Snyder is exactly right, and the framework maps cleanly onto cost asymmetry: the world’s largest defense budget cannot buy strategic coherence when the operating system is personal grievance, and adversaries with a fraction of the resources extract enormous returns simply by waiting and watching.
The thirteen pillars he lists are really one pillar, institutional memory, and what we are watching is the deliberate liquidation of that memory in exchange for short-term loyalty rents to a small circle.
The Hegseth-as-resurrection detail is the tell, because regimes that win do not need to theologize tactical losses, and the Polish Romanticism comparison lands precisely except that Poland was partitioned by external powers rather than dismantling itself for sport. What makes this distinct from prior imperial declines is the speed and the consent——no Visigoths at the gate, just a cabinet of unqualified people cheerfully removing the load-bearing walls while the shareholders applaud.
Snyder’s closing point deserves emphasis, that the prior equilibrium was already unsustainable, because a system that confused GDP with legitimacy and military reach with consent was always going to produce something like this once the guardrails came off.
The last point is REALLY important. We don't know how to think critically anymore, or really spend much time thinking. We want constant entertainment, even from the Oval Office. Probably not true at Yale, but I remember hearing a college professor friend back in the 80s telling me the attention span of students was drastically minimized and coordinated with TV schedules. You have to admit that having a wrestling expert in the Cabinet representing Education is amusing, though possibly not as fatal as having a pretty boy Fox guy in charge of War. We seem to have become willfully stupid. If you haven't seen Snyder's speech at the Cincinnati No Kings rally at the end of March (the link is the last four words of his post above) see it. Dogs and cats can understand this and make it happen...
She is no wrestling expert Fran, she and her husband are/were promoters of wrestling performances that have no relationship to competitive wrestling, as seen in amateur events from the Olympics on down. 35 or so years ago I worked on a movie that they produced, it's all show as in show business. Making her Secretary of Education is like making a large rock the head of swimming instruction. Tim is spot on in every one of his points.
I believe there are two important tells in Snyder's essay. 1. The United States had foreign policy and diplomatic experts who were well qualified to negotiate with the Iranians. Most of them were fired. When we sat down to negotiate with Iran, they sent their A Team, tough experienced negotiators. The United States sent its D Team - a bunch of amateurs. No wonder they ate us 0alive. 2. Trump does not want advisors who will tell him what he "needs" to hear. He has surrounded himself with advisors who will tell him what he wants to hear. The result is Hegseth, Patel, Miller, and Bondi and Noem before they were fired. The rest of his advisors and Cabinet members are of similar unprepared, incompetent quality. This is the weakest group ever assembled by an American president. The result is American failure in every one of Tim's thirteen points. I mainly blame Trump for being an incompetent fool. I also blame the American voter who returned a man who had proven himself unqualified in his first term. January Sixth should have been the final nail -except it wasn't!
Indeed. Our challenge is to elect people who will work within the existing structure to bring about reform. For example by packing the Supreme Court to overturn key decisions by the existing one and to prevent blockage of progressive legislation.
We may not like certain features of the Constitution, like for example the Electoral College, but it would be a mistake to try amending it while Republicans control so many state legislatures.
Rebuild from the bottom up as well as from the top down.
Stephen, the continued existence of an unaltered Electoral College is one of the first changes that must be made. One of our colleagues suggested each state be guaranteed one vote and larger states get some limited multiple. Even that may not be workable, but it would certainly change political calculations. The current system seems, in today’s world, destined to end a united country — especially when a minority of the population, especially concentrated in in states contributing less to the nation’s tax receipts and often taking greater proportional distributions of federal disbursements have played the game to dominate our national political system. If the only satisfactory outcome is several smaller nations, perhaps we need to be thinking clearly about the composition of those nations and the most reasonable possible transitional rules.
I would prefer a single nation, but not the one we have become!
Johan, That this would happen is something my book club discussed almost two years ago when we were reading Project 2025.
