Medicaid and the "Able-Bodied Man" (Tinged with the Lens of Mental Health)

 First of all, there aren't nearly as many as politicians on the right imply. Unless you live in a state that has expanded Medicaid, most "able bodied men" who get Medicaid benefits are either unemployable because of a disability of some kind or employed but still too poor to afford insurance, even on the "market" created by the Affordable Care Act. Weakening the ACA's expansion provision without completely axing a popular program is, I believe, the real reason Republicans are proposing "reform"; it has nothing to do with fraud, abuse, or the exploitation of the program by a massive but silent cabal of "able bodied men."

As someone who worked alongside the public mental health system for seven years in a non-expansion state, I do have a few thoughts on the matter of reform, though.

The "able bodied men" I worked with, almost to a man, wanted to work. Work is an incredibly important part of the male self-image in America, especially acute in the plains, south, and the midwest, states as "Red" as they come. But mental health disabilities, while often not precluding work, still create tremendous levels of discrimination by employers (100% of the time, in my experience), despite the existence of the Americans with Disabilities Act. The ADA, while a potentially powerful tool, essentially requires someone to self-disclose a disability, opening them up to being denied employment on other pretexts. In the mental health field in particular, men are encouraged to accept disability and disabled identities, to parrot back to providers their diagnoses as fundamental parts of themselves. It was routine to be introduced to someone by name and diagnosis, even though the work I was called to do was ostensibly based on recovery and moving beyond being identified as an illness.

By accepting the life of a mental patient, benefits and services—many of them quite helpful and valuable, such as housing and therapies—would be available to our ostensible "able bodied men." But this access also came with lifelong limitations, both from the system itself (more on those later) and within the minds of the men in the system. Despite wanting to work, these men often don't feel worthy of it, much less capable.

Once in the mental health system, 100% of them also become medicated. While many find these medications helpful, the meds often come with devastating side effects: lethargy; obesity; tardive dyskinesia, which weakens muscles and creates Parkinson's-like tremors. These medications can make the kind of work often open to those who want to work their way off the system, generally entry-level and labor intensive, all but impossible. And even if an "able bodied man" were to convince his service providers that he should seek alternative treatments, there are no guides for stepping down from psych meds, resulting in withdrawal syndromes that are often worse than the symptoms that led to the psychiatric diagnosis to begin with. Especially in rural areas, alternative therapies, such as talk therapies, are difficult to access or unavailable, so our supposed "able bodied man" is out of luck if he both wants help for his mental health challenges and an able body.

More generally, the entry-level work already mentioned that is available to those on Medicaid doesn't come with health insurance, doesn't pay well enough to purchase insurance via the ADA, is part time, and is dangerous or physically demanding. Kicking "able bodied men" off Medicaid will simply leave many of them impoverished, ill, and injured. With no other recourse, they will end up with unstable housing, inadequate nutrition, and frequent visits to the ER. This would shift costs from the public and onto private insurers, as these once "able bodied men" show up at hospitals with a mission to serve everyone regardless of ability to pay, therefore passing those costs along to those of us with private insurance coverage.

Thus an expensive public program becomes an even more expensive public problem, paid through ever-increasing health insurance costs for employers and the employees who qualify for benefits. Chances are that most Republican lawmakers haven't considered this, but it's possible many have but figure that the middle classes have just gotten used to paying more for insurance every year and won't make the connection to the Medicaid cuts they propose.

If we want to actually solve the problem, we should mandate a living wage and vastly expand Medicaid (or more properly Medicare, which, while flawed, is a much better system) to include everyone, much like every other industrialized nation has done. But, since obvious solutions are also politically radioactive in these United States, we could try these half-measures instead:

1. Emphasize preventative care. Private insurers are already starting to do this (though often poorly). While he is dreadfully wrong on many of the details, RFK, Jr. is right about this in the broad strokes. The system should pay out/subsidize prescriptions for nutritious foods, for example, which are often out of reach for those poor enough to qualify for Medicaid. Likewise for gym memberships, exercise equipment, and vouchers for safe and healthy housing. We're perpetuating the problem into infinity when kids of families that receive Medicaid are exposed to lead—whether that's through exposure to old paint or directly injected through the barrel of a gun.

2. Coordinate with other healthy living initiatives (and restore the ones the Trump administration has already killed). If we want to save public money in the long run, we need to spend it now cleaning up neighborhoods (and on lead abatement, as above), creating walkable cities, providing medical transportation in rural areas, and subsidizing neighborhood gardens.

