Republicans Versus Schools

Trump hates the pandemic. Not because 130,000 Americans have died and that many more may die. He is not doing a thing to prevent more deaths. He is the only victim who matters. The coronavirus has ruined His economy, which ruins the prospects for His winning, winning, and more winning in November.

Trump has flailed at the virus, putting on display for everyone the disorganization, the inability to plan or lead, the absence of empathy for nearly everyone, and the overpowering weight of his ego. Watching his incompetence dealing with this crisis has become a national spectacle. We are liable to be blinded by that display and miss how Republicans are exploiting mass death to pursue their attack on American education.

Schools and schooling have played a central role in conservative ideology my whole life. The social eruptions around who gets to go to what school marked the 1960s and continues to this day. That was part of the fateful shift of racial conservatives across the country away from the Democratic Party, lured by the Republican “Southern strategy”. Later conservatives launched an ideological war against the American curriculum in science and history. In my lifetime, “professor” has turned from an object of respect for knowledge and intelligence to an object of ridicule on the right. Now, under cover of outrage at the Republican blundering during the pandemic, they are attacking two long-time educational enemies with unprecedented assertions of executive power.

Public schools are barely tolerated by Republicans. The long-delayed push to equalize education for black and white sent conservatives into resistance to any changes to the status quo, and then fleeing into private schools when they lost. Those schools and many more since then became a refuge from the discoveries of science and the transformation of our understanding of race and gender, where a certain version of Christianity is lifted into dogma. But most American children go to public school, and Republicans have fought to control national curricula by inserting creationism and rejecting revisions to great white men’s history.

They have won some battles and immensely slowed down change, but they are losing the cultural war.

Few principles have been raised as high in the conservative war for education as local control. “Local” did not always really mean local. “States rights” was the stated principle behind the Southern resistance to integration, because the push for educational equality was supported by the federal government. For people who mythologized the Confederacy, states’ rights was a natural slogan and opposition to racial equality a natural goal.

Now that they have control of the presidency under a man who knows no rights other than his own, today’s Republicans brush aside all principles, even their own, in their rush to achieve partisan goals. The principle was not so important after all, just the ideological goal.

Trump made the extraordinary demand that public schools across America open up for in-class teaching: “In Germany, Denmark, Norway, Sweden and many other countries, SCHOOLS ARE OPEN WITH NO PROBLEMS. The Dems think it would be bad for them politically if U.S. schools open before the November Election, but is important for the children & families. May cut off funding if not open!”

This is not extraordinary for the lie behind the comparison of European countries who have the virus under control to the out-of-control spread in the US, or for the use of CAPS, or for the attack on his enemies. The President is asserting that he can control Congressionally-mandated funding for more than 130,000 local public schools. The federal government contributes about 8% of school funding, which mostly goes to schools with large numbers of low-income students and to special education. Any attempt by Trump to withhold federal funding would probably fail, but he might be able to block funds from the March CARES Act to deal with the COVID crisis. His threat might be empty, but it reveals ever more clearly both the conservative agenda to control public education and the disdain for the welfare of the most vulnerable children.

Most of Trump’s sudden assertions of executive power come from his deep need for potency rather than legal rules. Here, too, his ability to actually cut off money from public schools is questionable. But with the support of Education Secretary Betsy DeVos and the silence of other Republican officials, Trump’s tweeted assertion of executive power has become official Republican policy.

So much for enemy number 1. Enemy number 2 is higher education, also a system of public schools under state jurisdiction and private schools, many with worldwide renown. What could be a better idea than to combine an attack on all these schools with an assault on immigrants? Trump said he would refuse visas to international students and deport those in the US if their institutions did not teach them in classrooms. His effort to control thousands of colleges and universities from the White House also proved to be a flop. The administration had to drop this plan after Harvard University and MIT, supported by dozens of other universities, more than 70 higher education associations, and 20 state attorneys general sued to block the new policy and it was subjected to massive criticism.

That victory over anti-intellectual malice will not reverse the disastrous decline in international student enrollment caused by other Republican policies. The numbers are uncertain, but it is likely that enrollment of new international students in American higher education this fall will be one-third or less of the number from previous years.

Knowledge is power. But knowledge can be disempowering to the mythology of Republican ideology. These failed attempts to take over American education from kindergarten to graduate school will not be the last efforts by Republicans to prevent popular knowledge from disproving their alternative facts and baseless theories. They want to destroy what is best about America.

