- My daily routine;
- How Trump would be king and end the rule of law in America, and how this is understandable given base human nature;
- Paul Krugman on the existential threat of climate change, that conservatives deny or simply do not understand;
- How the Supreme Court is driving a return to patriarchy, and the conservative drive to preserve the best traditions of the past, which turn out to be tribalistic, pre-Enlightenment, ideas.
Most of my days are split into three segments. In the mornings after breakfast I spend up to an hour checking some two dozen websites that I check virtually every day, from Slate and Salon and The Atlantic, to Joe.My.God and Jerry Coyne and Big Think, to OnlySky and Right Wing Watch and File 770, plus Facebook and Gmail. From them I collect notable items as links in a running Word document (used to be in Wordpad).
Then I go about my day, working sfadb.com or reading books or writing bits of my own book, or going on walks or hikes and making trips to the supermarket. The parts about books concern issues more abstruse and intellectual and fundamental than the scary vagaries of politics.
And near the end of the day I return to the links I collected in the morning, review them and decide what to write up in the day’s blog post. Most of the time, lately, it’s about the current American political scene. Not every day. But again today.
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Not news, but it would be irresponsible not to keep pointing this out.
The Atlantic, J. Michael Luttig, 14 May 2025: The End of Rule of Law in America, subtitled “The 47th president seems to wish he were king—and he is willing to destroy what is precious about this country to get what he wants.”
The president of the United States appears to have long ago forgotten that Americans fought the Revolutionary War not merely to secure their independence from the British monarchy but to establish a government of laws, not of men, so that they and future generations of Americans would never again be subject to the whims of a tyrannical king. As Thomas Paine wrote in Common Sense in 1776, “For as in absolute governments the king is law, so in free countries the law ought to be king; and there ought to be no other.”
Donald Trump seems also not to understand John Adams’s fundamental observation about the new nation that came into the world that same year. Just last month, an interviewer from Time magazine asked the president in the Oval Office, “Mr. President, you were showing us the new paintings you have behind us. You put all these new portraits. One of them includes John Adams. John Adams said we’re a government ruled by laws, not by men. Do you agree with that?” To which the president replied: “John Adams said that? Where was the painting?”
When the interviewer pointed to the portrait, Trump asked: “We’re a government ruled by laws, not by men? Well, I think we’re a government ruled by law, but you know, somebody has to administer the law. So therefore men, certainly, men and women, certainly play a role in it. I wouldn’t agree with it 100 percent. We are a government where men are involved in the process of law, and ideally, you’re going to have honest men like me.”
And earlier this month, a television journalist asked Trump the simple question “Don’t you need to uphold the Constitution of the United States as president?” Astonishingly, the president answered, “I don’t know.” The interviewer then asked, “Don’t you agree that every person in the United States is entitled to due process?” The president again replied, “I don’t know.”
This is not a man who respects the rule of law, nor one who seeks to understand it.
Once again, this is understandable through acknowledgment of base human nature, which is tribal and authoritarian, on the one hand, and the systems humans have invented in recent centuries to overcome those primitive impulses in order to build a society bigger than a tribe, a society that fairly deals with many more people than would be in a single tribe. Driven by the expansion of humanity around the world, and the practical necessity of rival tribes needing to get along with one another.
For the almost 250 years since the founding of this nation, America has been the beacon of freedom to the world because of its democracy and rule of law. Our system of checks and balances has been strained before, but democracy—government by the people—and the rule of law have always won the day. Until now, that is. America will never again be that same beacon to the world, because the president of the United States has subverted America’s democracy and corrupted its rule of law.
Until Trump exits public life altogether, it cannot be said either that America is a thriving democracy or that it has a government “of laws, not of men.”
A very long article about how things are falling apart, American ideals are falling apart, under Trump. The evidence is all there; yet so many people refuse to see it, or don’t care.
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Existential threats are still out there, despite Trump and MAGA denialism.
Paul Krugman, 14 May 2025: Is This the Year We Doom Civilization?, subtitled “We may be losing our last, best chance to limit climate change”
On Monday House Republicans released the final parts of their proposed tax and budget bill — and it’s the stuff of nightmares. As Bobby Kogan of the Center for American Progress documents, the bill would impose the largest cuts to Medicaid and SNAP — the program formerly known as food stamps — in history. Millions of low-income Americans would lose health coverage; millions would go hungry. Many of those suffering would be children.
The purpose of these cuts, sadism aside, would be to partially offset the cost of huge tax cuts for the rich — cuts that would still explode the budget deficit. The cruelty is mind-boggling. In fact, I have both a suggestion and a prediction for major media organizations: I’d like to see them do focus groups with ordinary voters, describing these plans. My prediction, based on what we’ve seen in the past, is that many voters will simply refuse to believe the policy descriptions, insisting that elected officials can’t possibly be that vicious.
But they can be and are.
Making the point that the oil and gas industries spend much more to support Republican candidates than Democratic ones. While alternative energy mostly supports Democrats.
This is, in my worldview, the inability of conservatives to consider long-term consequences, and to prioritize anything that will make them lots of money before the next election. It’s a pattern that happens over and over again.
Why does MAGA hate renewables? They consider them woke because they help fight climate change, which they insist is a hoax. And they’re cleaner than burning fossil fuels, which means that they aren’t manly.
It’s all kind of funny — or would be if it weren’t so tragic.
At this point there’s no legitimate way to deny that man-made climate change is an existential threat. According to researchers at NASA — whose work is, of course, on the chopping block — 2024 was the warmest year on record. But the politics of climate action have always been extremely difficult. The threat isn’t always obvious, since there are still cold days; it’s global, not local; and it’s long-term, with the big payoffs to doing something decades in the future.
Again, there’s that tribal mindset about manliness, and the inability to understand long-term thinking. Do conservatives not realize the consequences of climate change on their grandchildren? Apparently not.
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Conservatives aren’t about preserving the best traditions and ideas of the past, as they claim. As I’ve mentioned before, they’re about restoring the traditions and ideas that preceded the Enlightenment, the Scientific Revolution, and the rules of law as enshrined in the US Constitution. They strive to return to a tribalistic way of life. (Well, I suppose they do think that way of life as being the best of the past.) This is the inescapable allure of evolutionary human nature.
Slate, Leah Litman, 13 May 2025: The Supreme Court’s Radical Right Turn Is About Restoring Patriarchy, Plain and Simple
This is an excerpt from Litman’s book Lawless: How the Supreme Court Runs on Conservative Grievance, Fringe Theories, and Bad Vibes
As it happens — I am only just now making the connection — she was a guest on this morning’s KQED Forum show, which I listened to with half-attention as I was updating my sfadb.com site. I remember thinking how well-spoken she was, and does she have a book? Without realizing I’d collected the link to this Slate piece an hour before.
(Why is Ryan Gosling in the photo collage? It took me a moment. The Barbie movie! Patriarchy! I thought it was a brilliant movie; others, of course, hated it.)
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Enough for today. I always have more collected links than I have time to post. But at some point I have to return to my core mission.
