Category: Right Mindset

Posts that focus on the mental tools that will help us fight the good fight

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Princeton’s President Dares to Speak Up for Columbia

Christopher L. Eisgruber (The Atlantic), The Cost of the Government’s Attack on Columbia: American universities have given the country prosperity and security. The Trump administration’s attack on academic freedom endangers all of that.

 Please excuse a brief point of personal privilege: my undergraduate degree is from Princeton, and, between us, my wife and I have a bunch of degrees from Columbia. (To be more precise, I have one degree from Columbia, and she has so many that I can’t remember them all.)

Yesterday, Ed Luce of the Financial Times warned that The US establishment is scared of its own shadow: Fear and muddied thinking are stopping Trump’s opponents from acting in defense of a democracy in peril. 

Well, that’s as may be. But, I am very happy to say, Princeton’s president did not get the memo. I salute him and I honor him. 

President Eisengruber of Princeton writes,

The United States is home to the best collection of research universities in the world. Those universities have contributed tremendously to America’s prosperity, health, and security. They are magnets for outstanding talent from throughout the country and around the world.

The Trump administration’s recent attack on Columbia University puts all of that at risk, presenting the greatest threat to American universities since the Red Scare of the 1950s. Every American should be concerned.

The rise of the American research university in the 20th century depended on many factors, including two crucial turning points. The first, at the start of the century, was the development of strong principles of academic freedom that allowed people and ideas to be judged by scholarly standards, not according to the whims or interests of powerful trustees, donors, or political officials. Stanford’s dismissal in 1900 of Edward Ross—an economics professor who had incited controversy with his remarks about, among other topics, Asian immigrants and the labor practices of a railroad run by the university’s founders—catalyzeda movement to protect the rights of faculty members to pursue, publish, and teach controversial ideas. Significant governance reforms took place in the same period, shifting control of professorial appointments from boards of trustees to presidents and faculties.

The second turning point came during World War II, when Vannevar Bush, the director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development, created the modern partnership between the federal government and the country’s research universities. Bush recognized that by sponsoring research at universities, the United States could lead the world in discoveries and innovations. Over time, American universities became responsible for a large portion of the government’s scientific programs, accepting tens of billions of dollars a year to perform research that would make the country stronger and improve the lives of its citizens.

These two developments had an important connection. The government’s successful collaboration with American universities depended on its respect for academic freedom, which, for decades, presidents and legislators from both political parties largely observed. That freedom attracted the world’s finest scholars and facilitated the unfettered pursuit of knowledge.

Robust federal funding helped make American universities the world’s best, but it also created a huge risk. Universities had acquired a public patron more powerful than any private donor; their budgets became heavily dependent on that single source. If the United States government ever repudiated the principle of academic freedom, it could bully universities by threatening to withdraw funding unless they changed their curricula, research programs, and personnel decisions.

That’s what the Trump administration did this month when it canceled $400 million in funding to Columbia without the legally required due process. The government toldColumbia that the money would be restored only if the university met various conditions, which included placing its Middle East, South Asian, and African Studies department “under academic receivership” and making unspecified but “comprehensive” reforms to its student admissions and international-recruiting practices.

Recent events have raised legitimate concerns about anti-Semitism at Columbia. The government can respond to those concerns without infringing on academic freedom. The principles of that freedom do not give faculty or students the right to disrupt university operations or violate campus rules. Nor does this freedom allow faculty to violate the scholarly standards of their discipline or compel students into political activity. To the extent that the government has grounds to investigate, it should use the processes required by law to do so, and it should allow Columbia to defend itself. Instead, the government is using grants that apply to Columbia science departments as a cudgel to force changes to a completely unrelated department that the government apparently regards as objectionable.

Nobody should suppose that this will stop at Columbia or with the specific academic programs targeted by the government’s letter. Precisely because great research universities are centers of independent, creative thought, they generate arguments and ideas that challenge political power across fields as varied as international relations, biology, economics, and history. If government officials think that stifling such criticism is politically acceptable and legally permissible, some people in authority will inevitably yield to the temptation to do so.

Nor should those who might revile the views expressed by some Columbia faculty members, or who dislike the university’s admission policies, take any comfort from this assault on academic freedom. Universities are now under attack from the right; in the future, left-leaning politicians may demand that universities do their bidding. Under such circumstances, the safest appointments may be the blandest ones—and brilliant scholars, those whom the world most needs, are rarely bland.

