In October 2020, near the end of his first term, Trump imposed a new classification for career civil servants called Schedule F. It was intended to strip job security from career civil servants so they could be replaced by Trump loyalists. One of Joe Biden’s first actions was to eliminate Schedule F.
Trump pledged during his 2024 campaign to implement Schedule F. He calls the Civil Service “the deep state.” He believes that career bureaucrats slow-walked or impeded some of his most extreme ideas. And he is on his way, with full control of the Executive branch, both Houses of Congress, and (usually) the Supreme Court.
By implementing Schedule F, Trump would gain control of 50,000 jobs that are now held by civil servants. He and his deputies could replace them with MAGA loyalists.
The creation of the Civil Service was considered a very important reform and has been sacrosanct for more than a century. Before the Civil Service Commission was created in 1883, government jobs were handed out based on party affiliation. This was known as “the Spoils System.” The saying went “to the victor goes the spoils.” Win the election and appoint the people of your own party, who will be loyal to you.
Trump wants a return to the Spoils System, so he can appoint Trump loyalists. He wants to turn the clock back more than a century.
The first comprehensive merit-based civil service system was put in place by the Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act of 1883, which created the United States Civil Service Commission. The Act ended the Spoils System by specifying that merit – qualifications measured by testing – is the basis of hiring decisions. For the first time, appointments were open to all citizens, made based on merit, and were given to the best qualified applicants. The Act also protected incumbents from being thrown out of office simply because of a change in the Presidency, providing tenure protection for employees and ensuring their political neutrality. Initially, only about 10.5% of Federal jobs were included in the competitive civil service system. By the end of the century, approximately 42% were included; by the early 1900s, it was over 60%; and by 1952, over 90% of Federal jobs were included in the civil service system.
Merit-based civil service systems followed in the states and at the local level. The first state civil service law was enacted under the leadership of then-Assembly Member Theodore Roosevelt and then-Governor Grover Cleveland in New York in 1883. Teddy Roosevelt also served as a commissioner on the United States Civil Service Commission and was a staunch supporter of the civil service during his presidency, leading to a period of major government expansion and further reforms of the civil service system. Roosevelt is known as the “Father” of modern civil service….
After World War II, the rise of collective bargaining in the public sector and the civil rights movement affected the civil service system, bringing the ideas of Equal Employment Opportunity, affirmative action, and equal pay for equal work into the world of personnel administration. The Civil Rights Act of 1964, Equal Pay Act of 1963, Age Discrimination in Employment Act of 1967, Rehabilitation Act of 1973, and the Americans With Disabilities Act of 1990 all marked the growing inclusiveness of public personnel policies and procedures. These movements clearly spoke to the fundamental civil service ideal that appointments are based on merit established by competitive processes, not on any other factors.
By the 1970s, a new civil service reform movement began with the goal of making civil service more responsive to the personnel needs of executives and managers. While the first reforms begun in the late nineteenth century established the principles of competitiveness and merit, they also created a significant separation between management and personnel administration.
Managers had little control over personnel issues and their day to day operational needs were often stymied by overly restrictive civil service rules. Despite the decentralization of civil service systems during the Roosevelt era, personnel offices still retained significant control and managers continually found there were significant barriers to effectively attracting, retaining, evaluating, disciplining, rewarding, and terminating employees.
The Civil Service Reform Act of 1978 was designed to address these issues at the Federal level. The Act abolished the Civil Service Commission and created the Office of Personnel Management in its place. Agency chief executives were given direct policy control over personnel functions and the purpose of the civil service system moved from a regulatory function to a service orientation in order to better support organizational and leadership efforts.
Civil service processes were streamlined and simplified; the merit system restated and expanded to include an employee’s abilities, education, experience, and job performance; and the emphasis turned to recruitment, career advancement, performance based compensation, and performance appraisal. The Act also created the Senior Executive Service, which is designed to help attract and retain high level senior executives outside of the civil service system. Many of these changes were mirrored at the state and local levels.
This latest reform movement lost momentum under President Reagan during the early 1980s and many of the same concerns brought to light during the 1970s regarding the responsiveness of civil service systems continue to exist today.
The primary goal of the civil service system has been and continues to be to ensure that appointments to government jobs are based on merit and ability as determined through a competitive process. The principles of civil service specify that the most qualified person be appointed to the job; that appointments not be based on any other factors such as political activity or patronage; and that incumbents are protected from the political whims of elected officials. This primary purpose of civil service has remained constant throughout the various historical movements that have changed and shaped civil service over the last 200 years.
Adapted from the website for the U.S. Office of Personnel Management (www.opm.gov) and The New Public Personnel Administration by Nigro, Nigro, and Kelloug
Greg Olear is simply amazing. Read the post here and perhaps you will agree. He is wise, smart, learned, insightful, and inspiring. I know of no other writer who weaves together politics, literature, and history as seamlessly as Olear. He writes at Substack and charges no fee.
Dear Reader,
The great British historian Eric Hobsbawm wrote an indispensable series of books in which he divides the 20 decades after the French Revolution into historical “ages.” The period from the 1789 storming of the Bastille to the uprisings sweeping across Europe in 1848 he termed the Age of Revolution. Eighteen forty-eight until the end of the Great Boom circa 1875 is the Age of Capital. The Age of Empire spanned from the mid-1870s until the start of the Great War in 1914. And the “short twentieth century,” a term he coined, was dubbed the Age of Extremes, and ran from the assassination of the archduke until 1991.
Ever since I discovered his books in 2012, the year of his death, I’ve often wondered what Hobsbawm would have called the fifth historical “age”—the one that began in 1991. That was the year of the first Gulf War, and the banishment from Saudi Arabia of Osama bin Laden that kickstarted his Al Qaeda movement; the mysterious death of Robert Maxwell—friend to the British royal family, mentor to Jeffrey Epstein, business partner of the Russian mobster Semion Mogilevich, and Israeli spy—who fell off his yacht off the coast of the Canary Islands; the repeal of the apartheid laws in South Africa, where Errol Musk made his fortune; the rollout of the WorldWideWeb; and the breakup of the Soviet Union—on Christmas, no less, capitalism’s holiest of holy days.
