Author: Herb Childress

I have a feeling this is going to be a string of posts.

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I’ve always cultivated the ability to hide out and do the thing I wanted to do, fully focused and without interruption. And I’m increasingly recognizing what a luxury that is, unavailable to most of us most of the time. I’d like to explore that luxury—to whom it’s offered, and to whom it isn’t. How carefully it’s built, and how easily it’s lost. How our best intentions lead us, individually and institutionally and culturally, away from that precious state.

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The idea of autonomy has to do with self-determination, An autonomous person gets to make, or at least strongly participate in, decisions about their own actions and beliefs and relationships. The opposite condition is submission or subordination, subsuming our own intentions to the intentions of others, Let’s look at that from two directions.

DIRECTION ONE. About thirty years ago, the British architect Frank Duffy wrote a book called The New Office, in which he put forth a taxonomy of work types, each of which requires different characteristics for a good workplace. (I admit that I’m a total sucker for a well-crafted X-Y quadrant diagram.)

I’m a writer and not an architect, so I’ll take exception to his four clever shorthand terms for each space, but the principle makes a lot of sense.

• If you’re told exactly what to do and left alone to do it, you’re a drone. Example workspace: cubicle.
• If you’re told exactly what to do and put in a group to do it, the work of the pack is more important than the individual member. Example workspace: high school classroom.
• If you decide what to do and are left alone to do it, you’re an artist in her garret. Example workspace: writer’s desk.
• If you decide what to do and are working with others to achieve it, you’re part of the inner circle. Example workspace: boardroom.

Hang onto that, while we go to…

DIRECTION TWO. The environmental psychologist Irv Altman developed a theory that the fundamental definition of privacy was the control of information: both information about oneself going out, and information from others coming in. So having your mail snooped around in is a loss of privacy, because you’ve lost control of information about yourself; but having loud neighbors is also a loss of privacy, because you hear their arguments and their video games and their TV shows without having asked for it.

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Put those two directions together and you can understand why your job sucks. You don’t get to control information. You don’t even get to decide what to think about! And it’s not just the world of endless interruptions, though that’s an enormous disrespect to our attentional autonomy. It’s more importantly that we’re constrained by the very nature of our businesses. Here are a few examples:

I worked for a business once that was part of a national consortium founded upon ten common principles. My very first research project there was truncated after a day. I’d asked my new colleagues which of the ten principles was most important to them specifically, and was told that the company’s position was that only one of the ten really mattered, and that the other nine were niceties that had no real bearing on our work.

I worked for a business once that did exactly the same four or five jobs for one county government after another. Same scope of work, same methods, same spreadsheets, same deliverables. There was no room there to ask interesting questions or to approach the problem sideways.

I worked for a business once that hadn’t the faintest idea what a meeting was for. The president called us all together once a month to give us the equivalent of a podcast; the provost did the same thing with a smaller group every week. Committees were established with no time frame and no demands for progress; we just got together and picked at the same scabs for a couple of hours every Thursday afternoon or Tuesday morning. I rarely felt like I got any work done, because I set it aside every twenty minutes to go to another meeting.

These were all low-autonomy environments that had hired us because we’d been successful in high-autonomy training. They recruited us because we’d done really good work on projects we devised and cared deeply about, and then told us that all of that individual motivation was no longer the currency of the land.

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So think of this post as the preamble. Over the next few days, I’d like to think about what attentional autonomy can tell us about social class, about craft, and about education. Maybe some other stuff, too.

When I worked at the Boston Architectural College¹, one of the fundamental rituals was the weekly Directors’ Meeting. Turns out that for a college of a thousand or so students, there were a lot of directors.

There were four directors representing the four disciplinary divisions: architecture, interior design, landscape architecture, and design studies. Those were the four academic/professional fields in which one could get a degree, the warp threads that were fundamental to setting up the loom. But every weave also has its weft threads that cross the entirety of the fabric. At the BAC, they were Design, Design Media, Design History and Theory, Technology and Management, Liberal Studies, and Professional Practice. No matter which of the four degree strands you were engaged in, your path would cross each of the six topical areas.