3. Provide evidence-based alternative treatments. Plenty of talk and behavioral therapies have good evidence to back them, such as DBT, CBT, and exposure therapy (for PTSD). They're expensive at first but cheap in the long run. I'd rather pay for someone's equine therapy than see them debilitated by TD, if it comes to that. It makes little sense to have an environmentally damaging "all of the above" strategy for energy policies while not having a potentially helpful one for health care. Further, having more options is synergistic: better physical health leads to better mental health and makes people more employable, more "able bodied."

4. Create greater flexibility. Because so few entry level jobs provide benefits and are often hard on the bodies that do them, one should not have to face the binary choice of employment or benefits. A system designed to graduate benefit levels depending on income, availability of viable options on the ACA marketplace, and the healthcare needs of the individual could go a long way towards the every-"able bodied man"-employed vision of the political right.

The idea here goes beyond a safety net: if we want "able bodied men" to get off Medicaid and to "get back to work," we need a much more solid foundation from which they can launch.

On the Minor Pleasures of Being a Grind

by Lael Ewy

Being neither talented nor smart, my ambitions, modest to begin with and blunted by decades of failure and disappointment, have pushed me into becoming a grind. Where others seem to take to reading or writing or math, to some sport or another, I have always had to work twice as hard for half their success. The only difference between me and those who fall behind has been the willingness to put in the work.

I say ambition, but as much it has been fear, a terror of the abjection of failure, a fear, in my case, based on hard experience. This terror often took the form of compulsion, but since that compulsion was applied to acceptable pursuits—such as academic work—it was largely overlooked by those whose joy it would have been to medicate my striving away. Played out over years, these compulsions have just become who I am, a grind.

I wake up and grind out some (generally ineffectual) exercise, grind out lesson plans, grind out graded papers. I grind out mediocre pieces of writing like this one, fueled by thousands of hours of reading because, no matter how many hours I have in, I still read slowly.

At best, I also read deliberately, not missing the nuance, maybe even forming better questions along the way. I'd like to think I feel with James Joyce, though I might be less likely to understand him as others do. I know that Emily Dickinson and I, at least in short bursts, look out at Amherst through the same set of eyes.

Knowing it will take a while, I can sit back and fall into a stately groove; it would be pointless to rush it anyway. Staring down a hundred papers to grade, I adjust my schedule, not my standards or the expectation that I might have a moment of free time after. Many of those emails didn't need answering anyway, a realization that, though I am late to it myself, many a sharper, faster worker never realizes at all.

Being a grind comes with its own sense of accomplishment, one I can't really share with others, since so much of our culture is obsessed with talent, efficiency, and speed. I can't brag that I worked 80 hours in a week since I only accomplished as much as someone working 45, but, damn it, I put the time in, didn't I?

The grind worries less about word count or chapters written and more about having engaged in the writing itself. There's a pleasure in the process, after all. I haven't gotten to the point at which writing or working or working out have become versions of a zen-like mindfulness. I have to grind out meditation, too. But I'm getting there.

I'm the opposite of this era's poster children, the ones who identify as ADHD, simultaneously set upon and lionized, claiming disability and the superpower to multitask, to livestream on YouTube while scrolling TikTok and updating Insta.

No, thanks. I'll spend the next hour writing two pages, maybe reading ten.

But maybe I'll also be able to spot the logical fallacies in some podcaster's diatribe, the wisdom of which you praise.

Just give me a minute. Maybe a day.

Misconceptions of the Left (and What to Do About Them)

 

Months out from the 2024 elections, the punditocracy is still nattering about why the Harris-Walz campaign lost. Most of this consternation relies on the following misconceptions, which have become holy writ on the left, and none of which are true.

There is such a thing as natural solidarity.

Not all Latin-Americans will naturally see their struggles as akin to those of Black Americans, or, especially, those of LGBTQI folks. Likewise for any other minority group, no matter their history of being oppressed. It's not just that the American public is decimated; it's that we're alienated from everyone else individually and between the groups with which we identify. For some, traditional ways of life or systems of belief pose further barriers: a Catholic of Mexican origin is likely to see herself as more aligned with other Catholics than with the queer Colombian kid down the street.

If the left wants to create a movement, build solidarity, raise consciousness, public education must commence.

Oppressed people cannot themselves hold discriminatory attitudes or practice discrimination.