I am a member of Indivisible Abroad. I lead a group in a city in Northern Germany. Indivisible Abroad and Indivisible are some of the organizations supporting Free Speech for People's campaign to impeach Trump and his cabinet. Would you please read my piece explaining it and help us get 2 million signatures by signing the petition in it? https://lindaweide.substack.com/p/indivisible-abroad-supports-the-impeach?r=f0qfn
Because of our current Supreme Court, I fear our only alternative is national suicide. This Supreme Court appears to be intent on hindering our rights as citizens. This Supreme Court is enabling the buffoons who are in power, alas. Consequently I fear any attempt to reset our aims and ideals will simply be nullified by Roberts et al.
I agree with you but I've never seen anyone fight the judgements of the Supreme Count and win. Just stating a fact and this Court simply doesn't make sense of the Constitution. Obviously, we have to keep on fighting.
It is not hard to see. It hasn't been hard to see since his first term. The only reason he didn't succeed was that Vought and company weren't put in power then. I thought Bush broke just about everything possible with the war in Iraq, ignoring New Orleans, etc. But Trump, as you point out, has a different mindset - it's about getting more money for himself and his cronies and having his name on everything in sight. Laws, norms, the Constitution are for suckers and will be ignored while he plunders and destroys this country. I can't imagine any country trusting us in the foreseeable future. And lord help us if we have another pandemic.
Online here, I see so many heartfelt comments by people who are so decent and so passionate about freedom. There’s a lot of us! We must all fight back.
Ruthy, you are right about there being a lot of us people who are decent and passionate about freedom. We need to put our heads together and talk. Don't forget that there were people just like us who are no longer alive but we can still communicate with some of them (like the writers and historians) by reading their works. We, who are still alive, need to get together and talk. Small groups meeting regularly can listen to and speak with each other and develop ideas from various points of view. Street demonstrations are nice but not enough. Our minds are starved for exchanging ideas and new insights for finding solutions for the problems that are all around us.
Tim articulates what I had been thinking. For me the phrase that sums it up is that Trump "treats the existence of the United States as a commercial opportunity for a select few people, American and otherwise." Like a hostile corporate takeover where the new owner liquidates the assets, lays off its staff and sells off the parts. In that, he is in cahoots with his broligarch buddies who join him to better milk the once in a lifetime opportunity. And then, behind his rise, is Vladimir Putin who has been salivating at the opportunity to destroy the West.
Trump wants to stay in office forever, but his rapidly declining mind and body suggests otherwise. In the meantime, he has yoked the United States to his personal decline.
Meanwhile, as gas prices rise, more and more Americans are waking up and are pissed. The big war is happening right here on American soil as Americans fight to take back their country. As we are seeing, he and his minions will use every dirty trick in the book and then some to hold onto power. That war will last at the very least into early 2029 when the next presidential term begins assuming there is one.
If our side wins, and I think it will, probably because the alternative is too awful for me to contemplate, we will have to do a deep scrubbing from top to bottom. Trump's rise is a culmination of the war of the very wealthy on the rest of us. But it also reveals the deep foundational flaws in our system that allowed such a man to rise to power. And it also highlights the contradiction of a country espousing ideals of freedom and inequality founded on slavery.
Yes, Ellen: "we will have to do a deep scrubbing from top to bottom."
Michael Corthell suggested several points in a recent Substack of his to comprise this "scrubbing." I've added the following specificity to his good points:
1) "strengthening labor" could oblige Dem public officials to appear much more often in red states and red areas to speak before audiences of our rural and working class fellow Americans.
2) "protecting voting rights" could mandate a national campaign for laws against gerrymandering.
3) "breaking the power of oligarchy" could return to the higher taxes on the rich of the Eisenhower era.
4) "defending public education" should end the rule of standardized testing. Return all decision making to the teachers. Hire only the best college grads as teachers -- and leave them be.
5) "confronting white nationalism" requires attorneys general who will enforce laws against hate speech -- including against the social media billionaires' algorithms for hatreds.
