“Donald Trump’s presidency, not yet ten weeks old, has already coerced powerful institutions like Columbia University into abandoning their values. From canceling $400 million in research grants to forcing out professors and banning student groups, Trump’s threats reveal an authoritarian style that stifles freedom, echoing McCarthyism—but with far less resistance.”
We Are the Fourth Branch of Government
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In high school, when we studied the separation of powers, I asked my civics teacher: “What happens if the executive branch ignores the judiciary?” He didn’t have much of an answer. It has happened before. One famous case was President Andrew Jackson’s refusal to enforce a Supreme Court ruling overturning Georgia’s seizure of Cherokee lands. “[Chief Justice] John Marshall has made his decision; now let him enforce it,” a defiant Jackson supposedly said. Georgia expelled the Cherokees in an act of ethnic cleansing known as the Trail of Tears. Lincoln shrugged off a federal judge’s habeas corpus order to release a Confederate sympathizer. The administration of George W. Bush defied the Supreme Court’s ruling in Rasul v. Bush (2004), ordering Guantánamo prisoners be given access to U.S. courts for habeas petitions. Still, presidents usually respect the courts. The Constitution’s checks and balances have mostly held up over 236 years. But there’s another factor—one that political scientists and teachers like mine…
Read MoreWhen Presidents Clashed with Allies: Trump, Zelensky, Roosevelt, and de Gaulle in Historical Context
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“The public display in the Oval Office was unprecedented and bizarre: Trump dressed down Zelensky, echoing Roosevelt’s contempt for de Gaulle during WWII. From plans to seize France’s empire to tensions over Ukraine’s war, history reveals startling parallels in how U.S. presidents handled beleaguered allies.”
Trump Grabs at a Presidency of Intentionality
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There are two kinds of leaders: managers and revolutionists. Most American presidents are managers. Managers have small ambitions, often so small as to be immeasurable. They may or not think that the organization that they’re taking over requires a few nips or tucks, but they believe that the fundamentals are sound. The main ambition of these incrementalists is to attain their position. The moment their buttocks sink into the big chair behind the big desk, they have fulfilled their biggest goal. It is easy to identify a managerial president during a time of crisis. No matter how bad things get and how angry voters become, managers are loathe to change much. They govern as though continuity were a given. Jimmy Carter and Barack Obama, both consummate technocrats, assumed the nation’s highest office during periods of economic upheaval. Yet they did not follow the example of Franklin D. Roosevelt, a revolutionist, by introducing major plans or anti-poverty bills to try…
Read MoreTheory of the Non-Voter
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Non-voters are the biggest (potential) voting bloc in American politics. In midterm, state and local elections, more eligible voters choose not to exercise their franchise than to do so. Pundits and political sociologists ignore non-voters. Nobody polls them. Nobody asks them why they don’t vote. Nobody asks them what issues they care about. Nobody asks them what it would take to get them to vote, or who they would vote for if they did. Whether this lack of interest in non-voters is due to a lack of imagination or contempt based on the belief that they are lazy and apathetic, the result is that we don’t know much about the political leanings and motivations (or lack thereof) of the majority of our fellow citizens. There are tens of millions of them. They are an untapped resource and, until recently, there has been little attempt to reach out to them. Democratic Party strategists largely assume that there is…
Read MoreAre Killers Insane?
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As is typically the case after a high-profile murder, people are speculating about suspect Luigi Mangione’s state of mind when he allegedly killed United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson outside a Hilton hotel in Manhattan. We have a likely (political) motive in the form of a handwritten statement Pennsylvania police say they found on Mangione when they arrested him. “Frankly, these parasites simply had it coming,” it reads. “A reminder: the US has the #1 most expensive healthcare system in the world, yet we rank roughly #42 in life expectancy. United is the fourth largest company in the US by market cap, behind only Apple, Google, Walmart. It has grown and grown, but as our life expectancy? No, the reality is, these [indecipherable] have simply gotten too powerful, and they continue to abuse our country for immense profit because the American public has allowed them to get away with it…It is not an issue of awareness at this point,…
Read MorePut the Planet First
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We face so many challenges that the task of choosing which ones to emphasize and which can be edited out for the sake of brevity is nearly impossible. So many injustices afflict our fellow human beings that, of those that make the shortlist to be attacked and redressed, determining an order of priority is best left unattempted even by, especially by, those with the best intentions. (Yet we must and we shall. This process is called “politics.”) One matter, however, is so self-evidently far ahead of the rest that calling it an “issue” doesn’t come close to doing it justice: the environment. Without a clean, healthy planet to live on, nothing else matters. Human extinction or, failing that, the collapse of civilization as has been predicted by 2050, renders all debate on all other issues and policies moot. Without a planet that sustains life, college affordability is irrelevant. If you are starving and there isn’t enough food,…
Read MoreDemocrats Welcome the Fascist
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After an election, we make nice. The loser congratulates the victor; everybody shakes hands and promises a smooth transition of power. Spicy campaign rhetoric notwithstanding, such courtesies in service to the god of Stability are made possible by the underlying assumption that, while competing candidates and parties offer different ideas of how to achieve a better America, that’s the goal we all want because we all supposedly have similar values. Conveying a sense of continuity was no doubt paramount on President Biden’s mind when he delivered his post-election invitation to President-Elect Trump to visit the White House. There, the two men exchanged an easy repartee before an Oval Office fire–a tradition Trump did not deign to offer the victorious Biden before slinking off to Mar-e-Lago in mid-January of 2021. Restoring normalcy, with the corollary that Jan. 6th was anomalous, is also why Biden as well as Vice President Kamala Harris will attend Trump’s inaugural ceremony. Understandable, laudable…
Read MoreStein Wins!
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The world of politics, as well as the globe writ large, was shaken to its neoliberal foundations this week by the surprise victory of Green Party candidate Jill Stein, who did not qualify for debates and was accorded little media coverage, in the campaign for American president. Stein, a 74-year-old physician, will mark a trifecta of history as the nation’s first woman, Jew and third-party victor since 1860 to become commander-in-chief. Going into Election Day, polls as well as Las Vegas odds makers had shown the major-party candidates, Democrat Kamala Harris and Republican Donald Trump, locked neck-and-neck in a virtual dead heat, with seven key battleground states considered a tossup. The polls, it turns out, were dead wrong. A majority of American voters, it’s now clear, collectively decided that the two-party system, derided by critics as a “duopoly,” was no longer serving the country or their needs and needed to be sent a message: be responsive to…
Read MoreWhy Can’t Kamala Talk Dude?
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One of the most persistent challenges faced by Kamala Harris’ abbreviated presidential campaign is a vexingly wide gender gap. Men just aren’t that into her. Democrats have deployed several approaches to convince male voters to feel the joy. Divide and conquer: Harris’ policies divvy up guys by race. Her “opportunity agenda for Black men” would offer special loans and internships to Black entrepreneurs (no word on whether that’s been lawyered for constitutionality), fund federal studies on sickle-cell anemia and other diseases that disproportionately affect Black men and give them priority to profit from the emerging legal marijuana business (note to Democrats: cannabis equity failed in New York). Harris’ “opportunity agenda for Latino men” (see a trend?) would offer Latino guys more small business loans. A Google search for “opportunity agenda for white men” comes up empty but hey, there are still a couple hours left in the race. Kamala is also playing the class card. A spot…
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