Dear Commons Community,

The New York Times has a featured article this morning focusing on whether vaccinating teachers will get students back to school.  Opinions vary with teachers’ unions largely supporting plans to put educators near the front of the vaccine line, but this might not be enough to open more schools in the spring. The authors of the article interviewed a number of education leaders throughout the country to get their views.  The entire article (see below) provides balance and insight into the complexity of the question.

Tony

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New York Times

If Teachers Get the Vaccine Quickly, Can Students Get Back to School?

By Eliza Shapiro, Shawn Hubler, and Kate Taylor

Dec. 15, 2020

States and cities across the country are moving to put teachers near the front of the line to receive a coronavirus vaccine, in an effort to make it safer to return to classrooms and provide relief to struggling students and weary parents.

In Arizona, where many schools have moved online in recent weeks amid a virus surge, Gov. Doug Ducey declared that teachers would be among the very first people inoculated. “Teachers are essential to our state,” he said. Utah’s governor talked about possibly getting shots to educators this month. And Los Angeles officials urged prioritizing teachers alongside firefighters and prison guards.

But in districts where children have spent much of the fall staring at laptop screens, including some of the nation’s largest, it may be too early for parents to get their hopes up that public schools will throw open their doors soon, or that students will be back in classrooms full time before next fall.

Given the limited number of vaccines available to states and the logistical hurdles to distribution, including the fact that two doses are needed several weeks apart, experts said that vaccinating the nation’s three million schoolteachers could be a slow process, taking well into the spring.

And even once enough educators are inoculated for school officials and teachers’ unions — which hold considerable power in many large districts — to consider it safe to reopen classrooms, schools will likely need to continue requiring masks and distancing students for many months, experts said, until community spread has sharply dropped, possibly by summer.

“I think some people have in their head that we’re going to start rolling out the vaccine and all this other stuff is going to go away,” said Marcus Plescia, the chief medical officer at the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials, which represents public health agencies.

But in schools, as in daily life, he said, there will be no quick fix. “My feeling is that we’re all going to be wearing masks and keeping our distance and trying to be careful around each other for probably most of 2021.”

Vaccination could have the largest impact on schools in places where teaching has remained entirely remote this fall, or where students have spent limited time in the classroom. That includes many big cities and districts in the Northeast and on the West Coast, which have been the most cautious about reopening despite little evidence of schools — and elementary schools in particular — stoking community transmission.

At the same time, there are many schools in the South, the Midwest and the Mountain States where a large percentage of teachers and students are already in classrooms, and where a vaccine would most likely not have as much impact on policy. But even in some of those parts of the country, such as Arizona, distance learning has resumed in recent weeks as coronavirus cases have surged, and vaccinating teachers could help reduce such disruptions.

The nation’s roughly three million full-time teachers are considered essential workers by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which means that in states that follow federal recommendations, they would be eligible to receive the vaccine after hospital employees and nursing home residents.

But the essential worker group is huge — some 87 million Americans — and states will have flexibility in how they prioritize within that population. Many more people work in schools than just teachers, including nurses, janitors and cafeteria workers, and it is unclear how many of them would be included on the high-priority list.

Public health experts disagree on where teachers should fall, with some saying that in-person education is crucial and others noting that teachers generally have better protections and pay than many other essential workers, such as those in meatpacking plants and day cares. Many teachers have not been in their classrooms since March, either because their districts have not physically reopened, or because they have a medical waiver exempting them.

Groups that represent teachers, for the most part, are eager to see their members fast-tracked for vaccines. Last month, more than 10 educational organizations, including the nation’s two largest teachers’ unions, wrote to the C.D.C. asking that school employees be considered a priority group.

“Our students need to come back to school safely,” they wrote. “Educators want to welcome them back, and no one should have to risk their health to make this a reality.”

Teachers in districts that have already opened classrooms, like Houston and Miami, should be prioritized for shots, said Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, which includes some of the country’s largest local chapters.

“Let’s have an alignment here of the schools that are reopening for in-person learning and availability of vaccine,” she said. As more teachers are vaccinated, she added, “we believe that more and more schools can open in person.”

In New York City, home to by far the country’s largest school system, Mayor Bill de Blasio has confidently predicted that many more of the city’s 1.1 million students will be able to return to classrooms this spring as the vaccine is distributed to educators.