Steve Hochstadt

Springbrook WI

July 21, 2020

What Will Happen on November 4?

It looks like Biden will beat Trump badly and the Republicans will suffer disastrous losses across the country in November. Although the polls have just been inching toward the Democrats, suddenly articles about what Trump might do if he loses are multiplying, here, here, and here.

Trump might declare the elections fake, go on FOX News to say he had really won, call out the National Guard, barricade himself in the Oval Office, order the Secret Service to shoot Biden on sight.

But what he will do is the wrong question. What matters is what his supporters will do when they lose.

Three groups of supporters are crucial to observe. The media will focus at first on Republican politicians. Will Senate losers in Montana, Arizona, Colorado, and other states jump on the fake news bandwagon? Would Mitch McConnell go quietly if Amy McGrath beats him in a very close race? Maybe Susan Collins will accept defeat in Maine, but what about QAnon promoter Jo Rae Perkins in Oregon? How about Lauren Boebert, QAnon enthusiast and House candidate in Colorado, and the other 7 Republican congressional candidates on the ballot who have expressed support for QAnon?

The whole Republican Senate delegation has already cast doubt on the results by allowing their leader to proclaim unchallenged that the election will be fraudulent. On June 22, Trump said the 2020 election “will be the most RIGGED Election in our nations history”. In 2018, the National Republican Senatorial Committee followed up a Trump tweet about “electoral corruption” in the Arizona Senate race by charging that the election they lost there was rigged. Stripped of power, perhaps for years, it’s not hard to imagine Senators Tom Cotton and Lindsey Graham, among others, casting doubt on the results.

Thus far the bravest Republicans in Washington, aside from Mitt Romney, are Pennsylvania Sen. Pat Toomey, who called Trump’s pardon of Roger Stone a “mistake”, and Maine Sen. Susan Collins, who said she won’t campaign against Joe Biden. The majority of Senate Republicans cowers in silence.

Will Trump’s toadies now running our intelligence services and justice system speak up and what will they say? Across the country, Republican state legislators who lose their gerrymandered majorities could join the chorus.

A second set of Trump supporters use their control of media to send waves of influence into every corner of America. Will FOX News report the official results or attack them? How about the other people to whom Republicans listen, even more partisan and less connected to reality, like Limbaugh, Breitbart, InfoWars, Drudge? Will powerful evangelical pastors Franklin Graham and Robert Jeffress proclaim that their God-given leader was cheated?

The third group is the most important and hardest to gauge – the MAGA-hat-wearing, Confederate-flag-waving white supremacists and conspiracy partisans who make up his legendary “base”. Will they see the end times coming as their messiah is defeated? Will the dozens of armed militia groups adopt 2^nd Amendment remedies to the impending takeover of America by radical socialist pedophiles? What will Ammon Bundy, the boogaloo boys, the Oath Keepers, and the more than 500 other anti-government groups loosely allied in the so-called “patriot movement” identified by the Southern Poverty Law Center do? Will the NRA call out its members to fight the commies?

Trump could scream himself hoarse with no effect unless his supporters sing along. As full election results trickle in the days after November 3 and as the implications sink in with the approach of Inauguration Day on January 20, 2021, a coalition of supporters in Washington, state governments, media, and on the ground might throw our country into an existential, not merely Constitutional crisis.

It’s certain that Trump will do nothing brave himself, will commit himself to no action that he can’t back out of. But the radicals who drive their cars into Black Lives Matter protesters, who bring their assault rifles to the pizza palace, and who believe anything “Q” says are much more volatile, unhinged, and violent.

Whatever answers such questions might elicit now will change over the next few months, as Trump stokes more fear among his supporters, pushes them further away from the American center, and forces his Republican allies to come along.

Watch Reps. Jim Jordan (Ohio), Matt Gaetz (Florida) and Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (California), Gov. Ron DeSantis (Florida), and Mark Meadows, White House Chief of Staff. Watch wily Mitch McConnell, who shares with Trump a powerful belief in the importance of his own survival.

And watch out for America.

Steve Hochstadt

Springbrook WI

July 14, 2020

Not A Time To Celebrate

July 4 should be a moment to celebrate our country by remembering its founding document, the Declaration of Independence. But most Americans are not feeling good about our country now. Gallup’s recent poll found that 71% said they feel angry about the state of the country these days, and only 17% said they feel proud. Americans disapprove of the institutions of our national government, whose origins lie in the next founding document, the Constitution. Nearly three-quarters disapprove of the job that Congress is doing, and we know that nearly 60% disapprove of the President, because we are told that changing number every day.