This is a popular misconception on the right as well. Consider, though, that the same Puritans who, deposed from power in England, freely persecuted Quakers in the Massachusetts colony. Latinx folks can hate Black folks who can hate Asian folks. Remember the situation in Koreatown in the aftermath of the Rodney King beating? Seems like nobody on the left does anymore.

If the left wants to create a movement, reconciliation efforts need to happen and trust needs to be actively developed between potential coalition members.

Self-hatred/the acceptance of one's own oppression is impossible.

We woke ones may despise the Uncle Toms of the world or, at least, pity them, but recall that one of them has served on the Supreme Court for over 30 years. One way to get ahead in the world is to work hard; another is to buddy up to those who oppress you, telling them what they want to hear. One of the strongest advocates of bringing back feudalism in Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard, Firs, was formerly enslaved by it.

Bucking the system can be heroic, and it may lead to progress, maybe even revolution. It also leads to trouble.

A hopeful sign that progress is possible is Cory Booker's historic 25 hour speech on the Senate floor, invoking John Lewis's idea of "good trouble." But we must build the groundwork for it by raising people's awareness of their own self worth and making the movement's goals and means safe, hopeful, and full of opportunity.

Established immigrants will naturally have fellow-feelings for recent immigrants.

The history of the US shows precisely the opposite. Even first-generation immigrants, once they have "made it" here, are notoriously disdainful of those "fresh off the boat." So familiar is this idea that there was even a mainstream sitcom with that title, yet we on the left somehow forget it as soon as the election cycle heats up. It took decades for colonial Englishmen to accept the Germans, for these newly minted "Americans to accept the Irish, for them to accept the Italians, and so on.

If we want to win, we need to revisit and celebrate the immigrant experience, yes, and to remind people of the hardships that brought people here to begin with and the hardships they faced building new lives. Why do you think the rightwing downplays, ignores, or, now, purges these stories from the public discourse?

We need to restore the public image of immigration as heroic, not as scurrilous.

The working class, farmers, and those lower on the income scale automatically understand their situation better than the "educated elites."

You'd have to be stupid or misinformed or both to believe that Donald Trump could magically lower grocery prices or instantly bring American manufacturing jobs back through tariffs or stop the war in Ukraine in 24 hours, yet millions of voting Americans believed exactly that. (Many still do, contrary to the clear evidence before them.) Working class people and farmers live in the same toxic media environment the rest of us live in, and they believe or reject misinformation based on a variety of factors, but because of generations of media programming, the one thing they believe about themselves is the "salt of the Earth" myth, that their judgments are more pure and more accurate because of, not despite, their lack of sophistication. The programming they receive, from AM talk radio, from Fox"News," from the pulpits of their churches and in their Facebook groups, though, is the sophisticated communication of educated people, people who don't have their best interests in mind. Their "commonsense" has been ginned up for them by the rightwing message machine.

It's dead wrong, but when it's all you know, and when it reinforces your own self-image, it starts to seem like the eternal truth.

And so, last of all, the left, if it wants to win, needs to play the long game, just as the right has done, thinking not one or two election cycles out, but decades, centuries, through, as we like to say about the environment, the seventh generation.

We love to hate on Project 2025, but, notably, we on the left don't have one, no playbook that articulates our aims, no "bible" to manifest our vision.

Given all this, it's no surprise that, despite most people agreeing with us on the issues, we continue to lose. But to win, we need to abandon these misconceptions and work hard to build the coalitions necessary for real progress to take place.

The Interminable Hell We're In

 We have to start getting used to the idea that Trump and Trumpism are here to stay.

Trump himself, while never of sound mind, and despite his atrocious diet, obvious obesity, and tanning addiction, seems relatively sound of body. Abetted by a compliant Supreme Court, a loyal and entrenched Republican party, and a toothless opposition, there's no reason to think we won't follow through on his signals to stay in office in 2028. Nursed along by the best health care available, it's possible he'll last another 20 years in office, increasingly demented but with lackeys whose power is dependent on his continued figurehead of the MAGA cult.

Having recreated the federal bureaucracy not only to enable authoritarianism but to guide that authoritarian system to support a handful of tech-minded oligarchs, there's no reason to think that Musk, Bezos, Zuckerberg, won't continue to support the regime that continues to support them. And even if one of them decides to depose Trump and install himself as dictator for life (and none of these men is all that old), there's little anyone would be able to do about it, with the federal system designed to avert such a thing as eroded as it already is.