Michael Mulgrew, who runs the United Federation of Teachers, the local union, said he thought that timeline might be overconfident — “I don’t think it’s around the corner,” he said of full reopening — but agreed that the thousands of teachers in New York City who were working in person should be among the first educators to get their shots.

Mayor Bill de Blasio has predicted that many more of New York City’s 1.1 million students will be able to return to classrooms this spring as the vaccine is distributed to educators. Credit…Victor J. Blue for The New York Times

Other union leaders, however, were wary about efforts to prioritize within their ranks.

“We don’t want to be in the business of putting a hierarchy in place,” said Becky Pringle, who runs the country’s largest teachers’ union, the National Education Association, “because some of our members are being bullied into returning back to classrooms. That’s not safe, we don’t want to support that.”

Teacher health concerns and union political power have played a significant role in states and cities that have not yet opened their schools, including Los Angeles and Chicago, the nation’s largest districts after New York. In California, where teachers’ unions hold great sway, state and local health rules will not allow the Los Angeles Unified School District to reopen classrooms until the rates of known cases drop significantly, regardless of the vaccine.

Austin Beutner, the superintendent, said he would like to use the district’s extensive testing infrastructure to systematically vaccinate teachers, school nurses and others. But he does not expect a return to pre-pandemic conditions — dozens of children in classrooms five days a week, without social distancing or masks — until the end of 2021.

“If we were able to provide those who work in a school with a vaccine tomorrow, great. They themselves are protected. But they could also be a silent spreader,” he said, referring to the fact that it has not yet been determined if vaccinated people can still carry and spread the coronavirus. And students are unlikely to receive shots before the fall because pediatric trials have only recently begun.

In Chicago, the teachers’ union is fighting a plan to begin returning some students to schools early next year. “Obviously, if school is continuing remote, there’s less urgency around the vaccination,” said the Chicago Teachers Union’s president, Jesse Sharkey.

Asked if he could imagine schools opening before fall 2021, Mr. Sharkey said yes, but he suggested it would have more to do with controlling the spread of the virus than vaccinating teachers. “With mitigation strategies in place, and with a reasonably low level of community spread, I do think that we could get to open schools,” he said.

Not every union leader expects all of their members to eagerly line up for inoculation. “Some don’t want to go back unless there is a vaccine, and others absolutely don’t believe in it,” said Marie Neisess, president of the Clark County Education Association, which represents more than 18,000 educators in Nevada.

In California, E. Toby Boyd, president of the state’s largest teachers’ union, said educators have been told they will be in the second wave of vaccinations. But some teachers may be reluctant to be among the first recipients.

“My members are anxious to get back to the classroom, but they’re skeptical,” said Mr. Boyd, whose organization, the California Teachers Association, represents some 300,000 members. “We need to be sure it’s safe and there are no lasting side effects.”

Teachers in California also continue to push for other safety measures that they think need to be addressed before normal school can resume. “We view the vaccine as one important layer in preventing school outbreaks,” said Bethany Meyer, a special-education teacher and union leader in Oakland, Calif.

“We also need testing and tracing and other mitigation measures, and that’s going to be the case for some time,” Ms. Meyer said, adding, “A vaccine is important, but our thinking is longer term than that.”

In places like Miami, where public schools have been open for much of the fall, vaccinations could have a different effect. Karla Hernandez-Mats, the leader of United Teachers of Dade, said she believed that widespread vaccination among educators there would help reduce the chaos caused by frequent quarantines and classroom closures.

The vaccine, she said, “would create more of a sense of normalcy, and it would bring a lot of relief to a lot of teachers working in person right now.”

MacKenzie Scott

Dear Commons Community,

MacKenzie Scott, former wife of Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, has donated over $4.2 billion in the last four months to 384 organizations in all 50 states, Puerto Rico, and Washington D.C., that address pressing needs amid the coronavirus pandemic, as well as those that combat entrenched inequalities.

“Some are filling basic needs: food banks, emergency relief funds, and support services for those most vulnerable,” Scott wrote in her Medium blog post. “Others are addressing long-term systemic inequities that have been deepened by the crisis: debt relief, employment training, credit and financial services for under-resourced communities, education for historically marginalized and underserved people, civil rights advocacy groups, and legal defense funds that take on institutional discrimination.”

