The authoritarians' war on cities is a war on all of us

Capitol Hill neighborhood, Washington, January 2018

Strongman rule is a fantasy.  Essential to it is the idea that a strongman will be your strongman.  He won't.  In a democracy, elected representatives listen to constituents.  We take this for granted, and imagine that a dictator would owe us something. But the vote you cast for him affirms your irrelevance.  The whole point is that the strongman owes us nothing.  We get abused and we get used to it.--TIMOTHY SNYDER (2025), quoted in Richardson (2025) Emphasis in original.

I'm taking the Trump administration's military occupation of Washington, D.C., a lot more personally than I took the occupation of Los Angeles earlier this year, or of Portland, Oregon in his first term. This is only because I lived there for a few months in 2018, not because it's more important. If James Madison (1785) was correct to write "It is proper to take alarm at the first experiment on our liberties," we should be fully alarmed by now at any of these displays of hostile force. It's certainly gone beyond the "experiment" stage.

Trump and his coadjutors like U.S. Attorney Jeannine Pirro have presented a false picture of violent crime in Washington (Qiu 2025). Like most of America, really, Washington has seen dramatic declines in violent crime since a spike in the latter half of the pandemic years (Lopez and Boxerman 2025, Altheimer Douglas and Contreras 2025). The U.S. as a whole is mostly back to the long-term nationwide decline in violent crime that began about 1990. 

The capital city is far from pacific, though, as Washington Post columnist Megan McArdle (2025) notes: "The problem isn’t as big as it was a few years ago, but with crime, as with cancer, 'somewhat less of a problem than it was' is not really very good news." Shadi Hamid (2025) adds:

Homelessness is worse today than before the pandemic. We don’t need data to tell us that. The encampments are impossible not to notice. And though they might not be the end of the world, they make D.C. feel more dystopian than it actually is, creating the sense of a governance vacuum. No one wants to feel that way about their city, least of all when their city happens to be the capital of the richest, most powerful nation in the world.

Still, the homicide rate in June 2025 was lower than that of St. Louis, Missouri; Richmond, Virginia; Memphis, Tennessee; Little Rock, Arkansas; and Atlanta, Georgia, some of whose governors have opportunistically sent National Guard troops to assist the occupation. In 2024 Washington was less violent than Cleveland, Ohio, or New Orleans, Louisiana, two more states with governors who are sending guardsmen to Washington while not deigning to attempt similar tactics at home. I'm calling bullshit. 

Entering downtown Providence:
Mayor Brett Smiley says "I know my colleagues around the country
are very concerned [occupation] could happen to our cities" (Bendavid 2025)

So, what's the emergency? If crime in Washington is an improving though ongoing serious problem, what's left to justify the occupation? Is the real emergency that Trump's public approval is flagging (Pew Center 2025)? Or that people won't stop talking about Trump's association with sex criminal Jeffrey Epstein?

People like my Senator Joni Ernst, who say they want to reign in "out of control" spending, will want to know this occupation is costing us taxpayers upwards of $1 million per day. And today they're picking up trash and spreading mulch--some awfully expensive landscapers!

And now he's got Chicago in his sights (Saunders 2025b, Lamothe 2025). (Saunders links to this Wikipedia page showing Chicago ranking 92nd among U.S. cities in violent crime though as high as 22nd in homicides.)

Two Shades Cafe in Chicago's Little Italy:
Cities have coffeeshops. We like cities.

If the occupation of D.C. were a serious crime reduction effort, we would have seen some planning that included city officials; a mix of enforcement and prevention methods (Hohmann, McArdle and Mangual 2025); and attention to areas like the Southeast where crime is concentrated. Instead we see prominent appearances in tourist areas like the National Mall, and assaults on food delivery workers (Schulze 2025). Everyday life for residents has been complicated if not outright scary (cf. Lerner 2025, Silverman Benn and Lumpkin 2025). Fox News has some dramatic video for its followers to devour (Wiggins 2025), while normal people doing normal things get pushed around by masked secret police who make no pretense of their political mission (Kabas 2025), and homeless people just get pushed around to different streets (Wild 2025).

It should be noted that National Guard troops are in D.C. to make a show of force, not to actually reduce crime. It’s not an effort to help residents of Southeast D.C., for example, who live with higher rates of violent crime than I, or most readers of this, do. It’s an effort to let people who are fearful of the crime over there that someone’s doing something about it. (Saunders 2025a)

Poster, National Public Housing Museum:
Hating on cities is a way to ignore the legitimate demands of their residents

If we've learned nothing else ten years into Donald Trump's political career, we've learned that:

1. He has no policy commitments whatsoever, making him unique among American presidents in my lifetime. This lack of interest extends to criminal justice (Green 2025).
2. He has no vision for America, or if he does it's rooted in gauzy nostalgia for the post-World War II years. He does make exceptions for stuff like meme coins, the sales of which have gotten him richer through an appalling pay-for-access scheme (Sigalos and Collier 2025)
3. His principal objectives seem to be attention and praise, material wealth, and sexual gratification (though maybe the latter has declined in importance over the years)
4. Losing face is to be avoided at all costs. This leads to false statements on a regular basis, sometimes on the most trivial matters, retribution against anyone who questions him, and the appalling injustices being visited on the accidentally-deported Kilmar Abrego Garcia.
5. His hatred for anyone who obstructs his access to any of those objectives is deep and enduring (cf. Stein Jacobs Goba and Roebuck 2025, Jacobs Rizzo Roebuck and Stein 2025, Siegel 2025)
6. He relies on drama and display as means of gaining attention, and is adept at using the power of his office for the purpose of creating spectacle.

Nevertheless, Trump has retained considerable political support, and the Republicans who control Congress and the Supreme Court find it prudent to support his actions and personal aspirations regardless of merit or practical consequences. As I suggested when he was reelected, his sizable public support is likely a mix of opportunism (how else do we get to conservative policy outcomes?), fantasy (he is a great leader making America strong), and hatred (he wants to hurt X Group and so do I). It's disturbing that there's so much of these attitudes out there, but it's hard to account for the Trump phenomenon otherwise. As of today he's still at 44 percent in the New York Times polling average.

Not blood-soaked: Community garden, South Ada Street, Chicago

So am I just complaining? My candidate didn't win the last election, boo hoo. My Cubs haven't won a single measly postseason game since 2017. And I have a nagging feeling I personally could be more popular.