Today, a mere 24 hours and change before we hand the federal government off to a hateful confederacy of Nazis, mobsters, Opus Dei weirdos, white Christian nationalists, and billionaire dorks, I think I know not only the name of the period after the Age of Extremes, but also its termination date. As I type this, we are living in the last few hours of the Age of Unreality. It ends tomorrow at noon.
Something else happened in 1991, you see—something that likely eluded Eric Hobsbawm. Producers at MTV were developing a TV show that would begin filming in February of 1992. It was called The Real World: New York. It was the first reality TV show—or, at least, the seminal reality TV show of the subsequent reality TV explosion. Riding the reality TV wave was a British producer named Mark Burnett, who would give us Survivor in 2000, and, four years later, what wound up being the most historically significant reality TV show of all time, The Apprentice.
Although I confess to having enjoyed a few seasons of The Surreal Life, back when our eldest son was a baby—Flavor Flav does not disappoint!—I have never liked reality TV shows, encouraging, as they often do, the very worst of human behavior. I don’t like meanness. I don’t like ruthlessness. I don’t like watching anyone being voted off the island. I don’t like when people are fired. I don’t like talentless humans. I don’t like Kardashians. Most of all, I don’t like the unscripted-but-very-much-scripted fluff that has replaced actual shows written by actual writers. By encouraging us to believe in a heavily-retouched fictional universe presented as the real world—or, I suppose, The Real World—reality TV has left us more susceptible to Russian disinformation, to deep fakes, to conspiracy theories, to manufactured media narratives, to tech-bro charlatans, to pseudo-scientific arguments against vaccines, and to mendacious politicians who have supercharged lying to a form of warfare.
I have often grumbled, half in jest, that reality TV would bring about the end of Western civilization. I did not think it would also bring about the end of Western democracy. To paraphrase Don DeLillo: Reality TV has given us Joe Rogan; that alone warrants its doom.
(Is this the real life? Is this just fantasy? Freddie Mercury died in—when else?—1991.)
One of the most significant, world-altering events in this Age of Unreality was, of course, 9/11. In response to the WTC attacks, the FBI shifted its focus from transnational organized crime, which was already operating in the United States and growing more powerful by the day—a genuine threat to our society—to Islamic extremist terrorism, which involved not very many crazy people mostly living in caves far, far away from New York. In response to 9/11, we have to subject ourselves to TSA search before boarding an airplane. In response to 9/11, Bush and Cheney launched a long and expensive war on Saddam Hussein, who had nothing whatsoever to do with the attacks, while simultaneously cutting taxes for their wealthy benefactors—two actions that, in tandem, starved the U.S. treasury and put the country so far into the red that it may never recover. In Britain, meanwhile, Tony Blair’s blind loyalty to Bush—a foreshadowing, perhaps, of Joe Biden’s blind loyalty to Bibi Netanyahu—paved the way for BREXIT and the series of hapless prime ministers that followed the disastrous decision to LEAVE.
Five days after 9/11, Anthony Lane, the New Yorker’s savagely witty film critic, published what remains one of the finest pieces of writing on the attacks, a short essay called “This Is Not a Movie.” I go back and revisit it every once in a while, when the mood strikes me. Reading it now, I see that Lane perfectly articulates the paradox of the Age of Unreality, the uneasy blur between fact and fiction, when he comments on “the degree to which people saw—literally saw, and are continuing to see, as it airs in unforgiving repeats—that day”—that is, September 11, 2001—“as a movie.” He notes that the elapsed time between the initial hijackings and the collapse of the north tower was “a little over two hours;” the length of a summer blockbuster disaster film.
Lane writes:
We are talking…of the indulgence that will always be extended to an epoch blessed with prosperity—one that has the leisure, and the cash, to indulge its fancies, not least the cheap thrill of pretending that the blessing could be wiped out. What happened on the morning of September 11th was that imaginations that had been schooled in the comedy of apocalypse were forced to reconsider the same evidence as tragic. It was hard to make the switch; the fireball of impact was so precisely as it should be, and the breaking waves of dust that barrelled down the avenues were so absurdly recognizable—we have tasted them so frequently in other forms, such as water, flame, and Godzilla’s foot—that only those close enough to breathe the foulness into their lungs could truly measure the darkening day for what it was.
There are echoes of this in the fires that have ravaged Los Angeles. Looking at those horrific images, it is impossible not to describe the fiery scenes as something from a movie—or, rather, a limited series, because, unlike with 9/11, the L.A. fires did not confine themselves to a movie-length running time. They began last Tuesday, almost two full weeks ago, and are still ongoing. If 9/11 was, as Lane suggests, a disaster film come to life, the fires are a combination of disaster film and horror movie: not just the fires themselves but the hundred-mile-an-hour winds and the dread of the fires spreading. Only those close enough to breathe the foulness into their lungs could truly measure the darkening days for what they are. My heart breaks for everyone in L.A., even as I know I can never fully understand their ordeal.
The fires are not a movie, just like 9/11 was not a movie. The fires are all too real.
As a country, we have not even begun to comprehend the extent of the damage, or its impact on all those hundreds of thousands if not millions of people in the Pacific Palisades and Altadena and beyond, much less the effect the fires will have nationally, culturally, societally—not least because the recovery will ultimately be overseen by an incoming administration not much known for its compassion, its competence, or its love for Hollywood.
