential – and together they’re a mass of people who could appreciably tilt the outcome of coming elections and the broader dynamics of the country’s political process.

But here’s my key recommendation: The Prime Minister should immediately convene a standing, non-partisan Parliamentary committee with representatives from the five sitting parties, all with full security clearances. It should be understood that this committee will continue to operate in coming years, regardless of changes in federal government. It should receive regular intelligence analyses and briefings by Canadian experts on political and social developments in the United States and their implications for democratic failure there. And it should be charged with providing the federal government with continuing, specific guidance as to how to prepare for and respond to that failure, should it occur.

If hope is to be a motivator and not a crutch, it needs to be honest and not false. It needs to be anchored in a realistic, evidence-based understanding of the dangers we face and a clear vision of how to get past those dangers to a good future. Canada is itself flawed, but it’s still one of the most remarkably just and prosperous societies in human history. It must rise to this challenge.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Friday, July 4, 2025 6:46 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


The Psychology of Trump Voters

They're not following Trump because of what he does. They're following him because of how he makes them feel. Understanding it is the first step in breaking the spell.

By Jayne jayneconverse3 | June 27, 2025

https://www.tiktok.com/@jayneconverse3/video/7520454365123972365 (5 minutes: 36-second long video which is worth checking out)

I’ve been dying to dig into this. I’ve been asking myself why Trump’s followers can’t see reality. So I did my research, and I’m going to share it with you.

Let’s talk about the psychology behind the Trump Cult, because that’s what it is. It’s not a normal political movement anymore, it’s a cult of personality and if we want to fight it, we have to understand it. So, let’s break it down.

First, Trump doesn’t offer policies, he offers identity. He’s not popular because of what he does, but because of what he represents. To many of his followers, he’s a walking, talking middle finger to a system they believe has failed them.¹

They see him as “their guy,” not because he’s honest, not because he helps them, but because he talks like them, rages like them, and punches the people they’ve been told to blame for everything.²

In psychology, there’s a term for this: “Identity fusion.” It’s when your personal identity becomes fused with your group or leader. That’s why criticism of Trump feels like a personal attack to his supporters. It’s not just “he’s being criticized,” it’s “I’m being criticized.”

Second, he offers revenge, not solutions. He doesn’t promise to fix healthcare, or raise wages, or protect your rights; he promises to go after “them.” Whether it’s immigrants, the press, Black activists, LGBTQ people, liberals, college students, elites, anyone outside the tribe… that’s classic authoritarianism.

Give people a sense of loss, tell them who stole it, then promise to make them pay. And to some people, that rage, that promise of vengeance is more emotionally satisfying than actual policy. It doesn’t fix their problems, but it feels like power.

Third: People crave order, and Trump promises strength. When institutions fail, when you don’t trust the media, the courts, elections, schools³, you start to look for a savior: Someone who says, “Only I can fix it.” That’s why Trump acts like a strong man. He creates the crisis, then sells himself as the only one tough enough to stop it. He’s done that over and over and over again. He’s not leading a movement, he’s leading a dependency.

Fourth: His followers are trapped in an information bubble. They don’t just believe lies, they live inside them. Fox News, MAGA influencers, far-right churches, Trump’s own app Truth Social is a closed-loop ecosystem that tells them every day, “The elites hate you, the media lies, only Trump tells the truth.” 4 This is called “epistemic closure.” It’s cult logic. If Trump says it, it’s true. If the world says otherwise, the world is lying.

And then fifth: Shame is too powerful, so they double down, just like Trump does. Some Trump supporters know deep down that they’ve been conned. They’ve seen the cruelty, the corruption, the chaos, but they’ve already invested years of their identity into defending him.5 To walk away now would mean confronting shame, losing their community, admitting they were wrong, and that’s terrifying to them, so instead they dig in deeper.

And finally, and this one matters, Trump makes them feel seen. He tells them, “They’re not after me, they’re after you. I’m just in the way.” That line is emotional manipulation, but it works… because for millions of people who feel ignored, dismissed, mocked by elites, Trump says, “You matter. You’re not crazy, they are.” He gives them belonging, and in a country where loneliness is rising and inequality is everywhere, belonging is everything.

So when people ask, “Why do people love him? Why would they follow him off a cliff?” it’s not just politics, it’s psychology, it’s identity, and it’s fear. This is deliberate. Trump didn’t create the cult, he just saw the cracks in our society and weaponized them.

But here’s the thing: not everyone in that cult is unreachable. Some are too far gone, but others are on the edge, quiet, doubting, hurting. We don’t get them back with facts, we get them back by offering something Trump never will: real community, real care, and real solutions. Because people don’t join cults when they are happy and secure. They join when they are scared, isolated, and desperate for meaning.

So here’s your call to action: Keep speaking truth, keep exposing the con, and when you can, offer people a way out that doesn’t begin with shame, but with dignity. This fight isn’t just about defeating Trump, it’s about breaking the spell and building something better in it’s place. That’s how we get them in, that’s how we get them to abandon him.

Let’s do it.

The original video from “Jayne” jayneconverse3 was transcribed and footnoted on June 30, 2025 by The Old Wolf at https://playingintheworldgame.com/2025/06/30/the-psychology-of-trump-v
oters/

For example, here is footnote 4: How sad it must be — believing that scientists, scholars, historians, economists, and journalists have devoted their entire lives to deceiving you, while a reality TV star with decades of fraud and exhaustively documented lying is your only beacon of truth and honesty.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Tuesday, July 8, 2025 2:40 PM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


Why Do So Many People Think That Trump Is Good?

The work of the moral philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre helps illuminate some central questions of our time.

By David Brooks | July 8, 2025, 6 AM ET

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/07/trump-administration
-supporters-good/683441/

There’s a question that’s been bugging me for nearly a decade. How is it that half of America looks at Donald Trump and doesn’t find him morally repellent? He lies, cheats, steals, betrays, and behaves cruelly and corruptly, and more than 70 million Americans find him, at the very least, morally acceptable. Some even see him as heroic, admirable, and wonderful. What has brought us to this state of moral numbness?

I’m going to tell you a story that represents my best explanation for how America has fallen into this depressing condition. It’s a story that draws heavily on the thinking of Alasdair MacIntyre, the great moral philosopher, who died in May at age 94. It’s a story that tries to explain how Western culture evolved to the point where millions of us—and not just Republicans and Trump supporters—have been left unable to make basic moral judgments.

The story begins a long time ago. Go back to some ancient city—say, Athens in the age of Aristotle. In that city, the question “How do you define the purpose of your life?” would make no sense. Finding your life’s purpose was not an individual choice. Rather, people grew up within a dense network of family, tribe, city, and nation. They inherited from these entities a variety of duties, responsibilities, and obligations. They also inherited a social role, serving the people around them as soldiers, farmers, merchants, mothers, teachers.

Each of these social roles came with certain standards of excellence, a code to determine what they ought to do. There was an excellent way of being a warrior, a mother, a friend. In this moral system, a person sought to live up to those standards not only for the honor and money it might bring them, but because they wanted to measure up. A teacher would not let a student bribe his way to a higher grade, because that would betray the intrinsic qualities of excellence inherent in being a teacher.

Read: The Trump voters who like what they see
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2025/04/satisfied-trump-v
oters/682645/

By being excellent at my role, I contribute to the city that formed me. By serving the intrinsic standards of my practice, I gradually rise from being the mediocre person I am toward becoming the excellent person I could be. My life is given meaning within this lifelong journey toward excellence and full human flourishing. If I do this journey well, I have a sense of identity, self-respect, and purpose. I know what I was put on this Earth to do, and there is great comfort and fulfillment in that.

If all of this sounds abstract, let me give you a modern example. At his 2005 induction into the Baseball Hall of Fame, the former Chicago Cub Ryne Sandberg described his devotion to the craft of baseball: “I was in awe every time I walked onto the field. That’s respect. I was taught you never, ever disrespect your opponents or your teammates or your organization or your manager and never, ever your uniform. You make a great play, act like you’ve done it before; get a big hit, look for the third-base coach and get ready to run the bases.”

Sandberg gestured to the Hall of Fame inductees seated around him. “These guys sitting up here did not pave the way for the rest of us so that players could swing for the fences every time up and forget how to move a runner over to third. It’s disrespectful to them, to you, and to the game of baseball we all played growing up.” He continued: “I didn’t play the game right because I saw a reward at the end of the tunnel. I played it right because that’s what you’re supposed to do—play it right and with respect.”

Sandberg’s speech exemplifies this older moral code, with its inherited traditions of excellence. It conferred a moral template to evaluate the people around us and a set of moral standards to give shape and meaning to our lives.

Fast-forward from ancient Athens a thousand-plus years to the Middle Ages. Judaism, Christianity, and Islam changed the standards for what constituted human excellence, placing more value on compassion and humility, but people still shared a few of the old assumptions. Individuals didn’t choose their own morality—there was an essential moral order to the universe. Neither did they choose their individual life’s purpose. That, too, was woven into the good of their community—to serve society in some role, to pass down their way of life, to obey divine law.

Then came the 17th-century wars of religion, and the rivers of blood they produced. Revulsion toward all that contributed to the Enlightenment, with its disenchantment with religion and the valorization of reason. Enlightenment thinkers said: We can’t keep killing one another over whose morality is right. Let’s privatize morality. People can come up with their own values, and we will learn to live with that diversity.

Crudely put, the Enlightenment took away the primacy of the community and replaced it with the primacy of the autonomous individual. It created neutral public systems such as democracy, law, and free speech to give individuals a spacious civil order within which they could figure their own life. Common morality, if it existed at all, was based on reason, not religious dogmatism, and devotion to that common order was voluntary. Utilitarianism was one such attempt at creating this kind of rational moral system—do the thing that will give people pleasure; don’t do the thing that will cause others pain.

I think the Enlightenment was a great step forward, producing, among other things, the American system of government. I value the freedom we now have to craft our own lives, and believe that within that freedom, we can still hew to fixed moral principles. Look at the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. if you doubt me.