(There were also directors of Admissions, Advising, the Learning Center, and Financial Aid. Without getting too far into the weeds, there were a few others as well, mostly historical artifacts and loyal long-term employees who’d grandfathered their security as the school had changed around them. True in every workplace ever.)

Let me oversimplify a little bit, but not much. The degree strands weren’t fully owned by the College. More fundamentally, they were owned by the professional accrediting bodies that granted the College the right to offer degrees with the respective words attached. The National Architectural Accreditation Board, the Landscape Architectural Accreditation Board, and the Council for Interior Design Accreditation all visited the school every six or eight years and made sure the franchisees were adhering to corporate standards. (Design Studies had originally come about as an exit ramp for students in the three professional strands who weren’t going to make it professionally but who had invested time and money and deserved a college degree of some kind or another. It’s become something far beyond that now, but it isn’t part of a larger national cohort.)

It was really the lateral bands that defined what made the College distinct. They were one school planting its flag in the sand and saying no matter what discipline a student is part of, this is what every one of them will experience.

When I taught at Duke, Writing 20 (Introduction to Academic Writing) was the ONLY COURSE that was required of every single undergraduate student. For twenty years, it was a fundamental hallmark of what it meant to be a Duke student.

I find, now that I’ve left higher education behind, that I have very little interest in the disciplines. (I didn’t while I was inside, either. I was just curious, and had my own questions that I needed to satisfy.) With almost five thousand colleges in the US, it seems to me that it’s the horizontal curriculum that declares a college’s institutional mission. Complete this statement for yourself: no matter what you major in, at our college you will… That’s the sentence that makes your college worth choosing over any of the others. It ought to be fully distinguishable from all the rest. Write it carefully, and live it fully.

1. 2006-2103. I have no idea what they’re doing any more. ↩︎

Let me start with a note. Whenever I raise an issue about current events, I don’t mean to ever suggest that I’ve isolated the single variable that “makes all the difference.” That’s not how culture works; everything is always multivariate. But I do want to bring up ideas that will be helpful for us to think about.

I’ve talked before about Colin Clark’s four-sector economic analysis. There’s primary production, which is extraction; secondary production, which is manufacturing; tertiary production, which is professions and services; and quaternary production, which is strategy and investment.

Most of the world, for most of history, was engaged in the primary economy. We were all farmers or hunters or miners or fishermen. There were a handful of skilled tradespeople making goods from mined or harvested materials, a handful of doctors and artists, and a handful of kings and popes who had all the money and made all the decisions..

The Industrial Revolution was the ability of a handful of nations to receive investment in manufacturing capability, while the rest of the world continued to mine and grow what was needed. The American colonies were prohibited from having factories for a long time; it was really only industrial espionage by Francis Cabot Lowell that allowed America to become something other than a source of inexpensive food and tobacco and cotton for England. During the 19th and first two-thirds of the 20th centuries, the American economy shifted almost wholly from primary to secondary production. In 1800, about 90 percent of Americans lived on farms; by 1900, it was about 40 percent; by 2015, it was one percent.

The issue is that other countries caught up in secondary production as well. Manufacturing in Central and South America, East Asia and Southeast Asia has become as sophisticated as ours, at lower labor costs. And automation has taken up a lot of the manufacturing that remains. Our economy has shifted upward again, into the services and professions.

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One of the most striking turns of phrase I’ve seen lately has been from the political scientist Tom Schaller. He was talking about the disproportionate deaths from COVID in Trump-voting areas: something like a four-to-one disparity between rural and urban counties. And he extended that notion more broadly.