Among the recipients of Scott’s giving are a number of colleges including HBCUs and CUNY’s Borough of Manhattan Community College and Herbert Lehman College; Meals on Wheels, United Way, Goodwill Industries, Easter Seals, YMCAs, and YWCAs.

To accelerate her 2020 giving, Scott tapped a team of advisors, using a data-driven approach to help identify “organizations with strong leadership teams and results, with special attention to those operating in communities facing high projected food insecurity, high measures of racial inequity, high local poverty rates, and low access to philanthropic capital,” she wrote.

After divorcing Bezos, Scott promised in March 2019 to give away at least half of her fortune to charity as part of the Giving Pledge, an initiative founded in 2010 by billionaires Bill and Melinda Gates and Warren Buffett that encourages the world’s richest people to donate more than half of their wealth to charitable causes.

At the time, she wrote in a letter published on the Giving Pledge website: “There are lots of resources each of us can pull from our safes to share with others. In addition to whatever assets life has nurtured in me, I have a disproportionate amount of money to share.”

Scott is the 18th wealthiest person in the world with an estimated $60.7 billion in net worth as of Tuesday, according to Bloomberg’s Billionare index. She is also the third richest woman in the world.

God bless her and may she be an example for others!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Yesterday we saw the ecstasy and agony of the coronavirus pandemic. 

The ecstasy was the images of  the COVID-19 vaccine being distributed and administered to the American people for the first time.  The vaccine provides hope that there is light at the end of a very long, dark tunnel.

The agony of COVID-19 was also made evident as our country recorded its 300,000^th death due to this scourge of a virus.  More Americans have died from coronavirus than died in all of World War II when 291, 557 perished.  However, during World War II, the country had a president in Franklin D. Roosevelt who led and gave Americans hope that the Allies would prevail and save the world from fascism and the Axis powers. During the coronavirus pandemic, our country has had an inept leader who has no empathy let alone understanding of the devastation that has occurred and continues to occur.

We need to last a few more weeks for President-elect Joe Biden to take over and demonstrate that he has the skills to lead us out of the pandemic.

Tony  

Dear Commons Community,

The news media is reporting that Attorney General William Barr has resigned.  He is another of the Trump lackies who wanted the limelight of national office.  He faithfully kowtowed to the President on issue after issue.  When he did not come through in finding fraud in the recent presidential election, he was cast aside and relegated to the ex-Trump appointee trash bin.  Here is reporting courtesy of the Associated Press.

“Attorney General William Barr, one of President Donald Trump’s staunchest allies, is departing amid lingering tension over the president’s baseless claims of election fraud and the investigation into President-elect Joe Biden’s son.

Barr went Monday to the White House, where Trump said the attorney general submitted his letter of resignation. “As per letter, Bill will be leaving just before Christmas to spend the holidays with his family,” Trump tweeted.

Trump has publicly expressed his anger about Barr’s statement to The Associated Press earlier this month that the Justice Department had found no widespread fraud that would change the outcome of the election. Trump has also been angry that the Justice Department did not publicly announce it was investigating Hunter Biden ahead of the election, despite department policy against such a pronouncement.

Barr told the AP that U.S. attorneys and FBI agents have been working to follow up specific complaints and information they’ve received, but “to date, we have not seen fraud on a scale that could have effected a different outcome in the election.”

Barr’s resignation leaves Trump without a critical ally as he winds down his final weeks in office, and it throws into question open Justice Department investigations, especially the probe into Hunter Biden’s taxes.

In his resignation letter, Barr said he updated Trump Monday on the department’s “review of voter fraud allegations in the 2020 election and how these allegations will continue to be pursued.” He added that his last day on the job would be Dec. 23.

Trump said Deputy Attorney General Jeff Rosen, whom he labeled “an outstanding person,” will become acting attorney general. As the current second in command at the Justice Department, Rosen’s appointment is not likely to change much in the final weeks before the administration departs.

Trump spent much of the day watching the Electoral College tally and calling allies but broke away to meet with Barr. His tweet about the Attorney General’s exit was a sober message from a president who is notoriously cold to his departing staff and quick to name-call and deride them once they say they are leaving.

Trump has also has previously claimed he fired staffers who resigned to make himself appear more powerful, and others, like former attorney general Jeff Sessions, were mocked by the president for weeks before they left office.

