A Breathtaking Lack of Perspective

This title states my take on the first week of Trump’s second term. To my mind, the problems we face are profound and devilishly hard to solve, but absurdly simple to state.

We face a rising, increasingly imperial China that already has vastly surpassed us in manufacturing, much of modern engineering and some of science. It is now grasping for the golden ring of supremacy in new scientific discovery, in quantum computers, microbiology, and artificial intelligence (if you call that a science).

We face a grisly imperial Russia that is out for eighteenth-century-style conquest. It boasts a nuclear arsenal and uses its ethnic minorities and North Korean peasants as cannon fodder, without (apparently) much internal dissent from its docile population. We face an autocratic and lawless Israeli prime minister who is using the remains of global sympathy for the Holocaust as fuel in an imperial machine barely less jingoistic and autocratic than Putin’s.

At the same time, our own nation is facing a drastic, precipitous decline. We have lost 60,000 factories. We have educated our youth, by and large, to eschew the rigors of science, math, engineering and medicine for “quick kills” in finance, software, memes and vibes. We are training and exalting “influencers” rather than doers, knowers and thinkers.

To the extent that we still have talent in the deeper and harder disciplines, it is starting to leave our shores in an appalling brain drain. We are watching helplessly as that drain draws supremacy in Western science back to Europe, where it began before an earlier, Nazi-fleeing brain drain insured our own brief supremacy during and after World War II.

Meanwhile, our economists bizarrely exult in a distorted economy of 70% services. Our so-called “thinkers” and “influencers” increasingly leave the world of hard reality behind. Instead they make careers in the abstract universes of profit, intermediation, “leverage” and financial manipulation, with or without the assistance of software and automation. Their intellectual laziness and alley-cat morality are not just spreading passively among us; they are boasted, celebrated and (because they promise riches) universally emulated.

So how does our once and present president propose to address this society-wide decline? He threatens our closest trading partners with massive, non-targeted tariffs to force them to reduce the flow of fentanyl and allegedly nasty immigrants coming from or through them.

Both the targets and the methods of his “solutions” are far from the essence of what ails us. He’s like an archer who turns his back on the target and aims his crossbow 180 degrees away.

But in adopting this spectacularly inappropriate and ineffective posture, he also seems to be emotionally mimicking a similar lack of perspective on the Democrats’ side. Here I speak of the ethos of “DEI” programs, for “diversity, equity and inclusion.”

Don’t get me wrong. I absolutely believe that diversity is the essence of our national strength, that inclusion of every minority is necessary for a healthy society, and that “equity” among people of various identities is a worthwhile goal, although hard to define and even harder to implement. (Hence my support for reparations for slavery and its multi-generational consequences, here and here.)

But what we have done as a nation, in my view, is egregiously take our eyes off the ball. For four centuries, we have enslaved, disenfranchised, marginalized, legally and socially disfavored, and steadfastly refused to recognize the contributions of, people whom we brutally stole from their African homes and their descendants.

We have made some progress in redressing these wrongs, but we still have a long way to go. So why do we Dems spend so much time talking and fretting about transgender people? Adults identifying as transgender constitute about 0.5% of adults, while Americans identifying as Black alone constitute 13.7% of us, a proportion 27 times as large. The complaints of transgender people have come to our attention, at most, in the last twenty years, while the much greater plight of a much greater number has been with us four centuries and counting.

If I could address our transgender people and their advocates as a group, here’s what I would say:

“Trans people absolutely have the right to live your lives as you see fit, to have sex (among consenting adults) with whom and however you like, and to make decisions about your heath care (with your parents, if minors) freely. I will support your rights in this regard, just as I supported the rights of homosexuals to marry (before President Obama did!), as part of the very essence of our Bill of Rights,‘live and let live.’”

“But please recognize that a much larger minority has been waiting and pushing for equal rights for four centuries and has acquired an enormous amount of strategy, wisdom and experience in so doing. Please don’t try to cut in line ahead of them or pre-empt their vast expertise.”

“Please understand that your special requests, on their face, appear to intersect with the majority’s views on vital subjects like sex, children, family and procreation, and that the roughly half of our species that identifies as female has longer-lived and equally vital interests and expertise in that regard. Their rights to reproductive health care have just been put in legal jeopardy for the first time in half a century. They too, would seem to have priority in claims and invaluable expertise and experience.”

“Anyway, please, please don’t ask me to change the language of the King James Bible, Shakespeare, Washington, Jefferson, Churchill, JFK, MLK and Obama just to recognize your right to equality. Please don’t insist that I use plural pronouns for an individual, thereby enhancing that person’s status and twisting the syntax of centuries, just to recognize that individual’s peculiar sexual identity and proclivities.”

“I believe that you and your fellows will advance your claims to equality as and when Black people and women do in America. I believe that your (and our nation’s) best strategy is to leverage their numbers, experience, expertise and wisdom. By making your unusual claims, seeming to demand priority, and insisting that the English language be changed for you, you only make yourself a target for ridicule and encourage the breathtaking lack of perspective that we see unfolding all around us in Trump’s second term.”

This is not to blame transgender people for Trump’s and the Republicans’ breathtaking lack of perspective. It’s merely to point out that a regime clearly trending toward tyranny—and using distraction and misdirection as its consistent modus operandi—demands relentless and pitiless focus from its opponents, lest they lose not just their offices but our democracy and the last vestiges of the Western Enlightenment.

I have every confidence that the highest and longest hurdles—full Black and female equality—are the decisive ones. As we surmount them, we will see our society gradually transform into something new, perhaps unrecognizable and seemingly unreachable from our current perspective.

I call it the “Judy Woodruff approach.” Over the past decade or so, on the way and into her semi-retirement, the erstwhile PBS anchor has done DEI the right way. She has nurtured, fostered and promoted some of the best women and minority men in the news industry as examples of underappreciated excellence.

One small result is the co-anchors of the PBS Newshour: Jeff Bennett and Amna Nawaz, a Black man and an Islamic woman, respectively. They are quite simply the best news anchors I have ever seen, and my experience goes back to the legendary Walter Cronkite.

I have no doubt that their consistently excellent work, almost every weeknight of the year, does far more to advance the notion of equality, both unconsciously and consciously, than any mandatory DEI sessions that employees are forced to sit through while they would rather be doing something else.

Call me a cockeyed optimist. But I’m old enough to remember when virtually everyone in the news, on TV and in the press was white, and virtually all the people of obvious power and influence were male. Kids growing up today have an entirely different perspective: the role models they see and hear every day are nearly as diverse as our population.

So what should we do? Should we encourage each new minority claiming equal rights, like the trans folk, to make spectacles and cheap targets of themselves? Should we continue to insist they everyone sit through mandatory abstract DEI sessions? Or should we encourage everyone to learn from the grizzled veterans of the struggles for Black people’s and women’s rights, who know what works and have the scars (and some impressive victories!) to prove it?

On the answers to these questions turn the attention of our people and our chances for reversing the precipitous decline into which our whirlwind of presidential dementia is drawing us like a cyclone.



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