Despite Trump's Psychosis, The Early Numbers Comparing San Francisco With New York Shows That Sheltering In Place Works

San Franciosco Chronicle writer Erin Allday asked why New York has ten times more COVID-19 cases than California, noting that "New York’s coronavirus outbreak has violently erupted over the past few days, and the state is now driving the national epidemic-- while on the West Coast, public health experts are wondering if an early and aggressive response saved California from a similar fate. California reported some of the earliest coronavirus cases in the United States in late January. And in the first week of March, California and New York were neck and neck on cases of COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus. But over the past week, New York case counts have doubled every few days, and the state now has 10 times the cases California does: 25,000 to 2,500."

Swell.Life has a fascinating analysis of The Chronicle's question by founder and CEO/CTO Sudha K Varadarajan: Bay Area is Flattening the Curve-- Early data indicates effectiveness of Shelter in Place. Shelter in Place was instituted in the Bay Area before any other jurisdictions and without any federal support or mandate. "So far," writes Varadarajan, "the numbers seem to indicate that this was not only a wise decision but will help us come out of this far quicker than anyone else (provided we can limit people traveling into or outside of the Bay Area and continue to maintain social distancing). And quicker recovery will mean that the economic impact is likely to be much lower than what it would have been had we done this sometime later, after more cases were allowed to spread. Now, I must caveat this with it being early days. But the numbers appear to indicate that aggressive distancing and lock-down policies are highly effective when applied early."

The Bay Area put its Shelter in Place effective Mar 17. I have compared data from Mar 15 to about 6 pm PT on Mar, 22, which was the time of this writing. And, I will continue to update this article over the coming days with more data.

This article examines data from two major states in the US, namely CA and NY. It also looks at some regions within CA, including the Bay Area and Los Angeles County. And finally, it looks at CA vs the rest of the US as an aggregate. For the purpose of this article, Bay Area numbers use the aggregate numbers from the following counties: San Francisco, San Mateo, Santa Clara, Alameda, Contra Costa, Marin, Santa Cruz, Solano, Sonoma and Napa.

Number of coronavirus tests conducted

There is no good data source I could find on this-- if you have any, please do send them my way. The best figures I could find indicate that California has conducted about 23,200 tests, New York has conducted 32,427 tests. These figures are about  a day or two old. The reason it is important to know how many have been tested is because I want to put aside the argument that NY has tested more and hence has reported more cases. The numbers indicate that both states have conducted similar numbers of tests on their population. 

Bay Area vs New York

First, let us compare the Bay Area to New York. On Mar 16, before shelter in place, we had 310 cases in the Bay Area with 5 deaths, and 950 in New York with 6 deaths. Here is how much the virus has spread in the past 6 days in these regions. The Bay Area is now at 786 cases and 13 deaths, while New York has 15168 cases and 114 deaths.

Bay Area vs California

On Mar 16, 310 of the 392 cases in California, or 79% of the cases, were in the Bay Area. Today, six days later, 786 of the 1555 cases in California, which is 50% of the cases, are from the Bay Area. The deaths have fallen from 83% (5 of 6 cases) to 44% (13 of 29 cases).

Santa Clara County vs Los Angeles County

In the Bay Area, on Mar 16, Santa Clara county accounted for 138 of the 310 (44%) cases and 4 of the 5 (80%) deaths. Shelter in Place was instituted in the Bay Area and so we compared it to Los Angeles County, which had 94 cases and 1 death on Mar 16 and now has 409 cases with 5 deaths.

California vs the US

We then look at California vs the rest of the US. California’s leadership acted early to institute social distancing effectively amongst its huge population. It is the most populous state in the country, with double the number of people in New York. The graph clearly indicates that California has been much more effective in flattening its curve compared to the rest of the country.

In summary, these are early days. But the early Shelter-in-Place by the Bay Area leadership and adherence by the community, appears to have made a huge difference in the spread of the virus in this community.

And speaking of San Francisco... Lawrence Ferlinghetti just turned 100-- and it sure looks like he's still going strong. He has a few words about the Trump Regime and its hangers-on (my interpretation).

Pity the nation whose people are sheep
   And whose shepherds mislead them
 Pity the nation whose leaders are liars
            Whose sages are silenced
  And whose bigots haunt the airwaves
 Pity the nation that raises not its voice
          Except to praise conquerers
       And acclaim the bully as hero
          And aims to rule the world
              With force and by torture
          Pity the nation that knows
        No other language but its own
      And no other culture but its own
 Pity the nation whose breath is money
 And sleeps the sleep of the too well fed
      Pity the nation oh pity the people
        who allow their rights to  erode
   and their freedoms to be washed away
My country, tears of thee

                   Sweet land of liberty

The Devil's Bargain-- Republican Religion

On Friday, Trump AG William Barr spoke at the Notre Dame Law School, decrying the ascendancy of secularism and vowing "to do all he can to assure continued religious freedom for Americans." More a political hack for the far right than an actual Attorney General, Barr babbled, incoherently to the students that "Among the militant secularism are many of the so-called progressives, but where is the progress? We are told we are living in a post-Christian era, but what has replaced the Judeo-Christian moral system?"

Trudy Ring's piece for The Advocate puts the lie to the manufactured grievances Barr and the rest of the Trumpists are trying to stir up among religious-right voters. This weekend was the annual the Values Voters Summit-- nothing more than a GOP conclave-- and progressive evangelicals Vote Common Good went... and got kicked out by the Trump-oriented anti-Jesus Family Research Council.

It’s been said that it’s better to light a single candle than to curse the darkness-- and that’s what the progressive Christian group Vote Common Good aims to do at this weekend’s Values Voter Summit.

“We want to just be a small candle in the corner of what tends to be a pretty dark narrative,” Doug Pagitt, cochair and executive director of Vote Common Good, told The Advocate in an interview ahead of the event.

...The list of speakers at this year’s VVS, which opened Friday at the Omni Shoreham Hotel in Washington, D.C., reads like a who’s who of homophobes, including FRC President Tony Perkins, former U.S. Sen. Rick Santorum, former Congresswoman Michele Bachmann, current Congressman Louie Gohmert, International Religious Freedom Ambassador Sam Brownback (set to appear Saturday night with Trump), and many more. Anti-LGBTQ sentiment is, of course, not the only thing the conference is about-- there are sessions devoted to anti-abortion activism, opposing gun restrictions, resisting “socialism,” and other causes close to the religious right’s heart.

But Vote Common Good will be represented at the VVS to show there’s an alternative path for religious believers, including evangelical Christians-- they don’t have to be part of the Christian right, Pagitt said.