The last paragraph of Lane’s essay is achingly, hauntingly beautiful. Many, many people wrote about 9/11 in the days that followed it, and it always struck me as both unlikely and somehow appropriate that a film critic would offer the purest take:
To be forced to disdain the ideal in favor of the actual is never a pleasant process. Even at its worst, however, it can deliver a bitter redemption. We gazed upward, or at our TV screens, and we couldn’t believe our eyes; but maybe our eyes had been lied to for long enough. Thousands died on September 11th, and they died for real; but thousands died together, and therefore something lived. The most important, if distressing, images to emerge from those hours are not of the raging towers, or of the vacuum where they once stood; it is the shots of people falling from the ledges, and, in particular, of two people jumping in tandem. It is impossible to tell, from the blur, what age or sex these two are, nor does that matter. What matters is the one thing we can see for sure: they are falling hand in hand. Think of Philip Larkin’s poem about the stone figures carved on an English tomb, and the “sharp tender shock” of noticing that they are holding hands. The final line of the poem has become a celebrated condolence, and last Tuesday—in uncounted ways, in final phone calls, in the joined hands of that couple, in circumstances that Hollywood should no longer try to match—it was proved true all over again, and, in so doing, it calmly conquered the loathing and rage in which the crime was conceived. “What will survive of us is love.”
Larkin, the poet who wrote that line—and who is, like Lane, British—was not at all a sentimental sort. His stuff is gloomy, sourpuss, almost defeatist. Throughout his poems we see a struggle between, on the one hand, recognizing the futility of life, and on the other, being paralyzed by the fear of death. It is his poem “This Be The Verse,” about how our parents “fuck us up,” that the pub owner quotes, somewhat incongruously, in Ted Lasso:
Man hands on misery to man. It deepens like a coastal shelf. Get out as early as you can, And don’t have any kids yourself.
Sunny stuff, right? Larkin’s entire worldview is neatly encapsulated in this line from “Aubade,” a title that indicates this is a poem about the dawn:
And so it stays just on the edge of vision, A small unfocused blur, a standing chill That slows each impulse down to indecision. Most things may never happen: this one will, And realisation of it rages out In furnace-fear when we are caught without People or drink. Courage is no good: It means not scaring others. Being brave Lets no one off the grave. Death is no different whined at than withstood.
The antecedent of the “it” in the first line is “death.” But we may just as well substitute “Trump,” and the lines work just as well: the standing chill, the furnace-fear and the rage, the necessity of other people and a good stiff drink, the futility of courage.
The poem that Lane quotes is called “An Arundel Tomb.” At Arundel, a medieval British town, is the tomb of Richard FitzAlan, the tenth Earl of Arundel, who died in 1371, and that of his second wife, Eleanor of Lancaster, who predeceased him by a few years. The tomb is capped by stone statues of the couple, who are, surprisingly, holding hands:
Side by side, their faces blurred, The earl and countess lie in stone,
Larkin, a dour librarian and bemoaner of the decline of civilization who seems not to have believed in love (even as he juggled three women for most of his adult life), calls bullshit on this romantic display:
They would not think to lie so long. Such faithfulness in effigy Was just a detail friends would see: A sculptor’s sweet commissioned grace
In other words, while the holding of stony hands has stood the test of time, the love it represents was probably a figment of the artist’s rosy imagination. (Note the double meaning of “lie.”)
How soon succeeding eyes begin To look, not read. Rigidly they
Persisted, linked, through lengths and breadths Of time. . .
Until,
Now, helpless in the hollow of An unarmorial age. . . Only an attitude remains:
Time has transfigured them into Untruth. The stone fidelity They hardly meant has come to be Their final blazon, and to prove Our almost-instinct almost true: What will survive of us is love.
Larkin is saying that what the statues represent isn’t real—that our “almost-instinct” is to believe in the much-ballyhooed power of love, and that the “stone fidelity” of the earl and his wife is so compelling as to make said love-power “almost true.” Almost true is not true; almost true is AI true—a lie we want badly to believe in. The entire poem is him expressing his deep, nasty cynicism. The oft-quoted last line is intended to be ironic—a fitting epitaph for our Age of Unreality.
Even so, what survives of Larkin is “What will survive of us is love.” And I like to think, as Lane does, that, whatever the poet’s intention, the Arundel sentiment is real.
The Age of Unreality began in 1991, when all the ingredients of the historical cocktail were thrown into the shaker: the fall of the Soviet Union, the rise of the Russian mafia, the ascendance of Jeffrey Epstein, the dawn of reality TV, the end of apartheid, and the last time that a coalition of Western democracies repulsed an attempt by a despot to invade a sovereign nation—thus upholding the tenets of the Westphalian order. Out of that cocktail shaker, cold as ice, was poured Jeffrey Epstein and Semion Mogilevich, Elon Musk and Peter Thiel, Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump.
Tomorrow, that mindfuck age draws to a close, and a new one begins. What it has in store for us is anyone’s guess. Will the last barriers between fantasy and reality be worn away, or, as Lane poetically puts it, have our eyes been lied to for long enough? Will democracy really die, as the fascism scholars have been warning us for years, or will the Trump power-grab finally wake up the American people and restore our love of liberty? Will generative AI destroy all art, or will a new analog artistry emerge? What will happen to our beloved Hollywood, to which Trump has named meathead Sylvester Stallone, rightwing wacko Jon Voigt, and radical Catholic weirdo Mel Gibson his MAGA “ambassadors?”
I take some small solace in knowing that we’ve been here before. As Hobsbawm notes in The Age of Capital, the United States in the late nineteenth century—the America Trump wants us to return to—was marked by
the total absence of any kind of control over business dealings, however ruthless and crooked, and the really spectacular possibilities of corruption both national and local—especially in the post-Civil War years. There was indeed little that could be called government by European standards in the United States, and the scope for the powerful and unscrupulous rich was virtually unlimited. In fact, the phrase ‘robber baron’ should carry its accent on the second rather than the first word, for, as in a weak medieval kingdom, men could not look to the law but only to their own strength—and who were stronger in a capitalist society than the rich? The United States, alone among the bourgeois world, was a country of private justice and armed forces….