There’s an old joke that you can tell what kind of conservative a person is by what year they want to go back to. I’d say the decline of a shared morality happened over the past 60 years with the rise of hyper-individualism and moral relativism. MacIntyre, by contrast, argued that the loss of moral coherence was baked into the Enlightenment from its start, during the 18th century. The Enlightenment project failed, he argued, because it produced rationalistic systems of morals too thin and abstract to give meaning to actual lives. It destroyed coherent moral ecologies and left autonomous individuals naked and alone. Furthermore, it devalued the very faculties people had long used to find meaning. Reason and science are great at telling you how to do things, but not at answering the fundamental questions: Why are we here? What is the ultimate purpose of my life? What is right and what is wrong?

And then in the 19th and 20th centuries, along came the crew who tried to fill the moral vacuum the Enlightenment created. Nietzsche, for example, said: God is dead. We have killed him. Reason won’t save us. It’s up to heroic autonomous individuals to find meaning through some audacious act of will. We will become our own gods! Several decades later, Lenin, Mao, and Hitler came along, telling the people: You want some meaning in your life? March with me.

Psychologists have a saying: The hardest thing to cure is the patient’s attempt to self-cure. We’ve tried to cure the moral vacuum MacIntyre saw at the center of the Enlightenment with narcissism, fanaticism, and authoritarianism—and the cure turned out to be worse than the disease.

Today, we live in a world in which many, or even most, people no longer have a sense that there is a permanent moral order to the universe. More than that, many have come to regard the traditions of moral practice that were so central to the ancient worldview as too inhibiting—they get in the way of maximum individual freedom. As MacIntyre put it in his most famous book, After Virtue, “Each moral agent now spoke unconstrained by the externalities of divine law, natural teleology, or hierarchical authority.” Individuals get to make lots of choices, but they lack the coherent moral criteria required to make these choices well.

After Virtue opens with MacIntyre’s most famous thought experiment. Imagine, he writes, that somebody took all of the science books that have ever been written and shredded them. Meanwhile, all of the scientists have been killed and all of the laboratories burned down. All we are left with are some random pages from this science textbook or that. We would still have access to some scientific phrases such as neutrino or mass or atomic weight, but we would have no clue how they all fit together.

Our moral life, he asserts, is kind of like that. We use words like virtue and phrases like the purpose of life, but they are just random fragments that don’t cohere into a system you can bet your life on. People have been cut off from any vision of their ultimate purpose.

How do people make decisions about the right thing to do if they are not embedded in a permanent moral order? They do whatever feels right to them at the moment. MacIntyre called this “emotivism,” the idea that “all moral judgments are nothing but expressions of preference, expressions of attitude or feeling.” Emotivism feels natural within capitalist societies, because capitalism is an economic system built around individual consumer preferences.

One of the problems with living in a society with no shared moral order is that we have no way to settle arguments. We have no objective standard by which to determine that one view is right and another view is wrong. So public arguments just go on indefinitely, at greater levels of indignation and polarization. People use self-righteous words to try to get their way, but instead of engaging in moral argument, what they’re really doing is using the language of morality to enforce their own preferences.

If no one can persuade anybody about right and wrong, then there are only two ways to settle our differences: coercion or manipulation. Each of us comes to regard other members of society as simply means to our ends, who can be coerced into believing what we believe. (Welcome to corporate DEI programs.) Alternatively, advertisers, demagogues, and influencers try to manipulate our emotions so we will end up wanting what they want, helping them get what they want. (Welcome to the world of that master manipulator, Donald Trump.)

In the 1980s, the philosopher Allan Bloom wrote a book arguing that in a world without moral standards, people just become bland moral relativists: You do you. I’ll do me. None of it matters very much. This is what Kierkegaard called an aesthetic life: I make the choices that feel pleasant at the moment, and I just won’t think much about life’s ultimate concerns. As MacIntyre put it, “The choice between the ethical and the aesthetic is not the choice between good and evil, it is the choice whether or not to choose in terms of good and evil.”

But the moral relativism of the 1980s and ’90s looks like a golden age of peace and tranquility compared with today. Over the past 30 years, people have tried to fill the hole in their soul by seeking to derive a sense of righteousness through their political identities. And when you do that, politics begins to permeate everything and turns into a holy war in which compromise begins to seem like betrayal.

Worse, people are unschooled in the virtues that are practical tools for leading a good life: honesty, fidelity, compassion, other-centeredness. People are rendered anxious and fragile. As Nietzsche himself observed, those who know why they live can endure anyhow. But if you don’t know why you’re living, then you fall apart when the setbacks come.

Society tends to disintegrate. Ted Clayton, a political scientist at Central Michigan University, put it well: “MacIntyre argues that today we live in a fragmented society made up of individuals who have no conception of the common good, no way to come together to pursue a common good, no way to persuade one another what the common good might be, and indeed most of us believe that the common good does not and cannot exist.”

Along comes Trump, who doesn’t even try to speak the language of morality. When he pardons unrepentant sleazeballs, it doesn’t seem to even occur to him that he is doing something that weakens our shared moral norms. Trump speaks the languages we moderns can understand. The language of preference: I want. The language of power: I have the leverage. The languages of self, of gain, of acquisition. Trump doesn’t subsume himself in a social role. He doesn’t try to live up to the standards of excellence inherent in a social practice. He treats even the presidency itself as a piece of personal property he can use to get what he wants. As the political theorist Yuval Levin has observed, there are a lot of people, and Trump is one of them, who don’t seek to be formed by the institutions they enter. They seek instead to use those institutions as a stage to perform on, to display their wonderful selves.

So of course many people don’t find Trump morally repellent. He’s just an exaggerated version of the kind of person modern society was designed to create. And Democrats, don’t feel too self-righteous here. If he was on your team, most of you would like him too. You may deny it, but you’re lying to yourself. Few of us escape the moral climate of our age. As MacIntyre himself put it, “The barbarians are not waiting beyond the frontiers; they have already been governing us for quite some time. And it is our lack of consciousness of this that constitutes part of our predicament.”

MacIntyre was a radical—both of the left and the right. He wanted us to return to the kind of coherent, precapitalist moral communities that existed before the Enlightenment project failed, locally at first and then on a larger scale. That’s the project that a lot of today’s post-liberals have embarked upon, building coherent communities around stronger gods—faith, family, flag.

I confess I find many of the more recent post-liberals—of both left- and right-wing varieties—absurd. People who never matured past the first week of grad school can spin abstract theories about re-creating some sort of totalistic solidarity, but what post-liberalism amounts to in real life is brutal authoritarianism. (A century ago, Marxists talked in similarly lofty terms about building solidarity, but what their ideas led to in the real world was a bunch of gangster states, such as the Soviet Union.)


We’re not walking away from pluralism, nor should we. In fact, pluralism is the answer. The pluralist has the ability to sit within the tension created by incommensurate values. A good pluralist can celebrate the Enlightenment, democratic capitalism, and ethnic and intellectual diversity on the one and also a respect for the kind of permanent truths and eternal values that MacIntyre celebrates on the other.

A good pluralist can see his or her life the way that the former Cub Ryne Sandberg saw his—subservient to a social role, willing to occasionally sacrifice immediate self-interest in order to get the runner into scoring position.

Recovering from the moral scourge of Trumpism means restoring the vocabulary that people can use to talk coherently about their moral lives, and distinguish a person with character from a person without it.

We don’t need to entirely reject the Enlightenment project, but we probably need to recalibrate the culture so that people are more willing to sacrifice some freedom of autonomy for the sake of the larger community. We need to offer the coming generations an education in morals as rigorous as their technical and career education. As the ancients understood, this involves the formation of the heart and the will as much as the formation of the rational mind.

These are the kinds of humanistic endeavors that MacIntyre devoted himself to, and they are part of the legacy he leaves behind.

Download Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue from https://annas-archive.org/search?q=Alasdair+MacIntyre+After+Virtue

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


The Contradiction at the Heart of All Conflict

By Daniel Shotkin| Sunday, Jul 13, 2025 5:30AM

https://3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2025/07/the-contradiction-at-the
-heart-of-all-conflict.html

Conflict follows us everywhere. Terrible drivers, horrible friends, evil politicians—the list goes on and on. For me, most conflicts never really made much sense. I avoid clashing with people as much as possible. It feels self-righteous, almost cringey, to be in a state of dispute. Ironic, because my favorite club in high school was debate. Still, I know people who, far from avoiding conflict, thrive in argument. So why do we conflict?

On a basic level, almost every human can agree on a core set of moral principles. Thou shalt not kill, thou shalt not steal, do unto others as you would have them do unto you. These are fundamental truths present in every culture. The three Abrahamic faiths, Hinduism, and Confucianism all espouse that last point independently. Even cultural practices that are, to us, morally questionable (think human sacrifice, headhunting) can’t be chalked up to evil intentions. Can you really blame the Aztecs for wanting to appease Quetzalcoatl?

At the end of the day, you’d be hard-pressed to find anyone who acts without explicit good intentions. Look at a morally deplorable historical figure, and you’ll see that even they acted with “good” in mind. Regimes don’t declare war, restrict speech, or commit genocide for evil’s sake; they do so in the name of national security. Similarly, ask any two beefing high schoolers, and you’ll see that neither did anything, and even if they did, it wasn’t on purpose—and actually, it was the other one who wanted to start shit.

So, logically, we’re in agreement. Then why do we still conflict?

Personal conflicts have been the focus of countless psychologists. John Dollard coined the frustration-aggression hypothesis in 1939, focusing on frustration as a root cause of conflict. Leon Festinger proposed that conflict occurs when people’s actions misalign with their beliefs. Finally, social psychologist Albert Bandura believed that children learn aggressive behavior from parents, media, and their environment—his social learning theory. A common thread among these explanations is a focus on a specific trait—frustration, dissonance, learning—as the cause of conflict.

On a broader level, sociologists have tried to explain conflict through a focus on societal traits. Critical theory proposes that conflict arises through power structures and imbalances. Its contentious namesake, critical race theory, focuses on race as a source of division. Extend sociology to broader political ideologies, and Marxists will tell you all conflict is class conflict, while Fascists argue it’s racial or national.

Global conflicts are tougher to pinpoint, mainly because of the countless factors involved. Realist international theorists argue that conflict is rooted in the rational actions of self-interested states. All international conflict is, therefore, the result of overlapping security interests. Liberal theorists posit a global international order based on rules, statutes, and conventions. Conflict comes when states fail to participate in the rules-based order.