Once power is completely aligned under Trump, which is almost already the case officially the case and clearly the case de facto, even a legal ouster under the 25th Amendment or an extra-legal ouster by other means won't, by themselves, restore democracy. The coup leader, be it JD Vance or someone else—Trump Jr., for example—would simply be installing himself atop an existing authoritarian system, not reforming one. And that would be the point: those in power now haven't gotten there because they have principles or value the popular will.

The idea that all authoritarian systems fall on their own, that they must give way, eventually, to the needs of the people, is specious: witness Spanish fascism, which lasted under Franco for almost forty years. Note that Castro's Cuba chugs along long after the revolutionary's demise. And then there's North Korea, now on its third generation of dynastic rule. Despite its recent transformations, "communist" China is still a repressive, one-party state, nearly eighty years after Mao's rise to power.

None of this is meant as an excuse for pessimism; it's simply meant as a warning: there is no natural end to dictatorship. For every Hitler, Mussolini, Ceaușescu, there are half a dozen others who never paid from their crimes, who, like Stalin, Franco, Castro, died in peaceful slumber, with nary a worry in mind.

Getting rid of dictators is not a political process. Instead, it is a matter of justice, and the failure of the Congress to find Trump guilty when it had two chances through impeachment, the failure of the State of New York and the federal justice system to jail Trump (or offer him exile), the failure that was the Supreme Court's ruling in Trump v. USA have all but sealed our fate. With Democratic leadership capitulating to Trump and Republicans repulsively loyal, it's difficult to see any way out, hard to see just who, what leader or popular uprising, will be willing to wield the hammer of justice to nail the coffin shut on Trump, his movement, and all it entails.

But without it, we better get used to living in this hell for the long haul.

The Left's Lost Voice

 

 The contemporary, radical right-wing authoritarians who were behind the rise of the MAGA movement, with their podcasters, 4Chan, AM talk radio, and OAN, have learned more from the activist left of the 1960s and 1970s, with it consciousness raising groups and direct action campaigns, than the current left has managed to retain.

The 1990s saw a massive shift on the left away from the unapologetic activism of the '60s and '70s, which we can see in the Clinton administration's sharp rightward turn in policy and in neoformalist and neoconservative movements in literature and academe. It is out of this milieu that the current crop of establishment Democratic politicians have come. It is this rightward turn and lack of institutional memory that tanked the Harris-Walz campaign in 2024.

The problem is not, as all the pundits say, that the Dems lost the working class; rather, MAGA gained it, and not because the left's message doesn't "resonate" with them. The problem is that the left is not loud enough, forceful enough, brash enough, and unapologetic enough in our messaging. We haven't done the hard work of educating the public that the authoritarian right has done over the last 40 years, a disinformation campaign that has led to literally millions voting against their own interests again and again.

This isn't to say that we don't need to address people's real concerns, but we do need to do it in a way that represents the reality of structural injustice in the present and the promise of a more equitable future. Trade unionists at the turn of the last century knew they had to educate workers in order to build class consciousness, and feminists and other civil rights activists in the mid 20th century knew they had to constantly beat the drum and to work one-on-one in order to overpower the indoctrination of literally millennia of racism, classism, sexism, and homophobia. We need to do the same now

I'm convinced that, rather than having "strongly held beliefs, as the Supreme Court might have it, few Americans have much loyalty to any particular set of beliefs. No one who had a hard time deciding between Trump and Harris could be said to be driven by ideological commitments. Their commitments are to a narrow set of interests, whether those are the so-called "kitchen table" and "pocketbook" issues or single issues that loom large for them for whatever reason (abortion, the border, crypto). To get Americans to see their situations more broadly and more deeply requires a commitment to communicating directly and constantly and with a confidence in one's message that, for those in the nation's soft political midsection, speaks much louder than words with their hard and specific meanings.

After all, if people can believe, without any real evidence, that "the concept of a plan" beats an actual plan, they'll believe the truth, too, if they hear it over and over again in a voice of certitude and determination.

And They Dug

 by Lael Ewy

The old observation about the Grand Canyon, the craggy attraction called out by all airline pilots who happen to fly over, is that it is, after all, just a big hole in the ground.

But we are enchanted by valleys of all sorts, naming housing developments for them; historical towns; our crooners from the 1950s; and America's favorite flavor, ranch dressing, which was originally marketed by Hidden Valley as a do-it-yourself mix, combining many of our favorite things in a convenient package, excepting flags and ammunition and guns.

When we're not busy admiring nature's holes-in-the-ground, we're busy making our own, striping the east with canals, the west with reservoirs, and everywhere with basements and the foundations of buildings.