Our current crop of robber barons is orders of magnitude worse than its forebears—but maybe the abject awfulness of these despicable people will make their reigns shorter, their fall more humiliating, and their historical impact less profound.
Even so, for all my optimistic tendencies, I fear tomorrow as surely as Larkin feared death, which he describes as
The sure extinction that we travel to And shall be lost in always. Not to be here, Not to be anywhere, And soon; nothing more terrible, nothing more true.
Death is permanent and absolute, but dictatorships are neither; moreover, Donald isn’t a dictator yet, and may well never be. Even as I have witnessed the poltroonish capitulation of our political leaders, our robber barons, our media figureheads, even our Snoop Doggs, I have faith that we will somehow find a better way, that we will repulse this ugly MAGA incursion, that the moral arc of the universe will bend towards justice, that the better angels of our nature will prevail. My faith will be tested, surely. But it will remain.
Nothing more true than this: What will survive of us is hope.
Laurence Tribe and Kathleen Sullivan report in The Contrarian on a momentous event that was ignored by the media: The U.S. Constitution has a new amendment. In one of his last acts as President, Joe Biden made the Equal Rughts Amendment official.
Critics claimed that the time limit for the ERA had passed, but Tribe and Sullivan explain why the critics were wrong.
With three days left in his presidency, Joseph R. Biden ensured that the United States Constitution, the oldest on earth, would finally include an explicit guarantee of sex equality. In truth, the Equal Rights Amendment should have been recognized as part of our Constitution nearly half a dozen years ago, when Virginia became the 38th state to ratify it on January 27, 2020.
By proclaiming, in effect, “Yes, Virginia, you have made history by repairing a glaring omission in our most fundamental law,” President Biden made official a reality that many Americans failed to recognize at the time: that Article V of the Constitution expressly makes any proposed Amendment to that document “Part of this Constitution, when ratified by the Legislatures of three fourths of the several States.” Nothing in Article V makes the Constitution’s binding contents depend on any further official action by any branch of the federal government, whether Congress or the Judiciary or indeed the Executive.
What makes this action controversial is, of course, the decades that have elapsed since Congress saw fit to propose the ERA to the states for ratification in 1972. But there is no legal basis for treating the ERA as having expired when the arbitrary time limits of 7 and then 10 years set by the House and Senate for the ratification process had run out. The Constitution’s arduous process for amending the document makes it the hardest in the world to revise, with the result that an 18th and 19th century sensibility casts too long a shadow There is no justification for making a uniquely difficult amendment process more difficult by grafting onto it a requirement that amendments must be ratified speedily, a requirement nowhere to be found in the Constitution’s text .
Nor can any such requirement be extrapolated from the history of the amendment process as we have employed it over the years. The most recently ratified amendment, the 27th, was finally approved by the Legislature of Michigan in May 1992, more than two centuries after it was proposed by the First Congress in September 1789. But because its text – unlike that of the 18th, 20th, 21st, and 22nd Amendments – contained no language making it “inoperative unless ratified” by enough states “within seven years of its submission” or indeed within any specified time, that long percolation period made no difference.
So too with the ERA. Congress knew by the date of its submission to the States, March 22, 1972, precisely how to include a shelf date in the text of the amendment , but instead included a time limit only in the advisory resolution . That makes all the difference, because such a resolution is not a binding law, and is not a part of the amendment the States vote whether or not to ratify. Congress recognized as much when it extended that limit by three years in 1982 through a resolution of the two houses.
The Supreme Court, in a case that one of us (Tribe) presented to that court over four decades ago, National Organization For Women v. Idaho, similarly treated the time limit in the resolution as non-binding. And, although five states – Idaho, Kentucky, Nebraska, South Dakota, and Tennessee – attempted to rescind their state legislatures’ earlier ratifications of the ERA between 1972 and 1982, nothing in the Constitution provides for any such turnabout nor tolerates the chaotic and unpredictable legal situation that would be created by permitting states to reverse course as the process proceeds. Ratification is rightly understood as a one-way ratchet.
After careful consideration and consultation with constitutional experts, President Biden – like the American Bar Association last year – concluded that the ERA had met all the requirements for inclusion in the Constitution. He decided that the Oath of Office he took upon assuming the presidency – the Oath to “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States” – meant that he should formally announce that conclusion to the world.
We welcome debate on the political and moral pros and cons of keeping the ERA alive rather than letting it fade from memory until Congress is again willing to propose similar language for the states to consider – a wait that could be many decades long. And others can debate the implications for the Biden legacy and even the eventual outcome of the multifaceted litigation likely to ensue. Faithful to his Oath and to his duty to execute the laws, this president did not flinch from acting in accord with simple, straightforward, legally impeccable principle.
For that, he deserves our undying gratitude. It is not necessary for the National Archivist to publish the ERA in order for it to be adopted according to the provisions of the Constitution. The President avoided triggering a clash with the Archivist, who recently announced her intention to defy her statutory, and purely ministerial, duty to publish the ERA. The only reason Congress gave the Archivist such a duty nearly a century ago was to ensure that the Nation got word that an amendment was in force, enabling officials at all levels of government to conform their actions to it. In our modern age of broadcast, cable and internet communication, the President’s announcement itself performed that function.
Accordingly, our Constitution now demands that “equality of rights under the law cannot be denied or abridged by the United States or any state on account of sex.”
It’s long past time!
Laurence H. Tribe is Carl M. Loeb University Professor of Constitutional Law Emeritus at Harvard University.
Kathleen M. Sullivan is former Dean of Stanford Law School and professor of law at Harvard and Stanford.
Doktor Zoom writes on the blog Wonkette. This is an excellent commentary on Biden’s farewell address.
