In how many ways is Trump’s “war of whim” harming the United States? Let us count the ways…
Or perhaps we should just take note of the fact that we have deeply unserious, profoundly ignorant people in positions that require deep reservoirs of knowledge and expertise. Instead, we have an assortment of pompous pretenders and religious crackpots who have launched a war without even agreeing on its purpose.
Newsweek, among others, has reported on military leaders who have been telling troops that the Iran war has been launched as part of “God’s divine plan”– that “Trump and Jesus” are executing a divine purpose. The Military Religious Freedom Foundation has received some 200 complaints from roughly 50 military installations about U.S. commanders expressly linking Christianity to the “biblically sanctioned” war in Iran.
If those pronouncements–suggesting a throwback to the Crusades–weren’t horrifying enough, a post by Rick Wilson at Lincoln Square details the consequences for American readiness we can expect when attacks are launched by people who lack any detailed understanding of military strategy, let alone of the geopolitical context in which they are operating. As he writes, we are getting “a masterclass in what happens when a man who thinks black and white World War II movies in his head from the 1950s are the reality of modern combat between technologically advanced nations.”
Wilson picks apart Trump’s recent assertion that America has a “virtually unlimited supply” of “medium and upper-medium grade munitions.”
That’s not how our production and inventory of ammunition, guided weapons, and everything that leaves the barrel or the rail works. That’s not how industrial production works. That’s not how physics works. That’s not, as the kids say, how any of this works.
The United States does not have an “unlimited” supply of anything except debt, MAGA bots, and Trump mentions in the Epstein files.
As Wilson points out–and as Trump clearly doesn’t understand–every missile, every bomb, every 155mm shell, every variety of munition–“requires a supply chain, materials, rare earths, propellants, explosives, electronics, trained labor, and years of planning. Wars are not fought “forever” even in Trump’s brainfog alternate reality. There’s no imaginary Indiana Jones warehouse full of missiles.”
And about that context…
Trump has also bragged that we have additional “high-grade weaponry” stored for us in “outlying countries.” The irony of noting our dependence on the alliances and overseas basing structures he has constantly threatened, insulted, or tried to extort rather obviously escapes him.
Wilson has much more detail about the current state of U.S. armaments, and the gross incompetence of withholding support from Ukraine, and I encourage you to click through and read the entire essay for those facts and figures. But the firehose of lies and boasts about readiness aren’t even the worst part of this fiasco. As Wilson writes,
Now let’s talk about the dangerous part: casually boasting about stockpile levels. There is a reason serious leaders don’t blurt out operational readiness claims on social media, as if they’re bragging about golf handicaps.
Even if the numbers were accurate (and spoiler alert: he doesn’t know, and we’re burning through long-lead-time systems like a drunken sailor on shore leave), publicly telegraphing assessments of readiness, sufficiency, and shortfalls is the kind of thing professionals handle with classified briefings, not all-caps self-congratulation.
“Wars can be fought forever.” No, they can’t.
Wars chew through materiel, money, alliances, and political capital. Ask the Romans. Ask the British Empire. Ask the Nazis (the old ones, not the new ones). Ask the Soviets in Afghanistan. Ask anyone who served from 2003-2021 in Iraq or Afghanistan.
The idea that modern, high-intensity warfare can be sustained indefinitely without economic, industrial, and human consequences is the strategic equivalent of saying your credit card has “virtually unlimited” funds because the machine hasn’t declined you yet. Those $30,000 Shahed drones getting knocked down by $3,000,000 Patriots is a bad exchange rate.
So here we are–Trump (and MAGA Jesus?) have made domestic American society meaner while dramatically undermining our international influence and authority.
If I can distill this disaster into a single lesson, a cautionary tale, it would be this: failing to distinguish between celebrity and leadership is failure to understand how the world works, and voters who made that mistake–twice!–along with those who didn’t bother to vote, are responsible for the dire consequences of handing power to a clown car filled with people who haven’t the slightest understanding of their jobs, or the world they inhabit.
Back in the day, when I considered myself a Republican, lots of people in the GOP described themselves (as I did) as “fiscal conservatives and social liberals.” Those days, needless to say, are long gone; today’s GOP is exactly the opposite: fiscally promiscuous and socially illiberal.