The attack on Columbia is a radical threat to scholarly excellence and to America’s leadership in research. Universities and their leaders should speak up and litigate forcefully to protect their rights.

The universities cannot, however, prevail alone. Strong, independent academic institutions produce new technologies and insights that catalyze economic growth, save lives, improve well-being, and overcome injustices. Every citizen and officeholder who cares about the strength of our country must also care about free speech, self-governing thought, and the untrammeled quest for knowledge. They, too, should demand a stop to the government’s unwarranted intrusion on academic freedom at Columbia.

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“Just Because Trump is a Product of American Rage Does not Mean he is a Solution to It”

Derek Thompson (The Atlantic), The Political Right of the Century: For the first time in decades, America has a chance to define its next political order. Trump offers fear, retribution, and scarcity. Liberals can stand for abundance.

Derek Thompson is the co-author, along with Ezra Klein, of the new book Abundance. I strongly recommend the whole article. If you don’t subscribe to The Atlantic, then you really should. 

Here are some highlights:

Donald Trump has promised a “golden age of America.” But for all his bluster about being the champion of an American century, Trump’s actual policies point to something different: not an expansive vision of the future, but a shrunken vision of the present.

Throughout the opening months of his administration, the Trump White House has consistently pointed to existing shortages to demand new sacrifices. The administration says America cannot afford its debt, and therefore we cannot afford health care for the poor. The administration says America doesn’t have a healthy economy, and therefore we have to accept economic “hardship.” The administration says America doesn’t have enough manufacturing, and so we must suffer the consequences of less trade. The administration says America doesn’t have enough housing, and so we need fewer immigrants. The administration says American scientists aren’t focused on the right research, and so we have to gut our federal science programs. Again and again, Americans are being fed the line that everything that we don’t have requires the elimination of something that we need.

The MAGA movement might try to justify its wrecking-ball style by arguing that its extreme approach is commensurate with the level of anger that voters feel about the status quo. But just because Trump is a product of American rage does not mean he is a solution to it.

In housing, for example, Americans have every right to be furious. Home construction has lagged behind our national needs for decades. Today, the median age of first-time homebuyers has surged to a record high of 38. Large declines in young homeownershiphave likely prevented many young people from dating, marrying, and starting a family. Although Trump was swept into office on a wave of economic frustration, his initial foray into economic policy has done little to help the situation. As the National Association of Home Builders pointed out in an alarmed March 7 memo, his persistent threat of tariffs on Mexico and Canada could drive up the cost of crucial materials, such as softwood lumber and drywall gypsum, which are “largely sourced from Canada and Mexico, respectively.” Meanwhile, Trump’s anti-immigrant policies foretell new labor shortages in the construction industry, where roughly 25 percent or more workers are foreign-born.

This is where Democrats should be able to stand up and show that they have a winning response to the less-is-less politics from the right. But in many places run by Democrats, the solution on offer is another variety of scarcity. Blue cities are laden with rules and litigation procedures that block new housing and transit construction. As my colleague Yoni Appelbaum has noted, in California cities where the share of progressives votes goes up by 10 points, the number of housing permits issued declines by 30 percent. Where the supply of homes is constricted, housing prices soar, and homelessness rises. As of 2023, the five states with the highest rates of homelessness were New York, Hawaii, California, Oregon, and Washington—all run by Democrats.

As the cost of living rises in blue states, tens of thousands of families are leaving them. But the left isn’t just losing people. It’s losing an argument. It has become a coalition of Kindness Is Everything signs in front yards zoned for single-family homes. Liberals say they want to save the planet from climate change, but in practice, many liberal areas have shut down zero-carbon nuclear plants and protested solar-power projects, leaving it to red states such as Texas to lead the nation in renewable-energy generation. Democrats cannot afford to become the party of language over outcomes, of ever more lawn signs and ever fewer working-class families.

If Trump’s opponents are going to win at the polls, they will need to construct a new political movement, one that aims for abundance instead of scarcity. Such a movement would combine the progressive virtue of care for the working class and a traditionally conservative celebration of national greatness, while taking a page from the libertarian obsession with eliminating harmful regulations to make the most important markets work better. It would braid a negative critique of Trump’s attack on the government with a positive vision of actual good governance in America—while providing a rigorous focus on removing the bottlenecks that stand in the way.

