Tag Archives: Ronald Reagan

How far we have fallen

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Simple meanness seems to abound in America on the brink of her 250th birthday

Joseph Weber

When the Indiana state legislature was considering whether to bow to a pressure campaign by Donald J. Trump to redistrict the state to disenfranchise its few Democrats, Republican State Sen. Greg Goode pointed to the climate of fear and intimidation the president generated.

The Spirit of Indiana, a mural in the state capitol

“Misinformation. Cruel social media posts. Over the top pressure from inside and outside the statehouse. Threats of primaries. Threats of violence. Acts of violence,” Goode said on the Indiana Senate floor. “Friends, we’re better than this, are we not?”

But are we? Just what is Trump’s America on the brink of the country’s 250th birthday? Is it a country of decent people who treat one another with respect, who live their personal lives trying to do the right things, who open their hearts and wallets to the needy, who help to create opportunity for all regardless of color or creed, who work toward fairness and justice, who live in a land that acts as a moral beacon for the world?

Well, consider the president’s actions in trying to manipulate the nation’s electoral system to entrench his minority party’s power.

As Mother Jones reported, Trump summoned Republican state legislators to the White House and sent Vice President JD Vance to Indiana twice to lobby the legislature to rejigger the electoral map to eliminate the state’s two Democratic congress members. Trump vowed to primary Republicans who opposed his election-rigging redistricting plan, calling out individual state legislators by name. He called the leader of the state Senate, Rodric Bray, a “weak and pathetic RINO” after Bray said the body didn’t have the votes to pass the measure.

In a social media rant, Trump called the Senate leader “either a bad guy, or a very stupid one!” and threatened “a MAGA Primary” against “anybody that votes against Redistricting.” That same night, a Republican member of the state House was the victim of a bomb threat at his home. Another GOP state senator opposed to gerrymandering who received a pipe bomb threat at her home posted on X that it was the “result of the D.C. political pundits for redistricting.”

As the magazine reported, the intimidation efforts, which included warnings of a pipe bomb and fake threats against lawmakers designed to produce a law enforcement response, had ugly echoes. Recall that Trumpist rioters on Jan. 6, 2021, threatened to hang Mike Pence, the former vice president and former Indiana governor, because he wouldn’t go along with the president’s unconstitutional plan to overturn the 2020 election.

But now, instead of overturning an election, Trump wants to rig and predetermine the next one. The new map was designed to eliminate all Democratic representation at the congressional level in Indiana, giving Republicans 100 percent of seats in a state where Trump won 58 percent of the vote in 2024. While Indiana’s current map received an A from the Princeton Gerrymandering Project, the proposed one got an F.

In the end, the Indianans did the right thing. The Republicans among them stood up to their party’s president and shot down the redistricting effort 31-19, with 21 Republicans joining 10 Democrats in opposition. But they did so with worry.

“I fear for this institution,” said Republican state Sen. Greg Walker, chair of the Senate Committee on Elections, in an emotional speech. “I fear for the state of Indiana and I fear for all states if we allow intimidation and threats to become the norm.”

But across the country, are intimidation and threats not becoming the norm now? As Trump exemplifies sheer meanness in his dealings with the press (“Quiet, Piggy”) and others, are we not evolving into a nation dominated by heartlessness, violence and greed? Indeed, while Trump champions such things, is he not both a symptom of as well as the arch-crafter of much that has grown ugly in our country?

Source: ABC News

Politicians have a lot to fear nowadays beyond just electoral retaliation. Recall the assassination in June of Minnesota Democratic state Rep. Melissa Hortman and her husband in their home, as well as the shooting of Democratic state Sen. John Hoffman and his wife, Yvette, in their home. The shooter carried a hit list of 45 Democratic elected officials he was gunning for.