The U-turn on social policy is hard to miss: Republicans today seem to delight in making life unbearable for trans people, dangerous for women with problem pregnancies, and uncomfortable for every American who isn’t a straight White Christian male. But too little attention has been paid to the other part of the party’s reversal, a total abandonment of fiscal restraint.
Republicans who used to advocate for a government that funded its expenditures with tax dollars–not necessarily “balancing the budget,” but exercising responsibility when it came to “tax and spend” policies– are long gone. The GOP is now the party of extravagant tax cuts for the rich, lavish subsidies for fossil fuel companies, and billions spent on a bloated military (costs that are metastasizing thanks to Trump’s illegal and dangerous war on Iran.)
But hey–they’re “saving” money by cutting services to the folks who rely on those “wasteful” social programs like Medicaid and SNAP.
Which brings me to one of my multiple hot button issues–the insanity of America’s approach to the social safety net. In fairness, the stupidity of that approach has been, and remains, essentially bipartisan.
As I explained in the speech I shared yesterday, American social policy differs from social policy in happier (and equally capitalist) countries. Yes, it is punitive and shortsighted–but it is also needlessly and enormously expensive. Not because we are generous to those in need–perish the thought!–but because in our zeal to make sure that no one receives a penny to which they are unentitled, we have erected a massive, costly and inefficient system to “weed out” suspected slackers–a system that just happens to enrich private enterprises.
The post began by quoting the CEO of Equifax, who was celebrating passage of the budget reconciliation bill and cheering an expected windfall he described as “just massive”– new rules that will make it harder for millions of eligible Americans to receive healthcare and food benefits.
Those rules increase the frequency of eligibility redeterminations, added work requirements for Medicaid recipients, and tied federal funding for SNAP to error rates and work requirements. The CBO has estimated that these rules will strip Medicaid coverage from over 7 million people.
But for Equifax and other government contractors, this maze of new rules means profit.
Equifax extracts over $800 million worth of contracts from the federal government and state governments each year. Much of that total is for access to its Workforce Solutions product, the Work Number, which provides data on workers’ income and employment. The Work Number’s basic business model is to purchase exclusive rights to worker data from employers and payroll providers (often without a worker’s knowledge) and then sell that data to banks, creditors, and governments for a profit.
Since the United States, unlike many of our peer nations, has opted to means-test core government programs like healthcare, the government has become a huge buyer of this income data. In order to prove that a person is eligible for Medicaid, an Affordable Care Act Marketplace subsidy, or any number of safety net programs, state governments and federal agencies pay Equifax for data to verify that person’s income.
Worse, different federal and state agencies often pay half a dozen times for the same piece of income data about the same individuals. Money that might make life a little easier for struggling families goes instead to the bottom lines of very profitable corporations.
The President’s “beautiful bill” supercharged this process, doubling the number of times state Medicaid agencies need to verify many individuals’ income each year, and adding other new requirements. As the post says, “If you had tried to find the most efficient way to transfer taxpayer dollars from healthcare to a databroker, you could not have done much better.”
As the Indiana Business Journal recently reported, the new Medicaid work mandates were promoted as a means to save money, but states will have to spend millions to comply. Most states will have to update both their aging computer systems and their methods of verifying information through various databases–and the IBJ reports that “Most will have to turn to private contractors to meet the time crunch.”
It turns out that the real “welfare queens” are the companies profiting from money meant to provide health care and feed hungry children.
Yesterday, I delivered a keynote to a meeting of IU’s social work alumni, titled “The Importance of Social Work to a Functioning Polity.” I’m sharing it today, with the warning that it is considerably longer than my usual daily rants….
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The word “polity” is shorthand for citizens of the organized political entity we call a state.
In order to function in harmony with the structure of the state in which they find themselves, members of a polity will from time to time require the services of people whose job it is to address the inevitable “hiccups” that come from living with other people– situations where the behavior of individuals becomes detrimental to themselves or others, or is inconsistent with the expectations of their society or the mandates of their government, or other situations that arise when individuals find themselves unable to cope with their society’s legal or social requirements.
A variety of professions deal with different aspects of those “hiccups.” Lawyers and social workers are two of them.