All these theories focus on traits at various levels of conflict, but there’s a broader way to unify them. If you’ve ever talked to someone who radically disagrees with you, you understand that conflict is more than just a difference in opinion, cognitive traits, or social circumstance—it’s a clash of realities.

A perfect example of this, in my experience, comes when discussing current events at my high school. The war in Ukraine is a central talking point in the news, and so it’s come up more than once in discussions with friends. As someone who speaks Russian at home, has friends and family in Russia, and has visited more than once, I’m inevitably asked about my thoughts on the war. Of course, I’m no supporter of Putin—I am against the war in every way. Then comes the follow-up: Do they support the war in Russia? I’d love to say that Russians are vehemently against the war, but the truth is, the overwhelming consensus is either apathy or support. The implication, then, is that Russians support an illegal invasion and are in favor of attacking a sovereign country. But from experience talking to Russians, that just isn’t the case.

Russian supporters of the war aren’t in support because they want an illegal invasion or have an irrational hate of Ukraine, but because they believe in a “denazification,” or a “special military operation.” From that perspective, the entire framing of the conflict shifts—the war isn’t just legal, it’s necessary to ensure Russia’s security against the West. This is more than just a difference in perspective; it’s a fundamental shift in how reality itself is perceived.

Similarly, I have an Israeli friend—call him N—with whom I frequently discuss the war in Gaza. N believes that the hostages should be returned to Israel as soon as possible, and that the Israeli government is justified in using any means to bring them back. As an Israeli, he’s absolutely justified in believing this. N’s reality is that October 7th was the single deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust, and that Israel is fighting to bring back the 250 Israeli civilians held hostage by Hamas. Of course, the Palestinian reality is that since Israel began military operations in Gaza, thousands of Palestinian civilians have died, the entirety of Gaza has been displaced, and its two million civilians are at risk of famine. Palestinians are equally justified in their reality because of the extreme death and destruction caused by Israel’s offensive. Both realities are true, but at the same time, they negate one another—and that’s where the root of conflict sits.

These two perspectives aren’t just opinions; they are fundamentally different perceptions of reality. Israelis view the war in a completely different way from Palestinians, and vice versa, to such an extent that even hard facts become disputed. As of July 3rd, the official count of civilian deaths in Gaza is 57,645, but even that number is contested by the Israeli government, which claims that Gaza’s Health Ministry inflates the toll. The saying goes that truth is the first casualty of war, but it feels like it’s the other way around. Conflict arises when two truths conflict with one another.

At the end of the day, in any dispute, both realities are true—which is why conflicts can escalate to such vast levels. The reason why we feel so deeply about deep-seated conflicts is because our reality is in contradiction to the other side’s. Even on a personal level, any breakup, divorce, or falling out stems from two true but conflicting perspectives on the same events. It’s also why we can argue for hours without finding agreement—no matter what facts we present, the other side will always view them through the lens of their own reality, which is fundamentally opposed to ours. This also explains the contradiction I presented at the start of this article—we all agree that murder is morally wrong, but self-defense, revenge, and national security are less clear-cut—our realities influence how we frame any action.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Sunday, July 13, 2025 11:09 AM

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The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


Lasching Out - The Ideas Letter

By Soli Özel | July 10, 2025 | The Ideas Letter 44

https://www.theideasletter.org/essay/lasching-out/

(Christopher Lasch leading a student Seminar at the University of Buffalo in the 1980s. Photo courtesy of the University of Buffalo)

“Everything in Trumpworld happens twice,” the Irish journalist Fintan O’Toole wrote recently—“the first time as performance and the second as reality.” He was commenting on the deployment of the U.S. National Guard and U.S. Marines in Los Angeles against protesters challenging President Donald Trump’s immigration policies. If Trump’s victory in 2016 was performance, the aftermath of his 2024 victory is reality. And that reality, now manifest daily, is one that most liberals, leftists, or middle-of-the-roaders had not fully anticipated, despite warnings.

Among the most prescient, consistent, and insistent critics to warn the United States of its own frailties was the historian Christopher Lasch.

Some observers were blinded by their belief in the rootedness and resilience of the country’s institutions, its liberal political tradition, and the irreversibility of progress. Others failed to fully appreciate how money would corrode the American political system and would so deepen cultural-cum-class polarization. But beginning several decades ago, Lasch identified the growing divide between the educated managerial elites and the bulk of the lesser educated public.

Writing of “an enlightened elite (as it thinks of itself),” he argued that it “seeks not so much to impose its values on the majority (a majority perceived as incorrigibly racist, sexist, provincial, and xenophobic), much less to persuade the majority by means of rational public debate, as to create parallel or ‘alternative’ institutions in which it will no longer be necessary to confront the unenlightened at all.” American democracy would deteriorate based on “the routine acceptance of professionals as a class apart.”

Lasch was erudite. He was engaged in intellectual conversation with different disciplines, theories, and approaches worldwide, including the Frankfurt School, which inspired his texts from the late 1970s and 1980s. His major works present an archeology of social and political upheavals today: He identified long ago the roots of the current crisis of liberalism in the United States. After arguing that neither socialism nor fascism represented the future, Lasch asserted that “the danger to democracy comes less from totalitarian or collectivist movements abroad than from the erosion of its psychological, cultural, and spiritual foundations from within.”

Lasch’s last book, The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy, was published posthumously, in 1995; he had rushed it into print as he was fighting cancer. In that work, along with what is arguably his most famous book, The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations (1979), and his most substantive one, The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics (1991), he identified, with alarm, the corrosive influence of markets and bureaucratization on individualism and responsible citizenship. He also tracked the economic and cultural trends that turned citizens into consumers and created an environment in which “indifference, not the fear of deeply divisive disagreements, underlies the public’s refusal to get excited about politics.” And, for Lasch, “this indifference betrays the erosion of the capacity to take any interest in anything outside the self.”

To read Lasch, therefore, is in part to read the history of the transformation of capitalism, class, and cultural conflict in America over the last few decades—the rise of a mainly white, middle-age, and middle-class rebellion with patriarchal leanings—well before all those issues crystallized over wokeness and the inequalities caused by globalization.

Writing The Revolt of the Elites in the heyday of the West’s triumphalism after the end of the Cold War, Lasch questioned its self-congratulatory tone over the supposed victory of liberal democratic capitalism. As a critic of progressivism—an obsession, he believed, of both the right and the left—he called attention to the growing crisis of citizenship in advanced capitalist democracies such as the U.S. and warned, “Having defeated its totalitarian adversaries, liberalism is crumbling from within.” One reason for this, he argued, in keeping with themes he had pursued in the 1970s and 80s, was that: “Liberalism was never utopian, unless the democratization of consumption is itself a utopian ideal. It made no difficult demands on human nature”—and yet, to him, such demands were precisely what made civic virtue.

His solution? Populism. One could say Lasch was a romantic when it came to rectifying an enfeebled democracy. But today the burgeoning literature on populism sees the movement as a threat to democracy. The German political philosopher Jan-Werner Müller has argued that populism is not just anti-elite but also anti-pluralism: Populists believe they are the only true representatives of the people and that anyone who is not with them is not part of the people. This exclusivist approach is inherently authoritarian, and so populism is, on the face of it, against liberalism and democracy.

For Lasch, though, writing in the early 1990s, “at a time when other ideologies are greeted with apathy, populism has the capacity to generate real enthusiasm,” because “populism, as I understand it, is unambiguously committed to the principle of respect.” In his view, respect was the essential ingredient of civic virtue—without it, liberalism loses its constitutive ethos and deteriorates toward “a narcissistic preoccupation with the self.” Populism, he wrote, “is the authentic voice of democracy.”

Lasch did recognize that:

“It would be foolish to deny the characteristic features of populist movements at their worst—racism, anti-Semitism, nativism, anti-intellectualism, and all the other evils so often cited by liberal critics. But it would be equally foolish to deny what is indispensable in this tradition—its appreciation of the moral value of honest work, its respect for competence, its egalitarian opposition to entrenched privilege, its refusal to be impressed by the jargon of experts, its insistence on plain speech and on holding people accountable for their actions.”

Considering today’s realities, it turns out that he could have been more circumspect about tooting the positive aspects of populism.

A Leftist Conservative

Lasch was a critic from within, if not at times a contrarian. As a person of the left, he started to ring the alarm for the leftish-liberal New Deal order during social and political turbulence prompted by the civil rights movement, the Vietnam War, and student radicalism in the United States. Though he then remained a leftist in matters of political economy—in particular privileging equality in both economic and especially civic matters—he gradually distanced himself from the social and cultural tenets of the New Left. He believed that the once-hopeful movement of the ‘60s had gradually substituted culture for class and that its sense of individualism had paved the way for the neoliberal order and its egotistic ethos. “Most of us can see the system but not the class that administers it and monopolizes its wealth,” he wrote. “We resist a class analysis of modern society as a ‘conspiracy theory.’ Thus, we prevent ourselves from understanding how our current difficulties arose, why they persist, or how they might be solved.”

In the late 1970s, during the depths of the stagflation years that followed the 1973 oil crisis, Lasch published his cri du coeur about the family, Haven in a Heartless World. The family unit was, to him, the mainstay of a healthy society, because it could instill in children a sense of authority, discipline, and solidarity, as well as responsibility—and now, in his view, the family’s cohesion and sustainability were under threat from the savage attacks of the market and bureaucratization.

The Culture of Narcissism came soon after. The media reported that it inspired President Jimmy Carter’s so-called “malaise” speech of July 1979, in which Carter attacked consumerism and selfishness. The speech backfired spectacularly in political terms: Soon after, the Iran hostage crisis began and he was seen as a defeatist who could not lead the nation. Lasch later claimed that Carter had misunderstood his work. Still, Lasch’s writings then reflected the overall pessimism of the times, and to this day, they are evidence of his perceptive assessment of the pitfalls of a liberal democracy built on market relations. Those trends only grew stronger in subsequent decades, propelling Trump and Trumpism to power.

Lasch argued that Americans in the 1970s suffered from three structural transformations: the rise of postindustrial modes of manufacturing, the ubiquity of mass media, and the undermining of the role of the family in socializing children and reproducing the community spirit. The market invaded and undermined the family, and the welfare state intruded on its most intimate issues, the better to regulate them. And these forces produced a new, modal type of personality: the narcissist. “The new narcissist is haunted not by guilt but by anxiety,” Lasch wrote; he “has no interest in the future because, in part, he has so little interest in the past”; “the cultural devaluation of the past reflects not only the poverty of the prevailing ideologies… but the poverty of the narcissist’s inner life.”