President Biden made mistakes. He was not perfect. But he survived an unprecedented barrage of defamation from the Republications, who did everything possible to portray him as a criminal and to destroy his son. Never mind that the Republican’ star witness against the Bidens was an FBI informant who falsely claimed that Biden and Hunter took millions in bribes, and eventually confessed to being a Russian plant; he was recently sentenced to six years in prison.
Biden is a good man. He is a man with a heart. He is deeply empathetic. We can’t say the same for the felon who succeeds him.
And, despite razor-thin numbers in both houses of Congress, he managed somehow to pass a remarkable lot of legislation that will rebuild our nation’s infrastructure, create good jobs, attract new industries, revive technology manufacturing, and address climate change. Trump inherits a thriving economy–the best in the world–and will claim credit for it. In the 48 months of Biden’s time in office, there was job growth inbb by every single month. Furthermore, he relieved the debts of millions of students, prioritizing those who got debt forgiveness in return for public service. The Republicans accused him of buying votes, but they lied: Biden continued to forgive college debt after the election.
And that Norman Rockwell painting portrayed in the post? It hangs in Biden’s White House. You can be sure it will be moved to storage on Monday.
Doktor Zoom writes:
….Biden made an explicit parallel to Dwight D. Eisenhower’s farewell address, which warned about the threat of the “military-industrial complex” that nevertheless still has a stranglehold on our economy and politics in a “disastrous rise of misplaced power.”
Today, Biden said, we should be wary of the “potential rise of a tech-industrial complex”:
“Americans are being buried under an avalanche of misinformation and disinformation enabling the abuse of power. The free press is crumbling. Editors are disappearing. Social media is giving up on fact-checking. The truth is smothered by lies told for power and for profit.”
He didn’t name Donald Trump explicitly, just some of those forces that helped him retake power, and which threaten to help Trump and his billionaire buddies undo democracy.
Biden also offered some very concrete steps that might help rein in the destructive forces, although the chances they’ll be enacted during the tenure of the Lord of Misrule seem slim. He started with the easy stuff that won’t happen under Trump.
“We must reform the tax code. Not by giving the biggest tax cuts to billionaires, but by making them begin to pay their fair share.
“We need to get dark money — that’s that hidden funding behind too many campaign contributions — we need to get it out of our politics.”
Then it was on to three ideas that will almost certainly have to wait until we bury Trumpism, at the very least.
“We need to enact an 18-year time limit, term limit […] and the strongest ethics reforms for our Supreme Court. We need to ban members of Congress from trading stock while they are in the Congress. We need to amend the Constitution to make clear that no president, no president is immune from crimes that he or she commits while in office. The president’s power is … not absolute. And it shouldn’t be.”
OK, maybe the second one, the ban on members of Congress trading stocks, has some ghost of a chance; it also wouldn’t really do anything to keep Trump in check, though it’s certainly a general good-government idea. Maybe Biden threw it in for the sake of parallelism, to call for reforms in all three branches of government.
Letting the super-wealthy run things, Biden reminded us, is a recipe not just for oligarchy, but for despair: If everyone knows the system is rigged, we all too often give up, or lash out in violence, neither of which is good for democracy. He offered as a hopeful metaphor an image from a 1946 Norman Rockwell painting that hangs in the White House, showing a crew of workers cleaning the torch on the Statue of Liberty, so its “rays of light could reach out as far as possible.” Keeping that torch lit is the work we all have to do as citizens. And while Biden didn’t mention this detail, do keep in mind that Liberty is not enlightening the world with a damn tiki torch, either.
The bald guy with the pipe is a caricature of Rockwell. Wikipedia notes that ‘The inclusion of a non-white figure working with whites, apparently only noticed in 2011, contravened a Saturday Evening Post policy of only showing people of ethnicity in subservient roles.’ Darn that DEI!
Biden closed with a rather remarkable passing of the torch, not so much to the incoming wrecking crew, but to the only people who can stop those bastards: Us.
“I still believe in the idea for which this nation stands — a nation where the strength of our institutions and the character of our people matter and must endure. Now it’s your turn to stand guard. May you all be the keeper of the flame. May you keep the faith. I love America. You love it, too.”
What a contrast to the rhetoric of Ronald Reagan, who blithely called America a “shining city on a hill” because it’s so plainly the bestest place possible. (As Sarah Vowell reminds us, adding “shining” was a sunny perversion of the original Puritan metaphor’s dour intent, which warned that everyone would see our sins, like Abu Ghraib).
But America isn’t a self-illuminating beacon of virtue that’s virtuous just because it’s America. Instead, Biden argues, the light of freedom requires constant maintenance and renewal — and it only keeps shining if we do the hard, even risky work of participatory democracy.
James Fallows is a veteran journalist who has covered national and international politics for decades.
In this post, he explains why Joe Biden’s farewell address surprised him. He expected the same tone and substance he had heard for years. But the last eight minutes were different.
He writes:
I turned on Joe Biden’s Oval Office speech last night mainly from a sense of duty. I’d followed this man’s discourse generally over the decades, and very closely through these past few years. So I might as well see him out.
(For instance, with this look at a State of the Union address two years ago; this about the “music” of Biden’s rhetoric — “like the joke about Wagner’s music, it’s better than it sounds”; this about his challenges as “explainer”; these two—first, and second—about his speeches on the future of democracy one year after the January 6 attacks; and this about his powerful speech at Morehouse College last year. I even proposed a draft speech Biden could give about choosing not to run again, several weeks before he made that announcement for real.)
A running theme in these speech-related items has been Biden’s preference to “deliver tough messages softly,” rather than in a combative tone like Harry Truman’s or Teddy Roosevelt’s. And that is what I expected last night.