“Back in the day” I was a lawyer (I have since recovered). When I began to work on this talk—and especially when I read your code of ethics and some of your profession’s history—I recognized a significant number of common concerns—a number of what we might call similar preoccupations.
It turns out that lawyers and social workers are actually two “social service” professions, and that while we focus on different aspects of the services society requires, we have many things in common—especially when it comes to healing those social “hiccups,” the inevitable conflicts that arise between individual citizens and the structures of the society in which they find themselves.
Both law and social work are grounded in the fundamental truth of an old African proverb that may at first blush seem unconnected, the ancient adage that “it takes a village to raise a child.” Both professions deal with the important– and all too frequently overlooked– issues raised by that proverb: What should our village look like? What is the common good? What is the nature of mutual social obligation? What rules, social arrangements and ethical commitments are most likely to promote what Aristotle called “human flourishing”?
In other words, what is social justice, and how should we facilitate it within the boundaries of the legal and ethical regimes in which we find ourselves? It’s a question that is foundational to the legal profession and rule of law regimes, and– as I learned over my twenty-one years of working with colleagues on IU’s social work faculty– it is equally foundational to social work.
Every profession operates within the context and framework of the larger society in which it is embedded, and that’s certainly true of both the legal and social work professions. In the United States, lawyers and social workers use our professional skills to serve the inhabitants of an increasingly diverse society—a society defined and held together by what I have called “The American Idea.”
Allow me to suggest that there has never been a better time to revisit that “American Idea,” and to remind ourselves of its essential elements.
Unlike other societies in other times, citizenship in America has never depended upon conquest, rank or faith—we were never a “blood and soil” country. We were and are Americans because we bring our diverse identities, beliefs and backgrounds to a metaphorical communal table built upon the aspirational philosophies of the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.
American citizenship has never been based upon ethnicity or religion or even a static geography—it has always been based upon adherence to an Idea—or, perhaps more accurately, allegiance to a governing philosophy.
Both social work and the law are committed to the protection of individual rights and civic equality within the context of that philosophy—that “American Idea.” We work to enlarge individual liberty and self-realization within the necessary restrictions imposed by the needs and common good of the overall society. It is not an easily achieved balance, and its realization requires a familiarity with the history of our country—the good, the bad and the ugly.
When I look at the Social Work Code of Ethics, I see important parallels to the philosophy of America’s constituent documents. As the preamble to your code of ethics puts it, “social work begins with the belief that every individual has the right and potential to lead a productive and fulfilling life, and the belief that each person in a society has dignity and worth.” That belief requires practitioners to respect individual and cultural differences—an undertaking that is mirrored by language in both the First and Fourteenth Amendments to America’s Constitution.
Read organically, the First Amendment’s Free Speech and Religion clauses require government to respect the integrity of each citizen’s individual conscience. The Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment requires government actors to treat equally situated citizens equally.
Legal and social work professionals work to enhance our clients’ capacities for self-determination, and to do so in a manner that recognizes a dual responsibility to the individual client and to the broader society.
Today, both professions face unprecedented challenges. Lawyers are currently facing a ferocious assault on the rule of law; in the past few years, Supreme Court decisions have upended and discarded long-settled judicial precedents, decisions apparently based upon the majority Justices’ ideological and theological commitments rather than upon principled legal reasoning. The current challenges to social work in the U.S. are different—and arguably even more formidable. You face ongoing and persistent efforts to erode an already insufficient social safety net, and—more recently and along with lawyers– accelerating efforts to roll back progress toward racial and gender equality, efforts to return America to a time when straight White Christian males were –as Orwell’s pigs put it in Animal Farm—”more equal than others.”
The challenges faced by America’s lawyers and social workers are different in kind from the challenges faced by lawyers and social workers in other first world countries. That isn’t a new phenomenon—it has always been the case. It’s a truism that all of us work within the context of a given society, and that means that in America, law and social work differ significantly from law and social work elsewhere. For social workers, as those of you in this audience know all too well, some of those differences create tension and stress.
For one thing, America’s patchwork social safety net comes into conflict with deeply-held principles of social work. You practice in what might be called a “residual” welfare system—a system where social welfare benefits are available mainly when markets and families fail, unlike the case in countries with more universal systems. That means that many American social workers must function as gatekeepers to scarce benefits, screening eligibility and enforcing programmatic rules. Add to that the chronic underfunding of a patchwork system in which different programs have different eligibility requirements and rules, and American social work inevitably becomes focused on crisis rather than prevention.
