Quite a number of interesting items stacked up. Let’s just start working them.
- How sending education “back to the states” is problematical for the same reason you don’t run a nation like a business;
- How Trump creates problems he then claims to fix;
- How the assault on DEI is about resegregation;
- How California farmers, who supported Trump, don’t want to talk about what he did to their water;
- Timothy Snyder about what makes a country, and what we can do now to fight back against tyranny.
Slate, Derek W. Black, 6 Feb 2025: “Back to the States”, subtitled “Trump’s Department of Education plans go against our country’s long history of federal support for schools”
All these moves are supposedly justified by the idea that the federal government does not play a legitimate role in education. But founders like Washington, Adams, Jefferson, and Madison would be confused, if not outraged, by the current administration’s disdain for public education and the federal government’s role in it. Our Founding Fathers knew that democracy could not survive without an informed population, and at every turn they called for federal government support of public education. And that support, more than once, has helped transform our democracy for the better.
…
Federal leadership on public education predates the Constitution itself. During the Revolutionary period, the Founding Fathers were animated by the idea that public education was an essential ingredient of America’s radical experiment in self-government. James Madison quipped: “A popular Government, without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a Prologue to a Farce or a Tragedy.” The cure, John Adams proposed, involved extending public education to “every rank and class of people, down to the lowest and the poorest.” Thomas Jefferson seconded the idea and warned that representative government would be the tool of “tyranny” unless common people were equipped with the skills to resist it.
The piece goes on with much historical background. The basic problem with eliminating the DoE, it seems to me, is the same as the reason you don’t run the government like a business. Businesses are about making money. About cutting off bad investments and products that don’t return on investments. Then recall that blue states like California pay much more taxes into the government that they get back, and that red states get much more money from the government than they pay in taxes. Cut the Feds out of education, let each state fend for itself, and the poor states will get poorer educations than the rich states.
And this recalls Lakoff’s idea about the government having a moral mission to provide protection, and empowerment. (See this post.) But that’s his progressive view; conservatives don’t believe this at all. Conservatives are just in it for the money, apparently.
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Trump creates problems and then pretends to fix them and then claims victory.
Salon, Brian Karem, 6 Feb 2025: Our republic’s arsonist: Trump lays the groundwork to claim a Pyrrhic victory, subtitled “He’ll return to claim credit for putting out the fire — but not before the United States gets burned”
With examples of withdrawing from the UN Human Rights Council, and his crazy plans for Gaza. My favorite example is also cited:
That would also explain why Trump started a fire by issuing tariffs on Mexican and Canadian imports, only to pull them back less than a day after issuing them. He said he did it because both countries had capitulated to his demands — but in fact they just committed to actions to which they’ve already agreed.
That is, first Trump blustered about using tariffs would solve all sorts of problems, but all he got out of his threats were promises by Mexico and Canada to take various actions that… they were already doing. Trump didn’t know or didn’t care; he trumpeted their ‘capitulation’ as a great success, and suspended the tariffs. At least for now.
The piece goes on and on, about USAID, the California fires, and the scrubbing of science (especially about climate change) from federal websites, with threats to the NOAA, which tracks weather systems around the world.
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This is obvious.
Washington Post, Karen Attiah, 6 Feb 2025: The assault on DEI? It’s aimed at resegregation., subtitled “The GOP leaders attacking inclusion programs want to go back to an era when White men ran everything”
Frankly, I wish the media would stop using “DEI” and “diversity hiring” altogether. Any official, including the president, who chooses to blame everything from plane crashes to wildfires on non-White, non-male people should be asked whether they believe that desegregation is to blame. Whether they believe resegregation is the answer. We need to bring back the language that describes what is actually happening.
“The function, the very serious function of racism is distraction,” Toni Morrison said. “It keeps you from doing your work. It keeps you explaining, over and over again, your reason for being. Somebody says you have no language and you spend twenty years proving that you do.”
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Don’t need to quote from this; the title will do.
Politico, 6 Feb 2025: Trump dumped these farmers’ water. They’d rather not talk about it., subtitled “President Donald Trump followed through on his promise to unleash California’s water — only the water he released belonged to the very farmers he’d promised to help.”
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From Timothy Snyder, author of the short book ON TYRANNY (reviewed here), which is lately back on bestseller lists. That book leads with his now oft-cited rule “Do not obey in advance.” He’s on Substack too.
Timothy Snyder, Thinking About…, 2 Feb 2025: The Logic of Destruction, subtitled “And how to resist it”
This piece ties to the JD Vance issue about primitive vs enlightened morality, to Lakoff, to Reich, to Richardson’s definition of fascism.
What is a country? The way its people govern themselves. America exists because its people elect those who make and execute laws. The assumption of a democracy is that individuals have dignity and rights that they realize and protect by acting together.
The people who now dominate the executive branch of the government deny all of this, and are acting, quite deliberately, to destroy the nation. For them, only a few people, the very wealthy with a certain worldview, have rights, and the first among these is to dominate.
For them, there is no such thing as an America, or Americans, or democracy, or citizens, and they act accordingly. Now that the oligarchs and their clients are inside the federal government, they are moving, illegally and unconstitutionally, to take over its institutions.
The parts of the government that work to implement laws have been maligned for decades. Americans have been told that the people who provide them with services are conspirators within a “deep state.” We have been instructed that the billionaires are the heroes.
All of this work was preparatory to the coup that is going on now. The federal government has immense capacity and control over trillions of dollars. That power was a cocreation of the American people. It belongs to them. The oligarchs around Trump are working now to take it for themselves.
Theirs is a logic of destruction. It is very hard to create a large, legitimate, functioning government. The oligarchs have no plan to govern. They will take what they can, and disable the rest. The destruction is the point. They don’t want to control the existing order. They want disorder in which their relative power will grow.
The end of his pieces offers ideas for how to respond, from which I will quote selected passages…
If you voted Republican, and you care about your country, please act rather than rationalize. Unless you cast your ballot so that South African oligarchs could steal your data, your money, your country, and your future, make it known to your elected officials that you wanted something else.
…Trump should obviously be impeached. Either he has lost control, or he is using his power to do obviously illegal things. If Republicans have a sense of where this is going, there could be the votes for an impeachment and prosecution.
Those considering impeachment should also include Vance.
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Commentators should please stop using words such as “digital” and “progress” and “efficiency” and “vision” when describing this coup attempt. The plotting oligarchs have legacy money from an earlier era of software, which they are now seeking to leverage, using destructive political techniques, to destroy human institutions. That’s it. They are offering no future beyond acting out their midlife crises on the rest of us. It is demeaning to pretend that they represent something besides a logic of destruction.…
Federal workers should stay in office, if they can, for as long as they can. This is not political, but existential, for them and for all of us. They will have a better chance of getting jobs afterwards if they are fired. And the logic of their firing is to make the whole government fail. The more this can be slowed down, the longer the rest of us have to get traction.…
What is a country? The way its people govern themselves. Sometimes self-government just means elections. And sometimes it means recognizing the deeper dignity and meaning of what it means to be a people. That means speaking up, standing out, and protesting. We can only be free together.
