What The Good Guys Are Doing

Sometimes I feel like a motorist driving past a spectacular wreck. It’s hard not to rubberneck. And these days, government sure looks like that wreck–here in Indiana, where a gerrymandered legislature focuses on everything but the common good, and in Congress, where the wheels have come off the legislative vehicle, and the entire enterprise looks more like one of those old Keystone Kop movies than a genuine effort to govern.

It really is important to remind ourselves that–while we are craning our necks to look at the destruction–other cars are moving properly down the highway. While the local and national members of government’s lunatic caucuses are attacking democratic institutions and neglecting pressing problems, a wide variety of “good guys” are devoting their time and resources to solving those problems.

Recent headlines have reported the extension of broadband Internet access to millions of people, the eradication or control of several diseases around the globe, multiple acts of charity and philanthropy, and scientific progress on a variety of threats to the environment. You can probably point to many more nuggets of good news.

What triggered this post was a story I came across detailing the work being done by Matt Damon, the movie star, to address the threats posed by lack of access to potable water.

Evidently, when Matt was young, he took multiple trips around the world with his mother, and witnessed what life was like for communities living with the global water crisis. Then, while filming a movie in Sub-Saharan Africa, he spent time with families in a Zambian village who lacked access to water and toilets. Those experiences “inspired a commitment to helping solve the global water crisis. In 2006 he founded H20 Africa Foundation to raise awareness about safe water initiatives on the continent.”

While his foundation brought water to families in need in Africa, the A-list actor realized he needed more expertise to solve the world’s water and sanitation crisis. Fortunately for him, a partner who could help Matt do more, faster, was a meeting away.

In 2008, during an annual Clinton Global Initiative meeting in New York, Matt met Gary White, an engineer from Kansas City who had gained an international reputation as a water and sanitation expert. Realizing the global impact they could have together, Matt and Gary’s organizations came together to create Water.org in 2009.

In their book, The Worth of Water, Gary and Matt invite us to become a part of this effort—to match hope with resources, to empower families and communities, and to end the global water crisis for good.

My visit to Water.org prompted a google search for other efforts focused on water–especially efforts to clean Earth’s increasingly polluted oceans. There are, it turns out, several: The Ocean Cleanup is a non-profit organization developing and scaling technologies to rid the oceans of plastic. (The organization uses what it calls a “dual strategy”– intercepting plastic in rivers to cut the inflow of pollution, and cleaning up what has already accumulated in the ocean and won’t go away by itself.) The Ocean Conservancy is studying the effects of climate change on the oceans of the world, and working to ensure that the oceans get the government funding and attention they require. The Ocean Rescue Alliance is conserving reefs through restoration, research, eco-Tourism, & education.

There are several others, and that’s just efforts directed toward the planet’s oceans. Scientists are working on a wide variety of technologies intended to ameliorate the worst effects of climate change; multiple non-profit organizations are addressing daunting social ills. In short, there are a lot of very good people doing very good things and ignoring the wreckage that is America’s current, overwhelming political dysfunction.

There are, of course, reasons that this blog focuses on that dysfunction rather than on what the “good guys’ are doing. The most obvious is that–as a former professor of public policy–governance and policy are my areas of interest.

That said, it is also the case that government remains the pre-eminent mechanism through which people and communities can act; a non-functioning government negates or hobbles the efforts of those good guys. The lunatic caucus in the U.S. House threatens everything from citizens’ civil liberties to world peace; the chokehold of the GOP supermajority in the Indiana Statehouse prevents urban Hoosiers from exercising local control and undermines  public schools in rural areas, among many other travesties.

I will continue to focus on the wreckage that is America’s current political environment, but every so often,  I do want to recognize that there are a lot of “good guys” out there, and that many of them are making a real difference.

If only we had a government that was helping, rather than hindering….

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Elon Musk And The Public/Private Dilemma

Alexandra Petri recently had a gloriously snarky opinion piece in the Washington Post,comparing Elon Musk to her toddler. Titled “Things both my toddler and Elon Musk do that are signs of genius, apparently” it included things like “Constantly yelling at people to change things that cannot be changed” and “When presented with slow, patient explanations of why things are not possible, just screams louder;” and “Likes to seize nice things and ruin them because of a fundamental misunderstanding of what they are for.”

And of course, “Wants to be center of attention at all times.”

It’s disturbing enough when a man-child (“man-toddler?”) has enough money to buy and control what had been a significant mode of communication, but its terrifying to discover that this petulant child has the power to interfere in matters of global war and peace. As multiple media outlets have reported, Musk’s SpaceX refused to allow Ukraine to use its Starlink internet services to launch an attack on Russia last September–a decision that undoubtedly prolonged the conflict and benefitted Russia.