A main indication that the settlers are here to stay?

They dig a well.

Between our buildings, we dig trenches for pipes carrying in fresh water and sewers carrying away foul, holes for fence posts, power poles, streetlights. In the rural area in which I was raised, to manage the waste we shat out or washed off, we'd dig a "septic lagoon," which nature, being less fussy, would promptly fill with cattails and duckweed, inviting in snapping turtles and redwing blackbirds. Rather than being disgusted with these interlopers, I've come to admire what they make of our muck.

On the subject of reservoirs, my dad helped dig one near Cheney, Kansas, which supplies the bustling metropolis of Wichita and its dependent suburbs with water. Well, my father didn't do the actual digging; he was a diesel mechanic who worked on the heavy earth-moving equipment that other men used to get the job done, the bulldozers and backhoes and front-loaders and such.

So enchanted was he with these diggers that, later, he got a bulldozer of his own, ostensibly to help dig deeper a natural pond on the 20 acres of heaven we owned east of town. But we knew better: it's just fun to dig in the dirt, to see the progress you've made as the hole expands, as the horizon rises, as the hole forms down past layers of grass and topsoil, into the deposits of sand or clay or rock below.

We dug as kids, with trowels or Tonka trucks, with garden hoses, blasting snake holes into the ground until our mom came out and told us to stop.

But she dug, too, and still does: holes for flowers or shrubs, neither hobby exactly nor compulsion; it's just what you do, grow things, and it always involves some movement of the soil, some disruption necessitated by production.

Dad had an acre set aside for a garden of his own, vegetables, of course, and he dug long, shallow trenches for sweet corn, deeper holes for sweet potatoes and tomatoes—the last his personal favorite, the starts going in by April, each delicate plant protected by a half a plastic milk jug against the likely event of frost. We'd often have fresh fruit by June, by early July, a precociousness I've never had it together enough to maintain.

On the reservoir project, dad met many professional diggers, men schooled in holes and the vagaries of their creation. Many of these men had worked as wildcatters and pipefitters in the oil fields of Texas and Oklahoma, and they had colorful stories, were earthy people with an earthy set of sensibilities.

On a hot day, one of them might say "Hell's only about six-inches deep out there!" as if, with a spade, damnation might be surfaced via one, quick cut.

Other stories cut deeper. One of my dad's favorites was from an oil well worker who accidentally dropped a hammer down the hole they were drilling, potentially damaging the rig. It took many hours of work to retrieve, halting progress and costing the operation untold dollars.

When the worker had retrieved his lost hammer, the foreman said, "Great. Now, you're fired."

To this, the man, thinking quickly and with admirable presence of mind replied, "Well, I guess I won't be needing this anymore," and promptly dropped the hammer back down the hole.

My dad also tells one on himself, about almost getting fired for using one bulldozer to put the one he was working on on its side in order to access the parts he needed to repair.

But these are really stories about how management should properly treat their workers, about how they need to understand their situations and to give them the tools they need to do their work properly, ideas he took with him when he later took an executive track.

From Black English, we have the term "dig" to indicate understanding in a deep way, with the depth of our feelings, our thoughts, our souls aligned all the way down. Even today, as the kids have swirled down with "skibidi" and "rizz" rotting holes in their brains, if you ask them if they dig it, they still do.

We come by it honestly, this digging: notably, the kids continue to go down rabbit holes, something we've all learned from Lewis Carroll, and indicative of the safety many animals have always found underground: rabbits, moles, foxes, badgers, worms and grubs (of course), and even a species of owl or two. The occasional wasp or spider digs or moves in after the fact. Dens and burrows harbor the bigger digging animals; ants collectively create entire underground cities, their intricacy shaming even the complex earthworks undergirding a Paris, a New York, a Rome.

I've so far avoided the fact that when we stay in one place we put down roots, figuratively, but when a plant grows it does so literally, digging by pure force of whatever passes for a plant's will, sucking out the goodness of the very earth itself for its vibrant, verdant display.

I've avoided, too, a philosophical matter: the fact that a hole is a thing only in the absence of all that surrounds it, a thing we build only through negation. For every hole we want, there is material displaced. A pile of dirt develops, a berm, a mound, perhaps a place to play, a set of whoops over which a dirt bike might fly.

A hole is an act of mass selection.

We dig when we die, too, of course, or rather a hole is dug for us. We trust the embrace of that good earth with the remains of our most beloved, knowing that the dirt has both the power to forever remember and the heft to help us forget. It is only within this solidity that the quick may be separated from the "silent majority," a term Safire cribbed from Milton, the memento mori that there, by God's grace, dig I.

