They really hate you
One doesn’t need Harry Litman, the former former U.S. Attorney and Deputy Assistant Attorney General, to tell you that the MAGA administration is gunning for blue states. Literally.
What’s happening in Los Angeles County is proof enough of that. There was never any need to put National Guard and Marines in the streets there. Donald Trump sat on his butt while far more of his MAGA horde battled police and sacked the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 than protested ICE raids in southern California. Los Angeles was never in flames like Trump’s hyperventilating flacks alleged. But for Trump, a couple of burning Waymo taxis was all the pretext he needed for setting a precedent he could apply anywhere, anytime.
Litman wrote last week at The New Republic:
Indeed, earlier this week he issued a Truth Social message proclaiming: “We must expand effort[s] to detain and deport aliens in America’s largest cities.” He continued: “ICE Officers are herewith ordered, by notice of this TRUTH, to do all in their power to achieve the very important goal of delivering the single largest Mass Deportation Program in History. We must expand efforts to detain and deport Illegal Aliens in America’s largest Cities, such as Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York, where Millions upon Millions of Illegal Aliens reside.”
Why those cities? According to Trump: “These, and other such Cities, are the core of the Democrat Power Center, where they use Illegal Aliens to expand their Voter Base, cheat in Elections, and grow the Welfare State, robbing good paying Jobs and Benefits from Hardworking American Citizens.”
It’s a breathtaking statement from an American president. The various accusations against Democrats are patently false. But even setting that aside, exploiting a supposed national crisis to demonize political opponents is antithetical to a president’s role in moments of national crisis.
But it’s not just the Democratic Party in Trump’s sights. It is the infrastructure and institutions that underlie the American middle class that arose in the aftermath of World War II. That less stratified America, with its broader prosperity, access to better education and expanded minority rights, threatened the tidy order of redlining, Jim Crow, and the “natural order” of white-male control. Trump-MAGA means to burn down the post-war order like the Greenwood District in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
An extinction-level event for higher education
Astra Taylor and Eleni Schirmer write this morning atThe New Republic that Trump’s reconciliation bill represents “an extinction event for higher education as we know it.” The measure “weaponizes working-class families’ reliance on debt to finance their college dreams with such intensity that not only will it push millions to the financial brink, it will push them out of higher education altogether.”
The bill’s effect will be to “cement the stereotype of higher education as an elite institution into an ironclad reality.” What better way to restore an old caste system than by limiting upward mobility and gutting the American Dream? Who knows? Maybe white-columned mansions will come back into fashion across the South.
Yes, it will re-impoverish America and further weaken our world standing (already in the toilet). But what the left refuses to acknowledge is that some of our neighbors would rather be worse off economically than see Irresponsibles get ahead. For them, politics is not about money. It’s about social dominance.
Taylor and Schirmer write:
In the words of influential conservative activist Christopher Rufo, “Reforming the student loan programs could put the whole university sector into a significant recession” and state of “existential terror.” The goal is to use economic policy to impose an unpopular and stifling ideological agenda, exacted by punitive student debt.
The rest is details. The bottom line is conservative social control. They hate you. They really hate you.
The reconciliation bill threatens to supercharge their oligarchic cause. Rising costs will reinforce the perception that education is the domain of an out-of-touch elite, prompting many to abandon or abort their academic dreams, which will resegregate broad swaths of society. The threat of mounting debt will discourage people from studying their passions or pursuing careers in public service, steering them instead toward the private sector or the military. It will weaken the general bargaining position of workers, who will be less able to use education as a path of upward mobility, while making the labor force more docile; workers burdened by debt are less likely to strike. By funneling student debtors’ ballooning payments into Wall Street coffers and regressive tax cuts, it will ensure that social and economic disparities become more entrenched.
Ladies? It’s barefoot and pregnant again for you. Workers? It’s uneducated dependency on the company store again. (Cue Tennessee Ernie Ford.)
The good old days will be here again! Or in Trump-speak, THE GOOD OLD DAYS!!!
Fire up your laptops and let your MOCs know that despite Kamala Harris’s loss last fall, you’re not going back.
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