Musk has defended his decision as an effort to prevent possible nuclear war. Whatever your opinion of that excuse, or his action, the episode raises a profound question: should a single private citizen–even one less mercurial and self-aggrandizing than Musk– have the power to decide such questions? 

We live in a very weird time. Government evidently gets to decide what I do with my uterus, but not how the U.S. will assist in the defense of its allies….

I know this will come as a shock to several self-satisfied “captains of industry,” but having a lot of money does not necessarily translate into superior knowledge or nuanced understanding. Musk is actually a poster boy for that disconnect–as David French (who spent years as a First Amendment lawyer) recently wrote in the New York Times,

Despite his loud and frequent protestations, Elon Musk may be the worst ambassador for free speech in America. To understand why, it’s necessary to look at X, the website formerly known as Twitter, which he owns and rules over like the generalissimo of a banana republic….

Instead of creating a platform for free speech, Musk created a platform for Musk’s speech — or, more precisely, Musk’s power. First, he has demonstrated that he’s perfectly willing to take action against people or entities that challenge him or challenge X. As my friends at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (where I used to serve as president) have detailed, he has used his authority to suspend accounts, to throttle (or limit the traffic of) competitors and reportedly to boost his own voice.

As French quite accurately notes, rather than making Twitter (now X) into a free speech paradise, Musk has turned it into the generalissimo’s playpen, where the generalissimo’s values shape everything about the place.

X is Musk’s company, and he can set whatever speech rules he wishes. But do not be fooled. When Musk defends his decisions by shouting “free speech,” I’m reminded of the immortal words of Inigo Montoya in the movie “The Princess Bride”: “You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.” Musk isn’t promoting liberty; he’s using his power to privilege many of the worst voices in American life.

Power and privilege. Those two words are–or should be– at the heart of the public/private distinction. Once again, we come back to that fundamental question: what is government for? What functions are properly left to the private sector–to the individual, to the marketplace, or to the wide variety of nonprofit and voluntary organizations–and which must be exercised by a democratically-elected government? 

Right now, that essential inquiry is mired in a host of very serious concerns about the declining health of democratic decision-making, and the increasingly obvious effort of MAGA Republicans to turn America into an autocratic, White Christian Nationalist state. If they are successful, American government will no longer be legitimate under any definition of that term, and the allocation of power between those privileged by the regime and the rest of us will be moot.

If we do manage to salvage democratic governance–if voters come out in 2024 and deal a sufficiently robust defeat to the MAGA Confederates still fighting the Civil War–we will need to turn our attention to the necessary divisions between public and private power.

Governments can and do make grievous mistakes, but that is no reason to allow individuals–even individuals considerably more mature and informed than Elon Musk–to usurp decision-making in realms that must be subject to public accountability.

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Trust And Governance

When I was doing research for my 2009 book Distrust, American Style: Diversity and the Crisis of Public Confidence, I became aware of the considerable amount of data that tied social trust to the functioning of institutions–especially government.

What prompted that research, and the book that emerged, was my considerable skepticism of a widely-read study by Robert Putnam (author of the even-more-widely read Bowling Alone), in which he attributed America’s diminished levels of social trust to our growing diversity. I agreed that the erosion of interpersonal social trust had occurred, but I strongly disagreed about the cause, which I attributed to burgeoning evidence that much of government was untrustworthy.

I also saw the data as manifestation of a “chicken-and-egg” problem: were low levels of trust a cause or consequence of diminished trust in our government?

My research led me to argue that–partly because of the complexities of modern society and partly due to specific attributes of America’s political culture–generalized social trust depends on our ability to trust our social and governing institutions.

Fish rot from the head.

The issues are complicated, and I don’t intend to re-litigate the arguments I made in the book, but one clear lesson I took from my research was that social trust is incredibly important. (One of the reasons the collapse of a truly mass media is so consequential is that the rise of outright propaganda has contributed mightily to the erosion of that trust.)

We see the consequences of low levels of trust–in government, in medical science– in the refusal of too many Americans to get vaccinated, prolonging the COVID pandemic. We see it in the astonishing numbers who believe the “Big Lie” about rigged elections.

What prompted me to think about my former research was an article in the Atlantic, titled “A Trust Recession is Looming Over the American Economy.”