Abundance begins with specific goals for America’s future. Imagine much more housing where it’s most in demand. An economy powered by plentiful clean energy. A revitalized national science policy prioritizing high-risk discoveries that extend lives and improve health. And a national invention agenda that seeks to pull forward technologies in transportation, medicine, energy, and beyond that would improve people’s lives. …

I can imagine somebody opposed to the MAGA movement reading all of this and thinking: Why, at a time when Trump presents such a clear threat to the American project, is it appropriate to focus such criticism on the Democratic side?

First, to make the argument for a liberal alternative to Trumpism, Democrats have to show Americans that voting for liberals actually works. … 

Second, Americans are furious about the status quo—the youngest voters are “more jaded than ever about the state of American leadership,” according to the Harvard Political Review—and liberals need a new style of politics for the age of anti-establishment anger. The right’s answer to rage is chaos in search of an agenda. MAGA acts like a drunk toddler with a chain saw, carelessly slashing through state programs with a high risk of self-harm. But Democrats should not allow the forces of negative polarization to turn them into the party that reflexively defends the status quo at every turn, even when it means refusing to reform institutions that have lost the public’s trust. Quite the opposite: Abundance should be a movement of proud, active, and even obsessive institutional renewal.

Consider U.S. science policy, an area that is under attack from the right at this moment. As the centerpiece of U.S. biomedical funding, the National Institutes of Health has accomplished extraordinary things; you will have a hard time finding many scientific breakthroughs in the past 50 years—in heart disease, genetics, epidemiology—that were not irrigated by its funding.

But many of the same factors that have infamously plagued our housing and energy markets—paperwork, bureaucratic drift, entrenched incumbent interests—have become fixtures in American science. It is practically a cliché among researchers that the NIH privileges incremental science over the sort of high-risk, high-reward investigations that would likely uncover the most important new truths. Surveys indicate that the typical U.S. researcher spends up to 40 percent of their time preparing grant proposals and filling out paperwork rather than actually conducting science. As John Doench, the director of research and development in functional genomics at the Broad Institute, told me: “Folks need to understand how broken the system is.” …

Today, we seem to be in a rare period in American history, when the decline of one political order makes space for another. This crackup was decades in the making. It started with the Great Recession, which shattered a broad belief in free and unregulated markets. It continued throughout the 2010s, as slow economic recovery fueled public resentment of inequality, and an affordability crisis gathered steam. In 2020, the pandemic obliterated many Americans’ trust in government, or what was left of it. And from 2021 to 2024, inflation brought national attention to the interlocking crises of scarcity, supply, and unaffordability. For years, the boundaries of American politics had felt fixed, even settled. But now they are falling.

“For a political order to triumph, it must have a narrative, a story it tells about the good life,” Gerstle told me. Today’s politics are suffused with pessimism about government because “a way of living sold to us as good and achievable is no longer good, or no longer achievable.” In 2016, the rise of Bernie Sanders on the left and Donald Trump on the right revealed how many Americans had stopped believing that the life they had been promised was achievable. What both the socialist left and the populist-authoritarian right understood was that the story that had been told by the establishments of both parties, the story that had kept their movements consigned to the margins, had come to its end.

Political movements succeed when they build a vision of the future that is imbued with the virtues of the past. Franklin D. Roosevelt pitched his expansive view of government as a sentinel for American freedoms: of speech, of worship, from want, from fear. Decades later, Ronald Reagan recast government as freedom’s nemesis rather than its protector. Abundance, too, is about redefining freedom for our own time. It is about the freedom to build in an age of blocking; the freedom to move and live where you want in an age of a stuck working class; the freedom from curable diseases that come from scientific breakthroughs. Trump has defined his second term by demolition and deprivation. America can instead choose abundance.

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“They Have Seen the Sick and the Hungry in Their Own Land, and Passed by on the Other Side of the Street. They Have Done it in Your Name. Have Mercy on Their Souls. Amen. Oh, P.S., Help Us Pass the Damn Test.”

AL.com, Archibald: Alabama wants to pray or pay

The Alabama Legislature is worried about your soul.

So it is considering a bill that would hold education for ransom, slashing funding for school districts that don’t start their classroom days with a prayer.

Good bread, good meat, time’s wastin’ let’s eat.

HB231, sponsored by Pike Road GOP Rep. Reed Ingram and a host of disciples, is clear. Your students, no matter their faith, creed or lack thereof, must hear a prayer “consistent with Judeo-Christian values.”

Or risk losing 25% or their state funding. More than $63 million in Jeffco, for instance. Almost $100 million in Mobile. That’s $37 million in Madison County, and $34 million in Huntsville.