In countries with universal or near-universal systems, where benefits are entitlements rather than means-tested interventions, social workers tend to function more as intermediaries coordinating services. They are thus able to focus more on preventing problems through early interventions.
Those differences also mean that America’s social workers are more clinically oriented than the more community-oriented social workers elsewhere. (If you watch detective shows on Britbox or Acorn, for example, you’ll note the detectives’ frequent referrals to family support, child protection and other social services—something you don’t see on American shows like Law and Order or NCIS. On those British shows, the detective who is investigating the murder or disappearance of a family member will call in a “family liaison” or other social work service that is evidently a routine part of that nation’s support system.)
Other first-world countries also tend to have nationalized systems. In the United States, federalism—whatever its other benefits– has led to professional fragmentation, with different states having different rules governing licensure and liability. Among other things, that makes it more difficult for social workers to relocate—a problem you share with many other professions, from law to real estate brokerages to cosmetology.
When I was doing research for this address, a social worker I spoke to summed up her frustrations by comparing your code of ethics to the realities of practice. As she explained it to me, your code of ethics strongly emphasizes social justice and the issues that flow from structural inequality and social oppression, but in practice, many if not most social workers spend hours navigating bureaucracies, enforcing eligibility rules and trying to manage or at least ameliorate the multiple crises caused by poverty. Others I spoke to underscored the tension between social work values and what existing systems and rules actually allow practitioners to do.
I think those frustrations are particularly acute right now, because social work—much like public interest law– is a “woke” profession, and we are living at a time of backlash to any and all values that might be characterized as “woke.” Pointing out that those values are quintessentially American simply infuriates the reactionaries who are determined to turn back the clock to a time when only a select cohort enjoyed social and legal dominance.
As discouraging as that backlash is and has been, we are beginning to see signs that it has run its course. The extremists and the out-and-proud bigots who have led the charge against fair play and inclusion have never been in the majority, and we shouldn’t confuse being loud with being numerous. These unhappy folks have always been a part of our national landscape, our polity—the difference this time around is the Internet and social media, and the algorithms that keep us glued to various platforms by emphasizing and highlighting the latest outrages.
When this ugly time subsides—and I am growing more confident that it will—both lawyers and social workers will need to turn our attention to the necessary legal and policy repairs, and that is a process that will benefit enormously from your participation, because as social workers, you’ve seen the problems up close and personal.
Times of turmoil are difficult to experience, but we need to remind ourselves that their aftermath is often a time of renewal and innovation.
As you know, this talk was titled “the importance of social work to a functioning polity.” It’s a title suggesting an important question: what would a truly functioning polity look like?
We live in a time when we all need to be thinking hard about what comes next—thinking about how we can “build back better” as former President Biden put it.
What should an improved American social safety net look like? What changes to legal rules and practices would really promote fair play for all members of society? What changes to the social work profession and the legal and structural system within which you practice might ameliorate the tensions many of you have described? What changes would be most likely to address misogyny and racial and religious discrimination? What systemic changes would ease the problems of the working poor? What policies might restore America’s once-vibrant middle class?
We could begin with national health care. As we all know, the United States spends far more per capita on health care—and gets far less—than countries with national health systems. Perhaps the fiscal benefits of a national health care system will finally appeal to the people who don’t seem to be concerned about the waste and multiple drawbacks of a market approach to medical care. Given the costs, upheavals and multiple failures of coverage we increasingly experience, I do hold out a forlorn hope that we may finally be ready to enact Medicare for All or something similar. A national system would be an enormous benefit to the many Americans who are foregoing necessary care or struggling with medical debt.
Beyond health care, we should look carefully at the wide variety of approaches to social welfare systems that work well elsewhere, and both social workers and lawyers should advocate for the adoption of those that are most likely to work well here, and not so incidentally, most likely to knit together our fractured and polarized polity. Reforming our approach to social welfare would have the added benefit of allowing more social workers to practice the profession in a manner consistent with its ethics and values.