Am I just whinging? Does any of this matter?

The Cubs and my popularity, no. But Trump's fondness for what blogger Jennifer Schulze calls "made for TV authoritarianism," and indeed his whole approach to the Presidency, matter deeply and dangerously.

1. Authoritarian approaches represent the failure of the American project. The U.S. Constitution was written over 200 years ago, by imperfect people in a very different world. Its tenuous balancing act between governmental capacity and individual liberties was rooted in a system of checks and balances, which was mostly rooted in a Biblical conception of universal human sinfulness. Unchecked power is antithetical to the whole fabric, and will only end in tears.
2. He appeals strongly to hatred of cities. At issue is not about where you personally would rather live; it's about defending access to vibrant urbanism for all. Urban areas generate the vast portion of American gross domestic product, and are where people go for economic and social opportunity. When Trump claims "the cities are rotting, and they are indeed cesspools of blood," full of "roving mobs of wild youth, drugged-out maniacs, and homeless people," the truth is not in him. He is speaking to a decades-old stereotype, that to be frank was largely fueled by federal and corporate policies. In the words of Kansas City mayor Quinton Lucas, "They are looking to exploit issues for political gain, not to solve them" (all quotes from Bendavid 2025). You can't find common humanity in people you never see, which is why...
3. Cities are fundamentally about association with others. Pete Saunders recently pointed to an interview with anthropologist Anand Pandian, who has a new book about American society that looks interesting. In his travels Pandian noted the walls Americans keep building around themselves: The US is a vast country, and things look very different in various parts. Yet there are certain patterns in how everyday life is changing that I document in the book: the rise of fortress-like homes, patterns of neighbourhood isolation and segregation, new developments in American automotive and roadway culture that reflect a more defensive orientation concerning others, body cultures that lead people to think of their bodies as needing armouring and protection, and what I call walls of the mind, separating people into different information ecosystems, into completely different realities (Radhakrishna 2025). The more we bury ourselves in fortresses, whether physical or social, the scarier cities seem.
4. We need cities in order to solve our most serious problems. In a world full of seemingly intractable problems--climate change, housing, immigration and refugee flows, the costs of health care and education, and the future of employment, to name a few--we need cities. It's precisely the rollicking diversity of cities that make them places where problems get solved. Freedom, and conversation across differences, lead to innovation. Encounters across social differences make progress possible. Urban living arrangements are more environmentally and financially sustainable, not to mention better for public health. 

Whether you live on a noisy downtown street or by yourself in the woods, the quality of life you enjoy depends on cities. Trump's attack on them is an attack on all of us.

SEE ALSO: "Portland: Authoritarianism, or Nothing to See Here?" 24 July 2020

Theodore R. Johnson, "Trump's National Guard Deployment Echoes Hurricane Katrina Mistakes," Washington Post, 27 August 2025

VIDEO: Illinois governor J.B. Pritzker responded to Trump's threats to occupy Chicago in a magnificent speech August 25 (14:59):

Book review: On Tyranny

 

Snyder, Timothy. On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century. New York: Tim Duggan, 2017. 127 pp.

These are weird times in America. This month President Trump dusted off the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 in order to deport hundreds of immigrants to prisons in El Salvador; when federal district judge James E. Broasberg issued a temporary restraining order, Trump called Broasberg a "Radical Left Lunatic" and called for the judge's impeachment, while "border czar" Tom Homan said, "We're not stopping... I don't care what the judges think (Caputo 2025). Meanwhile, a number of American citizens as well as legal residents have been caught up in the administration's zeal for deportation and reckless disregard for due process (Foy 2025). At Trump's and/or Musk's behest, years of research data (Shendruk and Rampell 2025) and references to nonwhite troops (Warner 2025) are being removed from government websites. The Voice of America is gone, and the Federal Trade Commission disabled by (illegal) firings (cf. Mitchell 2025). And that's just this week. Congressional Republicans have approved everything Trump and Musk have done after the fact--including joining the effort to intimidate Judge Broasberg--while congressional Democrats seem baffled and helpless.

All this has been justified in the language of "emergency," against which Yale historian Timothy Snyder warns us in chapter 17 ("Watch for dangerous words"). Has America in 2025 become a tyranny? Is the elected President fomenting a coup? Whatever is going on, it's not the democratic constitutional system I taught about for decades. We need a new guidebook for a new regime.

Professor Snyder wrote On Tyranny after the presidential election of 2016, when no one knew what to expect of the newly elected President. Given Trump's petulant, hate-spewing campaign, and his disregard for either facts or norms, it wasn't unreasonable to expect him to try to do some very bad things once in office. And he certainly did try, but--thanks in large part to "babysitters" like Secretary of Defense James Mattis, Attorney General William Barr, and ultimately Vice President Mike Pence--he didn't get as far as some had feared. Republicans lost control of the House of Representatives in the 2018 midterms, and Trump lost his bid for reelection in 2020. The American constitutional system seemed to survive four years of Trump, and while the COVID epidemic kept threatening to spiral out of control, it too eventually subsided.

Now, after an improbable series of events, Trump is not only back, but with a plurality of the 2024 vote--an achievement that escaped him in 2016, and making him only the second Republican to do this since 1988. Trump brought the hate back with him, but not the "babysitters." The two months-plus of Trump's second term have been chaotic and destructive, with particular animus directed at political opponents, regulatory agencies, minority groups, and Ukraine. Public approval has dipped a little of late, but so far is nearly ten percentage points higher than during his first term. It seems quite a few of us like Trump's promises, or are entertained by his antics (though see Morris 2025 for the complicated polling picture).

So it seems timely to pick up Snyder's little volume of advice again. He suggests, from observing authoritarian regimes in Europe, several ways that ordinary citizens can respond to what's going on with maybe some degree of effectiveness.

The first is Do not obey in advance, acting in ways that accommodate the regime before they even give a specific order. For towns, educational and medical institutions, arts organizations, private firms, and anyone else who relies on federal funding for much of their income, this can be difficult, especially when the regime is erratic or vague in their demands. Anyone trying to keep up with the Trump administration's many and varied threats might understandably do whatever they can to minimize the uncertainty. Iowa's laws about "obscenity" in school libraries came with similar lack of clarity, probably in hopes the librarians would overcomply.

