democracy | The Casual Blog

September 4, 2025

Some butterflies, and an idea for improving our democracy

The first thing I’ll note is, no matter how many problems we have in America, there are still a lot of beautiful things, including flowers and insects. I enjoyed taking these pictures last week in Ernie B’s garden, and hope you enjoy them, too.

Otherwise, it was a difficult week. There’s a lot going on with Trump, so it’s challenging to get a grip on, and that may be part of the design: the sheer mass is exhausting and numbing.

According to a recent Pew poll, it seems that a majority of Republicans don’t see any big problems with Trump’s major initiatives. It’s possible nowadays to live in an impermeable information bubble, with unwelcome information blocked out, and I assume that accounts for some of the differences in our worldviews. Anyhow, especially for my Republican friends and loved ones, here’s some of what I’m seeing.

At the start of the Trump presidency, the new initiatives made some sense, even if they were deplorable. It seemed mainly about fearmongering and cruelty toward immigrants and minorities, while favoring the rich by dismantling business regulation and other laws. Then new, weirder initiatives came into view, including cutting agencies performing basic governmental functions. With no clear explanation, Trumpists began undermining federal law enforcement, military readiness, public health, education, disaster relief, environmental protection, legal procedures and courts, foreign aid, foreign intelligence, diplomacy, and revenue production.

Meanwhile, we started to see corruption on a scale never seen before, with billions of dollars flowing from those who needed favors to the coffers of Trump Inc. Wealthy donors, like oil and gas companies and crypto magnates, started getting the goodies they’d requested. We also began seeing a barrage of policies that seemed plain crazy, like attacks on wind and solar power, threats to take over other countries, self-destructive trade wars with former allies, abandoning health research, and cutting holes in the social safety net that protects, among others, the MAGA faithful.

This all seems terrible for those tens of thousands who have lost their freedom, hundreds of thousands who lost their jobs, those millions who lost nutrition and health care, and hundreds of millions indirectly affected, as well as sad for us all. But that’s not all.

Some things that we thought couldn’t happen here have already happened. Kidnappings in broad daylight by masked government men in unmarked vans, military troops turning out in force to intimidate protestors in key blue cities, raids of the houses and workplaces of regime opponents, establishment of new torture detention centers, blatant defiance of court orders, and open promises of rigged elections. And now President Trump is darkly teasing, “Maybe we would like a dictator.”

I’m pretty sure that that’s not true for the majority of us. We can see that, contrary to Trump’s crazytalk, we are in most respects not in any crisis or emergency, other than ones he’s creating. We can see that immigrants are not subhuman animals, and opponents of Trumpism are not evil traitors. The values that animate the MAGA-verse, like greed, willful ignorance, hatred, and cruelty, are not the values most of us want to see defining our culture, or want to cultivate in our lives.

What are the values we prefer? Kindness and compassion, for starters. Generosity and honesty, too. Tolerance. Curiosity. Rationality. All these are foundational to American culture. We all, or almost all, learned them as children, and teach them to our children.

But MAGA has put the alternative values into sharp relief, and we need to make some choices: kindness or cruelty, generosity or greed, tolerance or hatred, rationality or ignorance. We can also choose courage or fear. We definitely need to find our courage.

One good thing Trump has done by undermining and exploiting American democracy is to highlight longtime problems in the system that badly need fixing. For example, over generations, we’ve allowed too much power to accumulate in the presidency. We’ve allowed Congress to become less and less representative, and more and more dysfunctional. Our Supreme Court has become highly politicized. Our government has become oligarchical, with little consideration or support for ordinary working people.

Now is a good time to start working on an alternative vision for our democracy – perhaps a Project 2029. It would be sort of like Project 2025, but in the public interest, rather than the kooky kleptocrats’ interest. It’s a big job, but we can start simply, by deciding what direction we want to go. I suggest that we agree to make the objective of our government this: helping others.

That is, instead of designing a government primarily to help the rich exploit everyone else, we should design it to serve the common good, and to help those who need help. Our system should be oriented toward giving, rather than extracting. Does this sound impossible? It’s not a new idea. Jesus, Muhammad, and Buddha would all support it. JFK seemed to be for it, when he said, we should ask what we can do for our country.

January 29, 2021

A few reasons to quit being a Trumpublican

President Biden has certainly hit the ground running, with executive orders and actions addressing aspects of some of our biggest problems, including the covid pandemic, climate change, racism, xenophobia, LGBTQ discrimination, a stagnant economy, inadequate health care, right wing terrorism, and the nuclear precipice. His cabinet and other new top officials appear to be experienced and sensible. There are good reasons to be hopeful, and I’m trying to be.

But I’m still very worried. Lately, and especially since the January 6 attack on the Capitol, our democracy has been looking as fragile it’s ever been, and it’s still under threat. A significant part of the country continues to believe the despicable lie that the election was a fraud. Shockingly, despite strong evidence that Trump and his cronies supported the insurrection, Republican leaders continue to support the ex-President.