I’ve long obsessed about what an updated social contract might look like, and whether it’s possible to craft a governing structure that respects individual liberty and choice while providing basic material security. My periodic musings revolve around two issues: whether anyone is truly free who struggles daily just to survive, and whether better government safety-net policies might help to unify a diverse and increasingly fragmented population.
I think the Greeks had it right when they advocated for a “golden mean” between extremes. The importance of hard work and individual talent shouldn’t be minimized, but neither should it be exaggerated. When the focus is entirely upon the individual, when successes and failures are attributed solely to individual effort and merit, we fail to recognize the immense influence of social and legal structures that operate to privilege some groups and impede others.
When we ignore systemic barriers, or pretend they don’t exist, we feed stereotypes and harden tribal affiliations. That’s why I think the first priority of a social contract should be to nurture what scholars call “social solidarity,” the ability of diverse citizens to see ourselves as different parts of an over-arching, inclusive American community.
Any workable social contract connects citizens to a larger community in which they have equal membership and from which they receive equal support. The challenge is to achieve a healthy balance—to create a society that genuinely respects individual liberty within a renewed emphasis on the common good, a society that both rewards individual effort and talent, and nurtures the equal expression of those talents irrespective of tribal identity.
As I have frequently argued, public policies can either increase or reduce polarization. Policies intended to help less fortunate citizens can be delivered in ways that stoke resentments, or in ways that encourage national cohesion. Think about widespread public attitudes about welfare programs aimed at poor people and contrast those attitudes with the overwhelming approval of and support for Social Security and Medicare.
Despite ample evidence to the contrary, significant numbers of Americans stubbornly believe laziness and lack of motivation are major causes of poverty, and that welfare programs breed dependence. Social Security and Medicare are viewed differently, primarily because they’re universal programs; virtually everyone contributes to them and everyone who lives long enough benefits from them. Such programs avoid stigma.
The fact that universal policies unify is an important and usually overlooked argument favoring a Universal Basic Income, even while multiplying pilot programs continue to highlight numerous other positive consequences of no-strings cash stipends.
America currently has a patchwork of state and federal programs, with costly bureaucratic barriers and means testing that operate to exclude most of the working poor. Welfare recipients are routinely stigmatized by moralizing lawmakers pursuing punitive measures aimed at imagined “Welfare Queens.” Meanwhile, current anti-poverty policies haven’t made an appreciable impact on poverty.
A Universal Basic Income is a cash grant sufficient to ensure basic sustenance–but unlike welfare, a UBI has no phase-out, no marriage penalties, no people falsifying information.
Support for the concept isn’t limited to progressives. Milton Friedman proposed a “negative income tax,” and conservative icon F.A. Hayek wrote “There is no reason why in a free society government should not assure to all, protection against severe deprivation in the form of an assured minimum income, or a floor below which nobody need descend.”
In 2016, Samuel Hammond of the libertarian Niskanen Center, described the “ideal” features of a UBI: its unconditional structure avoids creating poverty traps; it sets a minimum income floor, which raises worker bargaining power without wage or price controls; it decouples benefits from a particular workplace or jurisdiction; since it’s cash, it respects a diversity of needs and values; and it simplifies and streamlines bureaucracy, eliminating rent seeking and other sources of inefficiency.
Hammond’s point about worker bargaining power is especially important in today’s work world—a world characterized by dramatically-diminished unions and a growing “gig economy.” With a UBI and single payer health coverage, workers would have freedom to leave abusive employers, unsafe work conditions, and uncompetitive pay scales.
A UBI might not level the playing field, but it sure would reduce the tilt.
A UBI would also have much the same positive effect on economic growth as a higher minimum wage. When poor people get money, they spend it, increasing demand—and increased demand is what fuels job creation. (If nobody is buying your widgets, you aren’t going to be hiring people to produce more of them.)
Counter-intuitive as it may seem, a significant body of research supports the importance of a robust social safety net to market economies. As Will Wilkinson of the Niskanen Center has written, the political Left fails to appreciate the important role of markets in producing abundance, and the political Right refuses to acknowledge the indispensable role safety nets play in buffering the socially destructive consequences of insecurity.
I have previously written about the salutary effects of a UBI–effects that several studies and pilot projects have confirmed. I have also suggested budgetary adjustments that could pay for it.