6) "demilitarizing civic life" means the U.S. change from its reliance on selling arms to dictatorial regimes abroad to programs for schools allied to other schools abroad for essaying programs among students learning English also to learn skills to see others as individuals in complicated cultures.
Snyder has hit all the points we all see clearly, and the unfortunate thing is that at least 37 % of the citizens don't see it and that a clear majority of Maga=Republicans seem to approve. I fear that the rest of us will go down with the ship of state.
This is excellent. I would like to see a "Part II" which delves into the details of the ideological and structural changes needed in the USA to prevent the Trump syndrome from repeating itself, and very importantly, how those changes would be brought about.
Masterful, but deeply troubling. It will take more than the invocation of the 25th Amendment to address and correct these deadly serious problems. Thanks for this careful analysis.
Trump is a moron driven by nothing more than greed and ego. He is therefore easily manipulated by those who want unbridled oligarchic power and to drain the resources of the nation for themselves. Oil barons, tech barons, finance barons, etc. all have a short sighted vision in which they smash and grab everything in sight as quickly as they can unaware and uncaring about the damage that they are doing. They think their gated communities, private security teams, and elite escape routes will protect them forever. They won't. The people are pissed and they are looking for accountability. Shit, even Jeff Bezos realized that the 500ft yacht with Lauren Sanchez' boobs hanging out is a bad look. I wonder, do they want to wait until the sans culottes set up Mme. La Guillotine before they wise up?
Trump is an evil genius. Yes, he has many people that help him but never in American History have we seen one party, the Republicans in this case, get behind everything Dear Leader says and does; and do it in a short period of time.
I do not blame rural non-wealthy voters that were conned into believing that voting for a billionaire was going to rub off on them. No, I blame my Palm Beach and NYC uber rich friends that voted with their pocketbook.
Never dreamed I would witness Americans voting to elect a group who would hold a gun to my country's temple and willfully pull the trigger. And continue to support them as we hit bottom. I am really beginning to take their Armageddon lust seriously, as I cannot for the life of me figure out what possible advantage this Administration is doing for themselves or their MAGA supporters, much less for the rest of us. (I really do wish I lived anywhere but the D.C. metro area these days--between Iran, the East Wing and the proposed Arc d' Trump, we are beginning to refer to our home with gallows humor as Ground Zero.)
I’m zeroing in on a very specific statement: "public education generally is replaced with scams whereby tax money is transferred from the poorer to the richer while schools themselves are starved”—I would like to know more about the way this happens. What I suspect is that school budgets never seem to include information about what it costs to buy standardized tests, curriculum materials, and “ed tech” (the packages that require students to sit in front of a screen manipulating little figures, with the claim that their test scores will go up). This is certainly one way money leaves the community to enrich Pearson and other “educational” giants—but I don’t know anyone with data on how much these things cost and at what point in the school funding system that money goes out the door. Anyone with insights?
Look up the status of public education in Ohio, as one example. My understanding here is that Dr. Snyder is referencing school vouchers. There is a great article in the New Yorker, I believe, about the corrupt history of school vouchers in the state of Ohio going back to the 90’s. I moved to Ohio 7 years ago and I am disgusted with the Republican supermajority in the statehouse that continues to enable and promote vouchers as our public school districts are starved for funds. The result is that every few years each school district has to put a levy on the ballot to request more money through property taxes, hitting especially hard on those that have fixed incomes. When those levies don’t pass, as happened at last Tuesday’s primary election, those school districts have to make tough choices about how they are going to continue to fund or cut services for the kids. As a tiny, concrete example of this, the school district where I live had to cut bussing for high school students. However, in this state, public school busses provide transportation for private school students. That means that the high school boys that live on my street have to find alternative ways to get to school while the public school buses provide rides to the kids just up the block that attend private school.