They’re making decisions that don’t just affect their communities; they affect other communities and other industries that are parallel or adjacent. So now, it’s an economic murder-suicide when you make these decisions that don’t just hurt your bottom line, your finances, your ability to pay for Johnny’s braces or Joni’s summer camp but are affecting industries and communities and devastating your neighbors—including your neighbors who didn’t vote for Trump, especially your nonwhite rural neighbors. (emphasis mine)

After I read that, I had to do a little research on the phenomenon of murder-suicide. A 2006 study by the Violence Policy Center has revealing findings.

• 94% of the perpetrators were male
• 74% of the victims were family members
• The most common instigating factors were a sense of being grievously wronged, and a shame in the resulting loss of status. “This type of murder-suicide typically involves a man between the ages of 18 and 60 years old who develops suspicions of his girlfriend’s or wife’s infidelity, becomes enraged, murders her, and then commits suicide.”

Now, maybe it’s a stretch, but if you disagree, argue carefully, don’t just bark. We have a population of mostly men who’ve lost the status that came from primary and secondary careers, and who see success flowing to women and the well-educated—people who don’t do real men’s work, and thus aren’t deserving. And that sense of being wronged, and being shamed, is enough for some to say “burn it all down,” and take their neighbors with them. The fact that they will perish too is less important than the fact that they can avenge their lost heroism.

And the kings, distant in their towers, watch with pleasure while their serfs come to blows.

Given that this blog is crossposted to LinkedIn, I’m imagining that the title might be provocative. It should be, of course, but I don’t think it’s wrong.

Lots and lots of people hate paying taxes, because they think as consumers. The money we pay in taxes doesn’t immediately reflect itself in goods and services obtained. (Actually, a surprising amount does, if we benefit from research or education or highways or the Internet or a defended nation or a river that doesn’t catch fire or whatever. They’re just not a) fun or b) visible as purchased goods.)

The proportion of our purchases that goes to the profit for the businesses that provide goods and services doesn’t benefit us, either. When gas was five bucks a gallon in early COVID, the oil companies made absolutely astonishing profits; the costs for raw and refined products didn’t actually change all that much. It was just that BP and Exxon and Shell knew they could take advantage of crisis and confusion. But even at the smaller and more honest scale, let’s say you have a driveway poured. You pay X for that service, which actually includes a ton of sub-components: materials, equipment, labor. But part of that—let’s say five percent of the price you pay—goes to the profit of the concrete business. You’ll never benefit from that, nor will the workers. It’s not even the owner’s salary; that’s part of the expenses. The profit is the owner’s tax on the transaction.

That concrete business had material delivered from a concrete plant, which made a profit. They drove to the job site in a mixer truck; the manufacturer of that truck, and the shop that maintains it, both made a profit. The contractor has a couple of pickup trucks; Ford or GMC made a profit. They hauled forms to the site on a boom truck; the truck manufacturer and the boom manufacturer both made a profit. Every step along the way, the owners—not the managers, not the workers—skimmed a little off the top. The homeowner probably paid a 25-40% collective tribute to all the owners in the chain. That $20,000 driveway could have been fifteen or less, except for all the ownership surcharges.

Workers don’t make a profit. Consumers don’t make a profit. We pay the ownership surcharges, which flow only upward. I don’t know about you, but I’d rather pay taxes for drug rehab and homeless shelters and public libraries. I don’t get to make that choice, of course, because someone entirely unaccountable to the public skims their sliver and never has to justify, or even disclose, what they’ve done with it.

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I read a great commentary today by the economist Kathryn Anne Edwards. She talks about the foolishness of trying to revive the manufacturing economy, but I want to quote a slightly different part of her talk:

If you really wanted to have good middle-class jobs in the U.S., you would identify the jobs that can’t be exported and replaced by a machine, and you would ensure that those jobs are high quality and well-paid. What made a manufacturing job good is that they were high-paying, had health, and had retirement. That’s not special to manufacturing. That’s just special to labor economic policy. The jobs that can’t be exported that need people like are teachers, nurses, doctors, childcare workers, a lot of these pink-collar jobs that have never had the type of economic leverage to demand higher quality. Not to mention the retail sector—people who work in kitchens, people who bring you food, people who take your bag up to your room when you check into a hotel. We have a massive sprawling low-wage service sector. You could make that into the middle class if you really wanted to, but I don’t think we want to. 