Manufacturer inventories. Durable-goods orders. Nonfarm payrolls. Inflation-adjusted GDP. These are the dreary reportables that tell us how our economy is doing. And many of them look a whole lot better now than they did at their early-pandemic depths. But what if there’s another factor we’re missing? What if the data points are obscuring a deepening recession in a commodity that underpins them all?

Trust. Without it, Adam Smith’s invisible hand stays in its pocket; Keynes’s “animal spirits” are muted. “Virtually every commercial transaction has within itself an element of trust,” the Nobel Prize–winning economist Kenneth Arrow wrote in 1972.

The article focused on the importance of trust to economic performance, and noted a little-remarked element of the remote work necessitated by the pandemic: one study  found that the longer employees were apart from one another during the pandemic, the more their faith in their colleagues fell. The article reported on a number of other studies that found similar “trust erosions” in the workplace.

As companies have gone virtual during the coronavirus pandemic, supervisors wonder whether their remote workers are in fact working. New colleagues arrive and leave without ever having met. Direct reports ask if they could have that casual understanding put down in writing. No one knows whether the boss’s cryptic closing remark was ironic or hostile.

The article reminds us that “Trust is to capitalism what alcohol is to wedding receptions: a social lubricant.”

The economists Paul Zak and Stephen Knack found, in a study published in 1998, that a 15 percent bump in a nation’s belief that “most people can be trusted” adds a full percentage point to economic growth each year. That means that if, for the past 20 years, Americans had trusted one another like Ukrainians did, our annual GDP per capita would be $11,000 lower; if we had trusted like New Zealanders did, it’d be $16,000 higher. “If trust is sufficiently low,” they wrote, “economic growth is unachievable.”

My own research noted the effects of diminished trust on business and the economy, but focused more on the widespread, negative consequences for governance and social amity.

In a complex society, we can no longer rely on gossip and informal interpersonal networks to tell us who is trustworthy and who is not. We rely on our social institutions, especially (albeit not exclusively) government. As I wrote in the book, when government does not function properly–when it intrudes into areas that are inappropriate for government intervention, when it violates the terms of our original social contract, or when it performs its necessary and proper functions in an incompetent or corrupt manner–it undermines social trust and cohesion.

The corruption of the Mitch McConnells and the corruption and incompetence of the Trump administration–aided and abetted by propaganda outlets pretending to be “news” organizations–have decimated the already badly eroded social trust required for democratic governance.

I for one don’t have a clue how to grow it back.

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It Goes WAY Beyond Hypocrisy

While I am on a rant against insanity, can you stand one more diatribe about anti-vaccination, anti-mask hysterics?

There are a number of theories about the motivation of these truly horrible people. (Not everyone who is unvaccinated falls within that category, of course–I’m focusing on the “activists” who are promulgating lies about the vaccines and threatening school board members.)

Paul Krugman recently opined that much refusal is political, pointing to the strong negative correlation between Trump’s share of a county’s vote and vaccinations. As of July, 86 percent of self-identified Democrats said they had had a vaccine shot, but only 54 percent of Republicans did.

He also pointed out that peddlers of quack medicine and right-wing extremists cater to more or less the same audience.

That is, Americans willing to believe that Barack Obama was born in Kenya and that Italian satellites were used to switch votes to Joe Biden are also the kind of people willing to believe that medical elites are lying to them and that they can solve their health problems by ignoring professional advice and buying patent medicines instead.

And those peddlers are making money. Horse dewormer, anyone?

But it’s the sheer lunacy–the extreme cognitive dissonance–that drives me up a wall. 

  • “We don’t  know what’s in it.” There’s a meme going around Facebook, enumerating all of the things Americans ingest without the slightest idea “what’s in it.” Everything from hotdogs to McNuggets to horse dewormer.
  • “Bill Gates has placed a chip in the vaccine to track people”–usually uttered by people carrying cell phones equipped with such chips…
  • “I have a right to control my own body”. This is a particular favorite of mine, coming as it does mostly from men who adamantly refuse to extend a similar right to pregnant women. Or people who disagree with them.
  • “Requiring masks is government overreach.” If the government can’t require a piece of cloth over your nose and mouth, why can it require that you cover your genitals in public? I want to see these “constitutional scholars” at the grocery, shopping naked. (I bet the men have teeny weenies.)
  • Speaking of overreach–these also tend to be the people who want government to drug test poor folks on welfare…
  • “I’m rejecting vaccines because I trust God.” If they truly trusted God, why do so many of them own/carry guns? Do they lock their doors? Buy eyeglasses and/or hearing aids? For that matter, why do they check into hospitals when they’re gasping for breath?
  • Speaking of individual liberty–government mandates seat belts, imposes speed limits, enforces smoking ordinances and issues multiple other rules to protect public safety. According to Hobbes, the original purpose of government was to remove us from the state of nature, in which there is “no arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” Government is supposed to keep the strong from hurting the weak, the predatory from taking advantage of the helpless, and the stupid and/or selfish from spreading a deadly disease.