The word evangelical is often associated with conservative Christianity. One of its definitions in the Merriam-Webster dictionary is “emphasizing salvation by faith in the atoning death of Jesus Christ through personal conversion, the authority of Scripture, and the importance of preaching as contrasted with ritual.” Another is “marked by militant or crusading zeal.” And evangelicalism is sometimes connected with Christian fundamentalism, a belief that everything in the Bible is to be taken literally.

But Pagitt, who describes himself as an evangelical pastor of a nondenominational church in Minneapolis, said there’s not a single agreed-upon definition of evangelicalism, although there are some general guidelines as to what it means. People who identify as evangelical, he said, tend to have a deeply personal sense of faith, organized around the life, death, and resurrection of Christ, and use the Bible as a guide to living. What his faith has guided him to is a belief in inclusion, of love for all people, including LGBTQ people.

“For many of the people who are in this movement, it has been the fight to include gay and lesbian people in their churches that has pushed them,” he said.

He and Vote Common Good also break with the Christian right on a variety of other issues. The group opposes the criminalization of abortion and limitations on contraception. It supports political action to reduce environmental destruction, poverty, gun violence, and international conflicts. These are all part of the priorities Pagitt calls the “four P’s”-- people, poverty, peace, and the planet.

...At the Values Voter Summit, Pagitt is promoting his organization’s “Love-in-Politics Pledge,” which urges leaders to act with the kind of love described in the New Testament’s First Corinthians, which says in part, “Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs.”

“It seems the opposite of what Donald Trump does in his life and his political positions,” Pagitt said.

The group doesn’t have a spot on the conference stage-- to obtain that, it would have to agree to a set of beliefs that Vote Common Good doesn’t endorse. So Pagitt and his colleagues will be spreading the word about the pledge in public spaces at the Omni. “We’ll do it with a wink and a smile,” he added, not by being disruptive.

Doug, in the den of the Beast

Maybe smiling is a no-no, because the Vote Common Good folks were kicked out of the event. Saturday, Pastor Pagitt wrote to Vote Common Good supporters that they went to the VVS "with a mission: Bring together Christians who are interested in elected officials who will lead in the way of love. And they kicked us out. The Family Research Council kicked us out because they are afraid. They’re threatened. When we engage in conversation with Christian voters, those people will realize that their values compel them to vote for the common good-- which means voting against Donald Trump and his allies, including the Family Research Council. They’re scared of losing support. We didn’t go to the Values Voter Summit with a mission of division or hate. We traveled to unite Christian voters behind our Love-in-Politics Pledge, calling on faith-full voters to support candidates who lead in the way of love. We are disappointed, but sadly not surprised, that the Family Research Council rejected our outreach. But we will persist. Our message of love resonates with Christians all across America. We know that when our movement opens up the conversation, others will join us."

Doug told me that he had requested a media pass last week, which had been turned down. They were told though that, with permission from the hotel, they could make recordings.  "When we arrived they changed that. They stopped up from recording ourselves in the hallway. We stopped recording. Then they came back 10 minutes later and said, 'we are revoking you participation and you must turn in your registration badge.' When we asked for the reason we were told, 'we don’t need to give you a reason. You need to turn in your badge and leave immediately or you will be escorted out by the city police.' Then we were told that we could not be in the part of the hotel where the conference was being held. We did as instructed after asking about a refund for our registration. We were told that we would have to email their office and request a refund."

Is that part of William Barr's Judeo-Christian moral system? They go mad when they hear this kind of thing-- which he wrote on Thursday in conjunction to Ralph Reed's upcoming book, Render to God and Trump-- from influential pastors like Doug Pagitt:

Ralph Reed has chosen Jesus’ statement to "Render to God what is God’s and to Cesar what is Cesar’s" for his argument calling Evangelical voter’s to support Trump. He should have however considered Jesus' other statement, "what does it profit a person to gain the whole world and lose their very soul."

Just as Reed has misread the "Render" passage-- it has nothing to do with giving blind allegiance to a President, so, I assume he would misread the "lose your very soul" quote.

Jesus was of course not referring to a an afterlife narrative of heaven or hell-- in fact Jesus never spoke of those dimensions.

Jesus was referring to losing the very sense of one’s self, losing touch with reality, losing, your own core self, becoming endlessly awash in the whims of the day.

And, that is precisely what Reed and the Right Wing religious fanatics he leads have done-- they have lost their souls, or some might say, "their minds."

I am reminded of the old joke about a stock trader who when he heard Jesus’ warning that you could gain the whole world and lose your soul responded by saying, "actually that’s a pretty great deal. Think about it, the entire world… for just one soul." It seems Reed has made that same calculation.

And, he is even willing to call his Christian fringe of followers to go down to the trading floor with him.

As it turns out Reed will not actually get the "whole world" in this trade. He will get a Tumpian, gold-plated, knock-off version of it. Because in the end, Trump will lose on November 3, 2020. And, as it turns out so will Ralph Reed and all the others who make this Devil’s bargain.

Being A Member Of The Elite May Be A Drag-- But Being A Slave Is Much Worse

You know the old refrain, "I work like a slave?" Don't use it anymore. There really are still slaves, actual slaves-- like the ones who built the pyramids, like the ones who built America...

Last week, the Boston Globe published a provocative essay by Jeff Jacoby, Slavery Then And Now. Jacoby bemoans the lack of awareness that slavery exists today.

“Slavery did not end with abolition in the 19th century,” observes Anti-Slavery International , which was founded in 1839 as the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, and is the world’s oldest abolitionist organization. Around the world today, tens of millions of men, women, and children are enslaved in different ways. About 25 million are trapped in forced labor, which is defined as “any work or service which people are forced to do against their will, under threat of punishment.” At least 8 million more people, especially in South Asia, are locked into debt bondage — a system of indentured servitude, in which they slave for little or no pay in order to reduce a debt.

“Often entire families have to work to pay off the debt taken by one of its members,” the anti-slavery society explains. “Sometimes, the debt can be passed down the generations and children can be held in debt bondage because of a loan their parents had taken decades ago.”





In a short film , Anti-Slavery International documents the awful, aching reality of brickmaking bonded laborers in India. Work in the kilns typically begins at midnight or 1 am, and entire families labor together for as much as 14 hours daily. Children account for about one fifth of the bonded-labor workforce. Most never get to attend school; many suffer ill health. “One of my sons is 14 years old, another is 9, and a third is 7,” one young mother says. “The children have to work at any cost-- what would they eat if they didn’t work?”

Chattel slavery hasn’t vanished from the world either. Across much of Africa, babies to this day are born into bondage and grow up as property owned by slaveholding families.