Remember, too, the attempt on the life of Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, a Democrat. An arsonist invaded and set fire to the governor’s residence in April in an antisemitic attack. More recently, a Utah man was arrested for threatening to shoot Gov. Spencer Cox, a Republican, and other leaders. Shapiro and Cox joined forces at a Dec. 10 meeting at the National Cathedral to condemn political violence.

“We need to begin by saying that all leaders must condemn all political violence — not cherry-pick which violence to condemn and which violence to accept,” Shapiro said, according to The Washington Post. “When you’re a governor, when you’re a president of the United States, you are looked to for that moral clarity. And we have a president of the United States right now that fails that test on a daily basis.”

Of course, Trump himself was the target of two assassination attempts. One killed a Trump supporter in the crowd and wounded two others. Rather than condemn the rising political violence, Trump’s post-shooting immediate response was to suggest that he was spared because he had God on his side. “Nothing will stop me in this mission because our vision is righteous and our cause is pure,” he said at one point.

The national pathology goes beyond the politicians, though.

Trump and his minions exult in the murders of at least 87 people so far – essentially summary executions without trial – in attacks on alleged drug boats. Meanwhile, at home, gun violence continues to take American lives at ghastly rates, with nearly 47,000 such deaths reported in 2023, the latest year for which figures are available (while 58 percent were suicides, 38 percent were murders).

And masked armed men stalk our cities, pursuing immigrants. In their deportation frenzy, ICE agents have rounded up some 220,000 people across the country since Trump took office. More than a third of those grabbed have no criminal records, contradicting the administration claim that is trying to purge the U.S. of dangerous migrants.

By another analysis in The New York Times, less than 30 percent of those seized in major cities had been convicted of a crime, with a far smaller share convicted of violent crime. The most common non-violent convictions were for driving under the influence and other traffic offenses.

In their simple-minded meanness, the ICE agents have assaulted non-migrants and hauled in the wrong people. Consider two incidents in Minneapolis, for instance.

Sue Tincher, source: Sahan Journal

Sue Tincher, a 55-year-old grandmother, was thrown into the snow, handcuffed, hauled off in a van and then detained for five hours with shackles on her legs. Officials cut off her wedding ring. Her offense: she showed up at the scene of an immigration arrest about 10 blocks from her home, asked whether the officials were from ICE, and refused to move on the street when ordered to. Did the 5-foot-4-inch Tincher pose a threat to the agents?

And then there’s the 20-year-old Somali American man who was harassed by ICE. Mubashir, who declined to share his full name for fear of his safety and that of his family, was tackled, arrested and held for about two hours. He had just stepped out onto the sidewalk during his lunch hour when two masked men approached him, followed him into a restaurant, handcuffed him, forced him to his knees in the snow and drove him off to a federal building. Only then did they let him turn on his phone and show him his ID.

“What we saw by these ICE agents that clearly did not know what they were doing was violence and unwillingness to hear the simple truth, which he was repeating again and again, which is, ‘I’m an American citizen,’” said Mayor Jacob Frey.

Modern American meanness takes other forms, too.

Our leaders seem content to let healthcare costs soar both for the neediest and middle-class folks, for instance. Insurance premiums are tripling (or worse). CBS, in reporting on the failure in the Senate of a couple recent health bills, shared the anecdote of a New Jersey woman, earning $72,000 a year, whose monthly insurance cost will rise from about $400 to more than $1,100.

And the Colorado Division of Insurance offered the example of a family of four with an annual income of $128,000. Their health insurance premium will rise some $14,000 for a standard silver plan if they live in the Denver area. If that family of four lives on the Western Slope, Grand Junction, southwest Colorado, the San Luis Valley, or the eastern plains, they will see premium increases of between $16,000 and nearly $21,000.

Where has compassion gone? Yes, healthcare is complicated and an overhaul is long overdue. But don’t politicians owe Americans intelligent efforts to fix the broken system, instead of letting citizens be fleeced or forced to go without coverage? Are we getting sincere efforts at reform?