From the time these words were written to our times today, the structural transformations only deepened. So did the societal and political crises that these changes triggered or exacerbated under the combined weight of the technological and digital revolution, ever-freer trade, the free movement of capital in a hyperglobalized world, and a politics increasingly beholden to capital. I think Lasch would have said that the advent, later, of the internet and social media made only a quantitative difference to the influence of the media, which already was corrosive. As Fred Turner, a professor of communication at Stanford, has pointed out: “it is the need for advertisers to make a profit that has remained constant from Lasch’s time to our own. Together, the spread of electronic media and the arm-twisting habits of advertising, writes Lasch, have made ‘the categories of truth and falsehood irrelevant to an evaluation of their influence. Truth has given way to credibility.’”

The Analyst as Moralist

Lasch was a mid-Westerner with an Ivy League education who did not feel at ease, culturally or socially, in metropolitan and elite environments. He started reflecting much earlier than many on trends in American society that brought about today’s clear and present dangers of illiberal democracy and competitive authoritarianism. And unlike many commentators today, he put the blame squarely on the elites. At the same time, he was almost totally oblivious to the potential darkness in the ways and thoughts of the people he believed were being discounted or ignored by the managerial elites. He believed that they were the true bearers of virtues such as loyalty, honesty, restraint, good manners, a solid work ethic—the building blocks of a healthy democracy. Trumpism has proved him wrong.

Yet the dynamics he analyzed over several decades are now widely accepted as the economic, social, and cultural causes of Trumpism—even though Trump himself is arguably the unlikeliest of personalities to articulate and amplify the resentment of less educated white males. Remarkably—and this symbolizes both the severe erosion of the establishment’s legitimacy and the fury of those who feel to have been left behind, against existing democratic norms—Trump’s re-election as president in 2024 took place after he was convicted as a felon and he had encouraged his supporters to stage a coup after the 2020 election, which he lost but would not concede.

Lasch probably would not have been surprised by Trump’s victories: After all, he wrote back in 1991, in The True and Only Heaven, that “old political ideologies have exhausted their capacity to explain events or to inspire men and women to constructive action” and that “American society suffered from the collapse of legitimate authority.” He consistently blamed the crisis of democracy on the educated managerial class and its condescension of the lower classes, particularly white workers: “One study after another depicted a working class newly suburbanized, economically secure for the first time but socially at sea, resentful of blacks and other minorities pressing up from below, beset by status anxiety, and ripe for radical demagogues.” The elites looked upon the family structure, approach to education, and democratic values of this class as founts of authoritarianism—as a result, they welcomed its apathy toward political participation. And so Lasch concluded, “the only people who really mattered, it appeared, were the members of the professional and managerial class.”

The main tenets of Lasch’s analysis about economic dynamics, the clash of cultures as a substitute for class struggle, the devastating effects of the crisis of the family, and the quest for social equality and justice did not change over time. His social and cultural views did evolve, in a more conservative direction, as he increasingly came to see the family and religious belief as the bulwarks of a stable and functional society. And yet he did not join the ranks of political conservatism or neo-conservatism. There is an admirable consistency in Lasch’s work, as well as a Coleridge-type of temperament, which does not fear change but instead wishes for change to be rooted in tradition and carried out through the agency of institutions. It is questionable, though, whether what he yearned for—a return to a simpler capitalism, the entrepreneurial spirit, de-bureaucratization, civic responsibility, citizenship not consumerism, social equality—could be attainable today. Then again, for a man who disliked nostalgia, Lasch arguably was being nostalgic about times long gone and that could never return as capitalism transformed itself.

Today’s Gaze

Reading Lasch’s work now reveals a simple truth: Many, if not most, of the analyses in circulation since Trump’s victory in 2016 had been readily available in the past. Trumpism also clearly had political precursors. And yet for decades the trends Lasch identified were not taken with the seriousness they deserved. They were filtered out as anomalies by the prevalent liberal ethos or, in Lasch’s parlance, the “progressive elitist” outlook of the managerial classes.

In fact, though, the 1992 presidential elections—held on the heels of the United States’ first post–Cold War military victory, in Iraq—featured two candidates outside the prevailing consensus on cultural and economic matters: Pat Buchanan and Ross Perot. Buchanan’s challenge was staved off in the GOP primaries; the old Republican Party elite still held the reins. But Perot, a businessman like Trump, ran as an independent and received 18.9% of the vote—possibly contributing to Bill Clinton’s victory against George H.W. Bush. He spoke to the anxiety the working classes were feeling about losing jobs, income, and status to free trade, unimpeded capital flows, and immigration. Since his time, these anxieties have only been exacerbated. One must acknowledge, perhaps begrudgingly, that Trump acted as a catalyst in the wake of the great recession of 2008–09 and funneled all that pent-up fury into his campaign.

Lasch lamented that market relations penetrated every sphere of life, destroying civic responsibility, and he disdained the fact that money had become the measure of all activities. He thought that the liberal welfare state eroded individual self-reliance; he claimed that the market weakened the family and its role in sustaining a stable social order. In True and Only Heaven, he wrote:

“I have no intention of minimizing the narrowness and provincialism of lower-middle-class culture; nor do I deny that it has produced racism, nativism, anti-intellectualism, and all the other evils so often cited by liberal critics. But liberals have lost sight of what is valuable in lower-middle-class culture in their eagerness to condemn what is objectionable … : its moral realism, its understanding that everything has its price, its respect for limits, its skepticism about progress.”

He looked upon the family the same way he did the white working class or the populist crowds: He saw in both what he wished rather than what they might actually have thought, felt, or acted upon. He was always a passionate anti-capitalist, opposing in particular the bureaucratic-cum-corporate version of capitalism that relies on a vast managerial class. Public and private bureaucracies alike were, he believed, primarily responsible for creating a culture of dependency and indifference, which ill served a democratic order.

Although Lasch was very good at exposing the educated elites’ condescending views toward those they deemed uncouth, the working- and lower-middle classes, he left many questions open. For all his relentless critique of nostalgia, he offered no way to restore the family as the “haven” he thought it was supposed to be in ways that would respond to changes in gender roles, women’s participation in the work force, and the marketization of all social relations in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. That failing might tempt some to equate his alarm about the fate of the family with the reactionary proposals of Project 2025, by the Heritage Foundation, whose sole purpose appears to be to reestablish control over women. This was not Lasch’s point, nor was it his aspiration.

He would have lashed out at the regressive, repressive, and inegalitarian propositions of Project 2025. His understanding of the function of the family was not at all the same: On political economy as well as ethics, Lasch stood almost at the opposite of the Heritage Foundation’s report. But because his work remained unfinished at his death, he did not have a chance to propose a fuller picture of how to restructure the family for the 21st century while maintaining its core attributes in a way that would build a civic culture.

“Does Democracy Deserve to Survive?”

Such is the title of one of Lasch’s essays anthologized in The Revolt of the Elites, first written in 1992, and this question remains, or recurs, as the second Trump administration disproves the comforting political notion that America’s institutions can hold the line against any assault on liberal democratic principles and practices. We now know better. A determined and unscrupulous executive, combined with a subservient legislature and a Supreme Court ideologically committed to the theory of the unitary executive, can and do forcefully disrupt the balance among the branches of government, trample the rule of law, and weaken democratic norms.

Lasch saw this coming 30 years ago, when he argued: “Liberals have always taken the position that democracy can dispense with civic virtue. According to this way of thinking, it is liberal institutions, not the character of citizens, that make democracy work.” And I have no doubt Lasch would say that democracy does deserve to survive. After all, he relentlessly criticized the elites out of anger that they were betraying democracy. He railed against them and their “revolt,” as he put it, precisely for undermining the democratic ideal, abusing meritocracy, and caring nothing about either income or social inequality. In his anger, though, he downplayed the nature of the potential counter elite—the one that now holds the reins of power in America and is paving the way for an authoritarian and regressive system. Despite his consistent warnings about the power of capitalist classes, Lasch was unable to foresee how a plutocracy could adjust to new circumstances and adopt an inward-looking political, economic, and cultural program.?

The real question, though, is one that he posed this way: “For all its intrinsic attractions, democracy is not an end in itself. It has to be judged by its success in producing superior goods, superior works of art and learning, a superior type of character.” It is through this lens that the decline in popular support for democracy in all advanced capitalist democracies ought to be assessed.

The social and political agenda of Trumpism, its intellectual backdrop (including Project 2025), and certainly the second Trump administration’s record to date go against the grain of a liberal democratic order. Yet so far, the people whom Lasch, the Midwesterner, championed for their commitment to the civic virtues he cherished—equality, co-existence, constructive political engagement—have failed to show up to defend them.

Time will tell if the calamitous economic consequences of the One Big Beautiful Bill for the poor and the lower-middle classes will lead to a revolt against the plutocracy and a search for a more meaningful democratic system predicated on equality and civic virtues. Now for the stress test. In 1787, Benjamin Franklin was asked, “Well, Doctor, what have we got: a republic or a monarchy?” He famously answered, “A Republic, if you can keep it.”

If you can keep it.

Soli Özel, a political scientist, is a senior fellow at L’Institut Montaigne, in Paris, and a visiting fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences (IWM), in Vienna.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Monday, July 14, 2025 3:22 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


More walls of text that nobody will read from failed "intellectuals" who got too high off of their own farts...

*yawn*

--------------------------------------------------

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon

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Monday, July 14, 2025 3:26 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:
Originally posted by second:
The American polity is cracked, and might collapse. Canada must prepare

The U.S. is becoming increasingly ungovernable, and some experts believe it could descend into civil war. What should Canada do then?

By Thomas Homer-Dixon

Published December 31, 2021
Updated January 2, 2022

This article was published more than 3 years ago. Some information may no longer be current.


We're a lot more governable than we were 3 years ago.

We're kicking out millions who don't belong here and people are going to prison for breaking the law again. And the world gets to see how you Leftoids burning everything down are insane. AND the NGO money that was funding all of these inorganic protests is basically gone, so that won't be happening much if at all anymore either.

This article came from long ago, years before the end of the shithole world from 6 months ago that you're still stuck in.