But despite Trump’s obvious disdain for those who publicly disagree with him, Barr had generally remained in the president’s good graces and has been one of the president’s most ardent allies. Before the election, he had repeatedly raised the notion that mail-in voting could be especially vulnerable to fraud during the coronavirus pandemic as Americans feared going to polls.

But Trump has a low tolerance for criticism, especially public criticism, from his allies and often fires back in kind. The two had been at odds in the past few months and Barr was said to have been frustrated by Trump’s tweeting.

Trump said on Fox News over the weekend that he was disappointed that the Hunter Biden investigation had not been disclosed. Hunter Biden himself announced it last week.

“Bill Barr should have stepped up,” Trump said.

One senior administration official not authorized to speak publicly and speaking to The AP on condition of anonymity said Barr had resigned of his own accord and described the meeting as amicable.

Barr, who was serving in his second stint as attorney general, sought to paint himself as an independent leader who would not bow to political pressure. But Democrats have repeatedly accused Barr of acting more like the president’s personal attorney than the attorney general, and Barr had proved to be a largely reliable Trump ally and defender of presidential power.

Sen. Lindsey Graham, the Republican leader of the judiciary committee, told reporters at the Capitol he was surprised by the news.

“I think he did an incredibly good job trying to repair damage done to the Department of Justice, trying to be fair and faithful to the law. I think he’s got a lot to be proud of,” Graham said. “He fought for the president where he could, as every attorney general and administration should, but he also didn’t cross lines that he shouldn’t have crossed.” He said he was referring to disclosing the Biden investigation.

Graham also praised Rosen as a “good man” who he said would “be an ethical leader and a steady hand” at the Justice Department.

Democrats who had long criticized Barr did not lament his departure. “Good riddance,” tweeted House intelligence committee chairman Adam Schiff, D-Calif., who said the attorney general had “lied to cover for Trump, launched political investigations, subverted justice and the rule of law and violently cracked down on protestors.”

House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerrold Nadler, D-N.Y., who led an investigation of politicization of the department, said that “whomever Joe Biden chooses as the new Attorney General will have a tremendous amount of work to do to repair the integrity of the Department of Justice.”

Before releasing special counsel Robert Mueller’s full report on the Russia investigation last year, Barr framed the results in a manner favorable to Trump even though Mueller pointedly said he couldn’t exonerate the president of obstruction of justice.

He also appointed as special counsel the U.S. attorney who is conducting a criminal investigation into the origins of the FBI’s probe of the 2016 election that morphed into Mueller’s investigation of possible Trump-Russia cooperation, following Trump’s repeated calls to “investigate the investigators.”

Barr also ordered Justice Department prosecutors to review the handling of the federal investigation into Trump’s former national security adviser Michael Flynn and then sought to dismiss the criminal charges against Flynn, who had twice pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI. Trump later pardoned Flynn.

Barr’s break from Trump over election fraud wasn’t the first. Earlier this year, Barr told ABC News that the president’s tweets about Justice Department cases “make it impossible for me to do my job,” and tensions flared just a few months ago when the two were increasingly at odds over the pace of the Durham investigation.

Trump had been increasingly critical about a lack of arrests and Barr was privately telling people he was frustrated by Trump’s public pronouncements about the case.

Trump was also said to blame Barr for comments from FBI Director Chris Wray on election fraud and mail-in voting that didn’t jibe with the president’s alarmist rhetoric.”

Barr will go down in history as a faithful toad almost to the end!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Michelle Goldberg has an important column today asking the question:  How dangerous was Donald Trump to our country?  It is a thoughtful piece that explores whether his bombastic bravado and unchecked tweeter-based propaganda will leave an indelible mark.  She explains that a lot of what he has done is more bullying and talk than extensive development of policies to match his warped inclinations.  She also reminds us that a lot of the fascism in Germany in the early 20^th Century started out as more talk than action until of course Adolf Hitler took over the country.  She is wary that this could happen again here in the United States.

I am not so sure.  Once he leaves office in January, Trump will lose a certain amount of attention unless the media continues to hang on to his every disparaging tweet and maintains his political stardom for the sake of their viewer ratings.  He may be relegated to coverage from Fox News and other right-wing outlets, and will have less influence on the public at large – similar to a Rush Limbaugh-type personality.  However, Republicans have to get their act together and stopped being the party of cowards afraid of the big bad bully.  They need to return to their conservative roots and to promote honorable individuals who have the courage to put country first.