And don’t they owe their fellow citizens basic fairness in taxes? Instead, the ultrawealthy thrive while others struggle. It’s no wonder that billionaires have lined up to kiss Trump’s, ahem, ring.

Over the next decade, Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill (BBB) will cut taxes for the richest 10 percent of Americans by more than $14,700 per year per household and cut taxes for the richest 1 percent of Americans by more than $50,000 per year, according to estimates from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) and Joint Committee on Taxation (JCT). Meanwhile, according to the Center for American Progress, tiny tax cuts for the working class will be outpaced by changes that will reduce the incomes of the poorest Americans.

Overall, CAP reported that the BBB cuts taxes by $4.5 trillion over the next decade, primarily with $2.3 trillion of provisions that deliver most of their benefits to the richest 10 percent of Americans by income. It delivers $1 trillion in tax cuts to the top 1 percent while cutting more than $1.1 trillion from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), Medicaid, and other health programs used by the poorest Americans.

Is that in any way fair? Does it reflect the sense of common decency that many of us like to believe animates most Americans?

Decades ago, former President Ronald Reagan repeatedly invoked American virtues and ideals in his talks. “We’re still a nation comprised of good and decent people whose fundamental values of tolerance, compassion, and fair-play guide and direct the decisions of our government,” he said in one 1984 speech in Ireland, for instance.

It’s mind-boggling to think about how far we’ve descended in four decades. But, maybe the courage shown by the good Midwesterners in Indiana is a harbinger of something better. Maybe, starting next November, the America of Ronald Reagan (and Jimmy Carter, Barack Obama, George H.W. Bush and others) will rise again and reclaim the virtues such men exalted.

An Assault by the Right

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George Wallace, source: The Washington Post

Conservative assaults on higher education are nothing new. Recall George Wallace’s vitriol about “pointy-headed intellectuals” in the late 1960s. Years before then, in 1952, William F. Buckley Jr. earned his spurs with the book “God and Man at Yale,” lambasting universities for straying from his dearly held Christian principles. That same year, the House Un-American Activities Committee investigated Communist methods of infiltration in education, as political analyst Pam Chamberlain explained in “The Right v. Higher Education: Change and Continuity.”

Indeed, it has become an article of faith in conservative circles that universities are dominated by lefties who don’t educate, but who indoctrinate. Ronald Reagan in his first gubernatorial campaign in 1966 stoked conservative hostility toward the University of California schools, particularly UC Berkeley, which was a center of demands for free speech on campus and a locus protest against the Vietnam war. After his attacks succeeded, and he forced the schools into a position of needing to charge tuition for the first time in their history.

Unlike these scattered efforts, however, today’s conservative movement is mounting well practiced and orchestrated assaults on what its supporters see as rampant liberalism in education. These drives are led by governors and lesser politicians who in calculated campaigns have won elections or appointments to boards of regents and higher education panels, particularly in red states.

Florida Gov.Ron DeSantis epitomized the drive in 2021 when he signed legislation designed to crack down on a perceived bias in the classrooms by requiring schools to survey themselves annually to measure “intellectual freedom and viewpoint diversity” on their campuses. He followed up early this year by packing the board at the New College of Florida with rightists determined to remake the campus and squash liberal viewpoints there.

He’s hardly alone, however. Other officials have driven out educators they believe would espouse values they can’t stomach, especially on matters of diversity, equity and inclusion (which evidently are values they can’t abide. Consider the actions of the U.S. Supreme Court against affirmative action in university recruitment).

Nikole Hannah Jones, source: NBC News

Most notable here are the cases of two distinguished New York Times journalists who, perhaps not coincidentally, were Black women:

— Nikole Hannah-Jones, whose leadership of the 1619 Project earned a Pulitzer Prize, was appointed in 2021 as the Knight Chair in Race and Investigative Journalism at the University of North Carolina’s Hussman School of Journalism and Media. But, after she was denied tenure by conservative trustees, she decamped to Howard University.