Can I get an amen?

So let’s just take a quiz. What prayers might meet that standard?

It is, of course, not as simple as all that. The bill, a constitutional amendment that would require a vote of the people, would withhold the money from school districts that show a pattern of refusing to comply. But the point is very real.

Freedom of religion in Alabama means “our way,” or to hell with you. Literally.

If this bill, this public piety for political purpose is passed, teachers should print that final prayer out and read it every single day in class.

Bow your heads and say it with me.

Oh Lord, help those men and women in the Alabama Legislature. They have taken food from the mouths of children, medicine from the sick and hope from the hopeless. They cast your people into prisons without mercy, rail against the poor and the immigrant. They have seen the sick and the hungry in their own land, and passed by on the other side of the street. They have done it in your name. Have mercy on their souls.

Amen.

Oh. P.S. Help us pass that damn test.

­­­­­­­­­­­­___________

Thanks to old friend and fellow Tuscaloosa High grad WA for sending along the article.

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How to Lose the 21st Century in 3 Easy Steps

In the Washington Post today, Catherine Rampell writes,

More than anything else, President Donald Trump loves winning. Yet he has already positioned America to lose the 21st century, in three simple steps:

  1. Alienate your friends.
  2. Destroy your business environment.
  3. Slaughter your golden goose (i.e., science and research).
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If You Have Open Borders, Then You Always Get Far Right Politics

David Leonhardt, In an Age of Right-Wing Populism, Why Are Denmark’s Liberals Winning?

Around the world, progressive parties have come to see tight immigration restrictions as unnecessary, even cruel. What if they’re actually the only way for progressivism to flourish?

Mr. Leonhardt is a senior columnist for the New York Times, and the author of Ours Was the Shining Future: The Story of the American Dream.

This is a very long article from the New York Times magazine. It takes 53 ½ minutes to read it aloud. (If you would like to hear it, go here.) In support of the thesis that is the headline of this post, the article covers a great deal of ground (geographically and historically), is well researched, and argues the case in great detail.

If you think that all US working class anti-immigrant feeling is grounded in simple racism—if you believe that the Democratic Party’s position on borders is coherent, well advised, and politically saleable—then I challenge you to read this article, consider it carefully, and articulate wherein you think it goes astray. 

A central focus is the anomalous continuing political success of Denmark’s Social Democratic Party. Leonhardt writes, 

Since the Social Democrats took power in 2019, they have compiled a record that resembles the wish list of a liberal American think tank. They changed pension rules to enable blue-collar workers to retire earlier than professionals. On housing, the party fought speculation by the private-equity industry by enacting the so-called Blackstone law, a reference to the giant New York-based firm that had bought beloved Copenhagen apartment buildings; the law restricts landlords from raising rents for five years after buying a property. To fight climate change, [Prime Minister] Frederiksen’s government created the world’s first carbon tax on livestock and passed a law that requires 15 percent of farmland to become natural habitat. On reproductive rights, Denmark last year expanded access to abortion through the first 18 weeks of pregnancy, up from 12 weeks, and allowed girls starting at age 15 to get an abortion without parental consent.

All the while, the country continues to provide its famous welfare state, which includes free education through college (including a monthly stipend of about $900 for living expenses), free medical care and substantial unemployment insurance, while nonetheless being home to globally competitive companies like Novo Nordisk, the maker of the anti-obesity drug Ozempic. In 2022, Frederiksen won a second term, defying the anti-incumbent mood that has ousted incumbent parties elsewhere since the Covid pandemic. As part of her success, she has marginalized the far right in her country.

But there is one issue on which Frederiksen and her party take a very different approach from most of the global left: immigration. Nearly a decade ago, after a surge in migration caused by wars in Libya and Syria, she and her allies changed the Social Democrats’ position to be much more restrictive. They called for lower levels of immigration, more aggressive efforts to integrate immigrants and the rapid deportation of people who enter illegally. While in power, the party has enacted these policies. Denmark continues to admit immigrants, and its population grows more diverse every year. But the changes are happening more slowly than elsewhere. …

Leftist politics depend on collective solutions in which voters feel part of a shared community or nation, [the prime minister] explained. Otherwise, they will not accept the high taxes that pay for a strong welfare state. “Being a traditional Social Democratic thinker means you cannot allow everyone who wants to join your society to come,” Frederiksen says. Otherwise, “it’s impossible to have a sustainable society, especially if you are a welfare society, as we are.” High levels of immigration can undermine this cohesion, she says, while imposing burdens on the working class that more affluent voters largely escape, such as strained benefit programs, crowded schools and increased competition for housing and blue-collar jobs. Working-class families know this from experience. Affluent leftists pretend otherwise and then lecture less privileged voters about their supposed intolerance.