Below is Ms. Goldberg’s entire column.

Tony

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New York Times

Just How Dangerous Was Donald Trump?

He failed to bend the state to his will, but he still broke the country.

By Michelle Goldberg

Opinion Columnist

Dec. 14, 2020

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Throughout Donald Trump’s presidency, there’s been an argument on the left over the sort of threat he poses.

The American left’s most famous figures — Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Bernie Sanders, Noam Chomsky — saw Trump as an authoritarian who could, if re-elected, destroy American democracy for good. But another strain of left opinion viewed Trump’s fascistic gestures as almost purely performative, and believed his clumsiness in marshaling state power made him less dangerous than, say, George W. Bush.

A leading proponent of this position is the political theorist Corey Robin, author of an essential book about right-wing thought, “The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism From Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin.” In an interview with the left-wing publication Jewish Currents, he argued, “Compared to the Republican presidencies of Nixon, Reagan and George W. Bush, Trump’s was significantly less transformational, and its legacy is far less assured.”

The day when the Electoral College meets to ratify Joe Biden’s victory seems an appropriate one to revisit this debate. Trump tried, in his sloppy, chaotic way, to overturn the election, and much of his party, including the majority of Republicans in the House, and many state attorneys general, lined up behind him. Yet he failed, and it’s unlikely that he will follow calls from supporters, like his former national security Adviser Michael Flynn, to declare martial law.

So what matters more, the president’s desire to overthrow American democracy, or his inability to follow through? Just how fascist was Trump?

Part of the answer depends on whether you’re evaluating Trump’s ideology or his ability to carry it out. It seems obvious enough that the spirit of Trumpism is fascistic, at least according to classic definitions of the term. In “The Nature of Fascism,” Roger Griffin described fascism’s “mobilizing vision” as “the national community rising phoenix-like after a period of encroaching decadence which all but destroyed it.” Translate this into the American vernacular and it sounds a lot like MAGA.

Fascism is obsessed with fears of victimization, humiliation and a decline, and a concomitant cult of strength. Fascists, wrote Robert O. Paxton in “The Anatomy of Fascism,” see “the need for authority by natural chiefs (always male), culminating in a national chieftain who alone is capable of incarnating the group’s historical destiny.” They believe in “the superiority of the leader’s instincts over abstract and universal reason.” This aptly describes Trump’s movement.

Yet Trump was only intermittently able to translate his movement into a government. The national security state was more often his antagonist than his tool. There were Justice Department investigations of the president’s political enemies, but they mostly came to nothing. The military was deployed against protesters, but only once.

Trump celebrated what may be the extrajudicial killing of Michael Reinoehl, an antifa activist wanted in a fatal shooting, but such killings weren’t the norm. He put children in cages, but was pressured to let them out. And in the end, he lost an election and will have to leave.

The damage he’s done, however, may be irreversible. On Twitter, Robin argued, correctly, that George W. Bush, far more than Trump, changed the shape of government, leaving behind the Patriot Act and the Department of Homeland Security. Most of Trump’s legacy, by contrast, is destruction — of even the pretense that the law should apply equally to ruler and ruled, of large parts of the Civil Service, of America’s standing in the world. (If mainstream liberals are more deeply horrified by Trump than some leftists, it could be because they maintain greater romantic attachments to the institutions he’s defiled.)

Most consequentially, Trump has eviscerated in America any common conception of reality. Other presidents sneered at the truth; a senior Bush official, widely believed to be Karl Rove, famously derided the “reality-based community” to the journalist Ron Suskind.

But Trump’s ability to envelop his followers in a cocoon of lies is unparalleled. The Bush administration deceived the country to go to war in Iraq. It did not insist, after the invasion, that weapons of mass destruction had been found when they obviously were not. That’s why the country was able to reach a consensus that the war was a disaster.

No such consensus will be possible about Trump — not about his abuses of power, his calamitous response to the coronavirus, or his electoral defeat. He leaves behind a nation deranged.

The postmodern blood libel of QAnon will have adherents in Congress. Kyle Rittenhouse, a young man charged with killing Black Lives Matter protesters, is a right-wing folk hero. The Republican Party has become more hostile to democracy than ever. Both the Trump and Bush presidencies concluded with America a smoking ruin. Only Trump has ensured that nearly half the country doesn’t see it.

