Here is a great excerpt from a recent interview with former president Barack Obama … He calls out the White House pattern of using venomous language to denounce their political opponents. And he calls upon us to stand up for our democratic values, fight for democracy.
https://www.facebook.com/share/r/1BQ4GGgmmd/?mibextid=wwXIfr
Information about the history of chattel slavery contribute to “corrosive ideology”? Truly Orwellian! How far can this attack on our freedoms and our urgent need to have an honest understanding of our history go?
Democracy requires honest facing of our country’s history!
National park to remove photo of enslaved man’s scars
This is stunning, jaw-dropping, and so fundamentally and clearly white supremacist. Shame!
Missouri Sen. Eric Schmitt openly promoted white supremacism in a public speech • Missouri Independent
I’ve been trying to think about what to say about Charlie Kirk’s murder. The internet is overflowing with reaction and commentary, some of it good, much of it not. As I try to digest the murder itself and its larger implications, I am stuck in a place between human reaction and political fear.
Let’s start with the most basic truth: he was a human being whose life was wrongly taken, from himself and from his family, criminally and apparently by a young man acting on the misguided belief that an act of hate, of evil, was the appropriate response to the sort of hate that Kirk spouted — all such spoutings protected by the 1st Amendment. (That’s another issue for future discussion.) In any case, I am deeply sorry.
Kirk’s murder has been labeled an assassination, and I think that is appropriate: he was a public political figure. Jonathan Last has this to say: “Assassination goes a step further [then ordinary murder]. In addition to all of the above, assassination is, like terrorism, an attack on our body politic. An attack on how we choose to live together.” This is perhaps the most critical point: Kirk’s assassin has added to the “attack on our body politic.”
To be clear, Charlie Kirk was no saint. The New York Times has published a piece on his comments on various issues. This is not good. His politics were hate-filled and anti-democratic, and in an earlier age he would have been a marginal figure. But there is no denying that he was a key force in bringing us to the age we are in, where a person like him is not marginal. And, for me his one and only redeeming quality is that he was prepared to debate all comers. (See Ezra Klein;s piece in the Times, about which I have mixed feelings.)
So maybe we have to love the sinner but hate the sins?
Still, we are in a terrifying moment. Trump and MAGA want to use this murder to justify all kinds of attacks on democracy. And that, frankly, is the scariest part of this.
In Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, immediately after the assassination of Caesar, Marc Antony seizes the moment to grab control, using the assassination to mobilize forces in Caesar’s name and on his behalf:
And Caesar’s spirit, ranging for revenge
With Atè by his side come hot from hell
in these confines with monarch’s voice
Cry “Havoc,” and let slip the dogs of war,
That this foul deed shall smell above the earth
With carrion men groaning for burial.
“Havoc” was a military order in the middle ages and early modern period that amounted to, “Let the plundering, pillaging begin.” This seems precisely to be what Trump and company are doing with Kirk’s murder.
Here is a very powerful piece by Paul Krugman on the means by which wannabe dictators build their power base … even in the presence of formal democratic institutions. His view converges with Levitsky and Ziblatt, Tyranny of the Minority.
Our friend and fellow blogger Dan Little has a wonderful academic blog, Understanding Society, that deals with issues “in philosophy of social science and the workings of the social world.” Dan is a very clear expositor of philosophical ideas, and I think that even if you have not had philosophical training, some of his posts will be accessible to you. That is certainly true of a recent post that I think is relevant to our group’s purposes, “A political philosophy for an inclusive multicultural democracy.”
Dan writes:
Here I want to lay out the skeleton of a political philosophy incorporating the ideals of an inclusive multicultural democracy. I maintain that a stable and inclusive multicultural democracy is a positive value for the whole of society: all citizens are benefited by a varied and harmonious population of peoples with distinct traditions, values, and practices. This is a society in which there are many groups and identities in society (racial, ethnic, sexual, class, nationality), and in which members of these groups have the moral emotions of compassion and respect towards members of other groups. Difference exists without discrimination and prejudice; more fundamentally, difference exists within the context of a cohesive sense of shared community. Rather than antagonism there is friendship across groups.
Dan links this idea to the work of Martin Luther King, Jr., who advanced
the idea that citizens in a just multicultural democracy will experience the moral emotions of compassion and respect for each other. King described this as a kind of ‘civic friendship’ in which people from different groups succeed in living together harmoniously and leads them to experience a sense of goodwill and shared identity with their fellow citizens.”
I might add that it also links to deep elements in Western political theory; Aristotle, for instance, maintained that there were two virtues fundamental to a well-functioning polis or society, justice and friendship. (There are key questions about how civic friendship might operate, but let’s save them for later.)