Through the first half of the speech, I listened on cruise-control, thinking that I’d been right on how the speech would go. Then suddenly I realized I had been wrong. The final eight minutes of Joe Biden’s final presentation in public life were different from the thousands of hours of rhetoric by him through his career, in a dramatic and instructive way.
A comparison with another old, departing president is inescapable, and clarifying.
January, 1961: Dwight Eisenhower on the ‘military-industrial complex.’
Dwight Eisenhower is known as the great Allied commander of D-Day, and as a hero who became the first Republican to win the White House since 1928. He was so popular that after incumbent president Harry Truman decided not to run again himself, he tried to persuade Eisenhower to run as a Democrat.
But in rhetoric Eisenhower is known only for two things. One is the speech he did not have to give, in 1944. That is the statement he would have issued if the D-Day landing had failed, in which he would have taken personal responsibility for what had gone wrong. (As he put it in his handwritten draft, “If any blame or fault attaches to the attempt, it is mine alone.”)
The other is the final speech he gave as president, his televised “Farewell Address” from the White House three days before he stepped down. The speech got only limited attention at the time. The incoming Kennedy team was young, exciting, a magnet for news. Eisenhower was old, tired, yesterday’s story.
But as the years go on the Farewell Address has steadily grown in attention and importance. There’s a whole, thick book about the crafting and consequences of this one speech. (That is Unwarranted Influence, by the late James Ledbetter, back in 2011.) This was the speech that delivered the hard-edged warning about the growing anti-democratic influence of the “military-industrial complex,” and introduced that term to popular discourse. The warning was all the more powerful in coming from a revered five-star general.
You can hear the original audio of Eisenhower delivering the speech in the embedded clip just below. The part that lives in history begins around time 7:30. The 100 seconds that follow are truly remarkable rhetoric, which repay very careful listening. This part is worth actually hearing for yourself.¹LISTEN NOW · 15:31
And here is the script from which Eisenhower read those words, as his final message as an office-holder. The underlines were for his planned cadence—pauses, emphases, multi-word phrases that should be read legato-style, as a smoothly connected whole.
January, 2025: Joe Biden, on the ‘tech-industrial complex.’
Nothing in Dwight Eisenhower’s previous rhetoric prepared the public for his farewell address. Nothing in Joe Biden’s pattern of speeches prepared me for the way he ended last night.
Through the first few minutes of Biden’s farewell presentation, I had a sense of the familiar. As expected, the speech took us through highlights of his administration’s achievements, especially on the economy, which (as I’ve frequently argued) will be judged much more favorably by history than they have been by the press or the 2024 electorate.²
And just as predictably, the speech would give us the story of Scranton Joe, and why his long journey has made him believe all the more deeply in the American Dream. That is where he seemed to be going with the elaborate curlicues of his Statue of Liberty analogy, which he pushed to the breaking point and which took nearly three minutes of the speech to spell out.³
Most of Biden’s recent speeches have ended with the assurance that he has “never felt more positive about America.” That’s what he still seemed to be saying when talking about the upcoming “peaceful and orderly transition of power.” A reference to this “peaceful transition” has been part of every farewell address I’ve ever looked at, and to every Inaugural Address⁴—even, grudgingly, the one given eight years ago
Indeed, because of his commitment to that process, Biden said, he “had no doubt that America is in a position to succeed.” But as soon as he had finished those words, about half way into the speech, everything changed.
‘I want to warn the country…’
He paused. He sat up straighter. Until then his body language and tone had seemed valedictory and going-through-the-motions. Suddenly he seemed urgent and engaged. His hands had been neatly folded. Now he gestured directly toward the camera with a pen in one hand. And he said these words:
In my farewell address tonight, I want to warn the country of some things that give me great concern.
I said to Deb, “Eisenhower.” And our body language, as listeners, also changed. We leaned closer to the TV as Biden laid out his blunt indictment of “the dangerous concentration of power in the hands of a very few ultrawealthy people, and the dangerous consequences if their abuse of power is left unchecked.”
What were these “concerns,” that troubled a president at the end of four years in the White House, and of half a century in public life? Biden dug right in, including using a word (oligarchy) I don’t think has appeared in presidential annals before.
Today, an oligarchy is taking shape in America of extreme wealth, power and influence that literally threatens our entire democracy, our basic rights and freedoms and a fair shot for everyone to get ahead. We see the consequences all across America. And we’ve seen it before.
Biden went on for a full three minutes in this vein, with comparisons to the worst of the robber barons of the Gilded Age. Only then did he make another historical connection explicit:
You know, in his farewell address, President Eisenhower spoke of the dangers of the military-industrial complex.
He warned us about, and I quote, “The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power.” Six decades later, I’m equally concerned about the potential rise of a tech-industrial complex that could pose real dangers for our country as well.
He went on to detail, much more specifically than Eisenhower had, exactly why this new oligarchy imperiled democracy. He referred to technologies and challenges that didn’t exist in Eisenhower’s time—TV itself was relatively “new” in 1961—and expressed concerns are at the center of tech-savvy debate in 2025:
Americans are being buried under an avalanche of misinformation and disinformation enabling the abuse of power. The free press is crumbling. Editors are disappearing. Social media is giving up on fact-checking. The truth is smothered by lies told for power and for profit. We must hold the social platforms accountable to protect our children, our families and our very democracy from the abuse of power.
The was nothing quaint or old-timey—Bidenesque—about this. It was as direct an indictment of the corruption of money-power as we’ve heard from a serving president in our times. From FDR or Truman? Sure, but that was long ago. …
Trump has suggested that Canada, a huge and sovereign nation, should become the 51st state of the U.S.
Elizabeth Evans May, a member of the Green Party in the Canadian Parliament, suggested instead that California, Oregon, and Washington State should become provinces of Canada.
Because Trump suggested that Wayne Gretzky should be elected Prime minister of Canada, She felt compelled to explain to Trump how the Canadian system differs from the American system. The people don’t elect the prime minister. The members of parliament do.