Thank you, Jennifer. I was completely forgetting about vouchers. A related example, now that you mention it: I taught in a public middle school for 4 years. In October there was always a surge of new kids—ones with a lot of needs and issues. Another teacher explained that the charter schools would accept students and get the funding for them, but by October they had decided which ones were too much of a handful and would make their scores look bad. They kicked those kids back into the regular public schools. The money, the way I heard it, did not follow the kids but stayed with the charter school that had originally admitted them. I categorically refuse to teach in a charter school.
Footnote: I live in Massachusetts, hardly a Republican-controlled state. Our Democrats don’t seem to be doing much to prevent these abuses.
I suppose there is something I’m failing to understand, but it seems to me to be more like murder than suicide. Trump seems to me to be, with help of course from Russell Vought et. al., to be murdering the United States out of greed, self-interest and disregard. I say take off the gloves and fight these traitors. Gerrymander them enough to overwhelmingly defeat them in the November election and in 2028. And then put them all in jail where they absolutely belong.
The decline of our country has been buzzing in my mind for awhile, maybe years. This essay seems to encapsulate my thinking. This may go into the third point but the gerrymandering that we have been going through last year for partisan advantage shows that the politicians can’t agree on the rules. Districts would only be changed every census, now it’s willy nilly. The rules governing the polity are breaking down.
I understand— or am starting to, with a dread that takes over my body— that the people at the center of this administration and the people behind Project 2025, are evil.
But what about those who have joined them? Like Marco Rubio? I don’t get it..
Rubio got in bed with the insipid orange turd knowing exactly who he was, he was in no way forced to do that, he did it of his own volition, that is exactly who Rubio is. Rubio is as insipid as the guy he takes orders from, millions will die early deaths in Africa because he didn't stand up for them, that process has already started, he could see all of that and he still chose to enable it.
But I keep imagining— I may be wrong— that Rubio believes the ideals he spoke of before ( the ideas we believed all Americans start with, true democracy , true liberty—so to act directly counter to those ideals , what goes through his head???
I don’t think anyone who believed in democracy or liberty would align him or herself with Trump. Trump wants to control the people of the U.S. and all its elections both state and federal. That’s neither freedom nor is it democracy. Actions speak louder than words. I admire your good-hearted wish to believe Rubio, but to me his actions don’t match up with his words, so I don’t. He’s opportunistic, not principled.
Hi Tim! It’s perfectly okay to feel appropriately terrified. In this moment, I believe the right response is to view death as a kind of friend. We need a form of reasoned optimism to create something more hopeful. I genuinely hope your future work can simplify the process of transforming hope into short-term tactical success and long-term strategic sustainability. If you could achieve that, I believe your work would be more inspiring and aspirational. You could help provide Americans and the world with a deeper sense of purpose. Americans are fundamentally optimistic people. We need leaders who speak from a place of rational optimism.
"Americans are fundamentally optimistic people. We need leaders who speak from a place of rational optimism." I couldn't agree more! I thought that's where Obama was coming from. Now it seems incredible that some of these states that voted for Trump 3 times also voted for Obama. What in the world happened? Historians are going to want to know. I'm not talking about states like Louisiana and Texas, oil and gas producing states where people probably voted for someone representing the interests of those industries. I'm talking about states from Oklahoma to Canada, the Southeast. Did those voters think Trump and the GOP would restore their economies and were looking out for THEIR interests?
Snyder is exactly right, and the framework maps cleanly onto cost asymmetry: the world’s largest defense budget cannot buy strategic coherence when the operating system is personal grievance, and adversaries with a fraction of the resources extract enormous returns simply by waiting and watching.
The thirteen pillars he lists are really one pillar, institutional memory, and what we are watching is the deliberate liquidation of that memory in exchange for short-term loyalty rents to a small circle.
The Hegseth-as-resurrection detail is the tell, because regimes that win do not need to theologize tactical losses, and the Polish Romanticism comparison lands precisely except that Poland was partitioned by external powers rather than dismantling itself for sport. What makes this distinct from prior imperial declines is the speed and the consent——no Visigoths at the gate, just a cabinet of unqualified people cheerfully removing the load-bearing walls while the shareholders applaud.