People born into descent-based slavery face a lifetime of exploitation and are treated as property by their so-called “masters.” They work without pay, herding animals, working in the fields or in their masters’ homes. They can be inherited, sold or given away as gifts or wedding presents. Women and girls typically face sexual abuse and rape, and often have to bear their masters’ children. In turn, their children will also be owned by their masters. 

According to the Boston-based American Anti-Slavery Group, the only black chattel slaves in the world now are found in Muslim north and central Africa. More than 500,000 African slaves (by some estimates, more than 850,000) “are still bought, owned, sold, and traded by Arab and black Muslim masters in five African countries”-- Algeria, Libya, Mauritania, Nigeria, and Sudan.

...One-tenth of North Korea’s population is held in absolute bondage, the highest percentage of enslaved people of any nation on earth. More than 2.6 million people live under slavery in East Asia’s notorious hermit kingdom, according to the 2018 Global Slavery Index , and the vast majority of them are forced to work by the government. The sheer evil brutality of North Korea’s slave-labor complexes is monstrous. They are hellholes where starving children are beaten to death for snatching a few kernels of corn, where three generations of families are enslaved together, and where relatives of escapees are tortured unspeakably.

Slavery in the 21st century also takes the forms of human trafficking, forced marriage, and domestic servitude. All told, more than 40 million victims are believed to be enslaved in the modern world. By all means, take the time to learn more about how slavery began in America four centuries ago. It was a terrible chapter in our history, and in some ways its effects are with us yet. But don’t get so caught up in studying slavery that no longer exists that you have no time to notice slavery that is still all too real. The scourge of slavery has yet to be wiped out. Human beings are shackled in the house of bondage yet, still groaning in their slavery and crying for help. 

Daniel Markovits is a Yale Law professor and author of The Meritocracy Trap. In his 2015 Yale Law commencement speech on the "Rat Race" he pointed out that "Elite lawyers’ real incomes have roughly tripled in the past half-century, which is more than ten times the rate of income growth experienced by the median American. Moreover, this explosion in elite lawyers’ incomes is not an eccentric or even isolated phenomenon. Instead, it fits into a wider pattern of rising elite labor incomes across our economy. You probably know that the share of total national income going to the top 1 percent of earners has roughly doubled in the past three decades. But its perhaps less familiar that fully four-fifths of that increase comes from rising wages paid to elite labor. And it may be more surprising still to learn that the top 1 percent of earners, and indeed even the top one-tenth of 1 percent, today owe fully four-fifths of their total incomes to labor. That is unprecedented in all of human history: American meritocracy has created a state of affairs in which the richest person out of every thousand overwhelmingly works for a living."

Elite lawyers’ incomes-- including when diluted by sabbaticals from private-public service-- will place you comfortably above the economic dividing line that comprehensively separates the rich from the rest in an increasingly unequal America. Perhaps most critically, your lawyerly skills will finance training your children-- through private schools and myriad other enrichments-- to thrive in the hyper-competition that you have yourselves, in effect, just won. This, then is where things stand. We have become a profession and a society constituted by meritocracy. Massively intensified and massively competitive elite training meets massively inflated economic and social rewards for elite work. You, in virtue of sitting here today, belong to the elite-- to the new, superordinate working class. This structure, whatever its virtues, also imposes enormous costs. Most obviously, it is a catastrophe for our broader society-- for the many (the nearly 99 percent) who are excluded from the increasingly narrow elite. There is an irony here. Brewster and others embraced meritocracy self-consciously in order to defeat hereditary privilege, … but although it was once the engine of American social mobility, meritocracy today blocks equality of opportunity. The student bodies at elite colleges once again skew massively towards wealth.

At Harvard College and here at Yale Law School, two places where students have skillfully and bravely compiled data that their universities suppress, as many students come from households in the top 1 percent as from the entire bottom half of the distribution. These facts will shock, as they are designed to do, but a moment’s clear reflection should render them unsurprising and even inevitable. The excess educational investment over and above what middle-class families can provide that children born into a typical one-percenter household receive is equivalent, economically, to a traditional inheritance of between $5 [million] and $10 million per child. Exceptional cases always exist-- as some of you sitting here prove-- but in general, children from poor or even middle-class households cannot possibly compete-- when they apply to places like Yale-- with people who have imbibed this massive, sustained, planned, and practiced investment, from birth or even in the womb. And workers with ordinary training cannot possibly compete-- in the labor market-- with super-skilled workers possessed of the remarkable training that places like Yale Law School provide. American meritocracy has thus become precisely what it was invented to combat, a mechanism for the dynastic transmission of wealth and privilege across generations. Meritocracy now constitutes a modern-day aristocracy of a kind, purpose-built for a world in which the greatest source of wealth is not land or factories but human capital, the free labor of skilled workers.

The social and economic caste order in which we are now embedded-- including through our celebrations today-- demands that you comprehend yourselves on instrumental terms. Your own talent, training, and skills-- your self-same persons-- today constitute your greatest assets, the overwhelmingly dominant source of your wealth and prestige. To promote your eliteness-- to secure your caste, you must ruthlessly manage your training and labor.

Markovits' speech on the "rat race"-- the meritocracy-- is different from slavery, of course. Right? Yesterday The Atlantic published an essay on thriving in the hyper-competition that he wrote, How Life Became an Endless, Terrible Competition. His Yale students are, he wrote, "overwhelmingly, products of professional parents and high-class universities. I pass on to them the advantages that my own teachers bestowed on me. They, and I, owe our prosperity and our caste to meritocracy. Two decades ago, when I started writing about economic inequality, meritocracy seemed more likely a cure than a cause. Meritocracy’s early advocates championed social mobility. In the 1960s, for instance, Yale President Kingman Brewster brought meritocratic admissions to the university with the express aim of breaking a hereditary elite. Alumni had long believed that their sons had a birthright to follow them to Yale; now prospective students would gain admission based on achievement rather than breeding. Meritocracy-- for a time-- replaced complacent insiders with talented and hardworking outsiders."

Today’s meritocrats still claim to get ahead through talent and effort, using means open to anyone. In practice, however, meritocracy now excludes everyone outside of a narrow elite. Harvard, Princeton, Stanford, and Yale collectively enroll more students from households in the top 1 percent of the income distribution than from households in the bottom 60 percent. Legacy preferences, nepotism, and outright fraud continue to give rich applicants corrupt advantages. But the dominant causes of this skew toward wealth can be traced to meritocracy. On average, children whose parents make more than $200,000 a year score about 250 points higher on the SAT than children whose parents make $40,000 to $60,000. Only about one in 200 children from the poorest third of households achieves SAT scores at Yale’s median. Meanwhile, the top banks and law firms, along with other high-paying employers, recruit almost exclusively from a few elite colleges.