The second "lesson" is Defend institutions, which leads into the next lessons on elections, symbols, professional ethics, the military and police. Trump has replaced the leadership of the military and FBI, all inspectors general, and Justice and Homeland Security officials, while gagging or defunding regulatory agencies. Before hobbling the FCC, he fired Democratic members of the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, National Labor Relations Board, and Equal Opportunity Commission to bring those panels below the number needed to act. And on and on. Snyder calls actions like these flashing red warning lights, but so far they have not visibly alarmed many people who weren't already opposed to Trump. Someone in our book group asked "How could we support" those who are being sidelined or who are being ordered to carry out Trump's orders? Maybe pointing out the trend and its significance can be a start, but pretty much anything you can say about Trump has already been said.

Some of us have less power than others, but we also might be less exposed, and so in a position to take more risk. The middle chapters of the book deal with taking personal responsibility. We are responsible for how we use language, treat others, and process information (especially when Internet rumors are too delicious to check out). Particularly poignant was his urging those in law enforcement to "be reflective." It is important to remember that Trump in his first term didn't tear children away from refugee families (in some cases losing track of them), charge into Portland and Seattle to use violence against protestors, or deport COVID-infected immigrants to countries that were ill-prepared to treat them. He ordered those regrettable actions, but somebody--a lot of somebodies, really--had to agree to carry them out, putting their jobs ahead of their humanity.

Chapters 12-15 discuss everyday life, particularly using our time (ch. 13) and social skills (ch. 12) and money (ch. 15) to build strong communities that can support vulnerable people. He concludes chapter 12: Having old friends is the politics of last resort. And making new ones is the first step toward change. Be out in public, but maybe keep your electronic profile lower (ch. 14; see also Ingram 2025, cited below.) Chapter 15 also talks about building civil society by associating with people who share our interests. A group of amateur brewers or cyclists can sustain vulnerable members, while also softening the attitudes of those who now seem indifferent or even supportive of tyranny.

On Tyranny is brief and direct. Those who wish more comparative political context can hunt up Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt's How Democracies Die (Crown, 2018, and discussed here); those seeking more insight into the tyrannical mindset will be rewarded by Martha Nussbaum's The Monarchy of Fear (Oxford, 2018). But for a quick basic introduction to the inflection point that is 2025 in America, with pointers on how to respond, On Tyranny is an excellent start.

SEE ALSO: 

Anthony Faiola, "Autocrats Roll Back Rights and Rule of Law--And Cite Trump's Example," Washington Post, 24 March 2025

Matthew Ingram, "Be Careful What You Put on Social Media, They Are Listening," The Torment Nexus, 13 March 2025

"Constitution Day: Whatever Happened to the Separation of Powers?" Holy Mountain, 17 September 2020

Free online version: On Tyranny

Music for urbanists: Lift Every Voice and Sing

James Weldon Johnson (from www.jamesweldonjohnson.org)

Sing a song full of the faith that the dark past has taught us,
Sing a song full of the hope that the present has brought us...

--JAMES WELDON JOHNSON

The African American Museum of Iowa stepped up in a big way this Martin Luther King Day. For the second year in a row, observance in Cedar Rapids was at risk of being overshadowed by events: last year by the Iowa precinct caucuses, and this year by the presidential inauguration. The A.A.M.I. provided reduced admission and child-friendly programming all day long, including displays and video documentaries.

For many years, most recently in 2023, Cedar Rapids commemorated Martin Luther King Day with an evening service at St. Paul's United Methodist Church. The highlight for me was always when everyone in attendance stood to sing "Lift Every Voice and Sing," one of my all-time favorite hymns that deserves wider usage. Like "Joy to the World," it's tied by tradition to a particular season, but its message is timeless.

Anne Harris Carter presents Mike and Toni Loyal with the 2025
Who is My Neighbor Award, as Pastor Jonathan Heifner looks on
(Sunday 1/19 at St. Paul's United Methodist Church)

"Lift Every Voice and Sing" began as a poem composed by James Weldon Johnson on the occasion of Lincoln's birthday in 1900 (PBS 2013). It was Johnson's brother, John Rosamond Johnson, who later set the poem to music with its distinctive dual melodies. 

James Weldon Johnson (1871-1938) was 29 when he wrote the poem that became such an enduring song. His was no "cockeyed optimist" (South Pacific reference) about racial conditions in America as he wrote his song, either; he spent much of the following two decades lobbying the federal government fort a national anti-lynching law, which was finally passed in 1919.

Johnson must have been a whirl of talent and energy, for at various times in his life he was an elementary school teacher, founder of a high school, a lawyer, a prolific composer (collaborating with his brother) for Broadway shows, author, college professor, diplomat to Venezuela and Nicaragua, and civil rights activist for the NAACP ("Civil Rights Leaders: James Weldon Johnson" n.d.).

Here is a 2009 choral version of "Lift Every Voice and Sing" by the Metropolitan Baptist Church choir (5:00):

And here is a hip-hop version from Austin, Texas, performed by Doughboy the Midwest Maestro and DJ Kool Rod. A casual Internet search reveals dozens of versions in a variety of genres. It is one versatile song.

Its repeated references to past tribulations seems particularly appropriate to oppressed groups i.e. not suburban white bloggers. But the lyrics, like King's often-articulated vision, are all-inclusive: "Lift every voice and sing, let earth and heaven ring" (italics mine). We all live in hope of seeing unity; we all stand in need of redemption. It is hope well-placed, too, because only unity produces the social peace and prosperity we need to live well.

We have come over a way that with tears has been watered,
We have come, treading our path through the blood of the slaughtered,
Out from the gloomy past, Till now we stand at last

Where the white gleam of our bright star is cast.

Martin Luther King Jr (1929-1968) at the A.A.M.I.

Martin Luther King Jr. understood the hope of unity, combined with critical thinking and endurance and empathy. So did Jimmy Carter, whose mourning period is being interrupted for Inauguration Day. Pope Francis, who's made hope the theme of the 2025 Year of Jubilee (Powell 2025), understands it as well. I'm less sure about those who have used their political office to take out after diversity efforts in schools and workplaces. Understanding the perspectives of those whose life experiences differ from the majority's seems essential to attaining unity. But they're doing their best to make "diversity, equity, and inclusion" dirty words. Is understanding all this just "woke bullshit," to quote our newly reinaugurated President?