I first made those arguments in 2017, when it became likely that AI and autonomous cars would lead to dramatically increased unemployment. Needless to say, the U.S. hasn’t advanced in the direction I was promoting…
Bottom line: We the People need to elect lawmakers who will work to solve real-world problems rather than engaging in culture wars while pursuing personal aggrandizement. Political leadership that respects evidence and expertise can change the destructive trajectory we’ve been on for the past several years.
America has the resources to create a nurturing “village” in which to raise our children—a village that can enrich our connections and imbue our diverse polity with a sense of community. It will take considerable effort, but we can—and must– usher in a society that will allow lawyers and social workers to take our fingers out of the metaphorical dike and employ our respective professional talents in more productive ways.
I know a lot of social workers, so I know that most of you in this virtual meeting are working toward that day and that society–and I salute you.
Thank you so much for inviting me here this morning.
If there is one thing Trump actually understands, it’s the utility of the “firehose” championed by Steve Bannon–the tactic of spraying the country with so much excrement each day that the body politic misses behaviors that would, in ordinary times, be scandalous.
Permit me an example.
While we have been distracted by “little things” like an illegal war on Iran, Pam Bondi’s transparent efforts to keep the lid on Trump’s multiple and damning appearances in the Epstein files, and the re-emergence of measles thanks to RNK, Jr.’s war on medical science, the goofball who is currently in charge of the Pentagon has been in a standoff with Anthropic, a tech company opposed to unregulated and unethical use of its AI product, Claude.
As the Atlantic has reported, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth issued an ultimatum to Anthropic’s CEO, Dario Amodei. He ordered the company to strip the ethical guardrails from its AI models “or face the full weight of the state.” Hegseth accompanied that order with a threat that, unless Anthropic allowed the Pentagon “all lawful uses” of its Claude models, he would designate Anthropic “a supply-chain risk,” effectively blacklisting the company from doing business with “any entity that touches the Department of Defense.”
To his eternal credit, Amodei refused, explaining that while he believed “deeply in the existential importance of using AI to defend the United States and other democracies, and to defeat our autocratic adversaries,” there is a narrow set of cases in which AI can “undermine, rather than defend, democratic values.” He concluded that the Pentagon’s “threats do not change our position: we cannot in good conscience accede to their request.”
As the linked article argues, the company’s stance represents a principled objection to the use of its AI for mass surveillance.
It is not opposed to autonomous weapons per se and has already carved out exemptions for missile defense and cyber operations. The company’s hesitation regarding autonomy is technical: Large language models are simply not yet reliable enough to operate without a human in the loop. Pushing them too far, too quickly, invites a mistake that could prove disastrous. Anthropic is asking for an exclusion on autonomous weapons not out of an ideological refusal to fight, but to allow for the research and development necessary to make such systems safe.
People in the Trump administration, however, are impervious to both logic and ethics. Not long after the Atlantic published its article about the dispute, the Washington Post reported that Anthropic had been cut off from all government contracts. The Post reported that the action “shook the tech industry” and hardened the political and cultural battle lines across Silicon Valley over military use of artificial intelligence.
As the article noted, Trump has now put all of Silicon Valley on notice: if tech companies want to do business with the Pentagon they should be prepared to accede to any and all administration policies and hand over control of how their technology is used.
Less ethical rivals of Anthropic (including–surprise!– Elon Musk) have rushed in to pledge that their own companies would not question Pentagon policies, styling themselves as “loyal patriots.”
It isn’t surprising that Trump’s transactional administration would favor companies willing to trade their ethical concerns for lucrative contracts. Last fall, the administration characterized Anthropic’s ethical concerns as attempts to manipulate the government with “fear mongering” about AI technology. Media outlets reported that the White House was “displeased” when Anthropic raised ethical objections to the ways in which the administration wanted to use its technology–especially its intent to use the company’s product for surveillance.
The Atlantic article called this ethical quandary over domestic surveillance an “unbridgeable divide.”
Under an administration that invoked the Insurrection Act, or that sought to map domestic dissent, the Pentagon’s demand for “all lawful uses” of Anthropic’s models could become a skeleton key. Amodei articulated this danger in a recent interview with Ross Douthat, noting that, although it isn’t illegal to record conversations in public spaces, the sheer scale of AI changes the nature of the act. As Amodei put it, AI could transcribe speech and correlate it in a way that would not only identify one member of the opposition but “make a map of all 100 million. And so, are you going to make a mockery of the Fourth Amendment by the technology finding technical ways around it?”