Hardworking outsiders no longer enjoy genuine opportunity. According to one study, only one out of every 100 children born into the poorest fifth of households, and fewer than one out of every 50 children born into the middle fifth, will join the top 5 percent. Absolute economic mobility is also declining-- the odds that a middle-class child will outearn his parents have fallen by more than half since mid-century-- and the drop is greater among the middle class than among the poor. Meritocracy frames this exclusion as a failure to measure up, adding a moral insult to economic injury.

Public anger over economic inequality frequently targets meritocratic institutions. Nearly three-fifths of Republicans believe that colleges and universities are bad for America, according to the Pew Research Center. The intense and widespread fury generated by the college-admissions scandal early this year tapped into a deep and broad well of resentment. This anger is warranted but also distorting. Outrage at nepotism and other disgraceful forms of elite advantage-taking implicitly valorizes meritocratic ideals. Yet meritocracy itself is the bigger problem, and it is crippling the American dream. Meritocracy has created a competition that, even when everyone plays by the rules, only the rich can win.

But what, exactly, have the rich won? Even meritocracy’s beneficiaries now suffer on account of its demands. It ensnares the rich just as surely as it excludes the rest, as those who manage to claw their way to the top must work with crushing intensity, ruthlessly exploiting their expensive education in order to extract a return.

No one should weep for the wealthy. But the harms that meritocracy imposes on them are both real and important. Diagnosing how meritocracy hurts elites kindles hope for a cure. We are accustomed to thinking that reducing inequality requires burdening the rich. But because meritocratic inequality does not in fact serve anyone well, escaping meritocracy’s trap would benefit virtually everyone.

Hierarchy by Nancy Ohanian

Elite parents push their babies onto the elite path immediately and these kids start feeling the "meritocratic pressures" from early childhood, starting in elite kindergartens. Markovits wrote that "epidemiologists at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have warned of schoolwork-induced sleep deprivation. Wealthy students show higher rates of drug and alcohol abuse than poor students do. They also suffer depression and anxiety at rates as much as triple those of their age peers throughout the country. A recent study of a Silicon Valley high school found that 54 percent of students displayed moderate to severe symptoms of depression and 80 percent displayed moderate to severe symptoms of anxiety."

The contest intensifies when meritocrats enter the workplace, where elite opportunity is exceeded only by the competitive effort required to grasp it. A person whose wealth and status depend on her human capital simply cannot afford to consult her own interests or passions in choosing her job. Instead, she must approach work as an opportunity to extract value from her human capital, especially if she wants an income sufficient to buy her children the type of schooling that secured her own eliteness. She must devote herself to a narrowly restricted class of high-paying jobs, concentrated in finance, management, law, and medicine. Whereas aristocrats once considered themselves a leisure class, meritocrats work with unprecedented intensity.

In 1962, when many elite lawyers earned roughly a third of what they do today, the American Bar Association could confidently declare, “There are … approximately 1,300 fee-earning hours per year” available to the normal lawyer. In 2000, by contrast, a major law firm pronounced with equal confidence that a quota of 2,400 billable hours, “if properly managed,” was “not unreasonable,” which is a euphemism for “necessary for having a hope of making partner.” Because not all the hours a lawyer works are billable, billing 2,400 hours could easily require working from 8 a.m. until 8 p.m. six days a week, every week of the year, without vacation or sick days. In finance, “bankers’ hours”-- originally named for the 10-to-3 business day fixed by banks from the 19th century through the mid-20th century and later used to refer more generally to any light work-- have given way to the ironically named “banker 9-to-5,” which begins at 9 a.m. on one day and runs through 5 a.m. on the next. Elite managers were once “organization men,” cocooned by lifelong employment in a corporate hierarchy that rewarded seniority above performance. Today, the higher a person climbs on the org chart, the harder she is expected to work. Amazon’s “leadership principles” call for managers to have “relentlessly high standards” and to “deliver results.” The company tells managers that when they “hit the wall” at work, the only solution is to “climb the wall.”

Americans who work more than 60 hours a week report that they would, on average, prefer 25 fewer weekly hours. They say this because work subjects them to a “time famine” that, a 2006 study found, interferes with their capacity to have strong relationships with their spouse and children, to maintain their home, and even to have a satisfying sex life. A respondent to a recent Harvard Business School survey of executives proudly insisted, “The 10 minutes that I give my kids at night is one million times greater than spending that 10 minutes at work.” Ten minutes!

The capacity to bear these hours gracefully, or at least grimly, has become a criterion for meritocratic success. A top executive at a major firm, interviewed by the sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild for her book The Time Bind, observed that aspiring managers who have demonstrated their skills and dedication face a “final elimination”: “Some people flame out, get weird because they work all the time … The people at the top are very smart, work like crazy, and don’t flame out. They’re still able to maintain a good mental set, and keep their family life together. They win the race.”

A person who extracts income and status from his own human capital places himself, quite literally, at the disposal of others-- he uses himself up. Elite students desperately fear failure and crave the conventional markers of success, even as they see through and publicly deride mere “gold stars” and “shiny things.” Elite workers, for their part, find it harder and harder to pursue genuine passions or gain meaning through their work. Meritocracy traps entire generations inside demeaning fears and inauthentic ambitions: always hungry but never finding, or even knowing, the right food.

...[I]gnoring how oppressive meritocracy is for the rich is a mistake. The rich now dominate society not idly but effortfully. The familiar arguments that once defeated aristocratic inequality do not apply to an economic system based on rewarding effort and skill. The relentless work of the hundred-hour-a-week banker inoculates her against charges of unearned advantage. Better, then, to convince the rich that all their work isn’t actually paying off.

They may need less convincing than you might think. As the meritocracy trap closes in around elites, the rich themselves are turning against the prevailing system. Plaintive calls for work/life balance ring ever louder. Roughly two-thirds of elite workers say that they would decline a promotion if the new job demanded yet more of their energy. When he was the dean of Stanford Law School, Larry Kramer warned graduates that lawyers at top firms are caught in a seemingly endless cycle: Higher salaries require more billable hours to support them, and longer hours require yet higher salaries to justify them. Whose interests, he lamented, does this system serve? Does anyone really want it?

Escaping the meritocracy trap will not be easy. Elites naturally resist policies that threaten to undermine their advantages. But it is simply not possible to get rich off your own human capital without exploiting yourself and impoverishing your inner life, and meritocrats who hope to have their cake and eat it too deceive themselves. Building a society in which a good education and good jobs are available to a broader swath of people-- so that reaching the very highest rungs of the ladder is simply less important-- is the only way to ease the strains that now drive the elite to cling to their status.

