Once again, considering current politics as the ways human nature plays out. Today’s topics:
- Efforts in several states to replace general education with Christian education;
- The reality of the “deep state,” and how they plan to survive Trump and MAGA;
- Zack Beauchamp looks at the worldwide trend against traditional political systems, and has no answer;
- While I ascribe this in part to the short-term thinking of base human nature, and how it’s becoming inadequate in the modern global world.
Again, Trump’s motivations behind the selections for his wrecking-crew cabinet seem identical to those of an outside invading force that wants to destroy the US government and replace it with a Christian theocracy. They’re either shameless about it, or clueless about it, I’m not sure which.
Salon, Amanda Marcotte, 26 Nov 2024: Trump opens up a new war on public schools, subtitled “MAGA leaders promise an ‘educational insurgency’ to create ‘boot camps for winning back America'”
Someone posted this on Facebook with a comparison to Hitler Youth Camps.
It’s not a coincidence that Donald Trump‘s nominee for Education Secretary, Linda McMahon, is the defendant in a lawsuit alleging that she ignored widespread sexual abuse of minors at World Wrestling Entertainment when she was CEO. Abandoning children to predatory forces who wish to dominate and exploit them seems to be a requisite of the job under the incoming Trump administration.
And:
Pete Hegseth, the Fox News host who Trump tapped to be Defense Secretary, was on a Christian nationalist podcast last week that described the vision. “I think we need to be thinking in terms of these classical Christian schools are boot camps for winning back America,” explained the host, who is closely linked with Douglas Wilson, a far-right pastor who advocates for theocracy. Hegseth, who is facing scrutiny after it was revealed he settled out of court with a woman who accused him of rape in 2017, concurred. He called for an “educational insurgency” where “you build your army underground” of children, so they can grow up to be the next generation of fundamentalist culture warriors.
More examples from Oklahoma with its new “Office of Religious Liberty and Patriotism” and purchase of Trump-branded Bibles; from Texas with new elementary school readers oriented around Bible stories; and from Arizona, where general funds are being siphoned toward religious schools and homeschooling. And:
It’s also an assault on one of the most crucial aspects of a real education: critical thinking skills.
Authoritarians are notoriously hostile to teaching kids intellectual autonomy, preferring children to exhibit mindless obedience. Southern Methodist University religious studies professor Mark Chancey, who has been speaking out against the Texas curriculum, worries that “when the lesson has a teacher read that Jesus was resurrected from the dead,” students “are going to hear their teacher promoting that as a factual claim.” That is, of course, very much the point. Trump’s election showed that the MAGA right’s power depends largely on supporters who can’t separate fact from fiction, mythology from science, or conspiracy theory from truth. That’s why Hegseth wants to reimagine schools as “boot camps”: not places where children learn to think for themselves, but where they are unquestioning right-wing soldiers, following MAGA orders.
Again, the 21st century plague: being unable to “separate fact from fiction, mythology from science, or conspiracy theory from truth.”
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Once again, neither MAGA nor Trump has any idea what the government, the so-called “deep state,” actually does, or what will happen when it’s eliminated.
Washington Post, opinion by Marc Fisher, 27 Nov 2024: Opinion | Report from inside the ‘deep state’: We’re not going anywhere, subtitled “Career Justice Department lawyers say they intend to outlast second Trump administration.”
Come, let’s meet the “deep state.” You know, the one Donald Trump wants his attorney general to rein in, dismantle or just plain nuke.
By day, they are the lawyers of the Justice Department, putting bad guys behind bars, foiling domestic terrorists and drug dealers, cybercrooks and corporate criminals. They’re government workers who still go into the office, keeping Metro rolling. But we visit them now in their native habitat, in suburban Northern Virginia, in such places as Springfield and Mantua, Arlington and Alexandria.
They’ve stayed with the government for decades because in good times, they are on the cutting edge of progress, helping the country expand rights and freedoms while ensuring that there are meaningful consequences for those who abuse their neighbors. And in tough times, they are the bulwark, the last line of defense against decay and decline.
The writer’s point is that most of them, the ones he’s spoken to, are not terribly worried. Here is a point about becoming acquainted.
One Justice veteran says most colleagues will stay on, both because civil service rules protect them from cavalier cashiering and because the first Trump term “did not have a significant impact on our work. His people came in with some general distrust of us, like, ‘You are the deep state.’ Then they got to know us and saw that we were good Americans who want to do the right thing.”