I’m not happy with our country either, certainly not with our government, run by Republicans whose handling of the pandemic has been so incompetent, that tens of thousands of people have died unnecessarily. But I have hope for the government, the next government, because it appears that Trump will lose badly in November. We’ll have a government that at least tries its best to keep Americans alive. Certainly a minimal hope.

I have less hope for the large minority of our population who continue to enable Trump and his minions. Let’s pick one third as a rough estimate of those who were entranced by Trump in 2016 and still sing his praises, not despite, but because of what he has done. The recent Gallup poll found 19% who rated Trump as a “great” President and 18% as “good”. Even if they lose in November, they will remain an impediment to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness for the rest of us.

They are ignorant as a conscious defense against those realities they don’t like. By refusing to believe that the climate is changing in ways that will cause massive crises in just a few years, they prevent actions which could mitigate the widespread unhappiness that a warming planet will cause. They treat scientific facts like the varieties of cereal at the grocery: pick some you like, leave the others behind. They have a long history of regarding science and scientists with suspicion. Evolution disproves the Biblical version of creation, so science is an anti-Christian conspiracy, as it was in Galileo’s time. The ridiculous notion that global warming is a hoax made it easier to say the same thing about the coronavirus.

They don’t care about most of their fellow Americans. They cheer their leader when he calls Democrats, the majority party in nearly every election of the 21^st century, traitors. They consider the majority who are not evangelical Christians to be immoral and want to impose their religious dogma on the entire country for our own good. They don’t care that rejecting masks endangers everyone they meet.

They applaud nastiness. Rush Limbaugh is blatant, Congressional Republican leaders are more subtle, and the President of all Americans uses his megaphone for unrelenting vituperation of the majority who disapprove of him.

Many of them are racists. But their self-regard goes beyond their white skin and its privileges. They believe that being American has conferred some special significance to their lives and ideas, which does not extend even to the white people of Europe, where white America originated. Nations which used to be our allies are now disdained, because they have managed to create more just and more equal societies. European success in the fight against the pandemic means nothing, because Americans are exceptional, meaning better.

Many tend toward violence. Not just police violence against people they deem unworthy, but also threats of personal violence toward people whose politics they don’t like, especially if they are Black. The videos are worth watching, because up to now the gun-wielders without badges have not started shooting.

They believe the most incredible fantasies of conspiracy inventers and reject one of America’s greatest institutions, the free press. Substituting the “news” from Breitbart, Drudge, and Infowars for reality prepared them for QAnon. Even a thoughtful writer for the “Atlantic”, Adrienne LaFrance, could not explain all of its fantasies. She could say what its followers disdain: “a movement united in mass rejection of reason, objectivity, and other Enlightenment values.” QAnon honors Trump as the hero of an apocalyptic tale of good versus evil, whose Armageddon is near. The convergence with the political theology of many evangelical Christians allows easy passage back and forth.

These characteristics of many or most of the one third intermingle and reinforce each other. For example, when Pew Research asked if “powerful people” had deliberately planned the coronavirus pandemic, half of “conservative Republicans” said this was definitely or probably true. This belief, that important Americans are intentionally killing tens of thousands of other Americans, defines a certain type of believer: they believe that the most reliable sources of information must be rejected; that many or most Americans are hopelessly evil; and that everything must be interpreted in terms of political support or opposition to Trump. That half of conservative Republicans are loony, but also dangerous.

Travis View, who critically discusses QAnon in the podcast “QAnon Anonymous”, is “pretty confident that this is not something that is going to go away with the end of the Trump presidency.” The “Washington Post” writer Philip Bump offers this “possible future, a step past Trumpism: a GOP in which a broad rejection of authority and open embrace of wild, unfounded conspiracy theories are widely accepted, if not the norm.”

Polling and voting have shown that young Americans overwhelmingly reject the anti-gay, racist and sexist ideology of conservative Republicans. Gallup’s poll in June found Biden leading Trump 68% to 28% among those 18-29, whereas those 65 and older favored Trump 52 to 46. So perhaps in the distant future, when those young people and their children are the great majority and those of us over 65 are gone or senile, Trump’s brand of inhumanity and political irresponsibility will have faded away.

Again, a minimum to hope for.

I guess that too much of my hopefulness for America has been damaged since 2016.

Steve Hochstadt

Springbrook WI

July 7, 2020