In May, Samuel Moyn predicted, in The New York Review of Books, that if Biden won, fears about American fascism would dissipate. Complacent in their restoration, he wrote, those who warned of fascism “will cordon off the interlude, as if it was ‘an accident in the factory,’ as Germans after World War II described their 12-year mistake.”

As American electors gathered — with the police offering armed guards and Michigan’s capitol closed by “credible threats of violence” — Moyn’s words, meant cynically, seem too optimistic. Trump failed to capture America, but he may have irrevocably broken it.

Dear Commons Community,

I just finished reading  The Tyranny of Merit: What’s Become of the Common Good by Michael J. Sandal, a professor of political philosophy at Harvard University.   His goal in writing this book is to show how our “meritocracy”  is not working for a large swath of “American life.”  As described in the jacket cover, the book examines “the hubris of meritocracy among the winners and the harsh judgment on those left behind.”  I think he does a good job of making his case.  His analysis of the admissions policies at our Ivy League institutions and the “sorting machine” that is the SAT are on target.  He also has keen observations of our leaders including Barack Obama and Donald Trump. His conclusion is that for the sake of our democracy, freedoms and fair-play, we must rethink the attitudes towards success and failure that have accompanied globalization and unchecked inequality.

I strongly recommend it if you are at all concerned about how our meritocracy has been at the root of elitism in our country, much of it to the detriment of common folks.

Below is a review that appeared in  The New York Times.

Tony

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New York Times

What’s Wrong With the Meritocracy

By Arlie Russell Hochschild

Published Sept. 15, 2020 Updated Nov. 30, 2020

The Tyranny of Merit:
What’s Become of the Common Good?

By Michael J. Sandel

In an eighth-grade math class at Pacific Palisades junior high in the late 1960s, Michael J. Sandel’s teacher seated students in precise order according to their grades. As their G.P.A.s shifted with the dramatically announced results of every quiz, so did the seating. “I typically shuttled between the second desk and the fourth or fifth,” Sandel recalls, and at age 14, “I thought this was how school worked.”

“The Tyranny of Merit” is like a brilliant response to that misguided but well-meaning math teacher from the viewpoint, as it were, of a kid in some back-row seat of any classroom in a Rust Belt, prairie town or inner-city school in America. What do grades and degrees tell us, Sandel asks, about the widening gap between rich and poor, proud and humiliated, trusting and suspicious, opponent and devotee of Donald Trump?

Some have called Sandel a “rock star moralist.” Without guitar or shiny shirt, the soft-toned but hard-hitting Harvard philosophy professor has packed St. Paul’s Cathedral in London, the Sydney Opera House in Australia and a 14,000-seat outdoor stadium in Seoul, South Korea.

One reason, perhaps, is that many of us need what he does so well: help us grapple with the unexpected and uncomfortable questions that history delivers us. Is it OK for parents to try to make a genetically perfect child (“The Case Against Perfection: Ethics in the Age of Genetic Engineering”)? Is it OK to pay your kid to read (“What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets”)? Now, in his new book, he asks: Is it OK to claim that our fine grades and degrees are all our own doing, so that we owe little or nothing in return?

What, he wonders, if the highly educated harden into a hereditary aristocracy? And what if this occurs under a flag of fairness, during a time when B.A.s and higher degrees are ever more closely tied to income and prestige? Let’s set aside the case of rich parents who bribe corrupt officials or donate huge sums to get their child into a good college. Let’s focus instead, Sandel writes, on the inequity that creeps in without breaking any rules. At Princeton and Yale, for example, more students come from families in the top 1 percent of income than from the bottom 60 percent. Two-thirds of students in all the Ivy League schools come from families in the top 20 percent. This is very largely because of the head start woven into upper-income life itself: engaging dinner conversation, better schools, private tutors, foreign travel.