Suburbia was/is white because of inequality and discrimination;
Who will tell this story if government threatens schools?
(Display photographed at A.A.M.I.)

Donald J. Trump, triumphantly returned to office on MLK Day itself, has thrived exclusively on disunity. Even now, he is a sore winner, utterly ungracious about the (rather favorable) conditions he inherits from his predecessor. During the awful wildfires that still rage in California, he has promoted disinformation, blasted anyone taking actual responsibility as "incompetent," and called the California governor Gavin "New-scum," which insult Newsom probably last heard in 1st grade. I was tempted to see what "weird shit" (George W. Bush's 2017 characterization) Trump would produce in the inaugural address, but decided my time would be better spent at the African American Museum.

Resist hate with love, said King
(My picture taken at A.A.M.I.)

Building the cities of the future won't be done with name-calling; it will be done with ongoing learning and persistent hard work.

Shadowed beneath Thy hand, May we forever stand.

True to our God, True to our native land.

SEE ALSO: 

"MLK and the Winter of Discontent," Holy Mountain, 16 January 2024 

James Weldon Johnson Foundation page

Kristin Du Mez, "From the Spiritual Underground: Love and Justice for Nov. 20 and Beyond," Du Mez Connections, 19 January 2025

Kathryn Mobley, "West Dayton Exhibit Inspired by Martin Luther King Jr's Dayton Speech," WYSO, 20 January 2025

Pete Saunders, "CSY Replay #16: More on Segregation," Corner Side Yard, 20 January 2025

10th anniversary post: Turn red for what?

(Source: X. Used without permission.)

Don’t make me waste a whole damn half a day here, OK? Look, I came here. We can be nice to each other, or we can talk turkey. I’m here for one simple reason: I like you very much, and it’s good for my credentials with the Hispanic or Latino community. You know, on the East Coast, they like being called Hispanics, you know this? On the West Coast, they like being called Latinos. They said, ‘Sir, please use the term Latino when you’re in New Mexico,’ and I said ‘I’ve always heard Hispanic.’ … I take a poll, and it’s 97 percent. I was right. A free poll. As I was saying, I love the Hispanics.--DONALD TRUMP, 10/31/2024

Ten years ago, in the mid-term elections of 2014, the Republicans gained a majority in the Senate and thereby unified control of Congress. Along the way they flipped the Iowa U.S. Senate seat that had been held for 30 years by Democrat Tom Harkin, and has been held ever since by Republican Joni Ernst. Ernst came to prominence with a hog-filled primary commercial in which she promised to "Make 'em squeal" in Washington. That vividly captured the Republicans' victorious message, which was directed at voter dissatisfaction while being vague about how they would make it go away.

My 2014 post-election post was full of mystification about the Republicans' content-free success, as well as Ernst's easy victory in Iowa. Rereading it seems like finding a letter from a previous civilization, as 2014 proved to be a turning point in Iowa politics. Beginning that year, the Hawkeye State has swung sharply towards the Republicans. Democratic presidential candidates had won Iowa every election but one from 1988-2012, but Donald Trump won by 10 percentage points in 2016 and eight in 2020 (uselectionatlas.org), and he is expected to win easily again this year. Republicans now hold more than two-thirds of seats in both houses of the legislature, and all statewide offices but one (which they lost by less than a percentage point.) Iowa is a good example of politics fueled by grievances that never get solved, while politicians that play to them become more popular. Turning red, indeed.

As different as 2014 seemed to be from 2012, it's easily recognizable in the political environment of 2024. Economic data indicate we have mostly recovered from a recent blow, but many people are not feeling it. The right track/wrong track average was 28-66 then, 27-65 now (Real Clear Politics). Economic inequality in America continues to rise, which surely contributes to that apparent discrepancy: the GINI Index was 41.5 in 2014, highest on record and highest in the developed world, and was 41.3 in 2022, the last year for which there are data (FRED). That definitely affects people's worldview, including political trust, efficacy, and engagement, though of course not all in the same way (Garon and Stacy 2024). It's a dry statistic that reflects the reality that a lot of people are feeling and expressing in all sorts of ways, viz. an apparent rise in road rage.

Another dry statistic is the number of degrees (1.9 F) the climate has warmed since the pre-industrial era, which is reflected in an increasing incidence and severity of natural disasters, including (this year) major hurricanes in the southeast, severe flooding in North Carolina and Spain, and weeks without rain in the Midwest as well as an admittedly gorgeous but abnormally warm fall. (On how climate politics contributes to lack of emergency preparedness, see University of Michigan 2024.) Natural disasters too impact people's lives in ways that aren't easily coped with, starting with increasing insurance rates.

So, it may seem strange for our national reaction to frightening change to be support for a party that plans to repeal the federal health insurance program, and a presidential candidate who has called global warming a hoax. (For projected impacts of Trump's climate policies after 2025, see "Analysis" 2024.) This same candidate, Donald Trump, held a grotesque rally in New York last weekend with warm up speakers spewing hate to a cheering crowd, followed by Trump's own rambling narcissistic rage. This is how Trump has rolled since he began his political career nine years ago, so comes as no surprise, and outside of some especially inflammatory comments barely qualifies as news (Koul 2024). There may be solid arguments for Republican policies, but instead we get name calling, and lies about Ohioans eating cats and dogs, gangs taking over cities, FEMA hurricane aid being diverted to undocumented immigrants, and the 2020 election. Always the election.

As President, Trump benefited from coming to office at a time of peace and prosperity. For four years, he was an agent of chaos and cruelty, managing to break a great deal of china in the shop even before the pandemic. His campaign is full of more of this (see links at Bruni 2024), salted with self-praise and the vaguest promises of good outcomes. So how is this guy standing at the brink of returning to the Oval Office? Why is he even above 20 percent in the polls, much less the 46.8 percent in today's 538 average? 

In my capacity as political scientist, I have struggled for nine years to explain Trump's support. I feel less and less confident in my ability to assess national politics the longer this goes on. Just asking people about their political stances is often fruitless; often you get an echo of what campaigns are saying. (Why, for example, is immigration the "most important problem" facing Montana voters, and I think #2 in Iowa, two red states that are experiencing very little population influx of any kind?) So what follows is admittedly tentative. 