As Dan points out, a key question from the standpoint of political theory – or more simply, how we understand what we are about in a democracy – is can, or to what extent can, the state, the government, actively work to nurture such civic friendship?
So achieving a just, stable, and cohesive multicultural democracy is a worthwhile goal. But will a well-ordered liberal democratic state have the authority — and perhaps the duty — to take measures that enhance the workings of a multicultural democracy?
The question is particularly poignant at this moment, given Trumpists’ attacks on DEI and so-called “wokeness,” and the rapid, too-often-preemptive, capitulation of universities, businesses, law firms and others on this matter. DEI might have – and I think it has had – its problems, and I might post about that in the future. But what we are seeing now is a wholesale rampage against exactly the kind of multicultural democracy that Dan is discussing.
What has been for some time the dominant theory of liberal democracy might well answer the above question about the state in the negative. In that view, “goods,” including even something like “civic friendship,” are private matters or matters for civil society, not matters for the state. The liberal democratic state’s responsibility is strictly to ensure that there is a space in which citizens can pursue their own conceptions of the good, as long as no harm is done to anyone else. Dan explores this issue in a subsequent post, “Can liberal political philosophy support anti-racism?”
One of the issues we face now is: resistance to Trump is one thing, but what comes next? In many ways we as a society through institutions like universities, governments, and businesses (motivated by markets, but still …) were moving us toward a more multicultural democracy. Now that is all under assault. When we get through this moment, how do we recover and better implement movement toward a genuine, broadly inclusive democracy?
Here’s a very good, clear summary by Pete Buttigieg of RFK Jr.’s destruction of large parts of the US public health system …
A major public university that is resisting Trump’s war on DEI … George Mason University’s president stands up for enhancing diversity and opportunity.
Conservatives want him fired. This president says he’s not going anywhere.
Two discouraging but one very hopeful story about Trump’s and Trumpists’ higher ed attacks. Let’s do the bad news first.
First, Michael Schill, the president of Northwestern (my alma mater), announced today that he is resigning, following tremendous pressure from the GOP and, undoubtedly, others, likely including some donors. Here’s the NYT article. Like other university presidents, Schill appeared before Elise Stefanik’s Congressional committee last year in the so-called hearings on anti-semitism run rampant on university campuses. Schill’s testimony, while perhaps not all it could have been, struck an appropriate tone in defense of academic freedom and was at not the complete disaster that befell his peers at other institutions, notably Harvard and Penn. But, it turns out MAGA retribution was only delayed, not repulsed.
Second, a story I had missed: in June 2025, Florida governor Ron DeSantis announced that Florida and six other states had formed a new higher ed accreditation agency — spurred by conservative (read: “reactionary”) complaints about the “ideological” and “woke” nature of the current accreditation process. Today, the Chronicle of Higher Education ran an article explaining how officials in the University of North Carolina System, which has basically been hijacked by anti-woke ideologues, along with the American Enterprise Institute, was a driving force behind the development of the new agency. [The Chronicle article might be behind a paywall; I can provide a copy if needed.] The MAGA assault on higher ed is well-coordinated and a real threat to the higher ed ecosystem.
The good news, of course, is that a federal judge has ruled that the Administration’s cancellation of Harvard’s funding was illegal. No telling where this is going to go, but we are seeing again and again that when institutions stand up to Trump, they have a good chance of winning. Especially in the courts, as this piece in The Atlantic reports.
Ali Velshi a few days ago had an excellent monologue on the failure of the leadership of the Democratic Party to rise to our current occasion (~ 9 min). This is an existential moment, not politics-as-usual, and yet – as I read somewhere else – everything coming out of the DNC, Schumer, and Jeffries “sounds as if has been focus-grouped to death . . . and it probably has.” As Velshi says, “If you are a political leader in this country, and you are not prepared to make ‘good trouble’, then step aside and make space for those who will.”
Stalwart liberal and longterm Congressman Jerry Nadler just announced that, for exactly that reason, he will not seek reelection. May others follow his lead.
But we need action now, before the midterms are completely corrupted by Trump and his minions and the Republicans walk away with complete, and sham, control. I understand that at this stage it would be extremely difficult to replace the Speaker and the Senate Minority Leader. Schumer and Jeffries could move in the right direction, though, and re-energize the party by ceasing the triangulation and drawing younger people with “fire in the belly” into a formal leadership structure. Appoint a “shadow cabinet,” as the Opposition Party does in some parliamentary systems, and turn them loose. Chris Murphy, Elizabeth Warren, Elissa Slotkin, Bernie, AOC, Cory Booker, and others would be possibilities. And, don’t let the governors stand alone on the matter of National Guard deployment. And for God’s sake, Chuck and Hakeem, endorse Zohran Mamdani for NYC mayor!
Affirming Democracy, Gathering Resistance 