Snyder’s closing point deserves emphasis, that the prior equilibrium was already unsustainable, because a system that confused GDP with legitimacy and military reach with consent was always going to produce something like this once the guardrails came off.
Johan 🐌
The last point is REALLY important. We don't know how to think critically anymore, or really spend much time thinking. We want constant entertainment, even from the Oval Office. Probably not true at Yale, but I remember hearing a college professor friend back in the 80s telling me the attention span of students was drastically minimized and coordinated with TV schedules. You have to admit that having a wrestling expert in the Cabinet representing Education is amusing, though possibly not as fatal as having a pretty boy Fox guy in charge of War. We seem to have become willfully stupid. If you haven't seen Snyder's speech at the Cincinnati No Kings rally at the end of March (the link is the last four words of his post above) see it. Dogs and cats can understand this and make it happen...
She is no wrestling expert Fran, she and her husband are/were promoters of wrestling performances that have no relationship to competitive wrestling, as seen in amateur events from the Olympics on down. 35 or so years ago I worked on a movie that they produced, it's all show as in show business. Making her Secretary of Education is like making a large rock the head of swimming instruction. Tim is spot on in every one of his points.
I believe there are two important tells in Snyder's essay. 1. The United States had foreign policy and diplomatic experts who were well qualified to negotiate with the Iranians. Most of them were fired. When we sat down to negotiate with Iran, they sent their A Team, tough experienced negotiators. The United States sent its D Team - a bunch of amateurs. No wonder they ate us 0alive. 2. Trump does not want advisors who will tell him what he "needs" to hear. He has surrounded himself with advisors who will tell him what he wants to hear. The result is Hegseth, Patel, Miller, and Bondi and Noem before they were fired. The rest of his advisors and Cabinet members are of similar unprepared, incompetent quality. This is the weakest group ever assembled by an American president. The result is American failure in every one of Tim's thirteen points. I mainly blame Trump for being an incompetent fool. I also blame the American voter who returned a man who had proven himself unqualified in his first term. January Sixth should have been the final nail -except it wasn't!
Indeed. Our challenge is to elect people who will work within the existing structure to bring about reform. For example by packing the Supreme Court to overturn key decisions by the existing one and to prevent blockage of progressive legislation.
We may not like certain features of the Constitution, like for example the Electoral College, but it would be a mistake to try amending it while Republicans control so many state legislatures.
Rebuild from the bottom up as well as from the top down.
Doesn't the U.S. have 12 federal judicial circuits, Stephen?
Wouldn't the addition of three justices to what we used to call the Supreme Court remedy the need for one justice for each circuit?
Stephen, the continued existence of an unaltered Electoral College is one of the first changes that must be made. One of our colleagues suggested each state be guaranteed one vote and larger states get some limited multiple. Even that may not be workable, but it would certainly change political calculations. The current system seems, in today’s world, destined to end a united country — especially when a minority of the population, especially concentrated in in states contributing less to the nation’s tax receipts and often taking greater proportional distributions of federal disbursements have played the game to dominate our national political system. If the only satisfactory outcome is several smaller nations, perhaps we need to be thinking clearly about the composition of those nations and the most reasonable possible transitional rules.
I would prefer a single nation, but not the one we have become!
Johan, That this would happen is something my book club discussed almost two years ago when we were reading Project 2025.
I am a member of Indivisible Abroad. I lead a group in a city in Northern Germany. Indivisible Abroad and Indivisible are some of the organizations supporting Free Speech for People's campaign to impeach Trump and his cabinet. Would you please read my piece explaining it and help us get 2 million signatures by signing the petition in it? https://lindaweide.substack.com/p/indivisible-abroad-supports-the-impeach?r=f0qfn
Love it, Johan: "short-term loyalty rents to a small circle."