No. I don’t think we want to. Unions bad. Government bad. Invisible hand always help. Ugg.

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Let me throw another quote out here, this time from Finian O’Toole’s review in the New Yorker of a new book by the historian Padraic X. Scanlan, called “Rot: An Imperial History of the Irish Famine.“

It was obvious to outsiders that the root of Ireland’s misery was what de Beaumont characterized as a “bad aristocracy”—the monopolization of land by a small élite that had no cultural or religious affinity with its tenantry and little sense of obligation to develop sustainable agriculture. But an English ruling class in which many leading politicians were themselves owners of vast estates in Ireland was unable to acknowledge this inconvenient truth. Who, if not the landlord system, could be to blame? It must be the Irish poor themselves. As Scanlan puts it, “Intensive monoculture made Irish potatoes vulnerable to blight. The solutions proposed to mitigate famine were themselves the product of a kind of intellectual and political monoculture. Solutions were unimaginable outside the market that fuelled the crisis to begin with.”

In a neatly circular argument, the conditions that had been forced on the laboring class became proof of its moral backwardness. It was relatively easy to plant and harvest potatoes—therefore, those who did so had clearly chosen the easy life. “Ireland, through this lens,” Scanlan writes, “was a kind of living fossil within the United Kingdom, a country where the majority of the poor were inert and indolent, unwilling and unable to exert themselves for wages and content to rely on potatoes for subsistence.”

This is about as good a summary of capital extraction as one could imagine. It’s always been easy to blame the poor for being poor, but the tentacles of profit drain us all dry.

More tomorrow.

We often think of oligarchy in immediate terms—a handful of people with whom all of the power and wealth are vested. One of the less-considered impacts is that after a few years, we’re left with their kids, who are even stupider and more venal than they were.

The Republican Party, who seem somehow to have captured the working class, keep putting up one nepo baby after another. George H.W. Bush, the son of a senator/investment banker and grandson of a railroad company president. George W. Bush, further down the creek than that. Mitt Romney, son of a state governor and automaker president. DJT, the ultimate failson, riding the family fortune into the dirt over and over and somehow still convincing people to lend him credit and credence. Elon, child of a wealthy landowner and jewel dealer.

We see this elsewhere, of course. Papa Doc and Baby Doc Duvalier in Haiti. Uday and Qusay Hussein in Iraq. King Charles. A.G. Sulzberger, the sixth-generation publisher of the New York Times who never would have risen that far on individual merit. All of the Kardashians. And the ultimate DEI hires: Don jr., Eric and Ivanka.

When I was a postdoc at Duke, I kept hearing other postdocs talking about something their mother had done as an administrator at some college, or something their father had done as a professor of chemistry. It seemed too common to be coincidence, so I literally went door to door and asked each person what their parents had done for a living. Fourteen of the twenty-six had one or both parents in higher education.

When power can be inherited, we can’t talk with a straight face about meritocracy.

Imagine, if you will, a length of rope, running through the center of a long metal pipe so that there’s some rope on either end. Let’s use the total length of the rope to represent an economy: all the material wealth that a nation generates. The amount of rope remaining on one side is the benefit to consumers; the amount of rope remaining on the other side is the benefit to workers. The pipe is the benefit to the owners.

Capitalism benefits the pipe. Government benefits the rope.

Left to its own devices, the investment community would increase the length of the pipe indefinitely, leaving no rope exposed at all. We see that every time we’ve have a colonial excursion, for instance: the money flows home to the wealthy in England, and the subjects get… well, they get the short end of the rope, don’t they.

“Back in the day, when America was great,” we were governed by wild-eyed Marxists like Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower, who tried to leave as much rope available as they possibly could. It was a pipe-shortening era, with extraordinary marginal tax rates at the top end of the scale and relatively low taxes for average workers. In 1960, the median family income was $5,500, and their Federal income tax rate would have been 20% on the first four grand and 22% on the remainder; on the other end of the scale, family income beyond $400,000 (about four and a quarter million dollars in current value) was taxed at 91%.