Sandel is not about guilt-tripping anxious parents of front-row kids; they’re suffering too, he says. But the credentialed have come to imagine themselves as smarter, wiser, more tolerant — and therefore more deserving of recognition and respect — than the noncredentialed. One reason for this, he suggests, lies in our American “rhetoric of rising.” Both rich and poor parents tell their kids, if you try hard enough, you can achieve your goals. For the upper strata, things may work out, but for the downwardly mobile blue collar and poor, there’s a Catch-22. If they fail to reach their goals — which a torpid economy almost guarantees — they blame themselves. If only I could have gotten that degree, they say. Even the poorly educated, Sandel notes, look down on the poorly educated.

Donald Trump has reached out to this group with open arms — “I love the poorly educated.” He has harvested their demoralization, their grief and their shame, most certainly if they are white. But, Sandel notes, two-thirds of all American adults lack four-year degrees. And in the wake of automation, in real wages, the white man without a B.A. earns less now than he did in 1979. The dignity of his labor has steeply declined. And since 1965, high-school-educated men in the very prime of life — 25 to 54 — have been slipping out of the labor force, from 98 percent in 1965 to 85 percent in 2015. Of all Americans whose highest degree is a high school diploma, in 2017 only 68 percent worked. And with rising deaths of despair, many are giving up on life itself. So you who are highly educated, Sandel concludes, should understand that you’re contributing to a resentment fueling the toxic politics you deplore. Respect the vast diversity of talents and contributions others make to this nation. Empathize with the undeserved shame of the less educated. Eat a little humble pie.

But we are left with an important issue Sandel does not address: the targeting by the right wing of colleges themselves. This isn’t new: Running parallel to the rise of the meritocracy in America has been a suspicion of the egghead who can’t skin a rabbit, build a house or change a tire. As the historian Richard Hofstadter observed in “Anti-Intellectualism in American Life,” and Tocqueville before him, many Americans have valued not simply the cultivated intelligence of heroes in a culture of merit but also the creative genius of the “common man” in a culture of survival.

Today this has taken a shockingly partisan turn. For the first time in recent history, the less education you have, the more you lean right and distrust higher education itself. In a 2019 Pew survey, 59 percent of Republicans (and Republican-leaning independents) agree that “colleges have a negative effect on the way things are going in the country these days,” whereas only 18 percent of Democrats (and those leaning left) agree.

So now’s a good time for both sides to sit down for a very serious talk, with “The Tyranny of Merit” required reading for all. And invited from inner-city, suburban and rural schools across the land should be those who warmed seats both in the front row and in the back.

The total number of electoral votes is 538, of which Joe Biden is projected to receive 306  and Donald Trump 232.

Dear Commons Community,

The New York Times is offering a preview of the voting today by the the Electoral College which will gather in their respective states to cast their official ballots for president. Ordinarily, the process is little more than a formal duty to rubber-stamp the results of the November election but there is the possibility for some drama this year given that for weeks, President Trump and his allies have pressured Republican officials to ignore the popular vote in close-fought states won by President-elect Joe Biden  and appoint their own electors who would favor Mr. Trump. They have also asked courts to hand victory to the president in states he lost.

But judges and Republican state lawmakers have shown little appetite for subverting the democratic process, and the electors have remained. As they vote on today, Mr. Trump is essentially guaranteed to end the day as he began it:  a one-term president.

Here’s how the voting will work, and on the next steps in the process:

Can I watch the Electoral College vote?

Yes — most states offer livestreams to watch the proceedings, including crucial battlegrounds won by Mr. Biden. Here are links for four of them: Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Georgia.

The electors don’t meet in one place or at one time; some start at 10 a.m. Eastern, and most vote in the afternoon. California, the crucial state for Mr. Biden to achieve 270 Electoral College votes, meets at 5 p.m. Eastern.

Electors for each state and the District of Columbia meet at a location chosen by the state legislature, most often the state’s capitol. The Delaware electors are meeting in a gym. Nevada is the only state holding its meeting virtually this year.

How does the Electoral College voting work?

The electors cast their ballots for president and vice president via paper ballot. Thirty-three states and the District of Columbia legally require their electors to choose whoever won the state’s popular vote, so there should be no surprises there. The other 17 states don’t “bind” their electors, meaning they can vote for whomever they choose.

On Politics with Lisa Lerer: A guiding hand through the political news cycle, telling you what you really need to know.

The electors were chosen by state parties (if Mr. Biden won a state, for example, the Democrats’ slate of electors casts the votes). Typically, electors are political activists, officials, donors and people with close relationships to the candidates — meaning they are very likely to vote for the candidate they pledged to support. In 2016, seven electors lodged protest votes for someone other than their party’s candidate. But the likelihood of “faithless electors” switching sides and handing the election to Mr. Trump is essentially zero.