--------------------------------------------------

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon

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Sunday, July 20, 2025 10:30 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

We're a lot more governable than we were 3 years ago.

We're kicking out millions who don't belong here and people are going to prison for breaking the law again. And the world gets to see how you Leftoids burning everything down are insane. AND the NGO money that was funding all of these inorganic protests is basically gone, so that won't be happening much if at all anymore either.

This article came from long ago, years before the end of the shithole world from 6 months ago that you're still stuck in.
Trump is failing to deport millions. His promise will eventually be that despite only deporting a million in the first 3 and a half years, he'll deport the next 10,000,000 in his final 6 months:

The discrepancy between arrests and deportations highlights the challenges the Trump administration faces to make good on Trump’s Inauguration Day vow to deport “millions and millions” of immigrants.

According to ICE data, its agents arrested roughly 30,000 immigrants last month, the most since monthly data was made publicly available in November 2020. But the number of immigrants deported in June — more than 18,000 — amounted to roughly half the number of arrests, according to internal figures obtained by NBC News.

The difference between arrests and deportations was similar the previous month. The Trump administration took roughly 24,000 immigrants into custody in May and deported over 15,000, according to the ICE data.

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/immigration/trumps-immigration-record
-far-high-arrests-low-deportations-rcna217752

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Sunday, July 20, 2025 10:31 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


The benefits of vigilance

In Finland, preparation – in this case, preparation for the possibility of war with Russia – is not just sensible policy, but somewhat of an antidote to the spiraling hyperpolarization seen in many other countries.

By Mark Sappenfield | July 20, 2025, 5:00 a.m. ET

https://www.csmonitor.com/Commentary/From-the-Editors/2025/0720/finlan
d-russia-preparation-vigilance

Preparation is hard, and it doesn’t offer many political advantages. The benefits, after all, always seem to be further down the road.

But that’s not how the people of Finland see it, particularly when it comes to national security.

Last month, I spent a week in Finland reporting the cover story in the July 21 issue of the Monitor Weekly. (‘It’s everyone’s business.’ In Finland, national security is a shared responsibility.) I came back with the strong impression that preparation is something of an antidote to the spiraling hyperpolarization we see in many countries, particularly in the United States.

In Finland’s case, it is preparation for war with its neighbor Russia. The Ukraine war might have come as a shock to the rest of the world. But Finns have been expecting something of the sort since World War II, when the Soviet Union came within a whisker of conquering them.

The last 80 years have been spent in preparation.

That has meant sacrifice. Most obviously, there is conscription for males 18 years old, who then serve in a reserve unit for decades. But it also means taxes on fuel and electricity to allow the state to maintain large reserves, making the country less vulnerable if Russia were to attack.

Yet the most interesting “tax” is the absolute necessity for cooperation. Finns know that if everyone in a nation of 5.5 million people doesn’t work together seamlessly, then they have no hope against a threat like Russia. This forces them all – businesses, government agencies, the military, and civil society – to put one common calculation above all others: national safety.

The result is a shared purpose and a sense of mutual trust that felt (to this American, at least) almost like stepping into a time machine. The United States hasn’t experienced similar levels of trust since the Cold War, when President Ronald Reagan was able to unify the country against a Soviet threat.

Today, Finland shows how the benefits of vigilance go far beyond strategic preparation. Preparedness demands the sacrifices of self that are the fuel for healthy democracies. Working with a common goal often has a unifying effect.

Finland would certainly rather not have a menacing neighbor. But that has played a part in helping it ward off the most toxic elements of partisanship now undermining effective governance across the West.

The question for Democracy 2.0, it seems, is how to create this shared purpose without needing an enemy to do it for you.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Sunday, July 20, 2025 2:00 PM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


Six characteristics of authoritarian breakthrough, all of which are currently in play.

By Tim Dickinson | July 18, 2025

https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/trump-authorit
arian-no-kings-playbook-1235388347/

This dictatorial to-do list includes
“directing investigations against critics”;
“giving license to lawbreaking”;
“regulatory retaliation”;
“deploying the military domestically”;
“federal law enforcement overreach”; and
holding tight to power, i.e. “the autocrat won’t leave.”

Trump is hewing to this well-worn playbook, Hunter said, by
pardoning violent Jan. 6 felons,
sending masked Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents to round up law-abiding immigrants,
deploying the National Guard and Marines into Los Angeles,
making “capricious threats” to deport U.S. citizens like Rosie O’Donnell, and
openly plotting an unconstitutional third term.

The pro-democracy trainer offered the encouragement that “Trump didn’t write this playbook. This is a global phenomena … the growth of autocracies.” He added that the experiences of allies across the globe offer strategies that have succeeded in turning back Trumpian figures in their own countries.

But the odds of success are sobering. The training included a study of 35 countries that experienced “democratic backsliding” in the last 30 years, and their track records for overcoming the authoritarian assault. Without a movement of mass “civil resistance,” less than eight percent of countries were successful at righting the democratic ship of state. Active civil resistance — such as the movement that No Kings is building in the U.S. — has historically increased the odds to 52 percent. “I don’t love those numbers,” said Hunter, but he added that the payoff for victory can be profound. Successful resistance movements typically forge societies that are “more democratic” on the other side — offering “an advancement” rather than a return to the status quo ante.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Tuesday, July 22, 2025 6:38 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


Why Don’t Americans Rise up Against Unpopular Policy Anymore?

The last time a political party paid a price for legislation was in 1989.

By Julian E. Zelizer, professor of history and public affairs at Princeton University | July 21, 2025

https://foreignpolicy.com/2025/07/21/medicare-cuts-unpopular-policy/

Congress has passed one of the most draconian cuts to social safety net programs in modern American history. President Donald Trump proudly signed the bill into law. As a result of the legislation, which opponents agree is deeply destructive, over 11 million Americans will lose their health care coverage. Many rural hospitals will likely have to close their doors, thereby widening the health care deserts. Millions will lose access to food stamps. Educational services for lower-income and disabled children will shrink.

The big political question is whether the Republicans will face serious political repercussions for what they have done to the American people, red and blue, all to pay for the extension of supply-side tax cuts and a massive expansion of immigration control enforcement. Fiscal conservatism has nothing to do with the decision, as the legislation is going to blow a hole in the debt that Americans will be paying for over generations.

In an earlier era, political logic would dictate that Republicans would pay a steep price. Taking so many concrete goods away from a wide range of citizens, including those who make up the core of a political coalition, has traditionally been considered a bad idea. But will that fallout happen by 2026? The central political question is whether the GOP will face electoral consequences or once again escape them. In an age of hyperpolarization and media fragmentation, outrage has a shorter shelf life, attention spans are fractured, and accountability is harder to achieve.

In 1989, though, a Democratic Congress was forced to repeal a major new health care benefit, along with the taxes that had been included to pay for it. How did this come to pass, and why wouldn’t such a reversal happen now?

Throughout the 1980s, health care experts became increasingly concerned about the costs that elderly Americans were facing as a result of catastrophic medical situations, such as strokes, spinal cord injuries, and heart attacks. Medicare, created in 1965, did not cover most of those conditions. Elderly Americans and their families were forced to find other ways to pay for treatment.

In 1988, the Democratic Congress, working with President Ronald Reagan, decided to do something about the problem. Secretary of Health and Human Services Otis Bowen, who had been the chair of an advisory council in 1984 that recommended a policy response, crafted much of the proposal. After regaining control of the Senate back from the GOP in 1986, Democrats mobilized to pass the Medicare Catastrophic Coverage Act. They added benefits such as premium protection to support lower-income beneficiaries. The historic bill passed with sizable margins and substantial bipartisan support. The vote was 328 to 72 in the House; 86 to 11 in the Senate.

The legislation expanded coverage in a number of critical areas, including hospitalization and skilled nursing, hospice stays, home health care, respite care, and strict caps on hospital and doctors’ bills. Congress also included a prescription drug benefit for the first time in the program’s history.

Reagan had insisted that the benefits be self-financing. In response, Congress included higher premiums for Medicare Part B (the section of Medicare that covered doctors’ visits), and then, to cover the remaining two-thirds, a progressive surtax that would increase depending on the income of the beneficiaries. For the highest brackets, the maximum amount would be $800 on individuals and $1,600 for couples.

“This legislation will help remove a terrible threat from the lives of elderly and disabled Americans,” Reagan stated upon signing the bill, “the threat of an illness requiring acute care, one so devastating that it could wipe out the savings of an entire lifetime.” The president explained that “it will be paid for by those who are covered by its services.” Overall, from the perspective of the administration, the measure seemed historic and politically beneficial.

Following passage of the bill, the architects of the program lost control of the debate. Opposition quickly mounted as the press reported on more of the details in the bill. “It blew up,” former Massachusetts Democrat Rep. Brian Donnelly, who opposed the measure, explained. “A lot of people in the United States already had this coverage. Almost every retired union member had the coverage through negotiated benefits.”

Some frustration stemmed from the bill’s design. Congress, for instance, had not included long-term hospital care. But the provision that generated the most heat was the tax increase. Although most Americans would never feel much of the burden of the surtax, opponents spread false information that every elderly citizen would have to pay the $800 surtax, a significant amount for working and middle-class Americans.

As news from the pollsters started to circulate, congressional Democratic leaders like House Speaker Jim Wright and Sen. Bentsen didn’t do much to push back. They assumed that emotions would settle, as they often did, and the elderly would rationally realize the immense benefits they would be receiving and gain a realistic understanding of the tax obligations.

The proponents were wrong, as their opponents blitzed the public with negative information. The National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare, a liberal group chaired by President Franklin Roosevelt’s son James, launched a major campaign calling to end the new program. The group sent out misleading flyers, warning that their 5 million members should oppose the “seniors-only income tax increase,” which suggested the $800 maximum on individuals, or even the $1,600 (which was for couples), would in fact fall on everyone who was over 65.

When the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) reported that costs would be much higher than legislators had originally predicted, public concern about costs accelerated. On Feb. 6, 1989, Republican Rep. Al McCandless, who had always opposed the legislation, introduced a bill to repeal the entire measure.

As legislators returned to their districts for the summer recess in August 1989, they were yelled and screamed at by voters who feared a mass tax on the elderly. “They thought retired people were sitting around doing their ceramics and their little aerobics classes in senior centers and wouldn’t give any fight,” explained a retired airline pilot in Las Vegas named Daniel Hawley. “Well, they found out differently.”