The results are clear. The Economic Policy Institute shows that in 1965, the average CEO/corporate president made twenty times as much income as the average employee; in 2021, that ratio was 399 to 1. For those at the top, it pays to elect people who make that pipe as long as it can possibly be. That’s the definition of oligarchy.

The great trick of the past sixty years has been that the lengthening of the pipe has mostly been toward one end. Wages have been stagnant or worse for decades, and employees are shed in massive waves of gigification. Whether you drive a cab or teach in college, you probably don’t have “a job.” But we’re all happy consumers, with our array of fancy coffees and artisan body wash and “free” internet content. Bad wages are the norm, but an eight-dollar carton of eggs will lose you an election.

And yes, capitalism as the engine of prosperity, blah blah blah whatever. Prosperity is the overall length of the ROPE, not the proportional length of the pipe. Don’t confuse the two.

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All of the above is only economics. It only has to do with things that can be measured in dollars. (I had a teacher in grad school who spent his whole career studying spatial design in shopping malls. “I love shopping malls. There’s only one variable that matters: dollars per square foot.” A great example of a wicked problem artificially tamed.)

That’s the other thing that government attends to: things that can’t be measured in dollars. Things like health, and dignity, and beauty. I’ll close today by quoting Robert F. Kennedy (the real one, not the washed-out photocopy we’ve got now), speaking in 1968 at the University of Kansas.

But even if we act to erase material poverty, there is another greater task, it is to confront the poverty of satisfaction – purpose and dignity – that afflicts us all. Too much and for too long, we seemed to have surrendered personal excellence and community values in the mere accumulation of material things. Our Gross National Product, now, is over $800 billion dollars a year, but that Gross National Product – if we judge the United States of America by that – that Gross National Product counts air pollution and cigarette advertising, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage. It counts special locks for our doors and the jails for the people who break them. It counts the destruction of the redwood and the loss of our natural wonder in chaotic sprawl. It counts napalm and counts nuclear warheads and armored cars for the police to fight the riots in our cities. It counts Whitman’s rifle and Speck’s knife, and the television programs which glorify violence in order to sell toys to our children. Yet the gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country, it measures everything in short, except that which makes life worthwhile. And it can tell us everything about America except why we are proud that we are Americans.

Irish Alzheimer’s: Having forgotten everything except your grudges.

In 1960, the population of Vermont was just shy of 390,000 people. Within twenty years, it was almost half again as large, as the hippies and the back-to-the-landers flooded north from New York and Connecticut and Massachusetts (the invading population collectively known as “flatlanders”). People who came to the country with their city ways, who learned how to farm from reading the Whole Earth Catalog and Organic Farming and Gardening instead of from their grandparents, who were happy to show the old-timers “a better way” to do something or another. And a vast number exchanged big-city life for small-city life, swelling the populations of Burlington and Barre, and creating meaningful suburbs from the small towns around them—tripling the size of South Burlington, quadrupling Shelburne, growing Williston by sixfold, all within the Burlington gravitational field.

To this day, a sense of being disrespected motivates a broad swath of “real Vermonters.” I remember a fairly contentious public meeting a few years ago in which one of the beleaguered asked their questioner,”yeah, well, where are YOU from?”

“I’ve lived here for thirty years.”

“Yeah, but where are you FROM?”

“Ohio.” And the point was made.

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Honor cultures are those in which respect is a vital currency, and disrespect—whether real or imagined—is the worst possible offense. There’s some evidence that honor culture may have its origins in herding communities, in which any possible threat must be addressed instantly (as opposed to crop communities, in which land occupancy is stable and one has to learn to deal with the neighbors). Gangs of all sorts are honor communities, because they’re constantly defending or encroaching upon turfs—wearing the wrong colors in the wrong part of town, or usurping gang regalia without actual membership, can be fatal.