How can that be done? For one thing, education-- whose benefits are concentrated in the extravagantly trained children of rich parents-- must become open and inclusive. Private schools and universities should lose their tax-exempt status unless at least half of their students come from families in the bottom two-thirds of the income distribution. And public subsidies should encourage schools to meet this requirement by expanding enrollment.

A parallel policy agenda must reform work, by favoring goods and services produced by workers who do not have elaborate training or fancy degrees. For example, the health-care system should emphasize public health, preventive care, and other measures that can be overseen primarily by nurse practitioners, rather than high-tech treatments that require specialist doctors. The legal system should deploy “legal technicians”-- not all of whom would need to have a J.D.-- to manage routine matters, such as real-estate transactions, simple wills, and even uncontested divorces. In finance, regulations that limit exotic financial engineering and favor small local and regional banks can shift jobs to mid-skilled workers. And management should embrace practices that distribute control beyond the C-suite, to empower everyone else in the firm.

The main obstacle to overcoming meritocratic inequality is not technical but political. Today’s conditions induce discontent and widespread pessimism, verging on despair. In his book Oligarchy, the political scientist Jeffrey A. Winters surveys eras in human history from the classical period to the 20th century, and documents what becomes of societies that concentrate income and wealth in a narrow elite. In almost every instance, the dismantling of such inequality has been accompanied by societal collapse, such as military defeat (as in the Roman empire) or revolution (as in France and Russia).

Nevertheless, there are grounds for hope. History does present one clear-cut case of an orderly recovery from concentrated inequality: In the 1920s and ’30s, the U.S. answered the Great Depression by adopting the New Deal framework that would eventually build the mid-century middle class. Crucially, government redistribution was not the primary engine of this process. The broadly shared prosperity that this regime established came, mostly, from an economy and a labor market that promoted economic equality over hierarchy-- by dramatically expanding access to education, as under the GI Bill, and then placing mid-skilled, middle-class workers at the center of production.

An updated version of these arrangements remains available today; a renewed expansion of education and a renewed emphasis on middle-class jobs can reinforce each other. The elite can reclaim its leisure in exchange for a reduction of income and status that it can easily afford. At the same time, the middle class can regain its income and status and reclaim the center of American life.

Rebuilding a democratic economic order will be difficult. But the benefits that economic democracy brings-- to everyone-- justify the effort. And the violent collapse that will likely follow from doing nothing leaves us with no good alternative but to try.

Connect the dots

Behind The Scenes And In Plain View: Mental Case, Criminal, Both?

Reporting for Vanity Fair this week, Emily Jane Fox, wrote that "Stephanie Winston Wolkoff was the mastermind event producer behind Trump’s inaugural celebration, which has since come under S.D.N.Y. investigation. Now, taped conversations reveal Wolkoff’s concerns with how money was being spent, the general chaos of the process, the involvement of the Trump family, and the people in charge, namely Rick Gates and Tom Barrack." If you haven't been watching Maddow with any kind of regularity over the past couple of years, you may be unaware that Trump's inaugural committee was a piggy bank for bribes from criminals-- both domestic and foreign-- to Trump and his contemptible spawn.

Last February, the New York Times published an article centered on WIS, headlined “Trump’s Inaugural Committee Paid $26 million to Firm of First Lady’s Adviser.” The inaugural committee had raised a stunning $107 million-- about twice what Barack Obama had hauled in 2009-- from donors such as Sheldon Adelson and corporations like AT&T. But as the Times reported, the tax form revealed profligate spending-- nearly $10 million on travel; $4.6 million on salaries and benefits; and $100,000 to Rick Gates, the former campaign aide and deputy chairman of the inauguration who, about a week later, became one of Robert Mueller’s first major cooperating witnesses. Some $40 million was publicly unaccounted for. Wolkoff, as the event planner in charge, became the face of the disarray. The Times story quoted an official from a government watchdog group accusing her of “fiscal mismanagement at its worst.” ... Sarah Huckabee Sanders would later say, “The president was focused on the transition during that time, and not on any of the planning for the inauguration.”

...Wolkoff had made a career in the events business, but she knew from the outset the inauguration would be a unique, and uniquely Trumpian, experience. First, she was a political novice who knew little about what an inauguration entailed. Then, there was Trump’s controversial reputation. Upon accepting the post on the Friday after his election, Wolkoff quickly reached out to her network of vendors. Most of them, according to people familiar with these conversations, resisted the opportunity to work with Trump. Even Burnett, who Trump enlisted to conjure up reality-show-like gimmicks (such as flying a gaggle of drones over the crowd), wanted to keep his involvement private.

Moreover, and perhaps not surprisingly, Trump’s family wanted to be involved in certain aspects of the coordination... [Wolkoff made] regular presentations to Trump, Melania, and the Trump family about various decisions, so that they could weigh in. (White House spokespeople have previously denied that the Trumps were involved in any planning, and said they knew little about the events.)

Trump was focused on the big-picture theatrics. He wanted to arrive on the Mall in a military plane with a military escort, much as he had arrived for tapings of The Apprentice on Trump Organization helicopters. He also wanted to have a full military parade, as well as tanks and helicopters on the ground...

In large part, Wolkoff worried about potential ethical issues surrounding the First Family-elect and their businesses. After all, Gates had been staying in a suite at the Trump Hotel for most of the inaugural planning. More than a dozen inaugural staffers had also been staying there. The Times reported last month that WIS alone had charged $31,000 for hotel rooms in the span of less than two months, including almost $18,000 at the Trump International Hotel. That did not include what was charged for room service, meals, and travel. In all, the Trump International Hotel was paid more than $1.5 million in inaugural funds, according to the Times. (Wolkoff’s contract states that the inaugural committee would reimburse WIS for travel, long-distance phone calls, mail-delivery services, and expenses connected to the performance of its work. WIS stands for “Who Is She,” Wolkoff’s play on her own anonymity.)

During the course of planning, Wolkoff had corresponded with Ivanka about the cost of using the Trump Hotel for events leading up to the swearing-in ceremony. On December 10, 2016, a Trump Organization employee sent an estimate for a ballroom rental and food and beverage minimum to use the Trump Hotel space for eight days. The price she quoted was $3.6 million, according to an e-mail. A week later, Gates e-mailed Ivanka about the cost. In this exchange, first published this past December by ProPublica and WNYC, Wolkoff flagged her concern. “These events are in PE’s [the president-elect’s] honor at his hotel and one of them is for family and close friends. Please take into consideration that when this is audited it will become public knowledge,” she wrote. (Peter Mirijanian, a spokesperson for Ivanka’s counsel Abbe Lowell, said in a statement: “When contacted by someone working on the inauguration, Ms. Trump passed the inquiry on to a hotel official and said only that any resulting discussions should be at a ‘fair market rate.’ Ms. Trump was not involved in any additional discussions.”)