I think there are three broad reasons why many people find Trump continually appealing. These are unscientific impressions, based on conversations with Trump supporters I know. They aren't mutually exclusive; in other words, some Trump supporters may share more than one of these perspectives.

1. Preference for Republican policy options (Trump is awful/embarrassing, but he's our only chance to get what we need/want). Trump's own policy expressions have been characteristically erratic, but if you strongly prefer, say, lower taxes, or an end to health insurance subsidies, or a ban on abortion, you're not going to get those from the Democratic Party. You'd have to discount Trump promising to jack up tariffs or deport millions of undocumented workers or bring the Federal Reserve Board under his thumb, not to mention sic the army on protestors, and all the other undemocratic things, but he says so many weird things that probably you can hope it's all just talk and you'll get some measure of traditional Republican policies under a Trump administration. "I don't like Donald Trump," billionaire Nelson Peltz reportedly told a fundraising dinner. "He's a terrible human being, but our country's in a bad place and we can't afford Joe Biden" (Glasser 2024: 46). Nikki Haley made a similar argument in The Wall Street Journal right before Election Day (Haley 2024). I'd hope there could be a better conservative messenger; as I said about abortion a few years ago, the more these ideas are tied to Trump, the more vulnerable they are to rejection when he is finally repudiated.

2. Low information (Trump is cool. And strong.) 

If you've read this far, you probably pay more attention to politics than most people, and it's hard to remember that a lot of people are going off vague impressions. They may not know all the wacky things Trump says or does, or how many of his former staff are begging us please not to reelect this guy, because they're not paying close attention. A lot of them remember the pre-pandemic years as relatively placid, and assume Trump must have had something to do with that. Or they may hear something that Biden or Harris said and assume the hate is flowing both ways. Their support is less about a package of policies than an idea of Trump as folk hero standing against the elites--a latter day Jesse James, if you will, or a modern day Cyrus. Hence all those exaggerated images...

Source: amazon.com

...of a man who in real life is 78 years old, very overweight, and has difficulty climbing into the cab of a truck. But, as Glasser's long article in the New Yorker (cited below) documents, there are plenty of elites putting their fortunes behind Trump's return to office, and they're fine with you buying whatever it is he's selling. 

3. Frustrated entitlement (Trump is fighting for me. He hath loosed the fateful lightning of his terrible swift sword. He's coming for you, and I'm glad!) 

On Day 1, I will launch the largest deportation program in American history to get the criminals out. We will get critical race theory and transgender insanity the hell out of our school. Kamala Harris is a train wreck who has destroyed everything in her path.--DONALD TRUMP, 10/27/2024

As many people out there are understandably anxious about their futures, so for some reason is Donald Trump, based on his constant bragging, insults, and lying. He also has a very comprehensive sense of grievance, with which he's managed through considerable rhetorical skill to inspire millions of people to identify. If he, and we, aren't getting what we deserve, it must be someone's fault (cf. Nussbaum 2018)! Anything that goes wrong--the pandemic, inflation, Trump himself getting shot at a rally--must be the fault of some nefarious actors who must be crushed. Trump and his allies have effectively directed the blame for economic and social anxiety towards immigrants (always from Latin America), gays and lesbians and transgendered people, feminists, protestors, city residents, political opponents, reporters, poll workers, and anyone else they find inconvenient. This is the logic of replacement theory, the idea that difference is intrinsically threatening. Those seeds have certainly found fertile ground. Thousands cheered Tony Hinchcliffe's hateful comments at Madison Square Garden last weekend, while hundreds more were outside chanting "Kamala is a whore!"

Here politics is being used as revenge fantasy (Remember "Lock her up!") rather than as a means of deciding solutions to common problems. But none of the pro-Trump rationales, frankly, is good for our common life. No policy victory is worth what Trump is putting the country through. In the real-world communities in which we variously live, we have a lot to work through, and we have to make room for a lot of people who aren't us. These were challenging even before Trump galumphed onto the scene, and will continue to be so when he finally goes away. I only wish more people could join us in building community, and be better at critical thinking instead of joining Trump in punching down.

I think the answer, for now, is not to let our national political disease run our lives. I take heart in the people in my life and my town who continue to work for better community. "Where there's life, there's hope," as Tolkien's character Sam Gamgee says, and while we're hoping, we can hope for a more loving and more practical world.

"How did you know the world was waiting just for you?"

SEE ALSO:

"The Election and Our Common Life," 8 November 2016

Susan B. Glasser, "Purchasing Power," New Yorker, 28 October 2024, 46-55

Nicholas Kristof, "I've Covered Authoritarians Abroad. Now I Fear One at Home," New York Times, 2 November 2024

Martha C. Nussbaum, The Monarchy of Fear: A Philosopher Looks at Our Political Crisis (Simon & Schuster, 2018)

Catherine Rampell, "Only Care About Your Pocketbook? Trump is Still the Wrong Choice," Washington Post, 29 October 2024, Opinion | Only care about your pocketbook? Trump is still the wrong choice. - The Washington Post

Project 2025 and Our Common Life

Heritage Foundation, Washington DC,
on a cloudy day in 2012

The first thing you notice about Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation's massive policy book for the next Republican administration, is not its content but its tone. Considering it's ostensibly about public policy, it has a lot about who it targets rather than how it proposes to solve public problems. The foreword, by Foundation president Kevin D. Roberts, is barely underway before it throws blame for today's problems on "wholesale dishonesty and corruption" of "the ruling and cultural elite today" (p. 1). Nothing happens unless it's someone's fault?

Contemporary elites have even repurposed the worst ingredients of 1970s "radical chic" to build the totalitarian cult known today as "The Great Awokening."... Most alarming of all, the very moral foundations of our society are in peril. (1)

Fevered, ad hominem attacks and name-calling continue throughout the foreword. 

In many ways, the entire point of centralizing political power is to subvert the family. Its purpose is to replace people’s natural loves and loyalties with unnatural ones (2).... The noxious tenets of “critical race theory” and “gender ideology” should be excised from curricula in every public school in the country. These theories poison our children (5)... Bureaucrats at the Department of Justice force school districts to undermine girls’ sports and parents’ rights to satisfy transgender extremists (8)....