And this, to me, is why waiting for Trump voters to feel betrayed by their leader will not be a winning strategy. There’s a whole group of Americans who’ve felt themselves talked down to for decades; that enduring sense of being disrespected makes “owning the libs” far more important than any good outcomes they might hope for themselves. As the Japanese proverb has it, “if you want revenge, dig two graves.” More important to hurt us than to help themselves.; death before dishonor.

We’ve been divided by decades of curated grudges, amplified by those who benefit from our division. “Those _______ think they’re better than you,” they say, and then fill in the blank: women, African Americans, queer folks, college-educated, urban, take your pick. It works the same way as middle-school lunch tables: “You know what Jenny said about you this morning?” And discord is sown and amplified, with the real power flowing to those who pull us apart. Feuds never end, and never actually achieve strength; they just give us someone else to feel good about hurting.

Generosity is a slow sauce, but it’s the only viable option. Someone has to be grown-up enough to not spin the endless cycle of pain delivered and pain received. Only then can we be allies in the work against the people who harvest wealth from our division.

Let’s put a core principle on the table: Business and Government are inherently countervailing forces, and should be. If business is the engine and drivetrain that powers a nation, government is the suspension and brakes that makes it operable and safe. All brakes, and it doesn’t run; all engine, and you put it into a tree in no time. The question of balance between functions has vexed every carmaker from Ferrari to Yugo, and it’s an important question. But just to decide that we don’t need half of the car? Dumb.

For a hundred years, Republicans have asked for the biggest engines they can get, even though they have no idea how to drive. And like young Vermonters in their vast diesel pickups, they make tons of noise and have a load of fun… until they put it into a tree.

Herbert Hoover: The Roaring 20s, followed by the nation’s worst depression.

Richard Nixon: American manufacturing converted into American retreat.

Ronald Reagan: eight years of dementia followed by the savings and loan collapse.

George W. Bush: took Clinton’s balanced budget, said TAX CUTS, DUDE!!!!, and drove us into debt again.

Trump the first time: the guy who said COVID would just disappear, like magic, costing a million American lives and hundreds of billions of American dollars.

Trump the second time: raw, unfettered oligarchy.

It was P.J. O’Rourke who said “Republicans campaign on the idea that government doesn’t work, and then they get elected and prove it.” But it’s so much FUN to drive fast and stupid!

This time around, though, it’s more sinister. This new breed of Republicans want to purposefully make sure that government doesn’t work, that we’re dissatisfied with it, so that we quit having any expectations at all and are willing to privatize all of it. (Ever try to get customer service from Comcast? From Blue Cross? From American Airlines? Good luck with that.) When Obama was working toward the first iteration of the ACA, there was a lot of noise about “death panels,” government bureaucrats who would decide whether or not you were worth treating. Well, friends, we already had death panels and still do—they’re called insurance companies.

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Government is not, and cannot be, and should not be “run like a business.”

First off, 80% of businesses go broke in their first five years, and tons of successful businesses go feet-up without much warning. We can’t take the chance on that kind of instability when we talk about our water quality or prisons or traffic lights. One of the crucial functions of “the deep state” is to provide expertise and stability that’s hard for any individual congress or president to screw up, unlike a Chrysler or Boeing or Kmart which can fail at any moment. (We may be testing the limits of how much malice can be absorbed before we break government systems forever.)

Second, are we really prepared to say that tens of millions of people should starve to death because they can’t hold jobs? For whatever reason? Every dollar we spend to house and feed and rehabilitate and support the poor would be withheld if they were seen merely as customers who couldn’t afford service. Every dollar we spend to reduce drug prices and to develop new ones keeps lifesaving treatments from being luxury goods.

Third, almost every business success is dependent on something that government did, and that ONLY government could provide at the necessary scale. Whether it’s streets and highways, or general-service police and fire instead of private armies, there are things that can only be done by pooling the money of a hundred million people. As someone once put it, I can’t buy a hundred dollars of clean air. But all of our hundreds put together can accomplish important pollution reductions.