While Reagan had signed the bill, congressional Democrats faced most of the blowback. One of the program’s designers, House Ways and Means Chairman Dan Rostenkowski, was accosted by a group of seniors in front of the press. Late in the summer, “Rosti” was in Chicago to speak to constituents at the Copernicus Center about the program. He arrived to find that almost 200 people were packed inside the building waiting to grill him. Taking the temperature of the room, the chairman said he preferred to speak to a smaller group in a private setting. They refused.

Feeling that the confrontations would be politically damaging, Rostenkowski left the building. The constituents booed him. Some of the elderly protesters followed him out of the building. “Liar!” and “Recall!” they screamed. The geriatric protesters surrounded his car, pounding on his windows, yelling insults about what he had done. “He’s supposed to represent the people, not himself,” one woman screamed at the closed car window. The crowd surrounded the car in order to block it.

Unsure of what to do, Rostenkowski opened the door and quickly departed, walking down the street as the protesters and media trailed him. The image was one for the ages. At one point, he walked into a gas station, where his car was waiting to speed him away.

California Rep. Pete Stark, who served on the Ways and Means Committee, concluded that the law had been too complex and opened the door to misinformation. “I don’t think there are 300 members of the House who could tell you extemporaneously what Medicare benefits are.” Proponents of the law also admitted that they made a tactical mistake by scheduling the premiums to go up before anyone received benefits.

On Oct. 4, the House voted to repeal the Medicare Catastrophic Coverage Act 360 to 66. The Senate voted to repeal the surtax and many of the benefits while keeping unlimited hospital coverage. The vote was 99 to 0. During conference committee, senators gave way to the House and accepted its more stringent decision. Most of the law was erased from the books. President George H.W. Bush signed the repeal into law in December. “Rarely has a government program that promised so much to so many,” noted the New York Times, “fallen apart so fast.” Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell warned: “By repealing the legislation, we have not repealed the problem. The problem is bad and getting worse.”

Given the state of contemporary politics, it might be that Republicans don’t suffer the same fate as Democrats in 1989—despite legislation that will have a much greater effect on the well-being of voters without providing any benefit in return.

Democrats face an even greater information challenge. Republicans have consistently enjoyed more success in the contemporary media environment. The rapid pace of news in the attention economy makes conditions very different in 2025 than the late ’80s. The ability for any single issue, no matter how dramatic, to hold national news space for very long has diminished. Moving from one story to another at dizzying speed, with more people tuned out altogether from any common source of information, provides some degree of insulation to a party from being held accountable for its decisions. If the public is not paying attention, which Trump is very good at ensuring, elected officials tend to worry much less. Media stunts like the protest against Rostenkowski can go viral, but the scroll moves on.

Like the problems with Medicare Catastrophic, the design of the budget bill will help Republicans. Congress delayed most of the Medicaid cuts until after the 2026 midterms. Assuming partisan discipline and media amnesia, there are a number of other reasons that Trump’s party might be able to weather this storm.

Since the 1980s, Republicans have been pounding away at the idea that government is a bad thing when it comes to social services and support. Though the right has been more than comfortable using government issues like defense and policing, when it comes to helping middle-class and working Americans, Republicans have unleashed a fierce rhetoric about the dangers of dependency, fraud, and abuse. Even when Republicans backed away from cuts, the ideas endured. Dependency, fraud, and bloated government became bipartisan concerns. Many Democrats, as the historian Gary Gerstle argued in The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order, have adopted their own version of this ideology. “The era of big government is over,” President Bill Clinton famously declared in his 1996 State of the Union address with House Speaker Newt Gingrich watching from behind feeling content.

For all of these reasons, Republicans are feeling, with justification, that they might be able to get away with the bill and avoid the turmoil Rostenkowski felt as he fled from a geriatric crowd.

Until Democrats figure out a strategy to break through this political environment through effective voter mobilization and public communications, they will watch, helpless, as the GOP dismantles programs they have built, waiting for their opponents to pay a price. One day, if the wreckage is complete, Democrats may realize they fought the battles of 2025 with the instincts of 1989 and lost the house that FDR and LBJ built.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Thursday, July 24, 2025 10:16 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


The Dismantling of American Health Care

By Adam Gaffney, David U. Himmelstein, and Steffie Woolhandler | July 8, 2025

We must resist Trump’s war on medical access and knowledge today, even as we prepare to rebuild something better tomorrow.

https://www.nybooks.com/online/2025/07/08/the-dismantling-of-american-
health-care/

1.

On July 4 President Donald Trump signed into law a piece of legislation that amounts to a declaration of war on the working-class and the sick. The “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” will slice more than $1 trillion from Medicaid over the next decade, stripping health coverage from more than 11 million lower-income Americans by 2034 and sending tens of thousands to an early grave—all in exchange for tax reductions for corporations and the wealthy. Despite Trump’s promises to the contrary, the law will also cut nearly $500 billion from Medicare over the same period by making the deficit surge past a point at which the Office of Management and Budget “is required to order a sequestration to eliminate the overage.”

This assault on the nation’s major public insurance programs is only the latest front in an ongoing right-wing campaign against health. On April 1 Trump’s hammer fell on the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), the sprawling agency that encompasses the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the Centers for Medicaid and Medicaid Services (CMS), the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), among other health-focused agencies. Having already forced out 10,000 HHS personnel earlier in his term, the Trump administration terminated 10,000 more on dubious legal grounds, devastating entire teams focused on major public health problems like tobacco control and occupational health. Altogether 25 percent of HHS’s workforce was dismissed. Since then a minority of the fired employees have been reinstated in the face of political pressure—but the depth and capriciousness of these chaotic cuts is without precedent. Disease surveillance, outbreak investigation, vaccine uptake, violence prevention, infection control, food safety, and opioid overdose prevention will likely suffer.

Meanwhile the nation’s biomedical research enterprise—in large part conducted by publicly financed scientists employed at universities—has been facing a sustained attack. NIH research grants that address important but now illicit health issues—like HIV/AIDS, racial health inequities, vaccine hesitancy, and LGBTQ health—have been wiped out in recent months. Not all of the cuts stem from specific bêtes noires: the administration has broadly decimated funding by canceling more than $1.8 billion in existing NIH grants in less than a month and a half (although some have been temporarily reinstated by court orders), reducing the issuance of new grant awards by 28 percent, and attempting to slash the “overhead” payments that cover universities’ costs for space and utilities via a now-stayed order that would have reduced grants from multiple federal agencies, including the NIH. This is on top of the funding blockades that the administration has imposed on many elite universities to bring them to heel—including all of the Ivies except Dartmouth and Yale.

The three fronts of this assault—on tax-funded medical coverage, public health, and medical research—have overlapping aims. The campaign to slash Medicaid—relied on by the poor since its establishment in 1965—follows a long neoliberal tradition of prescribing austerity for the working class and largesse for the rich. Trump and his allies seem to view public health, for its part, as waste that can be excised (DOGE-style) to fund tax cuts, as a source of regulatory excess that constrains profit-making, and as a locus of “woke” ideology and inconvenient facts. The assault on medical research is driven by similar concerns, with the added benefit of dominating rival centers of power like universities and the professions.

Yet such economic and ideological motivations do not explain the full measure of the administration’s agenda. It rests, too, on a Dark Ages disdain for science, part and parcel of Trump’s claim to be the arbiter of facts and truth. Robert F. Kennedy Jr.—the notorious antivaccine advocate appointed by Trump to lead HHS, who has previously engaged in AIDS denialism and spread conspiracy theories about chemtrails and 5G—touted cod liver oil to treat the measles epidemic that ripped through Texas and has since spread to other states. Casey Means, Trump’s most recent appointee for surgeon general, a position that requires “specialized training or significant experience in public health programs,” dropped out of her residency training to embrace a career in “functional medicine,” starting a business venture marketing supplements and other wellness products; recently she gave credence to a discredited link between vaccines and autism. And Trump’s choice to head the CMS, the former heart surgeon and television personality Mehmet Oz, was condemned in 2015 by his colleagues at Columbia University for expressing “disdain for science and for evidence-based medicine” on his TV program, where he also promoted the privatized Medicare plans he now regulates.

These shock troops of pseudoscience have already done harm. On June 9, in an extraordinary move, RFK Jr. cited flimsy conflict-of-interest charges (such as their prior participation in industry-funded research) to dismiss the entire panel of scientific experts who constitute the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP), which helps establish vaccine schedules for both adults and children. Many of the replacement appointees seem distinguished mainly by their distrust of vaccines and their apparent willingness to further undermine vaccine uptake among the American public. The new committee members include Robert Malone, a scientist who rocketed to fame during the Covid-19 pandemic by circulating misinformation on right-wing media; James Pagano, an obscure emergency room doctor whose thin Internet footprint includes an Islamophobic tweet and a blog post in which he expresses skepticsm of climate change; and Vicky Pebsworth, a nurse with a public health policy Ph.D. who is also the volunteer director of research for an anti-vaccine organization.

It might be tempting to respond to this war on health by calling for nothing more than a return to the status quo ante. That would be a mistake. For one thing, propagandists for RFK Jr.’s “Make America Healthy Again” (MAHA) movement have drawn some of their strength by denouncing a shadowy health establishment, including powerful drug firms that are rightly criticized for abusive pricing practices. Sympathy for MAHA also stems from legitimate concerns about corporations’ malign effects on air, water, food, and drug safety—even if those concerns are voiced by bad-faith actors working to dismantle the very regulatory programs that protect us from such threats, like the Clean Water and Clean Air acts, which, if judged by deaths averted, are perhaps the most important pieces of public health legislation in US history.

More fundamentally, undue commercial influence, grave regulatory failings, and underfunding all afflicted the public health system long before Trump. Our medical research infrastructure likewise had preexisting flaws: it should not only be reestablished but also funded more sustainably and efficiently, and its products made available to all rather than monetized by industry. Similarly, Medicaid and other public health care programs must be fiercely protected; at the same time, they too need reform to address their many shortcomings, including inefficiencies born of privatization and fragmentation.

Admittedly, few if any of these reforms seem attainable in the near future, now that the federal government is busy dismantling what benefits the system did provide. But we still need a positive vision of how to improve the country’s health system, both to prepare for whenever the window for political change reopens and to help galvanize that shift now. We must resist Trump’s agenda today, even as we prepare to rebuild something better tomorrow.