On the other hand, Trump wants to be a king. With citations from Thomas Paine and Timothy Snyder; and concluding:
They know the new administration’s threats could get serious. After all, Vice President-elect JD Vance suggested in 2021 that Trump should “fire every single mid-level bureaucrat, every civil servant” and defy court orders that seek to protect career workers.
In democracies, the rule of law depends on trust that people will obey legal authorities. In contrast, “In absolute government, the King is law,” as American revolutionary Thomas Paine wrote in 1776.
In this city, where laws are the primary product, our main protectors don’t live in the White House. They live in the burbs, getting by on salaries they could triple or more in the private sector. Democracy, as Yale historian Timothy Snyder has written, depends on laws “implemented by civil servants. We might find bureaucracy annoying; its absence, though, is deadly.”
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Here’s Zack Beauchamp again, looking at the big picture.
Vox, Zack Beauchamp, 27 Nov 2024: Trump’s win is part of a mysterious — and ominous — worldwide trend, subtitled “Why are people all over the world angry at ‘the system’?” [member-only page, sorry]
Clearly, something bigger is happening here: Voters around the world are really angry about how their political system is working, and want to empower people who aim to wreck or transform it. Understanding why radical parties are succeeding on both sides of the aisle — but especially the right — requires understanding why, exactly, voters have become radicalized against the political status quo.
The truth is that we don’t actually know. But it’s something we should figure out quickly because the kinds of parties these voters are empowering threaten more than just the parts of the system that deserve to be overhauled. Their rise could damage institutions that have delivered some of the greatest accomplishments in humanity’s history.
He then considers various ‘kinds’ of voters and their motivations. Then steps back.
The 21st century can, in broad strokes, be described as a series of shocks: 9/11, the 2003 Iraq war, the 2008 financial crisis, the 2015 European refugee crisis, and, perhaps most importantly, the Covid-19 pandemic. There is plenty of reason to be upset at how elites handled these situations, as they often directly caused the crisis or botched the response. When you layer deeper structural problems on top of that, like mounting inequality or the looming threat of climate change, it’s eminently understandable that voters would erupt in protest.
But this makes sense mostly in America, Zack admits. And he admits we don’t fully understand the reasons for any of this. Especially in this context:
It’s a puzzle that’s especially important to solve given that, at this moment, humanity is living through the best period in its history.
The world is richer than it’s ever been. War deaths have risen during the unusually destructive Gaza and Ukraine wars, but they’re still well below what the world looked like prior to World War II. We’ve eradicated smallpox, a disease that killed as many as 500 million people throughout history. We’ve made extraordinary strides toward social equality and inclusion, with historical practices like slavery now formally abolished across the globe. Challenges like income inequality and climate change remain serious, but there has been some real progress in the right direction.
With a chart showing rising life expectancy, of 10 or 20 years, in various parts of the world just since 1950. He concludes, still without an answer:
This is an important counterpoint to the grim story of the 21st century I told earlier. Our era has been defined as much by its extraordinary successes as its failures — both of which were made possible, in large part, by existing political systems. When anti-system political leaders start threatening the basic building blocks of the current order — including alliance networks, global trade, public health institutions, and democracy itself — you can imagine a world where the long trend toward human improvement reverses for good.
Yet simply saying “things are better” isn’t going to persuade people who feel like they’ve never been worse. What we need to do is understand anti-system voting better, and try to get a sense of why there’s such a sense of omnicrisis and what can be done to address it.
We — those who believe in the liberal democratic political order, imperfect as it is — are still missing something. And we better figure out what before voters throw the baby out with the bathwater by elevating politicians who stick it to the old elite by wrecking the parts of the system that are actually working.
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My take is simply that most people don’t think in any way long-term. They don’t care about stats about life expectancy. They care only about personal circumstances, and whether they’re are better now than five years ago, or than their neighbors’. And since there are inevitable fluctuations in social measures, especially inflation, politics, at least American politics, results in these swings of “mandates” by one party or the opposite party, as I discussed three days ago. Is there a solution for that? I don’t know, but perhaps a rethinking of the American political system. And all political systems. Our current political systems are not built to take long-term thinking into account, and so ignore long-term threats. But how could such rethinking possibly come about? You can’t only change political systems through political processes…. or revolutions. Which speaks to the big picture of humanity’s future. Perhaps there’s never a way forward, without a reaction back.
