Do we have any idea where we are going as a country? The sober fact is that the Congress is within hours of passing a massive tax “reform” bill that will absolutely devastate not only the discretionary spending of the US but the health care system as well, and wreak pure havoc with graduate-level education, particularly doctoral education. Making grad stipends and tuition remission into taxable income will put graduate education out of reach for all but the wealthiest students, and why would they want to get a degree anyway? The losses of students will in turn destroy department after department. Only a few well-endowed graduate programs will survive. And here’s the point — NOBODY SEEMS TO CARE! This is an absolutely foreseeable result — no “unforeseen consequences” here! For most of the Republicans, this isn’t a bug — it’s a feature. They’ve never liked pointy-headed intellectuals anyway, and this is a dandy way to cut them down to size. Let the Chinese take over world-class scientific research — who cares? There may be a couple of Republicans somewhere who actually believe in their own magic of “dynamic scoring”, but most of them understand that it’s a crock and that the tax bill will do next to nothing for investment. It’s a payoff for their donors, as some have openly acknowledged.
Barring some last-minute miracle, this is going to happen. There won’t be any last-minute miracles. All the swing votes have been bought off — Lisa Murkowski is having wet dreams at the thought of all that lovely oil flowing out of the ANWR; McCain, Flake, and the others are being good little party folks so that they don’t cut off their future lobbying jobs. In agency after agency, low-level political functionaries are energetically ripping out the governmental infrastructure that would ordinarily maintain continuity of policies in critical areas; they don’t even need secretaries and assistant secretaries; just a bunch of “special assistants” to do this work. The president’s Office of Science and Technology Policy for all practical purposes no longer exists, just as its role becomes more critical than ever.
Mick Mulvaney at OMB very well understands the essential fragility and vulnerability of the governmental apparatus, and knows just which props to pull out to make the whole thing come crashing down. How they believe that this is going to result in a better society is something I can’t fold my brain around, but they do. Within another year I don’t know if there will be enough left of the government, other than the Department of Justice (to prosecute pot growers), ICE, the Bureau of Prisons, and the Defense Department, to either ensure domestic tranquility or promote the general welfare. Medicare is about to take a $50 billion hit next year, more to follow. And Tillerson’s work gutting the State Department appears almost complete, so he’s going to be toast — reminiscent of nothing so much as the replacement of Yagoda by Yezhov at the NKVD once the Old Bolsheviks had been exterminated. You may find the butcher useful, but you don’t invite him to dinner.
Any thought that this whole pattern is going to be reversed by a sudden flash of national sanity and/or conscience is magical thinking. There is simply no cultural demand for an alternative vision, and no set of institutions strong enough to act as a core for its mobilization. Local committees are not going to spring up and demand change. There is no national media worthy of the name that isn’t hopelessly compromised. Most national politicians are so terrified right now about their private lives and conduct anytime over the last 30 years being exposed that they won’t lift their heads out of their bunkers. A solid 25–30% of the voters (their power vastly expanded by gerrymandering and vote suppression) are absolutely ecstatic about the havoc being wreaked on government, and would cheerfully participate in stoning anyone who tries to stop it, even as their own lives are rendered more and more difficult. The cascading failures of government at all levels will mean nothing to these people other than that they were right all along. In the meantime, all the discretionary resources of the country will have been scooped up by the rentier class and sequestered in offshore banks to pay for offshore luxuries.
After a lifetime spent studying organizations, I have come to respect, if nothing else, their power to preserve themselves. Just as large objects like suns and big planets warp the spacetime around themselves, so too do large powerful organizations (both the visible and invisible ones) warp the society around them in their own presumed interests. But the almost complete divorce of ownership from management — Elon Musk being one of the few exceptions — pretty much guarantees that those “presumed interests” will be short-term enrichment that the managers can feed from. For the past 50 years, we’ve be churning out MBAs who believe that this behavior is God-ordained, and who wouldn’t recognize a long-term investment if they slept with it. I won’t quite say that academia deserves its forthcoming collapse, for both its embrace of the managerial mind-set and “political correctness” as well as curricular short-sightedness and general indifference, but it’s a close call.
I’d love to believe that the country will pull back from the brink and that as a consequence an angel will get his wings, but you’ll have to offer a great deal more than hopes and faith. I’ve pretty much run out of those.