2.

The first theater of Trump’s war on health—dismantling or hobbling federal public health agencies—is already inflicting harms that will accumulate over time as existing programs, environmental regulations, and agencies wither. Among the agencies decimated by the April 1 cuts at HHS was the CDC’s Division of Environmental Health Science and Practice, responsible for addressing lead poisoning, asthma control, radiation exposure, natural disasters, and other environmental hazards. In April, when Milwaukee requested the CDC’s help to investigate unsafe lead levels in its schools, it was rebuffed: there was literally no one to send.

That division was abruptly restored last month, when HHS reinstated nearly 20 percent of the employees fired on April 1, but other teams have been less fortunate. Some two thirds of the staff of the CDC’s Division of Reproductive Health were cut, including the team responsible for issuing national guidelines on contraceptives for women with serious medical conditions. The CDC’s Injury Center and its Division of Violence Prevention, which monitor and help prevent firearm violence and other injuries, were also greatly reduced in April. Most of the staff at the Office on Smoking and Health (OSH) were fired, notwithstanding tobacco’s unequaled contributions to chronic disease—ostensibly RFK Jr.’s chief concern. One of the OSH’s former heads described the attack as “the greatest gift to the tobacco industry in the last half century.”

Alex Wroblewski/AFP

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. testifying about the Department of Health and Human Services’s budget before a Senate subcommittee, Washington, D.C., May 20, 2025

Meanwhile the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH)—a scientific agency established in 1970 during an era when Americans were regularly injured, poisoned, or killed on the job—was almost totally destroyed; 90 percent of its workforce was eliminated overnight. “Without warning, our research and ongoing studies were halted. We have not been allowed back to finish experiments, complete analyses, or collect data for publication,” a fired NIOSH worker recounted in Scientific American. The cut was so abrupt that some staffers were forced to euthanize their lab animals. A NIOSH program that investigates firefighter deaths was gutted. The destruction of another program has already put workers’ health at risk: in April the Mine Safety and Health Administration, citing the NIOSH “restructuring” and shortfalls in monitoring and protective equipment, delayed implementing a federal regulation meant to protect coal miners from deadly silica dust. In the face of a lawsuit and Congressional pressure, roughly a third of the fired NIOSH employees have been rehired, but the agency remains a shadow of its former self.

Health surveillance programs critical for assessing and addressing potential dangers are also under threat. Since 1971 the National Survey of Drug Use and Health has provided critical data on substance use; the team that runs it was eliminated in April. Workers responsible for the Pregnancy Risk Assessment Monitoring System (which collects data on pregnancy care and complications), the Web-based Injury Statistics Query and Reporting System (which tracks deaths and injuries), and AtlasPlus (a portal providing data on HIV, tuberculosis, and other infectious diseases) were also fired. The fates of these surveys are unclear. And the Agency for Health Research Quality, which conducts a survey that is the main source of data on Americans’ health care use and costs—data that we have used in many studies—is being dismantled.

Meanwhile “the FDA as we’ve known it is finished,” its former commissioner wrote in early April, after about a fifth of its workforce was laid off. Taking little heed of RFK Jr.’s anti-pharma rhetoric, the new commissioner, Marty Makary, has already vowed to speed up the approval of new drugs—which would, in practice, mean loosening the agency’s already lax approval standards. Such statements have, according to The Wall Street Journal, sent “a bullish signal to biotech.” The exception—for obvious reasons—is vaccines. They may, in contrast, face novel obstacles, including from RFK Jr.’s ACIP panel, which is now starting to re-review vaccines that have long been approved.

The administration is taking apart all this health infrastructure even as it embarks on an unprecedented assault on our environmental protections, as Jonathan Mingle has described in these pages. On March 12 the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced what it called the “biggest deregulatory action in US history,” including thirty-one measures that will degrade air and water quality and endanger population health nationwide. For its part, the “Big, Beautiful Bill” will pull the rug out from under clean energy production, pushing the nation toward greater fossil fuel consumption and pollution emissions.

Much remains uncertain about what will survive the April bloodletting at HHS: just last week a federal court ruled the mass firings there illegal, with unclear immediate implications. Yet it already seems evident that public health agencies across the federal government—which may have saved more lives than all the country’s doctors and hospitals combined, and which were underfunded even before Trump took office—will never be the same. And even darker clouds are on the horizon: Trump’s budget proposal for the 2026 financial year calls for a $32 billion cut to HHS, about a quarter of its current budget, excluding the Medicare and Medicaid payments it administers. If the administration gets its way, the CDC’s budget will be slashed by more than half, the NIH’s by 40 percent, and the EPA’s, too, by more than half.

*

This funding squeeze is without historical parallel. Yet it also bears stressing that public health agencies have long been underfunded and neglected. Unlike medical care—which almost everyone periodically encounters when they go to a doctor or an emergency room—the equally essential work of public health is often invisible. Americans’ life expectancy soared by more than twenty years in the first half of the twentieth century, mainly owing to public health measures like safe drinking water, rather than to improvements in medical care. In more recent decades public health measures, like those that decreased air pollution and smoking, have been responsible for about half of life expectancy gains.

Despite these achievements, public health has long been the neglected stepchild of the US health system. It has received only a meager portion of the country’s total spending on health, including medical services and drugs. Public health activities accounted for only 3.1 percent of total health expenditures in 2024—$467 of the $15,264 spent per person on health care that year.1 That figure reflects the short-term bump in public health spending precipitated by the Covid-19 pandemic; funding was set to recede even before the Trump blitzkrieg. By 2032 public health’s share of total health spending is projected to fall to 2.4 percent—the lowest proportion since the early 1980s.

A graph comparing total spending on public health initiatives to total health spending since 1929. Data on health spending from before 1960 comes from the Compendium of National Health Expenditures Data; from 1960 onward it derives from historical (1960–2023) or projected (2024–2033) National Health Expenditures Accounts. Per capita figures were calculated using population data from the US Census; dollar amounts are inflation-adjusted using the historical CPI-U from the Bureau of Labor Statistics or projections from the Congressional Budget Office.

In other words, today’s austerity is both unprecedented and an acceleration of a longer-term boom-and-bust cycle in public health funding. Interest and resources surge in response to crises and then fade, leaving us vulnerable to the next ones. Faltering federal public health spending along with the Reagan administration’s cuts to medical safety net programs in the early 1980s left the nation ill-prepared for the AIDS epidemic and resurgent tuberculosis. As we entered the Covid-19 pandemic, public health had been starved for years: over the course of the 2010s the CDC’s budget was reduced by 10 percent, adjusted for inflation, and in May 2018 the first Trump administration eliminated the White House’s pandemic preparedness office.

Similar dynamics have played out at state and local levels. Between 2008 and 2016 state and local public health agencies shed 50,000 staff positions. These agencies carry out much of the day-to-day work of public health, conducting disease surveillance and outbreak investigations in their communities, monitoring hazards like lead and fentanyl, educating the public about health risks, regulating and credentialing medical providers, inspecting restaurants, running state laboratories that provide tests unavailable in the commercial sector, procuring and managing supplies like vaccines, and more.

The problem is not just inadequate funding but tenuous, fragmented, and grant-dependent revenue streams. As the Institute of Medicine—today called the National Academy of Medicine—declared more than a decade ago, “the US public health financing structure is broken.” While doctors and hospitals bill for their efforts (and can reasonably trust that someone will pay), funding for most public health agencies is precarious. Today state and local health department agencies depend on CDC grants for about half their budgets. (The Trump administration has sought to withhold $11 billion in such federal support, although that move faces resistance in the courts.) This funding gets allocated largely through time-limited federal grants for which state and local health agency staff need to apply—a process that further strains their ever-expanding workloads. Many such grants, meanwhile, can only be spent on specific programs or diseases. And there is no guarantee that money goes to the communities that need it most.

Merely restoring public health funding as it existed before Trump, then, is not enough. When the Republican onslaught abates, grant-based funding for core public health activities should be replaced by bolstered, stable, and permanent funding streams, as public health experts have long advocated, to ensure that these agencies can deliver the full spectrum of public health services. Federal public health agencies, including the CDC and NIOSH, should not just be reestablished but expanded: addressing growing health threats like climate change and bird flu will require nothing less than ramping up the federal public health infrastructure. A companion agenda is necessary to both restore and advance biomedical research.

3.

“New impetus must be given to [scientific] research . . . [which] can come promptly only from the Government,” wrote Vannevar Bush, FDR’s director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development, in a landmark 1945 report that set the course for the postwar American scientific achievement. Bush called for a federal “National Research Foundation” that would generously fund scientific research projects at nonprofit institutes and universities and train the next generation of scientists through scholarships and fellowships.

Two research bodies realized that vision: the NIH—which predated the war—and a new institution called the National Science Foundation (NSF). Noncommercial health research soared in the postwar decades, rising from $67 million (in 2024 dollars) in 1940 to nearly $17 billion by the late 1960s. Growth slowed in the late 1960s and 1970s but rose sharply again thereafter until the mid-2000s.

A graph showing the increase in spending on health research since 1929. Data from before 1960 is from the Compendium of National Health Expenditures Data; from 1960 onward, it derives from the 2023 National Health Expenditures Accounts. Figures are inflation-adjusted using the historical CPI-U from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

This investment had monumental effects. The US became a global leader in biomedical research, with the NIH funding the basic science that underlies much of the inestimable therapeutic advances of the postwar era. In recent decades NIH science helped drive the discovery of cures for hepatitis C, life-saving treatments for HIV, pivotal new cancer therapies, the basic science underlying GLP-1 agonists (such as Ozempic), and the Covid-19 vaccines, to name only a few examples. NIH funding contributed to every new drug that was approved in the country between 2010 and 2016.

With the Trump Administration hacking away at the NIH and NSF, it makes sense to emphasize such achievements. But they shouldn’t obscure the many defects in the system. Since the mid-2000s federal funding for research has become more erratic and unstable, driven by shifting political winds. Rapid expansions of research funding have been followed by sudden contractions—another boom-and-bust cycle that has sometimes left expensive laboratory space empty and highly trained individuals unable to find employment as scientists in the US.