Explaining the basic facts of history and government to the undereducated Trump is a never ending task. He clearly learned nothing about such subjects in high school or college.
Trump selected Linda McMahon to be the next Secretary of Education. She is well known for making it rich in the world of wrestling entertainment, in partnership with her husband. Less well known is her role as Chair of the board of the America First Policy Institute (AFPI). Trump is close to AFPI, which promotes school choice and the “parental rights” movement, which promotes censorship of books and curriculum about racism and LGBT topics. They oppose any teaching that might make students “uncomfortable,” like learning about the history of racism, or that might teach students that LGBT exist.
The Nation published an article by Christopher Lewis and Jacob Plaza. The article tells the story of the think tank McMahon leads. It was launched after Trump’s loss in 2020 and its policy agenda defines Trump’s plans. To understand what Trump intends to do, learn more about AFPI.
Lewis and Plaza write:
Amid the incoming Trump administration’s flurry of unqualified, corrupt, and/or vengeance-driven cabinet nominees, it’s been easy to overlook Linda McMahon, Trump’s pick to head the US Department of Education. McMahon is best known for her role in running World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) with her husband the longtime Trump crony Vince McMahon. Linda McMahon’s background in education is exceedingly thin; she served on the Connecticut Board of Education more than a decade ago, thanks to an appointment from another politically connected friend, then–Connecticut Governor Jodi Rell. McMahon has a teaching certificate but has never actually taught. Indeed, she was forced to resign her spot on the Connecticut board when the Hartford Courant reported that she’d lied on her résumé about having an education degree. Add in the alleged role of the WWE and its parent company in a sexual-abuse scandal involving “ring boys” for the wrestling league, and McMahon’s nomination, in any sanely administered political order, would be dead in the water. (McMahon and her husband both deny the abuse allegations in the pending WWE suit.)
Yet McMahon possesses one key credential for the next Trump administration—in addition, that is, to a proven track record to personal fealty to the president-elect, and a long string of Fox News appearances: She’s the former head of the America First Policy Institute (AFPI), the policy nerve center for MAGA governance. For all the attention focused on the Heritage Foundation and its Project 2025 policy agenda, AFPI has been Trumpworld’s principal policy network, serving as a haven for former Trump appointees during the Biden years. AFPI hands assembled a detailed blueprint for Trump’s return to power, including plans to make the Trump tax cuts permanent and purge the federal workforce of civil service workers deemed insufficiently MAGA. In addition to McMahon, Trump has tapped several senior AFPI figures for cabinet posts, including EPA nominee Lee Zeldin, Agriculture nominee Brooke Rollins (the think tank’s president and CEO), and its Georgia chapter chair, Doug Collins, Trump’s pick to head the Department of Veteran’s Affair
As education secretary, McMahon would be charged with administering a uniquely destructive suite of policies, even by the usual standards of Trump governance. That’s because the Department of Education has been a bête noire of the American right ever since Jimmy Carter founded the agency in 1979. By creating a layer of federal oversight over locally run schools, the DOE has, in the overheated imaginings of right-wing policy mavens, arrogated deep-state sovereignty over the rights of parents to preside over the best educational options and life chances for their children. And as the Education Department has sought to clarify and standardize anti-discrimination policy for LGBTQ+ students, it’s become a pet target for anti-trans culture warriors on the right.
McMahon probably won’t heed the growing chorus of conservative calls to abolish the DOE outright, but she can be counted on to aggressively pursue other key MAGA objectives in education policy. In line with her work at AFPI, McMahon will likely continue to promote the use of privately backed charter schools to defund public education—the most fundamental plank of right-wing education policy. In addition, she’ll probably resume her predecessor Betty DeVos’s campaign to deny basic Title IX protections to LGBTQ+ students. And it’s a safe bet that she’ll also re-up plans to promote Trump’s 1776 commission—MAGA’s agitprop answer to the 1619 Project, promoting a “patriotic” national curriculum to downplay and discourage honest discussion of America’s racial history in the schools.
Following the lead of billionaire right-wing donors, AFPI enthusiastically champions the charter-schools movement, while seeking to undermine the government’s role in providing quality public education. McMahon’s think tank has erected a whole policy infrastructure to promote charter schools, including direct public subsidies to them, the creation of education saving accounts (ESAs) for parents to enroll kids in charters, and proposals to weaken teachers’ unions in conjunction with the rise of open-shop charters. This agenda does more than harness the long-standing animus to government-backed education on the right—it advances the creation of a parallel education system for right-wing partisans. In this regard, as well as in its aggressive model of privatized education funding, the AFPI plan recalls the original role that neoliberal economics played in supporting the new ad hoc network of “segregation academies” launched in the American South after the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education ruling to desegregate the nation’s schools. The same basic dictum holds for today’s American right as it did then: If you can’t segregate with law, segregate with economics.
AFPI claims that charter school students have higher scores on standardized tests. In reality, the findings here follow what holds for better-funded public schools: namely, that well-funded charter schools tend to produce better test scores, while less well-off charters fare a bit worse, with some regional variations. Students in the competitive DC charter school system’s Opportunity Scholarships program, often cited as the gold standard by charter school advocates, actually performed worse on reading tests than those who did not attend the program.
School choice and voucher programs are a drain on the public’s coffers. For hard-right ideologues like the advisers at AFPI, that’s the whole point. Privatized education is part of the broader right-wing campaign to block the public sector’s ability to finance anything, especially if it would further racial equality. The National Education Association notes that voucher programs redirect scarce public funds toward unaccountable private school programs, and found zero evidence that these programs—which increase school segregation—improve students’ performance. In some cases, there are negative impacts.
What’s more, private management naturally leads to a focus on profit, financial self-sustainability, and expansion—mandates that typically lead to steep budget cuts in the schools, even if students suffer. According to the Network for Public Education, for-profit management companies run nearly one in seven charter schools.
