#93: Constitution Under Seige

“It might be helpful for you to know that you are not alone. And that in the long, twilight struggle which lies ahead of us, there is the possibility of hope.”

“The Long Twilight Struggle.” Babylon 5, created and written by J. Michael Straczynski, Season 2, Episode 20, 1995.

Here’s what I’ve found interesting:

• First they came for Columbia;
• We need Democrats who want to oppose Musk-Trump;
• The Camp of the Saints is an atrocious book that inspires the worst people;
• When does a society cross a threshold;
• DOGE is courting catastrophic risk;
• Social Security is not a Ponzi scheme;
• The war plans to invade Canada;
• The real criminal element is lead (RIP Kevin Drum);
• Elon Musk is begging Americans to destroy Tesla; and
• Let’s not allow Trump to rewrite the history of the January 6, 2021, insurrection he instigated.

Here we go. I’m glad you’re here.

#1

First They Came for Columbia (Professor Ryan D. Enos and Professor Steven Levitsky, Harvard Crimson, Link to Article)

Like many autocrats before him, Donald Trump has launched what could be a devastating attack on universities.

Over the last week, the Trump administration has cancelled $400 million in grants and contracts to Columbia University and $800 million in grants to Johns Hopkins University.

Both schools were on a list of 10 universities (including Harvard) that the Department of Justice announced it was investigating over politicized allegations of antisemitism. The Department of Education subsequently launched a similar investigation into 60 universities.

And last week, the administration arrested a former student seemingly not for a crime but for his political speech on campus. Trump, who has pledged to punish universities that permit “illegal protests,” called it “the first arrest of many to come.”

WHY I FIND IT INTERESTING: 

Harvard Professors Ryan Enos and Steven Levitsky took to the pages of their campus newspaper to demand Harvard, and other higher education institutions, start taking steps to defend themselves from the Musk-Trump regime’s attacks.

They explain a dynamic I wish Democratic Party leaders understood: changing public opinion requires taking a public stand. If the public only hears from the Musk-Trump regime, minds won’t change, and the regime will win.

If the Musk-Trump regime pays no cost for the example it is setting of Columbia, we will see the executive branch go further down its university hit list. Our higher education institutions are the envy of the world for their scholarship and research. All of the benefits that leadership brings to the United States are in jeopardy.

Attacking higher education institutions and media outlets is a standard procedure for authoritarian regimes. As Enos and Levitsky explain, we have seen this happen again and again, from fascist Italy and Nazi Germany to El Salvador, Hungary, and Türkiye more recently.

We need universities and Democratic Party leaders to stand up in loud opposition now while it is still possible. Yes, it is hard. Yes, things are moving faster than most of us anticipated. Yes, it means taking risks.

But, as Benjamin Franklin warned, that is what is required if we are to keep the Republic.

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#2

The Fault Line in Democratic Politics (David Dayen, The American Prospect, Link to Article)

There’s a much more elemental question animating Democratic politics at the moment, if you bother to listen to people who still call themselves Democrats (or even independents): Is the party in opposition to Donald Trump going to oppose anything?

We saw this week what in retrospect was a predictable answer to that question. House Democrats, who face voters every two years, who must pay attention to the public mood, saw the government funding deadline as an early and important moment of defiance against the ransacking of America. They didn’t come to it on the basis of being progressive or moderate, in a safe seat or a swing district. They listened to their voters, who were looking for some sign of life among Democrats, or a plan to stanch the bleeding of an economic and moral collapse.

But Trump is also a great uniter of his own side, and he was able to pull the Freedom Caucus in on a spending bill for the first time in ages by promising he would continue to impound and delete programs regardless of what the bill said. Happy to outsource the carnage and the responsibility, all Republicans went with it. So it fell to the Senate, where Democratic votes would be needed on the bill for it to pass.

Senate Democrats don’t face voters every two years. They have the luxury of overthinking themselves into oblivion, inventing scenarios to avoid confrontation that they can reverse engineer into seeming wise. That’s what Chuck Schumer did, retreating from the fight and advancing a bill he called abhorrent to avoid a government shutdown, as if we’re not experiencing that already.