— And this year Texas A&M University drove out former New York Times editor and tenured University of Texas professor Dr. Kathleen McElroy as the new head of the journalism department. After announcing her appointment to a tenured spot, the school’s leaders steadily chipped away at the terms, eventually offering her a nontenured one-year position as a professor of practice with three years as the program director, serving at will. She refused and the university wound up settling with her for $1 million.

An alumni group had agitated against McEloy’s hire, balking at her reported advocacy of DEI. Regents echoed the worries. As The Chronicle of Higher Education reported, one regent texted the chancellor: “I thought the purpose of us starting a journalism department was to get high-quality Aggie journalist [sic] with conservative values into the market.” He wrote: “This won’t happen with someone like this leading the department.”

Take note: the regent didn’t argue for distinguished journalism chops and a commitment to such verities in the field as fairness, thoroughness and accuracy. No. Instead, he applied an ideological test, demanding “conservative values.” Indeed, for conservatives in Texas, McElroy’s affiliation with The New York Times was hardly a plus. It was as if she had worked for Pravda, McElroy said an official at the school told her.  

While often underhanded – as when schools chip away at offers that right-wingers object to – some of the assaults are simply dishonest. A flap this year at Arizona State University, for instance, included an official blaming the university for eliminating her position at the school, when in fact her job went away after a funder — a conservative — pulled his support for her center. The donor was offended when faculty members objected vocally to a couple right-wing speakers coming on campus.

Ronnie D. Green, source: University of Nebraska Foundation

And, sometimes, well-regarded academics who personally may be conservative themselves are victims of the assaults — presumably because they aren’t conservative enough. At the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, where I taught for 14 years, rightists led by then-Gov. Pete Ricketts attacked Chancellor Ronnie D. Green after he led an effort to promote diversity and inclusion at the school. Green, who grew up on a farm in Virginia, made his academic bones in agriculture and was known for his Christian religious commitments, wound up retiring this year as chancellor after just seven years, at age 61.

Aside from such examples, the efforts by conservatives to remake higher education have drawn heat from such groups as the American Association of University Professors. In a recent statement, the AAUP and the American Federation of Teachers condemned the efforts. Their statement said: “Right-wing lawmakers continue to wage a coordinated attack against public colleges and universities with legislation that would undermine academic freedom, chill classroom speech and impose partisan agendas on public higher education.”

The groups cited legislation introduced in at least 23 states that would limit teaching about race gender and sexual orientation, require intellectual and viewpoint diversity statements and surveys, cut funding for diversity, equity and inclusion efforts, and end tenure for faculty. As the groups said, “This legislation is the latest in a multiyear effort by right-wing activists and donors to reshape academia to its liking.”

These efforts come against a backdrop in which many Americans, particularly Republicans, feel hostile to university educations. According to Gallup, only 36% of Americans have “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in such schooling Among Republicans, only 19% of Americans expressed such sentiments. Given such feelings, academics who hope the public will back them in fights to preserve tenure, for instance, may be sorely disappointed.

Finally, let me share a personal anecdote. I once gave a college tour to a young man who was quite hesitant about entering the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. He told me he feared that his Christian faith would be challenged at the school, despite an abundance of churches on campus. He was trying to figure out if a small Christian college, where he would find reinforcement, would be a better fit for him. I recall thinking a few things: university should be a place where many of one’s ideas as a teenager should be tested (although I doubted his Christian commitments would be), and two, his faith must be a fragile thing, indeed, if it can’t hold up to exposure to people who may believe differently.

And yet, that young man may may be representative of much of the sentiment that has coursed through the right since at least the days of William F. Buckley Jr., before conservatives hit upon the approaches they are taking now.

Today’s assaults may owe their genesis to the isolated attacks of prior decades. But, nowadays, they are well-organized and well-developed. And in a troubling number of cases they are working.