...and on and on. References to the "global abortion industry" (261) in a chapter on foreign aid, and "the grotesque culture of violence against the child in the womb" (642) in a chapter on veterans, aren't going to gain you allies for the policies you advocate, either. 

Given the Heritage Foundation's own massive endowment and presence, one could be forgiven for thinking that they themselves are part of the ruling elite. Perhaps "ruling elite" is defined here as "smart people who disagree with us." 

Beyond the fantastic quality to this screed that seems remote from anyone's actual life, I think the tone detracts from the substance they are trying to promote here. Joe Biden comes in for a lot of criticism, as does Barack Obama, while Donald Trump gets none until page 722 relating to the Export-Import Bank. (Anyone who does appear to criticize Trump, like U.S. international broadcasts discussed in chapter 8, get roundly flayed.) I realize I'm not the target audience for Project 2025, but if I were to pick up a paper on, say, climate change, and it began with a lot of attacks on Donald Trump or Mitch McConnell or capitalism, it would lead me to question the credibility of the policy thinking that accompanied them. Are we even trying to solve public problems here, or are we just trying to elect Republicans and shout down people we don't like?

This is a problem because, whenever Project 2025 stops screaming about elites, it discusses some rather serious problems our society faces, like challenges to the family, from China, and for government budgeting, as well as the loss of separation of powers in the government. I feel I'd like to talk with these (mostly) guys, about these problems individually, or better yet as common symptoms of some deeper dysfunctionality, but the authors in Project 2025 prefer to reverse engineer their approach based on crushing their enemies. In reality, our American/human destiny is a common one, and we need to hear from all perspectives. Conservatives certainly have important perspectives, but there needs to be more engagement and less of what Daniel Pink (2024) called "authoritarian revenge porn."

The 30 chapters that follow contain some valuable practical advice. Chapters 1 and 2, by Rick Dearborn and Russ Vought, respectively, provide a basic introduction to the Executive Branch of which any citizen should be aware, and certainly anyone undertaking to work therein, whether or not their principal motivation is "combating the Left’s aggressive attacks on life and religious liberty, and confronting 'wokeism' throughout the federal government" (38). Chapter 7, by Dustin J. Carmack, gets 17 paragraphs into a careful analysis of the challenges facing intelligence in the post-9/11 world (201-204) before he suddenly seems to realize he hasn't attacked "woke culture" yet. There are interesting exchanges on trade in chapters 23 and 26.

I certainly don't have the policy expertise to evaluate the many recommendations in Project 2025. Nor do I have the resources to evaluate the truth or falsity of its numerous claims. (For responses to chapters 11 on education, and 8 and 28 on communications technology, see Perera, Valant and Meyer (2024) and Muenster (2024), respectively.) Project 2025 contains a lot of inside baseball, or #iykyk, nearly all of which goes over my head. A seemingly obvious proclamation like "To fulfill its mission, USAGM should also aim to present the truth about America and American policy— not parrot America’s adversaries’ propaganda and talking points" (235) is certainly a red flag that the writer is grinding some axe or other. I will say it is sobering to read how much investment there needs to be in the military (ch. 4) so quickly after condemnation of the national debt (chs 1-3) while we are also expecting to cut taxes (ch. 22). 

From the perspective of our common life, which is what we're all about here on Holy Mountain, there are reasons to worry if Project 2025 becomes the blueprint for the next administration its contributors clearly hope it will be.

1. Public problems that are inconvenient to the ideology of Project 2025--like climate change, access to health care, the legacy of racism, agricultural chemical runoff causing a dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico, gun violence, pedestrian deaths, threats against local officials, exploitation of workers, and inequality of wealth and opportunity--are either ignored or dismissed as unbelievable. Climate change doesn't appear until chapter 9 on foreign aid, when the very idea is described as "radical" and "extreme" (257). One page later the text attacks gay rights as "bullying" and "partisan" (258) while alleging "Past Democratic administrations have nearly erased what females are and what femininity is" (258-259). Chapter 5, on homeland security, doesn't even bother with an analysis of immigration problems; it wants control centralized so the border with Mexico can be "secured." (For some ways this approach to border security might implicate current residents, see Krauze 2024.) The Department of Homeland Security "has also suffered from the Left’s wokeness and weaponization against Americans whom the Left perceives as its political opponents" (135). We're outraged by phantoms and other points of view while we ignore the most serious public problems.

2. freedom. This is a value popular among the contributors to Project 2025, as well it should be, though perhaps it is not as popular with them as "interests" or "values." Freedom is actually objective #1 under education policy (322). Freedom has a lot of meanings in political theory. Here it seems to mean exemption from liberal policies one doesn't agree with, and the right not to be exposed to ideas not your own. Either we get our way, or we take our ball and go home. Section III features attacks on "the irrational, destructive, un-American mask and vaccine mandates that were imposed upon an ostensibly free people during the COVID-19 pandemic" (283). That includes having churches closed on Easter 2020: "What is the proper balance of lives saved versus souls saved?" (456). Chapter 8 on quotes Thomas Jefferson (on government funding for churches) to justify its scorched earth approach to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (246). Conservatives--apparently including ex-President Trump and the January 6 rioters (285 and pretty much all of chapter 17)--should have autonomy from anything from which they disagree, but not so liberals who go in for "woke transgender activism" or "abortion as a form of 'health care'" (284, scare-quotes in original). We get the right-to-infect and freedom to discriminate against transgendered people, but not to be safe during a pandemic or to be transgendered people.

3. separation of powers. Vought cites James Madison on separation of powers, urging the President to be bold in clawing back discretionary authority from the bureaucracy (filled with elitists who are often woke!), while restrained in relations with Congress with which they share power. This would be a tricky balancing act under any circumstances, given the long-standing incentives for Congress to delegate power to the executive as well as the inability of the elected and appointed leaders to oversee the vast bureaucracy. Vought is heavy on coordination and direction, and light on restraint. Chapter 5 wants centralized control over immigration; chapter 6 wants centralized control over foreign policy. It is easy to read this, as many have, as empowering the President to do conservative things by overriding checks and balances within the federal government, with self-restraint reserved for inconvenient things like racism and climate change (p. 60).