WHY I FIND IT INTERESTING: 

Supposedly wise pundits have lectured us about why Democrats needed to keep the Senate filibuster in place in case a Republican—or Trump—won the presidency.

Yet, on the first opportunity to stop lousy budget legislation since the Musk-Trump regime took office, Senate Democrats declined to use the filibuster. And then they refused to object to unanimous consent requests that sped along some confirmations and allowed the Senate to adjourn and start its recess on schedule.

After all, Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer had a book tour to start. Well, that is until his team figured out that irate Democrats were ready to share their outrage over his failed leadership by protesting his book events.

When facing an attempt at authoritarian capture, the opposition needs to, well, OPPOSE THE TYRANT’S ACTIONS to have a chance to win.

I understand that Democrats did not have a good option here once Trump could wrangle the House Republican caucus to go along with the budget continuing resolution. I even sympathize with the idea that ensuring the courts stay open had to be the priority right now.

However, Senate Democrats did not prepare the people for this vote. They hung their House colleagues, who were unified, out to dry on a tough vote. They did not take advantage of an opportunity to get people who don’t inhale politics daily to see what the Musk-Trump regime has been doing by breaking previously enacted budget laws.

It seemed like the plan was to let the House Republicans fail, and then there was no real Plan B once Trump got all but one of them on board.

Regardless, Senate Democrats could have earned more benefit of the doubt about this specific bill if they had already demonstrated a willingness to use the tools they have to fight the Musk-Trump regime.

Instead, they have refused to object to unanimous consent requests (we are up to over 500 of them since Trump entered office). Senate Democrats also refuse to force Republicans to be in the Senate in person by demanding a quorum call. There has been little talk about the need to impeach Trump. No, that won’t happen right now, but there is value in injecting the idea into the public discussion.

That’s created quite a bit of justified frustration. I am among the Democrats who want to see our Democratic-elected leaders start to fight back. If Schumer is unwilling to lead, he should step down.

#3

Making Fascism Work for Moderates (Alex Bronzini-Vender, Public Books, Link to Article)

Yet The Camp of the Saints, for all its lengthy, gratuitous depictions of the migrants’ crudeness and repellant hygiene, is a novel concerned equally with Western impotence as with Eastern barbarity. It is a reactionary diatribe against the very tenets of postwar liberalism: human rights, international law, and liberal universalism. As Nathan Pinkoski favorably noted in a defense of the novel for the Catholic integralist journal First Things, “Raspail wishes to hold a mirror up to our own society: He is concerned with ‘us,’ not ‘them.’”

For decades, the book has been a foundational text of the Far Right’s “great replacement” conspiracy theory. Yet its influence extends beyond the seediest extremes; in fact, The Camp of the Saints gave “sensible” conservatives—including Ronald Reagan, William F. Buckley Jr., and Silvio Berlusconi—ideological cover under which to unite both strands of their movement once and for all. Fear of “white genocide”—and the brutal, racist measures needed to stop it, measures premised upon rejecting the postwar, liberal notions of universal human rights and dignity—entered the range of acceptable political disagreement.

<snip>

Worse than the book’s plot, perhaps, is that it is finding new audiences today. As the ideas espoused by The Camp of the Saints grow more accepted in polite political conversation, so too does the Right feel more emboldened to publicly pay it homage. In 2015, Marine Le Pen, leader of France’s Far Right National Rally, tweeted: “Today, it’s a migrant submersion. I invite the French to read, or re-read, The Camp of the Saints.” In a series of leaked emails, Trump administration senior advisor Stephen Miller suggested to a Breitbart editor that “someone should point out the parallels [of the European migrant crisis] to Camp of the Saints.”

WHY I FIND IT INTERESTING: 

I hated reading The Camp of the Saints. It made me physically ill. But during President Obama’s first term, I saw increasing references to it in conservative online forums. So I checked it out.

And as much as I hated the plot, I couldn’t ignore this vile book’s undeniable propaganda power. There is a reason white nationalists—from Steve Bannon to Stephen Miller to Marine Le Pen to Viktor Orban—encourage their supporters to read it.

This article explores how some of the worst people we know have used Jean Raspail’s novel to make the Great Replacement Theory—and fears of a white genocide—viable political topics.