On American Values

 

by EW Wilder

Despite our protestations otherwise, most Americans have few, if any, "sincerely held beliefs." We have a very weak system of values—really, no "system" at all—and a very fluid, if not utterly arbitrary, moral code. Instead of values, we cleave to a handful of rules or, more commonly, to slogans: "family values," "pro-life." Or we rally behind abstractions like "freedom" or "liberty" without much of a concrete sense of what those things mean in the real world.

Decades of messaging from right-wing media and thinks tanks have associated being against abortion as being "pro life," an idea that, thanks to the same outlets, fails to expand beyond birth, into adulthood, or across the nation's borders. It doesn't strike the average American as a contradiction that being against abortion but in favor of the death penalty is in any way problematic; it would never occur to an American as counter to being "pro life" to support killing tens of thousands of innocent people in Gaza in the name of avenging 1200 Israelis, or, indeed, that it might conflict with a "pro life" stance for the US military to cause the deaths of perhaps 100,000 Iraqis for no apparent reason at all.

Americans pride themselves on being "values voters," and our media are happy to use the term, yet getting those same Americans to articulate those values clearly and in detail is next to impossible. We're happy to discuss "the ideological divide," but we're rarely confronted with the notion that an ideology is a coherent system with internal consistency, one applicable across a variety of social and political situations. Note how many of the same Americans who insist upon strict biblical literalism in issues of sexuality happily sport tattoos, wear their hair however they want, eat pork and shellfish and cheeseburgers as well, dress immodestly . . . . When those who dare to identify as leftists point out this hypocrisy, it does not compute; the leftist expects a system where only a rule exists, a principle where there's only a position.

American "values," then, don't exist outside of the individual and the individual's opinions, which, while a fittingly American attitude, makes it hard to thereafter claim divine providence for them. This fact merely makes the American proclaim them more loudly, often accompanied by the threat of extreme violence.

We believe in the divinity of our opinions not because we have much evidence for that, other than a few out-of-context bible passages, but because the opinions are ours, and we believe ourselves to be a Godly people. Because we believe we're Godly, our opinions are sanctified, not the other way around.

This is why people like Donald Trump can so successfully sway so many Americans: he embodies the idea that something is good and right when the individual thinks it or does it and bad and wrong when someone else does it or thinks it, even if it's exactly the same thing. So Joe Biden's justice system (even though, in point of fact, it is independent) prosecuting Donald Trump is bad, but Donald Trump promising to weaponize the justice system against Joe Biden is good.

This is the morality of children who haven't been taught right from wrong, as we used to say at a time when that phrase was associated with actual systems of values, which underscores my point: large numbers of Americans simply don't have a moral/ethical education of any worth.

To suggest a sense of the problem, I'll note how hard it can be to teach Toulmin-style argumentation in my second-semester composition classes. Stephen Toulmin's basic idea is that for every claim we make about the world, we have a warrant that we apply to the data we gather or receive, whether through formal research or sets of informal experiences. The problem is the warrant, the reason we think the claim fits the data.

I often use a very simple exercise in which I look at the price of a gallon of gasoline from, by turns, the perspective of a consumer (a position my students would be familiar with), an economist, and an environmentalist, asking whether or not the price is too high, too low, or just right. Thus one piece of data, the price of a gallon of gas, can lead to three different claims depending on the warrant we apply.

The problem I run into is that many of my students, generally the ones who claim to be conservatives, just don't get it. They either can't move beyond the perspective of a consumer, or, as likely, they simply don't see what the warrant has to do with anything, what weird magic would lead to different claims about a single point of data.

This brief essay is not to call for any sort of "traditional values," another vague term wielded by the authoritarian right. Traditional systems are patriarchal, racist, sexist, and unjust. Rather, it's to say that the American system of governance gives us an opportunity to be explicit and intentional about discussing and implementing systems of values, and we've squandered that opportunity for the sake of gaining and maintaining political power.

So not only do we need deep study of American doctrine—not only the actual text of the US Constitution but what it means and why it was written—but of other political and ethical values systems as well, within contexts in which it is OK to question and critique them in real and practical terms.

Yes, this is "critical thinking," and it may even involve "critical race theory" and other ideas with real weight. And that is exactly the point: if we are to be a nation of laws, or even if we aspire to be a lawful people, we need to understand values and principles, the systems in which they are embedded, and how they are applied in the real world.