4. love. This may be a weird criterion to judge a policy book, but the mountain on this blog is a holy mountain, after all. So much of this text is full of animosity. Even chapter 3 on the bureaucracy, analytically written by Donald H. Devine and co-authors, portrays federal employees not as human beings but as overpaid statistics. (How dare they have union representation and a pension plan! We like our workers hungry and scared?) Opponents are enemies, their motives portrayed with cynicism. (Chapter 4 on the military makes several mysterious references to "Marxist indoctrination" and the authors are obsessed with pandemic-era requirements for masks and vaccinations. Chapter 5 refers to the COVID-19 "vaccine" (scare-quotes in original, p. 156).) None of the contributors cites the biblical book of Revelation to advocate political opponents be thrown into a lake of fire, but the same logic prevails that other points of view must not be tolerated. Really? If you love this country, that means loving the people who live in it, including those with other perspectives than your own. Don't hate them, learn from them.

5. sinfulness. Maybe this is an even weirder criterion? If we take seriously that "all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God" (Romans 3:23), we should proceed cautiously with policy change, especially if we're as angry as the Project 2025 contributors seem to be. One of the reasons I like Strong Towns so much is that founder Charles Marohn refers constantly to "humility" in their approach. Admittedly, the very comprehensiveness of Project 2025 may exaggerate the degree of instantaneous wholesale change being contemplated. Nevertheless, the ready-to-go-on-day-one war of good against evil that it is itching to declare assumes all of the sin is by Them, and that We stand at Armageddon and battle for the Lord. This degree of presumption is frightening when you think about it, considering there are real human lives at stake.

Project 2025 has had a bumpy ride in 2024. Public opinion polls show that people who have heard of it by and large disapprove of it (Yang 2024). Former President Trump, the putative beneficiary of its thinking, has noted its unpopularity and thus renounced it (Hawkinson 2024). Vice President Harris, now the Democratic candidate, has been trying to frighten people with it, invoking it even when it doesn't actually contain the content she attributes to it (Dale 2024).

The megalith that is Project 2025: Mandate for Leadership is worth taking seriously; in the absence of alternative ideas in the Republican Party, this is the closest thing we have to a Trump campaign platform. It is full of serious ideas, though with a rich mix of partisanship, grievance, and score-settling. If the next Republican administration, possibly as soon as five months from now, pushes angrily "onward!" while denying the existence of key problems, it is likely to be alarming for advocates of common life.

SOURCE: Paul Dans and Steven Groves (eds), 2025 Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise (Heritage Foundation, 2023)

SEE ALSO: "Religious Freedom for Whom?" 15 December 2020

Amber Phillips, "What is Project 2025," Washington Post, 30 June 2024

Will Sommer, "He Found a Project 2025 Duffel Bag. Then the Police Showed Up at His House," Washington Post, 16 August 2024

Does America Need a Truth Commission?

Source: https://pursuit.unimelb.edu.au/. Used without permission.

The New Year offers a chance at restart for Americans and the world, along with the rollout of the coronavirus vaccines, and the impending inauguration of the avuncular president-elect Joe Biden. Besides that, though, it offers us all a chance to rest from collective trauma... rest from ten months (so far) of a deadly pandemic and the economic dislocation and social distancing it has wrought, rest from an unusually virulent election campaign whose overtime finally ends January 5 with the Georgia runoffs, and rest from a presidential term marked by relentless and aggressive public relations, alternative facts, erratic policy making, and outbursts of gratuitous cruelty and violence. 

One way that's been suggested to achieve national rest and reset is through a national Truth and Reconciliation Commission. A local version is underway in Iowa City, to address issues of racial justice. The nine-member commission was authorized by the City Council in June, appointed last month, and began their work before Christmas. They are charged with investigating discrimination, hosting a forum for stories of those impacted by racism, and facilitating conversations across racial lines. Commission member T'Shailyn Harrington told The Gazette: "Once you have these conversations, there's no way someone in good conscience can say instances of racial injustice don't happen in Iowa City. If there's evidence of something, there's no way you can say, 'That's fake news'" (Hermiston 2020; see also KCRG 2020). 

Priscilla B. Hayner in 2016
(Source: Independent Commission on Multilateralism. Used without permission.)

Priscilla B. Hayner, author of a major worldwide survey of truth commissions, suggests five defining features: 

A truth commission (1) is focused on past, rather than ongoing, events; (2) investigates a pattern of events that took place over a period of time; (3) engages directly and broadly with the affected population, gathering information on their experiences; (4) is a temporary body, with the aim of concluding with a final report; and (5) is officially authorized or empowered by the state under review. (Hayner 2010: 11-12)

She counted 40 truth commissions begun through 2009 (Hayner 2010: xi-xii). Hayner is a co-founder of the International Center for Transitional Justice, and has participated in quite a lot of them herself. She is, notably, more frank than sanguine in her reflections.

My interest in this topic comes from my own fatigue, as well as the strong impression that the common life that this blog celebrates has become badly torn. This interest preceded my awareness of public calls for an American truth commission, but come they have. The prolific author and former Labor Secretary Robert Reich called for one in a widely-circulated Tweet in October, promising 

It would erase Trump's lies, comfort those who have been harmed by his hatefulness, and name every official, politician, executive, and media mogul whose greed and cowardice enabled this catastrophe (quoted in Brown 2020). 

The same week, Elie Mystal presented a more detailed argument in The Nation: 

We need a form of truth and reconciliation commission precisely because our normal institutions have failed.... When a plane falls out of the sky, we don't just shrug our shoulders and say, 'Gravity has consequences.' We send in a team of experts to pick through the wreckage, figure out exactly what went wrong, hold people accountable, and make recommendations for future safety (Mystal 2020). 

Similar calls came from U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Massachusetts) and MSNBC commentator Chris Hayes. More narrowly, Elaine Kamarck of the Brookings Institution has called for a commission to review "what went wrong" with the American government's handling of the coronavirus pandemic (Kamarck 2020).

Makeshift medical facility in North Carolina, March 2020
(North Carolina Health News. Used without permission.)

The idea is far from universally beloved. Hillbilly Elegy author J.D. Vance called the advocates "whiny," telling FOX News: 

Instead of... moving on with the life of American democratic politics, they want to go backward and punish everybody.... [R]eally what this is saying is you are going to be punished for trying to implement your ideals and principles into the work of government (Creitz 2020). 