AFPI has also endorsed federal legislation to create national education savings accounts. Like charter schools, ESAs seek to redirect public resources to market-driven gimmicks under the broad rubric of consumer choice. When parents open an ESA, they withdraw their children from the school district and receive a deposit of public funds in a savings account authorized by the government. Parents are then allowed to spend from that account on a range of educational expenses, including tutoring, therapy, or school supplies.
ESA plans create an obvious bind by forcing parents to navigate the education industry all on their own. The ESA scheme affords no safeguards for students whose parents made poor spending choices with the funds in their account. A report in Forbes recounted the story of a family using up its entire account before paying for a single English or math class. And like the broader charter model it upholds, the savings-account system reinforces, rather than weakens, the core inequalities of the US education system; it ensures that wealthier parents will be able to afford to send their children to the best schools.
For a bracing illustration of how charter and for-profit education schemes pillage publicly funded schools, consider Chicago’s experience. In 2013, the city closed 48 public schools to cover widening budget shortfalls. And Chicago’s public schools were going broke in no small part due to the rapid expansion of a parallel charter systemcaptained by ardent school privatizers. Since the insurgent charter schools operated outside traditional governance and accountability, they accumulated millions in debt while draining desperately needed funding away from public schools. Ultimately, 17,000 students were displaced, and Chicago was left with a more unequal and racially segmented school system than it had at the outset of the city’s charter-school fiasco.
It is my review of Trump’s plans for K-12 education.
NYRB is the most distinguished literary-political journal in the nation. It has a huge readership. It reaches a different audience than education journals.
If you subscribe to NYRB, you can open it in full. If you don’t, it costs $10 for 10 issues. Or, if you wait, I will post it in full in a few weeks.
My first big assignment as a journalist was covering President Jimmy Carter’s 1995 visit to Rwanda, a doomed mission that brought him little acclaim.
Carter didn’t fight disease, promote democracy or negotiate peace to make headlines. He did the work quietly and diligently to make the world a better place. His life was a master class in a leadership style firmly out of fashion but will hopefully return.
I was in my third month as the Associated Press and Voice of America stringer in Kigali, Rwanda’s capital. A civil war between an ethno-fascist Hutu government and rebels from the Tutsi minority had culminated in the 1994 genocide that slaughtered 1 million people, most of them Tutsi civilians, in 100 days.
The Tutsi-led rebels drove the Hutu leadership and 1.2 million of their followers into neighboring Zaire, rnow known as Democratic Republic of the Congo. Insurgents from the Zairian refugee camps were still killing 300 people a week in Rwanda more than a year later.
I trailed Carter through Rwanda and the Zairian refugee camps. His Secret Service detail was minimal, yet he moved through these dangerous places with a confidence, kindness and humility that only comes from tremendous inner strength.
He spoke to political leaders, genocide victims, refugees and me with the same courtesy and respect. He knew Mobutu would probably never agree to a peace deal, but unlike most famous people, he didn’t allow the likelihood of failure to stop him from trying.
Carter wanted to negotiate a deal between the new Tutsi-led Rwandan government and Zaire’s dictator Mobutu Sese Seko, whose murderous misrule had made him a pariah.
“These leaders know that I’m their last chance to rejoin the international community,” Carter told me while driving to a church where the skeletons of the dead were displayed as a genocide memorial. He laughed and added, “If Jimmy Carter gives up on you, there’s no one else coming.”
Carter met with Mobutu, and he agreed to a summit with the Rwanda foreign minister. Diplomats knew Mobutu had cancer and hoped he might cut a deal to boost his legacy.
Carter’s staff asked me to join the trip to Mobutu’s palace in Gbadolite, Zaire. I watched Mobutu turn the summit into a farce. Eighteen months later, Rwanda overthrew him, installed a new president and forced the refugees home. The old dictator died in exile. Carter kept lobbying for world peace.
I saw the former president many more times over my 11 years in Africa. His foundation, the Carter Center, monitored elections and fought preventable diseases like river blindness, guinea worm and other neglected tropical diseases. Carter’s work saved tens of millions of people from suffering, but he never made a big deal out of it.
No one can accomplish so much without steely determination. Too often, I hear people describe Carter as the weak and bumbling caricature that President Ronald Reagan created to win the 1980 election. Folks should stop confusing courtesy for weakness.
After the Watergate scandal and the Vietnam debacle, Carter, in 1976, offered an alternative to Richard Nixon’s imperial presidency. He practiced what has become known as servant leadership, the theory that a leader’s primary duty is ensuring subordinates have the tools they need to accomplish their mission.
In the Army, my brigade commander instilled servant leadership in me when I joined his staff as a newly minted sergeant in 1986. He explained that junior enlisted members did not serve me because I outranked them; my rank meant I was responsible for their success, and the colonel promised to hold me accountable if they failed.
The term servant leadership is hackneyed, but it captures valuable techniques that have caught on in the business world. It emphasizes listening, empathy, persuasion, stewardship and community building while discouraging egotism and authoritarianism.
The greater good comes first, not any individual.
While president, Carter rejected much of the pomp at the White House. His speeches focused on addressing problems, not promoting himself. Despite attending the U.S. Naval Academy and serving in the nuclear navy, he was never a warrior-king style leader, which American voters tend to favor.
Humility does not do well in the current culture, where conspicuousness is valued. Politicians must constantly self-promote while denigrating their rivals. Compromise is considered a failure, and vulgarity is considered clever.
The strongest people I’ve encountered in the most difficult places don’t puff up their chests. They don’t need others to bow before them. People with inner strength don’t use cruelty to prove their power.
Here’s hoping kindness makes a comeback, courtesy becomes cool, and strength is demonstrated by lifting people up, not knocking them down.
Diane Ravitch's blog 