I think we need to understand what is driving the rise in racism we are experiencing. I don’t think it is a coincidence that I started seeing more and more references to this book during President Obama’s first term. Some people never accepted that the United States elected a Black president.

You don’t need to read the book. But I encourage you to read this article, which has a good summary of its sickening plot, so you can be aware of how its fear and hatred continue to inspire some of the worst people.

#4

A Russian Warning About Trump (Introduction by Natalia Antelava, coda, Link to Article)

What does a society look like in the moment before it crosses a threshold? The hindsight afforded by history makes these transitions seem obvious, even inevitable – but for those living through them, the signs often appear disconnected, their significance obscured by the routines of daily life.

I’ve been obsessing about this question in conversations with friends and our editorial team. Many of us on the team have direct experiences of either growing up in or living in authoritarian regimes, and while our lived experiences don’t provide simple solutions they do give us a unique ability to recognize signs and bring together diverse perspectives on the transformation that the United States is currently living through.

The perspective I am sending you today comes from Andrei Babitsky, an independent, now exiled Russian journalist and a fascinating thinker.

<snip>

I was struck by Andrey’s observation that strongmen consistently tell us exactly who they are and what they intend to do – yet we persistently refuse to take them at their word. "Horrendous crimes are usually announced to the world long before they're committed," he writes, drawing on Russia's painful lessons. He raises a question I've been pondering: Why do we struggle to recognize patterns of authoritarianism even when they unfold before our eyes? Is it optimism, exceptionalism, or perhaps a deeper psychological protection against uncomfortable truths?

WHY I FIND IT INTERESTING: 

Yeah, that’s quite the question. Historians and experts in authoritarianism have been warning us to take Donald Trump’s threats seriously because they were, history warns us, promises.

How do we know when we’ve crossed the Rubicon? When does a Republic fall into authoritarianism—as Rome’s did the day Julius Caesar crossed that river with his legion?

Coda Editor-in-Chief Natalia Antelava asks these questions to introduce an essay by Russian writer Andrey Babitskiy. He explores the parallels between Trump and Putin and notes that no conspiracy is necessary because “Trump and Putin are remarkably similar men who naturally understand each other.”

In the end, Babitskiy asks, given what history exposes about the current threat, “what are we going to do?”

If Senator Schumer and his Democratic colleagues wonder why people are so angry with them, that question gives them a clue.

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#5

DOGE Is Courting Catastrophic Risk (Brian Klaas, The Atlantic, Link to Article)

DOGE is courting these kinds of risks by automatically assuming that programs with no immediately obvious function—or at least none that Musk and his minions can discern—are wasteful. Some of its cost cutting may be eliminating genuine waste; no government spends its money perfectly. But DOGE’s campaign is riddled with errors, at the level of both understanding and execution. The agency’s strategy is akin to a climber replacing sturdy rope with low-cost string: We may not realize the full danger until it snaps.

Musk developed DOGE’s playbook when he took over Twitter, where resilience matters much less than it does in government. Gutting the social-media platform may have resulted in more harmful content and some outages, including one this week, but the stakes were low compared with the crucial government services that Musk is currently cutting. When X fails, memes go unposted. When the government fails, people can die.

The risks are not only to Americans but also to humanity, as technology and climate change have linked the destinies of far-flung people more closely and increased the likelihood of extinction-level calamities. It is not reassuring in this regard that Trump controls the world’s largest nuclear arsenal and that DOGE accidentally fired key people who manage it, that Trump doesn’t believe in climate change and is having Musk slash seemingly every agency designed to mitigate it, and that Musk summarized his view of AI risk by telling Joe Rogan that it presents “only a 20 percent chance of annihilation.” The United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction—an organization that DOGE would certainly eliminate if it could—came up with a more sophisticated figure in 2023: By its estimate, there is a 2 to 14 percent chance of an extinction-level event in the 21st century. This is not a world in which the government should be running itself on a just-in-time basis.

WHY I FIND IT INTERESTING: 

Elon Musk and DOGE are making the United States and the world less safe. People are already dying because of Musk’s actions.

But we are only at the beginning of the crisis. As Klaas explains, Musk is destroying our nation’s ability to respond to a variety of complex threats.