The hostile takeover of the Republican Party by Trump seems a fait accompli. If Trump should go to his reward, Cruz, Hawley, or someone even slimier will race to step into his role. There are still some traditional Republicans who aren’t happy about what has happened, but very few of them have found the necessary courage and gumption for opposition.

But for traditional Republicans who still care about our country and are considering whether to leave the Trumpublican party, I would ask, what’s keeping you? I understand you want to weigh the pros and cons of leaving. And of course there are some cons, like parting ways with old comrades-in-arms and the risk of becoming a target of deranged right-wing hate groups. But let me suggest some of the pros.

Patriotism. If we don’t give way to Trumpism, we may yet work together to realize and sustain our finest traditional ideals, including free and fair elections, the rule of law, equality of opportunity, checks and balances, freedom of expression and of the press, and peaceful transfers of power.

Honesty. Trump took corruption in government from an occasional lapse to standard operating procedure. He constantly lied about everything, as did many of his cronies. It was dirty. Wouldn’t it feel good to get cleaned up?

Decency. Scapegoating disadvantaged minorities and whipping up fear of foreigners was once considered something no decent person would do. Actually, it still is.

Reason. Trumpism made considerable headway in obliterating the distinction between reality and fantasy, but reality isn’t going away. It’s reminding us of this in various ways, including the ongoing deadly pandemic, melting glaciers and rising sea levels, and species going extinct. Denying science when it doesn’t fit with our fantasies has made a bad situation worse. See also Honesty, supra.

Personal safety. There are many things that seriously threaten our safety that are beyond our personal control, from collapsing dams and bridges to the possibility of nuclear war. In the old days, we counted on our government to mitigate such threats, rather than to ignore or increase them. Wouldn’t it be great to go back to those good old days?

Future generations. We owe much to our forebears, without whom we wouldn’t be here. Hopes for the happiness of our children, our grandchildren, and their successors are part of what gives meaning to our lives. The earth that has given us so much is in serious peril, which puts at risk the lives of our successors. We could choose to make it worse. Or better.

Compassion. While concern for those less fortunate used to mean giving a helping hand, under Trump it meant figuring out how to make them more miserable. But apart from Trump himself, most of us feel badly when we’re aware of people who are hungry, sick, or otherwise suffering, and wish we could do something. We used to look to government to help in such situations. We still can.

Self respect. This one is self explanatory.

January 2, 2021

Starting a new year, with eagles and hope for renewing democracy

The last week of 2020 was mostly cold and cloudy here, with extended periods of rain. I wanted to check on the eagles and other birds at Jordan Lake, but wasn’t sure the weather would work, or if I’d have the necessary willpower. One morning, when it was still dark, I managed to drag myself out of bed, verified it wasn’t raining, put on long underwear, and drove out of town and down US 1. Below Jordan dam, there were lots of big birds: eagles, herons, vultures, and gulls.

I found a promising spot to set up my tripod, directly across the river from a couple of young bald eagles perched in a pine tree, and hoped to get a shot of them catching fish. One of them took a dive close to me — too close to shoot with the long lens — but they caught no fish while I was there. Still, I liked the rushing water, and the many birds flying and calling.

Last week I learned that one of my favorite nature writers, Barry Lopez, just died at age 75. These last few months I’ve been reading some of his nonfiction writing on the Arctic and other challenging environments, as I planned my own trips to Alaska and Antarctica (postponed because of the pandemic to 2021).

Lopez insists that these wild places matter, even when there are no humans in the vicinity. He’s in favor of animals, rocks, ice, and wind. His writing has an austere beauty and clarity. I was glad to see he got an admiring obit in the NY TImes, which compared him to Thoreau and Muir. There was also an appreciative obit in the Economist of January 2d.

I was also pleased to see that another of my helpful sources, Heather Cox Richardson, got some mainstream recognition in the NY Times. A few months back, Sally put me on to HCR’s daily email newsletter on political matters. She basically gives a high level summary of the most worrisome news of Trumpworld, with the calm explanatory voice of a professor of American history. She provides persuasive evidence that sanity persists.

A couple of months back I listened to HCR’s latest book, How the South Won the Civil War. I expected the book to focus on the post-Reconstruction, Jim Crow era. In fact, it’s a lively and dramatic overview of American history from colonization till now, with special attention to enslaved and indigenous people.

HCR’s discussion of Western settlement after the Civil War was particularly interesting, with persuasive evidence that both anti-Black and anti-Asian racism shaped the political framework. She also traces the rise of Movement Conservatism, from Barry Goldwater, through Ronald Reagan, and to the Republican leadership today.

Richardson shows that our current political system is closely related to the oligarchical and racist system of the antebellum South — a system that never really went away. It’s a difficult and uncomfortable lesson.

But she doesn’t seem to have given up on the democratic ideals that have also long been part of the American system. I’m sure she’d agree, there’s still a chance we can make a better democracy. With the inauguration around the corner, it could be a good time to renew our vows to build on what’s good in that system.