Way back in time, in my first year in college, I took the introductory course in Political Science in a school that was known to have a strong department, and I was stunned, because, for the most part, the course dealt almost exclusively with the Executive Branch. So did the majority of courses dealing with U.S. politics, and none of the professors seemed really to understand grassroots politics, and some actually minimized the electoral side of politics, which struck me as a form of arrogance.

In retrospect, I shouldn’t have been surprised because most of the professors teaching, those who had any experience in government, had been political appointees in the Executive Branch. At that time, I didn’t have, obviously, that kind of experience, but my father had been a city councilor and acting mayor of the town where I grew up, and my mother was an executive board member of the League of Women Voters for the state of Colorado.

Later on, after I finished my tours in the Navy, and after being less than successful as an industrial market research analyst and real estate salesman, I got involved in local politics as a precinct committeeman, and then as a researcher for a political campaign for Congress, which led to a job as a legislative assistant to a congressman (the campaign was successful) and staff director for his successor. In turn, that led, after ten years, to an appointment in the Reagan Administration as Director of Legislation and Congressional Affairs at the U.S. EPA, after which I spent another ten years working for a high-powered D.C. consulting firm.

The head of EPA when I was there was an intellectually brilliant attorney who’d been a noted and successful state representative in Colorado. Although she thought otherwise, she didn’t know squat about how the federal government worked. Neither did a great many of the senior Reagan administration appointees who came out of state governments. The result was a political nightmare, with the result that almost all of the political appointees at EPA, including the Administrator, either resigned or were fired [two of us out of 36 survived], and one assistant administrator went to jail. Also, the Secretary of the Interior and a few others were canned.

Why? Because all these people who’d been successful elsewhere carried an air of arrogance, a definite feeling that they knew better than all those elected officials and federal bureaucrats. They assumed that intelligence and past experience would suffice… and they also didn’t listen to those who’d been there. Just like the Freedom Caucus and the Trumpists.

This is scarcely new, but what is frightening to me is that the current Trumpist/populist wave is also being led by a group of arrogant grassroots politicians who understand nothing about how government works. One can complain about Biden being a creature of Washington, D.C., but in two years he got more substantive legislation passed than Trump did in four years and, from what I can tell, more than Obama did, as well.

Not only do the populists not understand government, but they don’t want to. The fact that they excuse/ignore the January 6th insurrection and the three indictments and forty charges against Trump is a good indication of their indifference and arrogance. In addition, they essentially want to destroy the U.S. rule of law because they don’t like the results, but they also have no constructive plan about what to do once they have.

So far, neither Trump nor his GOP allies in the House have yet to accomplish anything except to attempt to significantly cut federal spending with no real understanding of what cuts might be useful and what would be disastrous and to seek to impeach people they don’t like, while defending the greatest liar in American political history.

What’s happening with Trump and the Trumpists is because too many people know too little about how government works while dismissing the knowledge and experience of those they don’t like and believing they know far more than they do.

And we’re all going to pay for that arrogance.

Years ago, and often since then, I said that anger makes smart people stupid. Unfortunately, it does even more to people who aren’t that bright or those who are willfully ill-informed.

That creates a considerable political problem, especially in a democracy, where there’s often little check on stupidity fueled by anger.

Yet, today, another indictment was served to Donald Trump, the man who tried in every way he could to overturn a fair election – an election called fair by Republican local election officials from coast to coast. Trump’s also been caught on a recording asking, indeed demanding, that the Georgia Secretary of State “find” 11,780 votes. The Trump companies were found guilty of 17 years of tax evasion. Trump was found guilty of sexual harassment and defamation. He’s set a record of over 31,000 documented lies or misstatements in his four years as President. And Trump’s repeatedly called Vladimir Putin a genius and a good man.

Yet today, he’s the front-runner to be the Republican candidate for President in the next election, and recent polls show he’s running neck and neck with Joe Biden, despite the fact that, legislatively, Biden’s accomplished far more than Trump ever did when President.

So… how is that possible?

It’s possible because the Republican base is angry – furious, in fact, with the Democratic “establishment,” so furious that Republicans in the House of Representatives seem to spend most of their time trying to find ways to “get” Biden, rather than deal with the nation’s problems, so furious that they pursue ways to ban abortion totally at a time when the electorate has shown in election after election that they don’t share that view, so furious that Republican politicians, even highly intelligent ones, either share that anger or fear to oppose it.

And that kind of stupid anger can destroy a nation, and those who spread that anger are made so stupid by their anger that they’re unable to even consider that possibility.

What I find most amazing about the Republican party’s rhetoric and claims that Democrats and Liberals are undermining freedom is the fact that most Republicans appear totally clueless that the GOP is the political party most involved in undermining freedom.

The most notable aspect of this is the issue of abortion, although it’s hardly the only one. The battle to outlaw abortion is obviously a restriction on the right of women to be free of religion-based restraints on their body. No matter what religious or other grounds one cites, any restrictions limit women’s freedom to choose.

Roe v. Wade, or the rights that the Right to Choose movement support, do not restrict the rights of women to choose not to have abortions or not to use birth control. A right-to-choose approach doesn’t force any woman to have an abortion or to use birth control. Yet some of the anti-abortion laws on the books in some states not only effectively forbid abortion, but are so restrictive that they limit medical care, in many cases involving medical problems having nothing to do with birth.