Because of our current Supreme Court, I fear our only alternative is national suicide. This Supreme Court appears to be intent on hindering our rights as citizens. This Supreme Court is enabling the buffoons who are in power, alas. Consequently I fear any attempt to reset our aims and ideals will simply be nullified by Roberts et al.
Fear is the great mind killer- Dune. If we allow ourselves to be immobilized by fear or hopelessness the collapse of the Republic is assured.
I agree with you but I've never seen anyone fight the judgements of the Supreme Count and win. Just stating a fact and this Court simply doesn't make sense of the Constitution. Obviously, we have to keep on fighting.
We need to win in Congress then institute court reform immediately (along with impeachment).
beautifully written, scarily accurate....
It is not hard to see. It hasn't been hard to see since his first term. The only reason he didn't succeed was that Vought and company weren't put in power then. I thought Bush broke just about everything possible with the war in Iraq, ignoring New Orleans, etc. But Trump, as you point out, has a different mindset - it's about getting more money for himself and his cronies and having his name on everything in sight. Laws, norms, the Constitution are for suckers and will be ignored while he plunders and destroys this country. I can't imagine any country trusting us in the foreseeable future. And lord help us if we have another pandemic.
Magnificently laid out. Heartbreaking to read.
Online here, I see so many heartfelt comments by people who are so decent and so passionate about freedom. There’s a lot of us! We must all fight back.
Ruthy, you are right about there being a lot of us people who are decent and passionate about freedom. We need to put our heads together and talk. Don't forget that there were people just like us who are no longer alive but we can still communicate with some of them (like the writers and historians) by reading their works. We, who are still alive, need to get together and talk. Small groups meeting regularly can listen to and speak with each other and develop ideas from various points of view. Street demonstrations are nice but not enough. Our minds are starved for exchanging ideas and new insights for finding solutions for the problems that are all around us.
That is exactly how I feel. Starved for ideas. Snyder and many of the commentators are so helpful in that regard.
Tim articulates what I had been thinking. For me the phrase that sums it up is that Trump "treats the existence of the United States as a commercial opportunity for a select few people, American and otherwise." Like a hostile corporate takeover where the new owner liquidates the assets, lays off its staff and sells off the parts. In that, he is in cahoots with his broligarch buddies who join him to better milk the once in a lifetime opportunity. And then, behind his rise, is Vladimir Putin who has been salivating at the opportunity to destroy the West.
Trump wants to stay in office forever, but his rapidly declining mind and body suggests otherwise. In the meantime, he has yoked the United States to his personal decline.
Meanwhile, as gas prices rise, more and more Americans are waking up and are pissed. The big war is happening right here on American soil as Americans fight to take back their country. As we are seeing, he and his minions will use every dirty trick in the book and then some to hold onto power. That war will last at the very least into early 2029 when the next presidential term begins assuming there is one.
If our side wins, and I think it will, probably because the alternative is too awful for me to contemplate, we will have to do a deep scrubbing from top to bottom. Trump's rise is a culmination of the war of the very wealthy on the rest of us. But it also reveals the deep foundational flaws in our system that allowed such a man to rise to power. And it also highlights the contradiction of a country espousing ideals of freedom and inequality founded on slavery.
Yes, Ellen: "we will have to do a deep scrubbing from top to bottom."
Michael Corthell suggested several points in a recent Substack of his to comprise this "scrubbing." I've added the following specificity to his good points:
1) "strengthening labor" could oblige Dem public officials to appear much more often in red states and red areas to speak before audiences of our rural and working class fellow Americans.
2) "protecting voting rights" could mandate a national campaign for laws against gerrymandering.
3) "breaking the power of oligarchy" could return to the higher taxes on the rich of the Eisenhower era.
4) "defending public education" should end the rule of standardized testing. Return all decision making to the teachers. Hire only the best college grads as teachers -- and leave them be.
5) "confronting white nationalism" requires attorneys general who will enforce laws against hate speech -- including against the social media billionaires' algorithms for hatreds.