“There is a price to pay when too many people enter your society,” Frederiksen told me. “Those who pay the highest price of this, it’s the working class or lower class in the society. It is not — let me be totally direct — it’s not the rich people. It is not those of us with good salaries, good jobs.” She kept coming back to the idea that the Social Democrats did not change their position for tactical reasons; they did so on principle. They believe that high immigration helps cause economic inequality and that progressives should care above all about improving life for the most vulnerable members of their own society. The party’s position on migration “is not an outlier,” she told me. “It is something we do because we actually believe in it.”

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Good News!

Jeff Shesol (N.Y. Times), John Roberts Has One Chance to Get This Right

In many ways, as of the last week in February, it feels as if we are all taking a trip on the Titanic, fast approaching that iceberg. Take for example the New York Times piece from today. I don’t disagree with a word in it. 

Our situation is dire, in so many ways that it’s difficult to count all of them. But … I really hope you can spare a few minutes to watch Rick Wilson’s video, to supply some needed perspective. 

And permit me to supplement Wilson’s take in the following way. Begin with several things we know for sure, or at least to a very high level of confidence, about how events are going to evolve over the next few weeks. 

Five Things We Know for Sure, or at Least to a High Level of Confidence

1. Trump, Elon Musk, and their henchmen remain high on their own supply. In very important ways, they literally do not know what they are doing. In many ways, they don’t know the harm they are causing (or are about to cause) in the lives of their own supporters. In many ways, they have a fundamental misperception of public opinion. (Yeah, lot of that going around.)

2. Trump and his crew will continue to wreck the federal government, which will produce ever increasing levels of mayhem.

3. Trump and his crew will do jack shit to combat inflation, in violation of the one campaign promise that put him over the top in 2024.

4. The process of wrecking the federal government will culminate—in maybe a month, or it could be sooner—in a true constitutional crisis, where Trump openly defies the Supreme Court.

5. Any of several pending foreign policy crises will ripen into disaster. In particular, just as Biden had his Afghanistan moment, so Trump is probably going to have his Ukraine moment. 

Now, Let Us Hazard a Cautious Prediction

Here is the prediction:

While we cannot predict the outcome when all of these situations ripen into disaster at more or less the same time, we can say with some confidence that the five trends will interact with each other.

To take an example: The number of people who might be willing, in good times, to acquiesce in Trump’s overthrow of the rule of law is smaller than the number of people who will cheer when he defies the Supreme Court at the same time that he is royally screwing over the folks who voted for him. And, at the same time, selling out America’s allies and cheering on a Russian invasion.

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Take This Job and Shove It

Danielle Sassoon, Esq., a graduate of Harvard College and of Yale Law School, a former clerk for Justice Antonin Scalia, a continuing member in good standing of the Federalist Society, and—for a few weeks, following Trump’s inauguration—temporary chief federal prosecutor in Manhattan, has resigned. She took this action because she could not, in good conscience, obey her masters’ orders to go into court and ask for dismissal of the criminal case against Eric Adams, in circumstances where there was no proper legal basis for making such a request. 

Her resignation letter of February 12, addressed to Attorney General Bondi, spends 7½ pages explaining the baselessness of the position she had been ordered to advocate to the courts. The letter concludes thusly,

I Cannot in Good Faith Request the Contemplated Dismissal

Because the law does not support a dismissal, and because I am confident that Adams has committed the crimes with which he is charged, I cannot agree to seek a dismissal driven by improper considerations. As Justice Robert Jackson explained, “the prosecutor at his best is one of the most beneficent forces in our society, when heacts from malice or other base motives, he is one of the worst.” The Federal Prosecutor, 24 J. Am. Jud. Soc’y 18 (“This authority has been granted by people who really wanted the right thing done—wanted crime eliminated—but also wanted the best in our American traditions preserved.”). I understand my duty as a prosecutor to mean enforcing the law impartially, and that includes prosecuting a validly returned indictment regardless whether its dismissal would be politically advantageous, to the defendant or to those who appointed me. A federal prosecutor “is the representative not of an ordinary party to a controversy, but of a sovereignty whose obligation to govern impartially is as compelling as its obligation to govern at all.” Berger v. United States, 295 U.S. 78, 88 (1935).