The answer to that question is obvious. The fascist regime that currently controls America’s federal government–and the Silicon Valley “bros” who are rushing to ignore those pesky ethical concerns–will be happy to make a mockery of the Fourth Amendment.
Americans have engaged in a longstanding argument about the nature of patriotism–and how it differs from nationalism. I agree with those who argue that a true patriotism requires allegiance to the nation’s founding principles, and includes an obligation to protest official actions that violate those original commitments. Nationalism, on the other hand, requires belief in “my country right or wrong”–blind support for wherever the nation’s leaders take us.
It has become abundantly clear that the various members of the Trump administration fall into the second camp, which brings me to the nationalist idiocy of FCC Chair Brendan Carr.
As a Daily Beast headline accurately put it, “Trump Goon Demands ‘Pro-America’ Content from the Networks.” Among Carr’s suggestions: broadcasters should start each broadcast day with the ‘Star Spangled Banner’ or Pledge of Allegiance” and offer viewers daily “Today in American History” announcements that explain “significant events that took place on that day in history.” (Somehow, I doubt that those history lessons would include the My Lai massacre or Emmitt Till’s murder…) Carr wants “patriotic, pro-America content that celebrates the American journey and inspires its citizens.”
Evidently, truly “pro-American” material would exclude televised interviews with Democratic candidates, since the memo followed a widely-publicized episode in which Stephen Colbert was forbidden to air a segment with Texas Democrat James Talarico, who is running for the Senate. Colbert had been told by CBS lawyers that airing the interview would run afoul of Carr’s decision to enforce the FCC’s “equal time” rule for talk shows, which had traditionally been exempt from that rule. This was not a one-off; a couple of weeks before this incident, Carr had launched an investigation into The View after it broadcast an interview with Talarico.
Carr is evidently as stupid as the rest of Trump’s appointees: Colbert published the video on his YouTube channel, where it has garnered more than 8 million views to date–far more than most of his late-night interviews. (It also generated $2.5 million for Talarico’s campaign in a mere 24 hours.)
An article in The Independent also covered Carr’s request that broadcasters join his Pledge America Campaign–a promise to air “patriotic, pro-America content that celebrates the American journey and inspires its citizens by highlighting the historic accomplishments of this great nation from our founding through the Trump Administration today.”
Carr rather clearly doesn’t understand what it means to be a truly patriotic “pro American.” Anna Gomez–who is the only Democratic Commissioner at the FCC, took to X to school him, writing that “Nothing is more American than defending our constitutional rights against those who would erode our civil liberties. If broadcasters choose to participate in this FCC campaign, they can do so by defending their First Amendment rights and refusing government interference.”
Carr and his tone-deaf efforts to undermine the First Amendment are just one aspect of the Trump administration’s nationalism–a nationalism that is far from patriotic. Historians and political scientists define patriotism as affection, pride, and support for the shared values of one’s country, and a commitment to support national improvement. Nationalism, on the other hand, is a devotion to “blood and soil.” It emphasizes the superiority of the nation over others, and fosters exclusionary, competitive, and aggressive attitudes toward foreign nations.
There’s an excellent quote attributed to someone named Sydney Harris: “the patriot is proud of his country for what it does, and the nationalist is proud of his country no matter what it does.” Precisely.
After the close of the Olympics, the New York Times published an article titled “At the Olympics, I Saw the Difference Between Nationalism and Patriotism.” It traced that distinction with references to the conduct of both athletes and audiences, and strongly rebutted J.D. Vance’s insistence that America’s “distinct national culture is part of what makes international institutions suspect, immigration threatening and alliances based on shared principles unwise.” The essay concluded:
With our wallets, our attention, our time and our collective groans with every fall and cheers for every newly realized lifelong dream, the world’s citizens are sending a message: We proudly root for our countries, but we are more than just our countries. And in many cases we are better — much better — than the governments in charge of them.
To be “pro America” is to be patriotic–not nationalistic. Too bad Trump and Carr don’t understand the difference.