Government workers do not get credit when their efforts prevent a crisis. They are only noticed when something goes wrong or when no one is there to respond because Elon Musk, or one of his young tech-bro employees, didn’t understand why a program matters.

We will wish some federal safety program gutted by DOGE the past two months was more resilient. The only question is how many people are going to get hurt or die because of what Trump has allowed Musk to do.

#6

Social Security Is Not a Ponzi Scheme (Lawrence B. Glickman, Boston Review, Link to Article)

When Elon Musk called Social Security “the biggest Ponzi scheme of all time” on Joe Rogan’s podcast on February 28, he was, wittingly or not, echoing a long line of conservative critics. Over the last fifteen years alone, a long line of Republican politicians—Mick Mulvaney, Ron Johnson, Rick Perry, Ted Cruz, and Rand Paul—have characterized it the same way.

Comparing a ninety-year-old federally backed social insurance system with a form of fraud that got its name in the 1920s—when Charles Ponzi was sent to prison for bilking investors out of millions of dollars—may seem bizarre. Senator Barry Goldwater obliquely conceded the oddity of the analogy when, in 1977, he called Social Security “the longest playing Ponzi scheme on record”—most Ponzi schemes being short-term gambits. In reality, of course, the Social Security system is almost the opposite of a Ponzi scheme: it uses funds collected from both employers and workers to pay small monthly benefit checks to retirees, disabled Americans, and others who qualify. (Self-employed people pay the full contribution.)

Inapt though such comparisons may be, they have been a persistent strand of conservative thought ever since 1935, when the Social Security Act became law.

WHY I FIND IT INTERESTING: 

There is little new in the radical right-wing’s attacks against the Social Security program. They have hated the program, and other New Deal programs, since President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed them into law.

Now Elon Musk has joined the list of people who lie about how the Social Security program works and the amount of fraud it experiences.

As Glickman explains, Republicans have tried to cut Social Security before using this plan. Musk is now adding a new element: inexplicable and anti-Constitutional worker layoffs that make it harder for recipients to reach someone who can solve their problems and increase the risk that the program will fail to pay promised benefits.

It would be wise for Democrats to start preparing the public for these potential problems so they cannot be used by the Musk-Trump regime to fool people into supporting the privatization or elimination of Social Security.

This is a time for a forceful response. Social Security is popular. Almost everyone knows someone who benefits from the program. Democrats should defend Social Security now because it is the right thing to do—and it is smart politics. That’s usually a pretty solid combination.

#7

Inside the US War Plans to Invade Canada (Peter Carlson, SpyTalk, Link to Article)

ONE DAY IN 2005, WHEN I WAS A REPORTER FOR THE WASHINGTON POST, I was in the National Archives, researching a story that has long ago escaped my memory. But I remember well what happened next: A PR lady for the Archives introduced me to an ancient gentleman who'd been an archivist there for 50 years.

Being a reporter, I blurted out what seemed like the obvious question: "What's the weirdest document you've seen in your 50 years?"

He did not hesitate even a second before replying, "War Plan Red."

"What's War Plan Red?" I asked.

"It's the American war plan for invading Canada," he said.

WHY I FIND IT INTERESTING: 

I mean, our military should be preparing for all possible scenarios, right?

And, as Charlie Pierce reminded readers, the United States’ desire to annex Canada goes to the birth of our nation, including a special clause in the Articles of Confederation (Article XI) that made it easier for Canada to join than any other colony. There have been several additional attempts over time.

I hate that Trump’s threats to Canada have made such stories relevant again. I wish our Democratic Party’s elected leaders could demonstrate as much passion in fighting Trump as the Canadians have. Elbows up, indeed.

#8

America’s Real Criminal Element Is Lead (Kevin Drum, Mother Jones, Link to Article)

Put all this together and you have an astonishing body of evidence. We now have studies at the international level, the national level, the state level, the city level, and even the individual level. Groups of children have been followed from the womb to adulthood, and higher childhood blood lead levels are consistently associated with higher adult arrest rates for violent crimes. All of these studies tell the same story: Gasoline lead is responsible for a good share of the rise and fall of violent crime over the past half century.