For an event producer used to detailed lists and punctilious itemization, Wolkoff was often caught off guard by the ad-hoc nature of the committee. According to the two people familiar with the matter, Gates approached a couple individuals working on the inauguration and asked if they would be willing to be paid directly for their work by a donor, rather than by the inaugural committee. They had received more donations than they’d initially anticipated, Gates told these people. Skirting the usual payment route could allow the inaugural committee to avoid reporting the full amount raised from donors.

Wolkoff frequently told Melania about her concerns regarding Gates, these people said. She relayed her concern about the high access level of his security pass within Trump Tower and his closeness with the Trump family. In her view, these people said, he exacerbated a situation already fraught with potential conflicts of interest. Members of the inaugural committee talked about how he frequently worked out of Donald Trump Jr.’s office. He was in constant communication with the adult children in order to keep them in the loop about decisions surrounding the inauguration.

Wolkoff also questioned Gates and Barrack about pricing and budgets across the board, according to the people familiar with the conversations. She started to grow concerned about being left out of meetings, particularly as she raised more red flags. Because part of her responsibilities included reviewing all budgets from her vendors and presenting them to other members of the inaugural committee, she studied the line items in order to be able to explain them. At points, she could not justify the numbers coming in. After circulation of a quote from one of their largest event-production vendors, Hargrove LLC, Wolkoff was shocked that no one in the organization appeared willing to question the figures. She suggested that the quote seemed far beyond what the Obama inaugural committee would have been charged in 2009. She sent an e-mail to her team and Barrack on December 31, 2016. “I am DISGUSTED by [Hargrove’s] lack of transparency and entitlement to [the Presidential Inaugural Committee’s] funding,” she wrote. “I can not approve any budget line items because I do not have a clue what these numbers represent!!”

One of the most concerning aspects to Wolkoff’s team, according to the people familiar with the situation, was the amount of money and attention being spent on Barrack’s chairman dinner, which he hosted on an evening before the swearing-in. A draft guest list for the event from days before the dinner included the likes of retired Lieutenant General Mike Flynn, G.O.P. fund-raiser Elliott Broidy, Michael Cohen, and key officials in the incoming administration. Among the list marked as confirmed were seven people described as “foreign ministers” for Saudi Arabia, one foreign minister from Qatar, and one from the United Arab Emirates. They were the only people on the list who were unnamed. (On Tuesday, ProPublica published a memo that showed Barrack’s investment firm planned to profit from its connections to the Trump administration. A spokesperson called it “an outline of a proposed potential business plan which was never acted upon or implemented.”)

...Much has been made of the various problems with the inauguration, from the lackluster crowd size to the president’s own “American carnage” speech, which struck a tone so dark that George W. Bush was reportedly heard calling it “some weird shit.” But Wolkoff’s part, the event itself, went off without a hitch, and the family was pleased. The day after the swearing-in ceremony was Wolkoff’s birthday. The Trumps sent flowers to the Trump Hotel room where she had been staying. She flew back to New York on a military plane with Melania, her stylist, hairdresser, makeup artist, and the rest of the Trump family, apart from the president, Ivanka, and Jared Kushner, who remained in Washington.

Much is still unknown about how inaugural funds were managed, or if the unaccounted for $40-odd million will ever be publicly explained. It’s unclear whether there was foreign influence, or illicit attempts to profit off of proceedings. What Gates has offered investigators—about anything, really, but about the inauguration, in particular—is also unclear. How deep the Southern District’s investigation into all of this is yet unknown. But much like some of Cohen’s other taped conversations, the discussions with Wolkoff about the inauguration may have turned out to be consequential. On the witness stand during Paul Manafort’s trial in Virginia last summer, prosecutors asked Gates if he charged personal expenses to the committee. “It’s possible,” he responded.

As investigators continue to pursue the matter, they may find themselves in a familiar situation: seeking out former Trump allies-turned-adversaries who saw it all go down firsthand. One of the most inexplicable plot points in the whirling Trump drama has been the president’s public treatment of his former lawyer. Trump was aware that Cohen possessed all manner of damaging information about him, and yet he wasted few opportunities to disparage him publicly. Ultimately, Cohen implicated Trump in federal campaign-finance violations as he pleaded guilty. He spent more than 70 hours cooperating with federal investigators, opening his book to tell them what he knew about the president, his business, and the campaign. While Wolkoff’s treatment has been gentler, she’s been similarly isolated and publicly disparaged. And now, what she knows could be of interest to investigators, too.

Yesterday, ProPublica updated their reporting with an article by Justin Elliott about how the Trump family was able to enrich themselves illegally, over-charging massively for the use of Trump International Hotel and pocketing the extra cash without reporting it or paying taxes on it. A truly corrupt scumbag and his well-trained family were taking over the executive branch of government and turning it into a criminal enterprise-- an organized crime family... right from Day One. Trump's life long penchant for felony coexists with increasing mental illness, something that is almost always left out of news reporting, as author and journalist Amanda Ripley reported this week, asserting, correctly, that Trump Is a Mental Health Story.

I tried an experiment the other day. To make sense of Trump’s behavior, I did not call foreign policy experts or pundits. That would be like calling an astrologer to explain a flu pandemic. Instead, I called Wendy Behary, who wrote the book Disarming the Narcissist and has treated hundreds of narcissistic clients, including surgeons, Wall Street executives, and other powerful people, in her private practice in New Jersey. It was one of the most useful conversations I’ve had about Trump in months.

Unlike the Washington Post or the New York Times, Behary has never once been surprised by Trump’s behavior. “His behavior is not remarkable. It’s predictable. It’s exactly what we’d expect,” she says. “He just continues to be a consistent version of who he appears to be.”



So far, most of the mainstream stories about Trump’s narcissism have been about whether mental health professionals should diagnose him from afar. That’s a worthy debate. But journalists are not psychiatrists. We are not bound by the rules of the American Psychiatric Association. We are bound by a duty to inform the public, without fear, drawing upon any source that may prove useful.

At this point, it’s not biased to acknowledge that Trump behaves in ways that most mental health professionals recognize as symptomatic of a larger problem. It’s not unreasonable to ask them to help explain and even predict his behavior. In fact, it may be more biased not to do so.