More objectively, Harvard professor Jill Lepore argues that a commission focused on Trump would violate the American tradition of peaceful transfers of power dating back to the election of 1800. The Trump administration should be investigated by journalists, chronicled by historians and, in some cases, tried in ordinary courts. She does support proposals to use commissions to study the coronavirus response, racial injustice, and American Indian boarding schools. More broadly, 

what the nation needs, pretty urgently, is self-reflection, not only from Republicans but also from establishment Democrats and progressives and liberals and journalists and educators and activists and social media companies and, honestly, everyone (Lepore 2020).

Moreover, the record of past truth commissions is mixed. South Africa's famous post-apartheid truth commission allowed victims of violence to speak before the nation, but ignored broader impacts of the apartheid system. Commissions' capacity to accomplish nationwide reconciliation is vastly overstated (Zvogbo and Crawford 2020). Even the most successful commissions fall short of their ideal goals: A South African statement-taker told Hayner Perhaps sixty percent feel better, but those people are only healed sixty percent (Hayner 2010: 150). 

Jules Bakery in Marion is the latest metro business to close.
(Source: julesbakery.com. Used without permission.)

Maybe Lepore is right, and what we really should be doing is self-reflection. But like most Americans, I think on reflection that I'm pretty cool already. Maybe what America needs is not a Truth Commission so much as an Empathy Commission to guide us toward that self-reflection. This is definitely not to settle political scores; I'll let prosecutors and creditors deal with the President. However, we can have common life only if we are inclusive enough to know something of each other's stories, and can once again see difference as a variation of "us" rather than an alien "them." We need to not merely to affirm in words each other's humanity, we need it to feel it in our guts. Off the top of my head the commission should hear testimony from: 

• Central American refugees whose children were taken from them
• immigrants who contracted COVID in detention 
• state government officials and workers who dealt with a succession of instigated attacks while also managing elections, a recession, and the coronavirus
• people of color who have faced official or unofficial violence
• peaceful protestors who met with official violence
• police officers who have dealt with protests during a pandemic
• people who have suffered looting of their property
• people who have suffered violent crime
• health care workers on the front lines against COVID
• small business owners whose livelihoods have suffered during the pandemic
• school teachers and staff
• school age children
• parents of school age children
• people who've worked through the pandemic at meatpacking plants, grocery stores, and other "essential" but low-paying, low-security, and high-exposure jobs
• religious groups whose observances have been disrupted
• elderly and disabled people whose activities and contacts have been severely curtailed

Pitfalls immediately appear. It might well seem to be trivializing the historical pervasiveness of racial injustice by wedging it in besides all these more recent problems. We are ill-advisedly deviating from Hayter's five essential features, as (1) many of these situations are ongoing, (2) the list fails to focus on a pattern of events, and (3) it fails to focus on a single affected group of people. At the same time, the J.D. Vances of the world might see the Empathy Commission as another form of "whining," while the event itself could get entitled or political in a hurry. Maybe we'll wind up recycling some more unsubstantiated but highly colorful allegations of voter fraud. 

It's also not clear Americans all want to move on, or even have an inclusive common life. Well over 40 percent of Americans continue to support Trump's performance as President, and are not likely to want to move on from whatever he represents to them. A Pew Research Center survey this fall found 77-80 percent of both Trump and Biden voters saying about the other group, "Not only do we have different priorities when it comes to politics, but we fundamentally disagree about core American values." An even larger proportion of both camps, 89-90 percent, said election of the other candidate "would lead to lasting harm to the U.S." The severity of political conflict has grown increasingly divorced from the magnitude of policy disagreement, wrote a group of scholars in Science magazine this fall, featuring the tendency to adopt a moralized identification with one political group and against another--in other words, they are not just wrong they are "alien" and "iniquitous" (quoted in Edsall 2020).

Maybe my Empathy Commission could tone those feelings down a bit, but at this point how do we even get people to the table?

Redmond Park, Cedar Rapids, a public space with potential
in the Wellington Heights neighborhood

Though there are lots of reasons why it can be unpleasant (Cox 2020), we each of us need to learn how constructively to encounter difference. If that can happen, it will most likely happen at the local level, rather than via national television or social media. There's the Iowa City effort. There's Richmond, Virginia, where the National Trust for Historic Preservation is supporting an effort to transform Shockoe Bottom, once America's second-busiest slave market, into a "site of conscience"... part of the international network of such historic places that bring difficult history to light and spark public dialogue to address modern-day injustices (Nieweg 2019); first they had to undo a surface parking lot and block suburban-style development of a baseball stadium. Also in the Cavalier State, the legislature has legalized "jaywalking," a huge step in democratizing streets (Gordon 2020).

In a well-designed place, buttressing such conversations that a commission "authorized or empowered by the state" (Hayter again) are able to facilitate, people come together randomly, unintentionally, and frequently on the city's sidewalks. Good fences may make good neighbors, but we also need gaps in those fences where neighbors can meet in low-stakes encounters that build trust (Jenny 2020). Let's hear from Jane Jacobs again:

I do not mean to imply that a city's planning and design, or its types of streets and street life, can automatically overcome segregation and discrimination. Too many other kinds of effort are also required to right these injustices.

But I do mean to say that... tolerance, the room for great differences among neighbors--differences that often go far deeper than differences in color--which are possible and normal in intensely urban life, but which are so foreign to suburbs and pseudosuburbs, are possible and normal only when streets of great cities have built-in equipment allowing strangers to dwell in peace together on civilized but essentially dignified and reserved terms. ([1961] 1993: 94-95) 

New Bo City Market courtyard, a public space amidst drive-to urbanism,
but with easy access to core neighborhoods

Of the 2021 priorities for cities in Strong Towns's end-of-year survey, some focus on physical structures, some on financial arrangements, and only some directly on people, but all involve improving proximity. Joel Dixon (zoning), Talicia Richardson (regulation), Tamika Butler (equity), and Mike McGinn (combination of all three) in particular point out that good public space involves physical design, but also an inclusive approach to who is allowed to use that space, and how they are allowed to use it.

When it comes to encountering difference, we need the conversations that a commission can facilitate, but success requires a well-designed place. 

PRINT SOURCES: 

Lee Hermiston, "'Truth and Reconciliation Commission' Gets Started," Cedar Rapids Gazette, 20 Sunday 2020, 1C, 8C

Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (Modern Library, [1961] 1993)