6) "demilitarizing civic life" means the U.S. change from its reliance on selling arms to dictatorial regimes abroad to programs for schools allied to other schools abroad for essaying programs among students learning English also to learn skills to see others as individuals in complicated cultures.
Snyder has hit all the points we all see clearly, and the unfortunate thing is that at least 37 % of the citizens don't see it and that a clear majority of Maga=Republicans seem to approve. I fear that the rest of us will go down with the ship of state.
This is excellent. I would like to see a "Part II" which delves into the details of the ideological and structural changes needed in the USA to prevent the Trump syndrome from repeating itself, and very importantly, how those changes would be brought about.
Masterful, but deeply troubling. It will take more than the invocation of the 25th Amendment to address and correct these deadly serious problems. Thanks for this careful analysis.
Trump is a moron driven by nothing more than greed and ego. He is therefore easily manipulated by those who want unbridled oligarchic power and to drain the resources of the nation for themselves. Oil barons, tech barons, finance barons, etc. all have a short sighted vision in which they smash and grab everything in sight as quickly as they can unaware and uncaring about the damage that they are doing. They think their gated communities, private security teams, and elite escape routes will protect them forever. They won't. The people are pissed and they are looking for accountability. Shit, even Jeff Bezos realized that the 500ft yacht with Lauren Sanchez' boobs hanging out is a bad look. I wonder, do they want to wait until the sans culottes set up Mme. La Guillotine before they wise up?
Trump is an evil genius. Yes, he has many people that help him but never in American History have we seen one party, the Republicans in this case, get behind everything Dear Leader says and does; and do it in a short period of time.
I do not blame rural non-wealthy voters that were conned into believing that voting for a billionaire was going to rub off on them. No, I blame my Palm Beach and NYC uber rich friends that voted with their pocketbook.
Never dreamed I would witness Americans voting to elect a group who would hold a gun to my country's temple and willfully pull the trigger. And continue to support them as we hit bottom. I am really beginning to take their Armageddon lust seriously, as I cannot for the life of me figure out what possible advantage this Administration is doing for themselves or their MAGA supporters, much less for the rest of us. (I really do wish I lived anywhere but the D.C. metro area these days--between Iran, the East Wing and the proposed Arc d' Trump, we are beginning to refer to our home with gallows humor as Ground Zero.)
I’m zeroing in on a very specific statement: "public education generally is replaced with scams whereby tax money is transferred from the poorer to the richer while schools themselves are starved”—I would like to know more about the way this happens. What I suspect is that school budgets never seem to include information about what it costs to buy standardized tests, curriculum materials, and “ed tech” (the packages that require students to sit in front of a screen manipulating little figures, with the claim that their test scores will go up). This is certainly one way money leaves the community to enrich Pearson and other “educational” giants—but I don’t know anyone with data on how much these things cost and at what point in the school funding system that money goes out the door. Anyone with insights?
Look up the status of public education in Ohio, as one example. My understanding here is that Dr. Snyder is referencing school vouchers. There is a great article in the New Yorker, I believe, about the corrupt history of school vouchers in the state of Ohio going back to the 90’s. I moved to Ohio 7 years ago and I am disgusted with the Republican supermajority in the statehouse that continues to enable and promote vouchers as our public school districts are starved for funds. The result is that every few years each school district has to put a levy on the ballot to request more money through property taxes, hitting especially hard on those that have fixed incomes. When those levies don’t pass, as happened at last Tuesday’s primary election, those school districts have to make tough choices about how they are going to continue to fund or cut services for the kids. As a tiny, concrete example of this, the school district where I live had to cut bussing for high school students. However, in this state, public school busses provide transportation for private school students. That means that the high school boys that live on my street have to find alternative ways to get to school while the public school buses provide rides to the kids just up the block that attend private school.
!!!!
Thank you for the specific, though absolutely horrifying details.