When differences of atmospheric lead density between big and small cities largely went away, so did the difference in murder rates.

Like many good theories, the gasoline lead hypothesis helps explain some things we might not have realized even needed explaining. For example, murder rates have always been higher in big cities than in towns and small cities. We’re so used to this that it seems unsurprising, but Nevin points out that it might actually have a surprising explanation—because big cities have lots of cars in a small area, they also had high densities of atmospheric lead during the postwar era. But as lead levels in gasoline decreased, the differences between big and small cities largely went away. And guess what? The difference in murder rates went away too. Today, homicide rates are similar in cities of all sizes. It may be that violent crime isn’t an inevitable consequence of being a big city after all.

The gasoline lead story has another virtue too: It’s the only hypothesis that persuasively explains both the rise of crime in the ’60s and ’70s and its fall beginning in the ’90s. Two other theories—the baby boom demographic bulge and the drug explosion of the ’60s—at least have the potential to explain both, but neither one fully fits the known data. Only gasoline lead, with its dramatic rise and fall following World War II, can explain the equally dramatic rise and fall in violent crime.

WHY I FIND IT INTERESTING: 

Kevin Drum passed away last week after a battle with cancer. I have been reading Drum since the first wave of blogging in the early 2000s when he was the CalPundit. Since then, he continued to blog for a variety of publications, including Mother Jones.

I didn’t agree with him all the time. But he was thoughtful and avoided the vitriol that is so common on the interwebs.

But he didn’t just do short-form blog posts. He could write longer features. And the one I am sharing here is what I consider his most important work: demonstrating the link between lead concentrations in the air and crime 20 years later.

It wasn’t Rudy Giuliani’s broken windows plan. It wasn’t mass incarceration. It wasn’t the war on drugs. The leaded gasoline used in the post-war era is the molecule that explains the crime surge and crime decline—given lead’s impact on the brains of young people.

It is one of the best articles I have ever read. It should be more famous. So, as my tribute to Drum, I’m sharing it with you.

#9

Elon Musk is begging Americans to destroy Tesla (Jason Sattler, The Last Billionaires, Link to Article)

Last week offered another in a series of heartbreaking reminders to all Americans who care about freedom, science, and each other: No one is coming to save us.

Not Senate Democrats. Not the courts. And certainly not the governor of our largest state, who has chosen fashy bro podcasting over opposing the current regime. Not anyone but ourselves. If America is to survive the next 1,400 or so days of the Trump presidency as something resembling a free and fair democracy, it’s all on us.

This is why we must do our best to take down what may be the sole reason we are in this mess: Tesla Motors.

Elon Musk's flagship operation's inflated and entirely suspect value must go down because he has left us no other choice. We are obligated by our history as Americans to do our very best to destroy his companies and him through them until he wisely decides to leave us the fuck alone. Our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor depend on it.

WHY I FIND IT INTERESTING: 

Protests work, even when our elected leaders—from Chuck Schumer to Gavin Newsom—fail us.

Tesla stock is down 35 percent this month. Elon Musk may be the only person who can lose $100 billion in paper wealth and not apparently care, but even he has to feel the pain at some point.

Instead of effectively overseeing Elon the CEO, the Tesla Board of Directors has recently sold over $100 million of stock.

We need more of this. The overvalued Tesla stock has financed so much of Elon Musk’s horribleness over the past few years. May this correction continue.

#10

The Reality of the January 6, 2021, Insurrection

On January 6, 2021, Donald Trump instigated a violent insurrection against the United States government. Here’s a video from the Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol that one can review if their memory fades.

People were hurt and police officers died protecting the Capitol. Vice President Pence and other elected officials just barely escaped danger. Our national streak of peaceful transfers of power ended.

It was not, as Trump claims, a “day of love.” And we must resist his efforts to rewrite the history of that dark day.

Post-Game Comments

Today’s Thought from my Readwise collection:

“American politics makes a lot more sense when you realize that the GOP is afraid of pissing off the GOP base, and the Dems are afraid of pissing off the GOP base, but neither party is afraid of pissing off the Dem base.”—The Atlantic’s Adam Serwer on BlueSky

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