The same applies to banning books in libraries. If you don’t like certain books… don’t read them. But banning books in libraries restricts the freedom of others to read, particularly for people who cannot afford to buy books.

Republicans also tend to oppose environmental laws, including those that impact human health, effectively requiring millions of people to breathe heavily polluted air for the sake of profits of a handful of companies. The right to excessive profit trumps [in some cases, literally] the right of the majority to breathe cleaner air.

Republicans are also the ones opposing efforts to make voting more convenient for those who live in areas inclined to vote for the other party.

And, of course, it was a Republican President who tried to overturn the free will of the American people to choose their President… and a good half of them, if not more, support a man who did his best to undermine freedom.

Yet they insist that they’re for freedom, and the Democrats aren’t.

Every human civilization has some amount of corruption. Corruption exists because humanity always has a proportion of people who are less able and less honest and who want to be paid or make money regardless of the cost to others, or who promise more than they deliver.

There’s also the very real problem of defining corruption.

Unfortunately, defining corruption is a bit like defining pornography. Everyone knows what it is, and everyone can recognize it (if in their own terms), but few can agree on a concrete definition.

A simplistic way of defining corruption might be: any activity that biases the outcome of any economic transaction or activity to grant an advantage to a party on the basis of factors other than price, cost, availability, and quality or (2) any legal or regulatory determination arrived other than through equal application of the law and standards of the land.

Corruption can negatively impact the economy directly, through, for example, tax evasion and money laundering, as well as indirectly by distorting fair competition and fair markets, and thus increasing the cost of doing business.

Studies have shown that, in general, countries where free markets and economic opportunities prevail tend to have less corruption, but the problem with totally free markets is that monopolies tend to proliferate, working conditions are poor, and economic inequalities grow. To mitigate those problems, societies such as the United States and European democracies regulate a fair amount of their economic activity in order to ensure that foods and medicines are safe, that dangerous working practices are outlawed, that industrial pollution is reduced or eliminated, that consumer products are not dangerous to the user when employed properly… and so forth.

Such regulations raise the cost of doing business, and businesses have always tended to oppose them, find ways around them, or ignore those regulations. That means that regulatory bodies not only have to spend funds to assure enforcement but also have to devote resources to explain and defend what they do as well as guard against bureaucratic and legislative attempts to dilute the effectiveness of laws and regulations. Such attempts could often be classed as another form of corruption in that they’re designed to reduce costs by foisting diseconomies on customers and society under the guise of lowering costs to the producer of goods or services.

As a consequence, government organizations tasked with protecting the public have a tendency to grow as economic entities attempt to evade or challenge regulations. In addition, each advance in technology also creates downsides that, if not controlled and regulated, can have massive negative impacts on health and the environment.

Unhappily, the situation isn’t any better in non-free market or authoritarian societies, because protecting the health and safety of the population is at best a secondary goal and because economies that are less market-driven are even more susceptible to corruption. First, in such regimes, loyalty is more important than competence. Second, because conformity, obedience, and loyalty are more important than profit, most economic entities are less efficient than in market-driven economies, and ability by outsiders is at the least minimized. Third, innovation tends to be stifled in most large organizations and overlooked or squashed in smaller ones. Fourth, the more prevalent the practice of bribery, the more likely that resources will be directed to less efficient uses, including to padding the incomes of middlemen/women.

So… societies effectively have a choice, either pay excessively to enforce standards and reduce corruption or fail to address standards and allow corruption, with the result that everyone pays excessively in terms of less efficiency throughout the society and in terms of far greater income inequality.

You’re going to pay. The only question is whether you want more government or more corruption.

As indictment after indictment of former President Trump occurs and more appear likely, a considerable number of Republican office-holders (and at least one of their attorneys), including a number of those seeking the nomination for President, are commenting on the indictments by saying that there’s “no evidence” that Trump is guilty.

No evidence? Really?

Now, it’s clear from history that people charged with crimes, sometimes even when the evidence seems overwhelming, are sometimes found innocent, but the idea that there’s no evidence in Trump’s case is absurd. The January 6th attack on the Capitol was widely televised. So was the recording of Trump asking Georgia officials to “find” him more votes. So were Trump’s statements conveying the idea that he wanted Mike Pence to illegally overturn the election So were the pictures of boxes and boxes of documents stored all over Mar-a-Lago. Not to mention the indictment of false electors in Michigan. The Trump Corporation and the Trump Payroll Corporation were convicted 17of felonies, including tax fraud and falsifying business records, over fifteen years.

Whether these instances and others constitute sufficient evidence to convict Trump is up to the courts and the juries, but there’s definitely evidence everywhere.

So why are these particular Republicans saying that there’s no evidence, I mean, besides the fact that they’re opportunistic cowards who don’t want to anger Trump?

Possibly because that allows them to avoid saying that Trump is innocent of wrong-doing, and avoids their having to take a position? Or, if Trump is convicted, possibly leaves them with the chance to say that the prosecutor was hiding evidence, and thus shift “blame” to the prosecutor? The latter is a good possibility because the Trumpists have been attacking DOJ and state prosecutors from the beginning. And, of course, since the die-hard Trumpists will believe anything that Saint Donald says, this will become another Trumpist mantra woven into the vast tapestry of lies.

But still… no evidence?