For the reasons explained above, I do not believe there are reasonable arguments in support of a Rule 48(a) motion to dismiss a case that is well supported by the evidence and the law. I understand that Mr. Bove disagrees,and I am mindful of your recent order reiterating prosecutors’ duty to make good-faith arguments in support of the Executive Branch’s positions. See Feb. 5, 2025 Mem. “General Policy Regarding Zealous Advocacy on Behalf of the United States.” But because I do not see any good-faith basis for the proposed position, I cannot make sucharguments consistent with my duty of candor. N.Y.R.P.C. 3.3; id. cmt. 2 (“A lawyer acting as an advocate in an adjudicative proceeding has an obligation to present the client’s case with persuasive force. Performance of thatduty while maintaining confidences of the client, however, is qualified by the advocate’s duty of candor to the tribunal.”).

In particular, the rationale given by Mr. Bove—an exchange between a criminal defendant and the Department of Justice akin to the Bout exchange with Russia—is, as explained above, a bargain that a prosecutor should not make. Moreover, dismissing without prejudice and with the express option of again indicting Adams in the future creates obvious ethical problems, by implicitly threatening future prosecution if Adams’s cooperation with enforcing the immigration laws proves unsatisfactory to the Department. See In re Christoff, 690 N.E.2d 1135 (Ind. 1997) (disciplining prosecutor for threatening to renew a dormant criminal investigation against a potentialcandidate for public office in order to dissuade the candidate from running); Bruce A. Green & Rebecca Roiphe, Who Should Police Politicization of the DOJ?, 35 Notre Dame J.L. Ethics & Pub. Pol’y671, 681 (2021) (noting that the Arizona Supreme Court disbarred the elected chief prosecutor of Maricopa County,Arizona, and his deputy, in part, for misusing their power to advance the chief prosecutor’s partisan political interests). Finally, given the highly generalized accusations of weaponization, weighed against the strength of theevidence against Adams, a court will likely question whether that basis is pretextual. See, e.g., United States v. Greater Blouse, Skirt & Neckwear Contractors, 228 F. Supp. 483, 487 (S.D.N.Y. 1964) (courts “should be satisfiedthat the reasons advanced for the proposed dismissal are substantial and the real grounds upon which the application is based”).

I remain baffled by the rushed and superficial process by which this decision was reached, in seemingcollaboration with Adams’s counsel and without my direct input on the ultimate stated rationales for dismissal. Mr. Bove admonished me to be mindful of my obligation to zealously defend the interests of the United States and to advance good-faith arguments on behalf of the Administration. I hope you share my view that soliciting andconsidering the concerns of the U.S. Attorney overseeing the case serves rather than hinders that goal, and that we can find time to meet.

In the event you are unwilling to meet or to reconsider the directive in light of the problems raised by Mr. Bove’s memo, I am prepared to offer my resignation. It has been, and continues to be, my honor to serve as a prosecutor in the Southern District of New York.

Very truly yours,

DANIELLE R. SASSOON

United States Attorney Southern District of NewYork

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Prof. Michael Sandel Explains What Trump’s Election Says About America

You know what they say: You can always tell a Harvard man—but you can’t tell him much. 

Michael Sandel, a political philosopher and the Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Professor of Government at Harvard, has a whole lot to say about the root causes of working class resentment in the United States. 

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A Sense of Being Treated Unfairly Is Not the Same as “Zero Sum Thinking”

I want to take issue with one implication found in the Guardian piece quoted in my most recent post, Rage in the Rust Belt.

The author implies that the good folks in the Rust Belt are thinking in zero sum terms: if Blacks or Gays are getting some benefit, that must mean that good old working class white people like me are being deprived of that benefit. In other words, there’s only so much to go around, and if your tribe is getting more, that necessarily means my tribe is getting less.

Now, I am sure that a lot of working class white folks do feel exactly that way. And I am sure that Orange Jesus and his supporters and enablers have done everything they can to whip up such zero sum thinking. 

But … but … but …

As a matter of fact, and as a matter of logic, it’s entirely possible that you can legitimately complain of being “left behind” without thinking, fallaciously, that the reason you were “left behind” is that someone else got a benefit. 

In other words, resentful thinking—a sense that you’re being treated unfairly—is not the same thing as zero sum thinking. 

Zero sum thinkers are likely to be resentful, but not all resentful folks think in zero sum terms.