Thank you, Jennifer. I was completely forgetting about vouchers. A related example, now that you mention it: I taught in a public middle school for 4 years. In October there was always a surge of new kids—ones with a lot of needs and issues. Another teacher explained that the charter schools would accept students and get the funding for them, but by October they had decided which ones were too much of a handful and would make their scores look bad. They kicked those kids back into the regular public schools. The money, the way I heard it, did not follow the kids but stayed with the charter school that had originally admitted them. I categorically refuse to teach in a charter school.
Footnote: I live in Massachusetts, hardly a Republican-controlled state. Our Democrats don’t seem to be doing much to prevent these abuses.
Here’s the article in the New Yorker:
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/01/20/religious-education-public-schools-vouchers-taxes-catholic-church-ohio
Thank you!
Very good point!
Starting point for answering your good Qs, Elise: Diane Ravitch's "The Language Police" (2003).
Thank you!
I suppose there is something I’m failing to understand, but it seems to me to be more like murder than suicide. Trump seems to me to be, with help of course from Russell Vought et. al., to be murdering the United States out of greed, self-interest and disregard. I say take off the gloves and fight these traitors. Gerrymander them enough to overwhelmingly defeat them in the November election and in 2028. And then put them all in jail where they absolutely belong.
William, if you’ve been watching election news lately, gerrymandering works bests for the Republicans in this country today.
Let’s change that.
Murder by poison or sepsis.
They’re aiming for rule by rich white Republican men, permanently.
The decline of our country has been buzzing in my mind for awhile, maybe years. This essay seems to encapsulate my thinking. This may go into the third point but the gerrymandering that we have been going through last year for partisan advantage shows that the politicians can’t agree on the rules. Districts would only be changed every census, now it’s willy nilly. The rules governing the polity are breaking down.
It's not that politicians can't agree on the rules. It's that one side is actively destroying the rules for partisan power.
I understand— or am starting to, with a dread that takes over my body— that the people at the center of this administration and the people behind Project 2025, are evil.
But what about those who have joined them? Like Marco Rubio? I don’t get it..
I see Rubio as a man of self-interest who aspires to power. He wants to be president and thinks this is the ladder up to that.
Rubio got in bed with the insipid orange turd knowing exactly who he was, he was in no way forced to do that, he did it of his own volition, that is exactly who Rubio is. Rubio is as insipid as the guy he takes orders from, millions will die early deaths in Africa because he didn't stand up for them, that process has already started, he could see all of that and he still chose to enable it.
But I keep imagining— I may be wrong— that Rubio believes the ideals he spoke of before ( the ideas we believed all Americans start with, true democracy , true liberty—so to act directly counter to those ideals , what goes through his head???
I don’t think anyone who believed in democracy or liberty would align him or herself with Trump. Trump wants to control the people of the U.S. and all its elections both state and federal. That’s neither freedom nor is it democracy. Actions speak louder than words. I admire your good-hearted wish to believe Rubio, but to me his actions don’t match up with his words, so I don’t. He’s opportunistic, not principled.
Hi Tim! It’s perfectly okay to feel appropriately terrified. In this moment, I believe the right response is to view death as a kind of friend. We need a form of reasoned optimism to create something more hopeful. I genuinely hope your future work can simplify the process of transforming hope into short-term tactical success and long-term strategic sustainability. If you could achieve that, I believe your work would be more inspiring and aspirational. You could help provide Americans and the world with a deeper sense of purpose. Americans are fundamentally optimistic people. We need leaders who speak from a place of rational optimism.
"Americans are fundamentally optimistic people. We need leaders who speak from a place of rational optimism." I couldn't agree more! I thought that's where Obama was coming from. Now it seems incredible that some of these states that voted for Trump 3 times also voted for Obama. What in the world happened? Historians are going to want to know. I'm not talking about states like Louisiana and Texas, oil and gas producing states where people probably voted for someone representing the interests of those industries. I'm talking about states from Oklahoma to Canada, the Southeast. Did those voters think Trump and the GOP would restore their economies and were looking out for THEIR interests?