What if we got new sources to help us through this “remarkable” time? This doesn’t mean bashing Trump. To the contrary. In order to treat her narcissistic clients, Behary has learned to empathize with them. This isn’t easy to do, she admits, but it is essential--  so that she doesn’t mistake them for being strategic or simply evil. “Narcissists don’t set out to harm people,” she says. “They will harm you--  but it’s to protect themselves. It’s not personal.” Taking narcissists personally is a very common waste of time and energy.

Narcissists, for example, need admiration the way addicts need substances. They believe they are truly special and yet not appreciated for their gifts, which can lead them to act entitled, as if the rules do not apply to them. In their quest for recognition, they sometimes exploit others, contradict what they’ve said, and break their promises --  all the while arguing (and often truly believing) in their new, alternative facts. Once we know this, Trump’s tendency to revise history becomes unsurprising and explicable.

It’s a painful way to live, because no amount of adoration will ever be enough. After every victory, feelings of envy, anger, and frustration squirm back to the surface. Now, Behary says, Trump is “unraveling.” This, too, is predictable, which is why we need to talk about it, out in the open. As the bad news stacks up for Trump, including Republican losses in the midterms, a divided Congress, and continuing legal investigations, he is likely experiencing profound mental agony.

In this agitated state, narcissists are notoriously bad at negotiating, as it turns out. (They are good at bullying, which is not the same thing.) Catherine Conner, a family law attorney and mediator in Northern California, understands this better than political scientists, because she has helped hundreds of people craft child custody agreements and divorce settlements. A crisis, such as a divorce, may intensify narcissistic tendencies and make negotiation impossible, she says.

“The only way to create an agreement is to put yourself in the other person’s shoes and come up with a package that might appeal to both of you,” Conner says. “If they are incapable of seeing the world through anyone else’s eyes, they won’t be able to do this. They will just remain stuck on their vision of what should be, convinced that everyone will see it their way.”



This would explain why Trump was reportedly shocked that the Democrats did not agree to his border-wall terms. He was unable to see the situation from their point of view. When this kind of intransigence takes hold in Conner’s cases, the parties are sometimes forced to rely on judges to make the decision.

In Trump’s case, if he is unable to compromise before the government shuts down again in two weeks, the courts might have to get involved. Or Trump might just turn the government back on in order to be the hero. “Narcissists are so good at showing up as Messiahs,” Behary says. If he’s at risk of losing the support of his fan base, which he needs in order to stop the pain, he will swoop in to save the day. Because that’s what narcissists do.

Typically, when all else fails and narcissists are unable to get the attention and affirmation they need, they play the victim. If the investigations continue to intensify, and if Trump begins to lose the affection of his base, Fox News pundits, and Republican leaders, he may resign, Behary predicts, based on all the narcissists she has treated for decades. “He’ll point the finger and say, ‘I was making America great again, and the Democrats stopped me.’”

Trump may not behave this way. Human behavior is complicated. But isn’t it useful to know how other people like him tend to behave, generally speaking? So let’s stop living in the past, under the old rules of journalism and politics. Let’s start talking about mental health with the directness and care that our readers deserve. If journalists want to help the public understand the world in which we live, it is time to find new pundits--  the kind who have seen this all before, who can empathize with the president and his opponents, and who do not benefit from perpetuating the chaos.

And by the way, real presidents have real inaugurations with real entertainment and no one from the family or entourage pockets millions of dollars:

What Standards Do We Hold Progressive Political Leaders To?

Click on the image to be able to read it

The Progressive Punch Top Ten. Ro Khanna is #1. It's based on votes, just votes. Ro's a friend of mine and early Tuesday I started getting e-mails and tweets aimed at me for supporting him-- not from Republicans but from progressives. Uggghhh, what now? I soon saw that people were freaking out because Ro Khanna had endorsed Joe Crowley, the powerful and corrupt former New Dem head honcho who Pelosi has handpicked to take over from her and who is being primaried by Alexandria Ocasio, a progressive heroine.

Crowley sent out a press release boasting he had been endorsed by some of the top progressives in Congress-- Ro, Mark Pocan and Maxine Waters. Focus turned immediately on Ro. I don't know why; but I was getting comments like "He's dead to me now." Odd when it was Pocan who's the leader of the Progressive Caucus and who's been whipping for Crowley. Maybe it's because Ro is so much more active on social media-- and because he takes chances-- like already endorsing 14 Justice Democrats candidates, more than anyone else in Congress... by far.

If Crowley becomes speaker, he decides which legislation gets voted on and which legislation languishes in committee and dies. What could possibly be more important to a policy guy like Khanna? And he was misled, not really aware that Ocasio was a viable candidate when he endorsed Crowley, a jovial and friendly politician. Crowley has been trolling for progressive support in a big way. "Crowley," he told me, "this Congress has supported Medicare for all, Barbara Lee and my bill to legalize marijuana, and the Workplace democracy act. Mark Pocan will tell you that he has genuinely moved ideologically and works to build consensus for progressive ideas. This term I have enjoyed working with him, and even visited his district on the digital divide."

Long before Pocan was elected to Congress I started following Crowley, the worst Wall Street whore among House Democrats who led the New Dems and created a miserable record, as well as a record of intense corruption. Since first being handed his seat, he's taken $6,957,621 from the finance sector, more than any other House Democrat. Anyone want to guess why they have cultivated him so assiduously?

Aiming for a leadership role, he kind of quit the New Dems and started voting along with the mainstream Democrats. He always had an "F" from Progressive Punch. This year he has a gentleman's "C."

Yesterday Ro endorsed Alexandria, a pretty brave move. He's now the only member of Congress to have done so. This-- below Shane Goldmacher's tweet-- is what he told me Wednesday:

I should have researched Ocasio’s story. She is exactly the type of candidate we should be encouraging, and who deserves a fair chance. She doesn’t come from privilege. She’s working class. She’s Latina. She’s a millennial. Endorsing her is recognizing that the system is stacked against new entrants in politics, that we need more people with her courage to run. She reminds me of my 27 year old self when I took on Tom Lantos against the war in Iraq. I love her bold policies on a jobs guarantee and saying no to corporate money.

The challenge for progressives is how to acknowledge people who change and adopt our policies. We need a broad coalition to pass anything. And at the same time to support new bolder voices.

As a freshman member of Congress, I won’t always get the balance right. But I have tried to do my best consistent with my values and trying to be an effective champion for progressive ideas.