The hypocrisy is stunning. Republicans are suing businesses that require masks. Florida’s insane Governor is fining businesses that require vaccinations. These are the same  Republicans who insist that businesses have a right to refuse service to LGBTQ customers… 

I could go on and on…If COVID is a hoax, why ingest bleach or dewormer to treat it?

Many Republicans encouraging vaccine resistance know better. They just want to hurt Joe Biden politically. Biden promised to defeat the virus, and they’re determined to keep him from delivering on that promise. If lots of their own voters get sick and die as a result–well, them’s the breaks…

Former Republican and sane person David Frum made an interesting point in a recent issue of The Atlantic.

As cases uptick again, as people who have done the right thing face the consequences of other people doing the wrong thing, the question occurs: Does Biden’s America have a breaking point? Biden’s America produces 70 percent of the country’s wealth—and then sees that wealth transferred to support Trump’s America. Which is fine; that’s what citizens of one nation do for one another. Something else they do for one another: take rational health-care precautions during a pandemic. That reciprocal part of the bargain is not being upheld…

In the end, the unvaccinated person himself or herself has decided to inflict a preventable and unjustifiable harm upon family, friends, neighbors, community, country, and planet.

Will Blue America ever decide it’s had enough of being put medically at risk by people and places whose bills it pays? Check yourself: Have you?

I certainly have.

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Why America Elects Moral Midgets

I haven’t previously posted about the Impeachment trial. Initially, I figured that, since virtually everyone who has an opinion has written, spoken and generally fulminated about those opinions, there wasn’t much of value I could add.

Most of the commentary has–quite correctly–pointed to the cowardice and lack of integrity of all but seven Republican Senators. Columns and editorials have especially zeroed in on the breathtaking hypocrisy of Mitch McConnell; in his speech immediately after the vote, he made it clear that he knew Trump was guilty as charged. The fig leaf that McConnell and his spineless colleagues  were frantically trying to hide behind was an utterly unpersuasive opinion that a President who no longer held office could not be constitutionally impeached–an opinion rejected by virtually all constitutional scholars.

It also didn’t escape notice that McConnell was the reason the trial had been delayed until after Biden was inaugurated.

Suffice it to say that the overwhelming hypocrisy and dishonesty in the face of what everyone in that chamber clearly knew was astounding–and it has all been the subject of widespread condemnation. What hasn’t been adequately analyzed, however, is how we got here–“here” being a legislative chamber containing so many Senators clearly unworthy of public office.

I am convinced that the pathetic performance Americans saw last week was the result of forty-plus years of denigrating the very existence of government and belittling those who serve in it.

Reagan started the incessant attacks, and Republican dogma ever since has been that government–far from being an important tool for collective action addressing America’s problems–is always and inevitably a threat that must be constrained and hobbled.  Republican messaging has been sneering and dismissive of the very notion that government might be an essential mechanism for achieving the common good. It has been years since I heard a Republican politician employ terms like “statesmanship” and/or “public service.”

When I saw that both of Indiana’s undistinguished, moral-pygmy Senators had (predictably) voted to acquit, I could almost picture them spitting on Dick Lugar’s grave…

The Republican demonization of government has largely succeeded in changing the identity of the GOP. The political culture that produced statesmen like Dick Lugar and Bill Hudnut has been replaced by the slimy “what’s in it for me” opportunism of Mitch McConnell and Donald Trump–and Lindsey Graham, Ted Cruz, Josh Hawley and too many others.

Honorable, talented people are attracted to careers that those in their particular tribes consider prestigious and admirable. When government employment is denigrated and mocked–“couldn’t get a real job?”– when political actors are expected to be corrupt, and when politics is widely considered the refuge of blowhards and scoundrels, blowhards and scoundrels are who it will attract.

It’s instructive to emphasize that these persistent attacks on government and public service have come overwhelmingly from Republicans. Democrats have been far more likely to defend the importance and worth of  America’s political institutions, and I don’t think it is just happenstance that as a result–as we can see at the federal level– Democratic officeholders these days tend to be considerably more public-spirited, honorable and impressive than their Republican peers.

Today’s Democrats have Jamie Raskin; Republicans have Marjorie Taylor Green…

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