Cratered

Moses told everyone to stand back from a bunch of rebels, “Get away from the coup.” It’s in the Torah portion this week. More on that later. . .

Trump told the citizens of Tehran to get out.

It was in May of 1991, that George H.W. Bush drew a line in the sand, when he told graduates at the University of Michigan that they should ignore the will of the people. But instead of revealing an explicit political agenda, he shrewdly directed his pique at a class of so-called elites. “No conclave of experts,” he maintained, “no matter how brilliant, can match the sheer ingenuity of a market that collects and distributes the wisdom of millions of people all pursuing their destinies in different ways.” Bush had taken aim at the Great Society, and at the same time, he disparaged a government “administered by the incumbent few”.

He subtly drove home his point: money makes the world go round, so it’s best to stay out of the way. Bill Clinton, among others, bolstered the neoliberal idea that people who had money in the game would mind the game. The loosening of regulations, overextended global markets brought on the bust of 2008; and Obama’s team of experts, who focussed on shoring up the banks and disregarding the plight of homeowners, enraged Main Street. And the 2010 Citizens United ruling at the Supreme Court provided a pass to dark money in elections.

Peter Edelman, Georgetown Professor of Law and Public Policy, had front-row seats in 1967 when his boss Robert F. Kennedy, the real one, took on poverty and hunger in Mississippi. In his 2011 book So Rich, So Poor, he challenges the assumption that the War on Poverty was a failure and delves into programs that had a favorable track record, and how America took a detour. Long before the elder Bush’s day, the political right used misdirection. If Republicans could mobilize people who felt left out, they could move middle class voters away from a liberal consensus that favored the majority of non-wealthy Americans.

Edelman emphasizes that it was Lyndon Johnson who warned that the “challenge of the next half century is whether we have the wisdom to use [our] wealth to enrich and elevate our national life. . .”

No one ever said that eliminating poverty, or, for that matter, providing care for the neglected population that now roams our cities’ streets would be an easy matter. Today, the public safety issues precipitated by mentally ill people left to their own devices requires a national response, as do the unmet needs of special needs kids and children with severe autism in our schools, as highlighted in the Boston Globe this past week. As reported by Mandy McLaren, the 1975 Individuals with Disabilities Act required that the federal government would pick up 40% of the cost - for teacher and specialist training and smaller class sizes. To date, the government provides only 10%, and leaves close to one million kids across the country with autism, along with their parents, in the lurches. Even that level of support is likely to go away, if the Republican-led Congress has its way.

What’s critical is the support in both parties for programs that would alleviate suffering that families across America experience. And yet, the political blame game paralyzes us. What the left insists is that our government should be more engaged with people in need, while the right rejects government interference and wastefulness. Meritocracy comes first, and billionaires should keep what they’ve “earned”.

A narrow ideological budgetary war has us shooting at one another. And while the gap between the rich and the poor widens, too few believe that government can work on their behalf.

The populist uprising that opened the door to Trump has for the time being closed the door to a livable wage, affordable housing, access to healthcare, and clean air and water. . . and campaign finance reform.

However, there’s another way to look at the political whiplash. In his book Anti-System Politics, Jonathan Hopkin thinks that the term populism itself misconstrues what has devolved on both ends of the spectrum. In survey after survey, from the 1960s until 2010, the electorate at large lost faith with each major party and decreased its participation in voting altogether. “Politics became a battle not between competing visions of the good society,” he writes.

Crucially, he adds that “At a very basic level, anti-system politics is about reasserting the power of politics over markets and money.”

And bringing common sense. . .

In the May/June 2023 issue of Mother Jones, for example, inspirational environmentalist Bill McKibben issues a plea to his own constituency, to consider when it may be a good idea to compromise. He mentions the environmental review laws being used “to delay the housing development desperately needed to keep people from sprawling out into fire-prone mountain towns.”

And in a poignant account from two years ago in The Atlantic, Jonathan Rosen tells the story of a close friend with whom he grew up. The young man navigated schizophrenia, and although he was a genius, he couldn’t tell when his thinking was delusional. By the time he was a Yale Law School student, he had experienced multiple psychotic episodes and his family sought care for him.

The rest of the story is about his unraveling and murdering the young woman he loved, and what might have been done to provide him with the help he needed, and to keep the person who loved him safe.

Rosen also cites a survey of 89 percent of New Yorkers favoring making it easier to commit people who are dangerous to the public, and yet civil liberties organizations oppose taking them off the streets. And although conservatives may blame John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson for shuttering the mental institutions that kept them at a safe distance from us, the truth is that it’s only half the story. It was Ronald Reagan who deemed care centers too expensive. As the governor of California he stood in opposition to giving them money, and later, as the president, he repealed Jimmy Carter’s legislation that would have funded continual community health center supervision and support for this vulnerable segment of the population. As of 1981, the federal government washed its hands of the problem. It became the problem of many American families, notwithstanding political affiliation.

Jonathan Hopkin writes: “The rise of anti-system parties is the direct consequence of . . . the increasing perception that political parties serve a narrow elite of career politicians and insider interests.” Political insecurity about an over-leveraged, hyper-financed election cycle, in fact, leaves the debate about what makes sense for this country in shambles.

Enters Trump, who taunts radical left politicians and RINOs alike. He throws it in our face.

This week’s Torah portion Korach describes just such a person, who rose up against the political class. Korach is a Levite, but he comes out of nowhere, injects himself. He stands up for the aggrieved, and he lambastes Moses and Aaron: “You’ve gone too far. All [these other] people are holy, all of them, and God’s in them [too].” (Numbers 16:3-4)

But who was Korach before all of this anyway?

According to the rabbis, before he took the national stage, he was Pharaoh’s treasurer, a venture capitalist. He “held the keys” to Mitzrayim’s wealth. In fact, the midrash uses the Greek term katholikos, that carries the meaning of “the whole” or what’s universal, and in this sense, his own private business interests were merged with Pharaoh’s. (Numbers Rabba 18) In the desert, he’s a celebrity nihilist.

Last night, Korach’s reincarnated squawker bragged on TV that an adversary’s nuclear project had “been completely and totally obliterated. Iran, the bully of the Middle East must now make peace.”

No question the ayatollahs are bad for the world, and bad for their own people. But this morning we learned that 86 people were wounded in widespread missile attacks in Tel Aviv and Nes Tsiyona, and as it has been reported by Reuters, Iran’s parliament has voted to close the Strait of Hormuz. Ellie Geranmayeh, an Iran expert at the European Council on Foreign Relations, says, “Iran knew this was coming and will have prepared a chain of responses.” Time will tell.

In the meantime, the New York Times reports that Republicans intend to cut $295 billion in federal spending over the next decade from SNAP (food stamps), according to the Congressional Budget Office. Each of the seven B-2 bombers cost a bit more than $2 billion and many hundreds of millions more to produce and maintain. Cratering a nuclear threat is one thing, the food for our hungry Americans is another.

The rabbis tell us that Korach’s sons sit together in Gehinom and sing songs of praise. It’s their punishment, an irony. (Sanhedrin 110a)

As for Korach himself, he descends into the pit of oblivion, but only after God tells everyone else to “move aside”. We’re going to have to deal with the hollows in our democracy after he’s out of the way.