(Not to mention—ski resorts operate on mountainsides largely groomed in the 1930s by the Civilian Conservation Corps, your GPS works because of satellites and standards developed by the Department of Defense, and you’re reading this on a distributed network originally designed and maintained by ARPA and the NSF. Bezos and Zuckerberg and Musk owe every single dollar they’ve ever made to government investment.)

The valorization of the American capital class is an important story, and it isn’t wrong. But it also isn’t complete. We celebrate the ones on top and never mention the thousands of entrepreneurs whose ideas came to entirely warranted deaths, nor do we talk about the millions of jobs that came and went without anything to do with the quality of the workers. And we neglect the fact that every business exists in a physical and social and policy ecosystem that existed before it came along. None of us are lone heroes; we stand on the unseen work of millions and millions of others, in an environment made safe and level and predictable… by government.

“The Democrats don’t matter. The real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit.” — Steve Bannon

Every so often, someone accidentally copies me on a wingnut nonsense post. I’ll use one example, from a former colleague on our little town’s Selectboard. He posted some smirking bullet list of liberal outrages, and sent it to a dozen or twenty people. I recognized right off the bat that a bunch of the points were just nonsense, so I spent the next six hours doing my research to find credible data that demonstrated the fallacy of each of those assertions. Six hours. I then sent it to the guy who sent the message to me, and he replied, “Well, I just thought it was funny.”

He’d spent two minutes reading it, and another minute to build his mailing list to send it out another dozen times. I spent six hours to correct it, and sent my response just to him. And therein you can begin to see what we’re up against.

Fox News defended itself in a 2020 slander case by successfully arguing that “no reasonable viewer” would believe that Tucker Carlson was engaged in factual, literal reporting. “Carlson cannot be understood to have been stating facts, but instead that he was delivering an opinion using hyperbole for effect.”

Rush Limbaugh: “First and foremost I’m a businessman. My first goal is to attract the largest possible audience so I can charge confiscatory ad rates. I happen to have great entertainment skills, but that enables me to sell airtime.”

Donald Trump: “I play to people’s fantasies… a little hyperbole never hurts. People want to believe that something is the biggest and the greatest and the most spectacular.”

Judicial review takes time. Accurate research and rebuttal takes time. Outrage and spectacle take no time at all. Just as reflexive statements like “common sense” and “libtards” and “DEI hire” take no time at all. No need to listen when all you have is a megaphone. I just got off the phone with a friend who said, “he’s a bully, and when someone stands up to him, he backs down.” But in the meantime, the administration lays off two thousand people from NOAA. Real lives, whose work has real professional implications for public safety. What they can break in a few hours will take us years to rebuild.

Another friend wrote me a couple of days ago. “When you’re in a street fight, you don’t assume the posture of a boxer.  That’s a gentlemen’s game.  You pick up a handful of dirt and throw it in your opponent’s eyes. and while they are blinded, you kick them in the balls.” It seems that facts, like the Constitution, are a gentleman’s game, vulnerable to those who walk in with a chainsaw and no moral core. And our playing by the rules just buys them more time.

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A few years ago, a colleague asked me to help her learn to teach people to innovate. “Innovate isn’t a verb,” I said. “You only know whether something is an innovation after the fact, when other people start to use it too.”

“So what’s the verb?” she said.

“Reimagining constraints.”

The old-school Democrats, raised in a different era where the rules were generally adhered to, haven’t been particularly effective at dealing with the institutional lawlessness of the GOP as currently configured. (The whole Republican infrastructure is ripe for a RICO prosecution, like any organized-crime gang.)

We’re polite. We believe in procedure, and in letting everyone be heard. And it’s hard for us to go against those established habits. But those are the kinds of invisible constraints that keep us from imagining new paths against lawlessness. It’s time, as our Canadian friends remind us, for “elbows up.”