Funding has also too often prioritized the development of expensive new therapeutic commodities, like drugs and devices, over more studies of potential social and public health interventions, such as reducing salt in the food supply to mitigate the hundreds of thousands of hypertension-related deaths annually, or implementing housing-first programs for homeless substance users. Moreover, new therapeutics that emerge from public research typically become the property of private companies: since the passage of the 1979 Bayh-Dole Act, which allowed companies to patent taxpayer-financed discoveries, the monetary rewards of publicly financed biomedical research accrue largely to drug firms. Those firms pay little or nothing for the “intellectual property” developed on the NIH’s dime, but charge plenty for the products they derive from it. (Moderna’s Covid-19 vaccine is a prime example of this profiteering.)

Smith Collection/Gado/Getty Images

A researcher at the Centers for Disease Control isolating Salmonella from a specimen, 1963

Alternative models could allow the public to retain ownership of the discoveries they help fund. The NIH itself could, if allowed, sponsor the final steps—most notably clinical trials—needed to turn basic research into products, rather than almost always ceding that task to drug firms, along with the profits those products generate. The resulting drugs could then be left unpatented, allowing low-cost generics to enter the market as soon as they gained FDA approval, as we and others have previously proposed. That would save patients billions. The government—which foots the bill for 59 percent of prescription drug purchases—would stand to save even more.

The FDA similarly needs reform. It has come to depend too heavily on drug firms for funding, and accommodates their interests too readily. Since 1992, when George H.W. Bush signed the Prescription Drug User Fee Act into law, drug firms have paid the FDA in exchange for faster reviews. Those payments now account for 75 percent of the agency’s drug division budget. RFK Jr. has criticized user fees—but Trump’s budget proposal, tellingly, would leave them undisturbed even while cutting the FDA’s public funding.

The result is that drug firms have partially captured the regulatory process, as evidenced by the approval of too many drugs with weak evidence of efficacy. (The FDA’s 2021 approval of Aduhelm, an ineffective and probably dangerous Alzheimer’s drug, was a particularly egregious example.) In recent decades “accelerated approval” pathways have also proliferated, allowing drugs to be approved on the basis of weaker standards of evidence.

Makary’s FDA looks set to accelerate this trend. “Companies aligned with US national priorities,” he has announced, will receive “National Priority Vouchers” that would shorten review times to a mere one or two months. Makary has already rolled out an AI platform across the FDA, telling employees (in an e-mail obtained by STAT) that they could use it to “expedite clinical protocol review and reduce the overall time to complete scientific review.” (Like other chatbots, STAT found, the tool produces output rife with errors.) The reality is that the FDA already has shorter review times than do comparable agencies in most other countries, and evidence suggests that rushed reviews lead to the approval of more unsafe drugs. Rebuilding the FDA should involve both making all its funding fully public and enforcing more robust safety and efficacy standards.

*

The fact that many scientists whose grants have been terminated find themselves in desperate straits points to another problem in the current method of research funding. Increasingly the salaries of university scientists have been funded by “soft money” support in the form of (mostly federal) grants, rather than being paid directly by universities. To continue working, they need to fundraise.

This status quo, as the economist Paula Stephan argued in a 2015 article, departs notably from Vannevar Bush’s vision.2 Initially grants only covered faculty members’ summer salaries, when the academic year was not in session; trainees were supported through dedicated fellowships. In the following decades, however, universities pushed to use research grants to cover the salaries of scientists and trainees year-round. By 1960 the President’s Scientific Advisory Committee warned about the implications of this trend. In a passage Stephan quotes, it called for “avoiding situations in which a professor becomes partly or wholly responsible for raising his [or her] own salary,” noting that “if federal funds should fail, a most unsatisfactory sort of ‘second-class citizenry’ is created.”

And yet today many scientists find themselves in this position—responsible for raising their entire salaries and at risk of unemployment “if federal funds should fail.” The results have been both “an unsustainable hypercompetitive system” for federal grants, as one group of scholars put it, and a grant-writing enterprise that wastes countless dollars and hours of scientists’ time—a “form of brain drain” that detracts from “curiosity-driven research,” as the psychologist Gerd Gigerenzer and colleagues have noted.3 This diversion of time and money means scientific roads not explored, missed opportunities for important advances, and ultimately fewer treatments for patients.

A more rational system would pay scientists salaries like other professionals. Grants would fund specialized equipment, reagents, or additional personnel needed for a particular study. Universities’ infrastructure for research might be funded by a dedicated funding stream, not by add-ons to each grant. And the fruits of scientific labor, paid for by the public, would be a public good available for the use and benefit of all.

4.

Having wreaked havoc on public health and scientific research, the Trump administration opened a third front of its assault on health: tax-funded health care coverage. The Medicaid program was passed into law during the Civil Rights era simultaneously with Medicare. Unlike Medicare—a federal program that covers virtually all elderly Americans—Medicaid was means-tested. Traditionally it also covered only certain categories of the poor—for instance, those eligible for cash welfare. It also borrowed the federalist structure of a slightly earlier program called Medical Assistance for the Aged, which—at the insistence of the conservative Southern Democrats behind it—had fallen largely under the control of state governments; under Medicaid states similarly had significant latitude in who they covered, and what they would pay for. (Many states have, for example, imposed limits on the number of prescription drugs Medicaid beneficiaries can receive.) Yet over time a series of expansions culminating in the Affordable Care Act (ACA) brought more than 70 million low-income Americans into the program; in states that implemented the ACA’s Medicaid Expansion, Medicaid is now available to all individuals with incomes below 138 percent of the poverty level.

Congressional Republicans took aim at the ACA Medicaid expansion early in Trump’s first term, but the attack faltered in the face both of divisions within the GOP ranks and of rage from the public, which contributed to Republican losses in the 2018 midterms. Now, eight years later, they have succeeded at pushing through catastrophic Medicaid cuts. Unlike in 2017, however, Republicans have not promoted their handiwork as a grand effort to “repeal Obamacare.” Instead, as the bill moved through Congress they cannily downplayed its impacts, perversely claiming that cutting some $1 trillion in Medicaid funding over a decade would somehow “protect” the program for deserving beneficiaries by shedding alleged freeloaders.

But in truth the size of the Medicaid cuts in the bill Trump signed into law are comparable in magnitude to those in the ACA repeal bill. These cuts, along with the law’s changes to Affordable Care Act marketplace plans, will result in an estimated 11.8 million Americans losing health coverage, with 5 million more becoming uninsured because Congress failed to extend Biden-era improvements to the ACA. As we recently reported in the Annals of Internal Medicine, the Medicaid cuts alone would cause more than 1.9 million Americans to lose access to their physicians, over 1.3 million to go without needed medications, almost 400,000 to forego needed mammograms, and more than 1.2 million to accrue medical debt. All this would result in more than 16,500 medically preventable deaths each year.4 The cuts would also financially squeeze, and possibly shutter, many safety-net hospitals and clinics that rely on Medicaid revenues to stay afloat.

As with public health and medical research, these deadly cuts must be fiercely fought. But here too we must acknowledge the structural flaws that make Medicaid both vulnerable to attack and inadequate for its beneficiaries. Like much of the rest of US health care, there is indeed “waste, fraud, and abuse” in our public health insurance programs—but not the kind Republicans suggest. Over the decades both Medicare and Medicaid have been progressively privatized: today about three quarters of Medicaid beneficiaries and more than half of Medicare beneficiaries are covered by private managed-care insurers, whose overhead far exceeds those of the publicly administered programs. In a forthcoming analysis, we project that this Medicaid privatization will result in the waste of $500 billion over the coming decade. Similarly, each year taxpayers make enormous overpayments to private Medicare Advantage insurers like UnitedHealthcare, Humana, and CVS/Aetna—$84 billion this year alone, according to Congress’s official Medicare advisory commission. Those overpayments will, we estimate, add $1.4 trillion to Medicare’s costs over the next decade.

The Republicans’ cuts would do nothing about this wasteful privatization. Simply put, their bill would realize savings by throwing millions of people off Medicaid and the ACA. Indeed, in an analysis published on July 2, we estimated that it will cost nearly $5 billion for states to establish the new bureaucracy they’ll need to monitor whether nondisabled adults on Medicaid are meeting the bill’s new work requirement; much of that money will flow to corporate consultants.

Bill Tompkins/Getty Images

Protesters in New York City marching against cuts to Medicaid, December 12, 1992

Medicaid has other flaws beyond administrative inefficiency. Many doctors, and even some hospitals, refuse to accept it, shutting Medicaid patients out of care; many people who should remain eligible for coverage are disenrolled because they fail to fulfill red-tape eligibility requirements; others lose coverage because a small income bump boosts them over the eligibility threshold. The solution here is more ambitious. Single-tier national health insurance—also known as Medicare-for-All—would provide universal top-class coverage and end the medical segregation of the poor (and, inter alia, of people of color, who disproportionately depend on Medicaid). And from a political perspective, health care programs with users across the economic spectrum—like Medicare or universal systems in Europe and Canada—have proven more resilient to attacks than those relied upon only by the poorest. Perhaps the best way to rebuild Medicaid, in other words, would be to replace it with something better: a universal system.

*

It seems difficult at present to resist Trump’s regressive anti-health juggernaut, much less to envision something better for tomorrow. But the medical community, which still wields considerable power and influence, appears to be reaching a boiling point. Colleagues fear seeing their coworkers and patients deported; academic freedom is threatened; medical decision-making is constrained by political fiat and managed care restrictions; research funding has disappeared; public health protections have been eviscerated; access to vaccinations has been curtailed; and charlatanism is displacing science at the highest level. Health professionals, having watched Congress slash the public insurance programs on which their patients and institutions rely, are soon to witness the needless suffering and death that will predictably follow. All these assaults are also breeding disaffection among voters. As many polls indicate, health is perhaps Trump’s weakest suit with the general public; most Americans favor more funding for science and public health, as well as universal coverage.

We find ourselves living under a federal government unconcerned with the well-being of its people. The administration’s assault on health—coupled with Republicans’ planned surge in spending for the military and deportations—indicates that it cares far less about preserving the lives of Americans than about controlling, surveilling, and policing them. All of us ought to fight to minimize harm from these depredations. In the process, we should channel the dismay they inspire not just into restoring the nation’s health institutions as they were, but into reimagining them so that, at last, they truly serve the public good.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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