We're Still Not A Theocracy

Earlier today, Frank Schaeffer, whose dad, Francis Schaeffer, was one of the founders of the Religious Right, reminded his readers that this country was never meant to be a theocracy and still isn't. Odd that he had to say so-- but today was the day it needed to be done. "For seven hours today," he wrote, "the remains of the evangelist Billy Graham will lie in the U.S. Capitol Rotunda. Why? Billy was a family friend but this is not appropriate. We aren’t Iran. We aren’t a theocracy. Watch Franklin Graham and Mike Pence strike a blow for further establishing of a homophobic white nationalist American theocracy this week by abusing the Billy Graham funeral/lying in state hoopla. And Trump will try to get in on the afterglow too."

The Religious Right is set to hijack Billy’s remains as his own son Franklin has long since planned to do.

I first met Billy Graham when I was nine. He visited my parents’ home and spent the day with us. I sat next to him and his then nine-year-old son Franklin, as they listened to my father preach in our living room that doubled as our chapel at my parents’ evangelical mission of L’Abri” (the shelter) in Switzerland.

I last saw Billy in the early 1980s when I was with my evangelist father Francis Schaeffer (“credited” as one of the founders of the religious right) who was undergoing treatment at Mayo Clinic. Billy, Dad and I met several times there when Billy was visiting for his checkups.

It seems to me that Billy died in the very year that the subculture of white evangelicalism he helped create has committed suicide by continuing to support Trump. And the double irony is Billy’s son Franklin has led what might now be called the Trump Crusade, not for Christ, but for power.

Trump’s most vocal evangelical supporter is Franklin Graham. Admired among far right white evangelicals, Franklin has defended Trump on television and social media through the white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, VA, the crackdowns on immigrants and refugees, the Stormy Daniels scandal, and the slur against Haiti and Africa.

When Barack Obama was president, Franklin Graham was part of the “birther” conspiracy that claimed the president was not an American citizen. He lied suggesting that Obama was not a Christian and might secretly be a Muslim.

During the 2016 presidential campaign, Franklin held rallies in 50 states to pump up evangelical turnout on what he called a “Decision America Tour.”

There’s a bizarre symmetry here: To get elected Trump held Graham-like mass “evangelistic” rallies and led white Christians to deny the faith Billy Graham had once preached. They denied Graham’s Jesus for the sake of accepting earthly and utterly corrupting power as their new “personal savior.”

Trump becoming president may turn out to be the lasting Billy Graham legacy. Graham’s funeral in North Carolina on Friday, which Trump will attend, will serve as a reminder of nothing so much as how the evangelical movement has mutated and splintered from one generation to the next. And sadly Billy fused his faith message with 1950s American anti-communism in ways that are still playing out today. As Anthea Butler writes in Religion dispatches (February 22, 2018 Billy Graham and the Gospel of American Nationalistic Christianity):

With Graham’s death, it’s time to reconsider how his promotion of a nationalistic version of Americanized Christianity has influenced evangelicals today. Graham’s proximity to the office of the presidency and government since the Eisenhower administration is part of why we see scenes of eager evangelicals embracing President Trump. It’s also responsible for a large cohort of evangelicals who are actively supporting Islamophobia, isolationism, and America first policies.

Billy Graham may have been “puffed” by William Randolph Hearst newspaper reporters in his first crusade in Los Angeles, but the more important event in Graham’s ministry was his Washington, D.C. crusade in 1952. It was there that he would begin what was part of his lifelong work: fusing Christianity and Americanism together to create a potent cocktail of Evangelical Christian Nationalism.

...Franklin Graham is cashing in on his parents’ deaths by making a shrine of their final resting place, and this was against his mother’s wishes. White evangelical Trump supporters don’t care about such niceties these days. They are into Franklin’s magical thinking-- that Trump is president because of God’s will, notwithstanding details like being a scum woman-abuser-- and no doubt think that Franklin is even more in touch with God’s will-- even in matters of where his mom wanted to be buried-- than the rest of us, let alone his mother.

Billy made magical thinking mainstream. He shaped a movement that then became as political as he was in his Nixon-supporting years and unlike Billy, never turned back. Full circle: Billy Graham sought to forge a movement that was distinct from the Southern racist fundamentalism of his day, yet that is precisely what today’s evangelicalism has become again.

Magical thinking isn’t a very good basis for policy or politics. “I believe Donald Trump is a good man,” Franklin Graham said on CNN, last month. “He did everything wrong as a candidate and he won, and I don’t understand it. Other than I think God put him there.”

Graham’s converts from the 1950s to 1990s (my generation, old, white, and tired) lined up to support not only Trump but Roy Moore. One of their very own, Sarah Huckabee, stands up every day and knowingly lies for Trump, covering for his multitude of sins on everything from racism to his lies about paying off porn stars, to abusing scores of women and denying that the Russians attacked our democracy to help get him elected.

Graham and the neo-evangelicals, as they called themselves, tried to create religious revival in the United States. Fifty years on what they got instead was Trump and Roy Moore, climate change deniers, white nationalism and the NRA’s lock on the party evangelicals uniquely empower.

Franklin Graham actually went to bat for the NRA. He blasted President Obama for his stand against military weapons being legal. Graham parroted the NRA/Gun-Lobby line in a Facebook post (January 6, 2016): “Your executive actions will do nothing to change this horrific problem. You can take all the guns in America and put them in a pile on the Mall in Washington DC, and those guns will stay there and will eventually rust and decay. Not one gun will crawl out of that pile and shoot or harm anyone. It takes a human being, and a human heart bent on evil, to pick up a gun, load it, and pull the trigger.”

Do evangelicalisms’ leaders remain interested in the spiritual at all these days as Billy Graham sincerely was? Or has their agenda become merely political? Trump is the answer to those questions.

The fatal arc of decline is clear. To use the biblical analogy of Saul, before he converted and took the name of Paul, holding the coats of the killers stoning St. Stephen to death, Graham’s son’s Franklin, is “holding Trump’s coat” while he stones American decency to death. Franklin even says this is God’s will.

Billy Graham’s veneer of pious civility is long gone from the white evangelical movement. It’s been replaced by Billy Graham’s own worst inner demons that he repented of after he’d become Nixon’s confidant. As he sat by Dad’s bedside Billy told Dad and me how he lamented supporting Nixon and never would “be political” again. The context of this conversation was when Billy was explaining to my father why he would not support Dad’s anti-abortion efforts.

Franklin never got the memo. The image of the white evangelicals these days is not of sinners repenting as they surge forward to the altar call while the hymn “Just as I Am” wafts over them, but rather of Nixon-type online trolls supporting gun rights by spreading vile lies about grieving high school students.

If Trump remains the defining bookend bracketing the Billy Graham era of white evangelical empowerment historians may judge Graham’s stated purpose to reach “the lost” for Christ as failed. His lasting significance may rather be understood as having contributed to the creation of a power-crazed movement that enabled an American tragedy.