After the electors cast their ballots, the votes are counted and the electors sign certificates showing the results. These are paired with certificates from the governor’s office showing the state’s vote totals. The certificates are sent to Vice President Mike Pence, in his capacity as president of the Senate; the Office of the Federal Register; the secretary of state of the respective state; and the chief judge of the Federal District Court where the electors meet.

What happens next?

Congress officially counts the votes in a joint session held in the House chamber on Jan. 6, with Mr. Pence presiding. Mr. Pence opens the certificates — in alphabetical order by state — and presents them to four “tellers,” two from the House and two from the Senate, who count the votes. When Mr. Biden reaches a majority with 270 votes, Mr. Pence announces the result.

The proceeding is strictly prescribed by federal law, down to where various politicians sit in the chamber. (Mr. Pence gets the speaker’s chair, Speaker Nancy Pelosi sits to his left, and the “tellers” sit at the clerks’ desks.)

The session cannot be ended until the count is complete and the result publicly declared. At this point, the election is officially decided. The only remaining task is the inauguration on Jan. 20.

Which Congress runs the process?

Since the new members will be sworn in on Jan. 3, the next Congress will conduct this joint session. Democrats will hold control of the House. And Republicans will control the Senate, regardless of the results of the Georgia runoff elections on Jan. 5, because Mr. Pence will still be in office to act as the tiebreaking vote if the chamber is split 50 to 50.

Can members of Congress block the results?

There is no debate permitted during the counting of the electoral votes. But after the result is read, members of Congress get one opportunity to lodge their concerns.

Any objection to a state’s results must be made in writing and be signed by at least one senator and one member of the House. The two chambers would then separate to debate the objection. Each member of Congress can speak only once — for five minutes — and after two hours the debate is cut off. Each body then votes on whether to reject the state’s results.

Since the Electoral Count Act was passed in 1887, there have been just two instances of congressional objections, in 1969 and 2005. Neither passed either the House or the Senate.

What’s the likelihood of Congress changing the outcome?

Stopping Mr. Biden from assuming office remains a long-shot strategy for Republicans.

For an objection to stand, it must pass both houses of Congress by a simple majority. If the vote followed party lines, Republicans could not block Mr. Biden’s victory.

Democrats control the House, so an objection would already be doomed there. In the Senate, Democrats would need to pick off only a couple of Republicans to side with them to vote down the objection. A number of Republican senators have declared Mr. Biden the president-elect.

With some Trump allies already planning objections, the congressional session is likely to make for good political theater. But the process has little chance of changing the outcome of the election.

Tony

Chief Wahoo

Dear Commons Community,

The Associated Press and the New York Times are reporting that the Cleveland Indians plan to change their name after 105 years.

Citing three people familiar with the decision, The New York Times reported last night that the team is moving away from a name considered racist for decades. The Indians have been internally discussing a potential name change for months.

A team spokesman told The Associated Press the franchise has no immediate comment on the report.

The Times said the team could make a formal announcement later this week. It’s not known when the name change will take effect or if the team has settled on a new moniker.

Cleveland’s move away from Indians follows a similar decision earlier this year by the NFL’s Washington Football Team, which was previously known as the Redskins.

For years, Native American groups and others have protested against Cleveland’s use of Indians as its name as well as other imagery used by the American League charter franchise founded in 1901. Last year, the team removed the contentious Chief Wahoo logo from its caps and jerseys, but the smiling, cartoonish mascot has remained popular and merchandise is still sold bearing its image.

The Indians have dealt with a backlash from fans upset over Chief Wahoo’s removal and the club is certain to hear more with the decision to change its name.

In July, just hours after Washington’s plans became known after being pressured by several sponsors, including FedEx which holds naming rights to the football’s team’s stadium, Cleveland owner Paul Dolan released a statement saying the team would review “the best path forward with our team name.”

In the months since, the team has consulted players, front office members, coaching staff, community leaders, shareholders and Native American groups.

A few days after Dolan’s statement, Indians manager Terry Francona said it was time to “move forward” with the name change.

“I’ve been thinking about it before we put out that statement,” said Francona, who has been with the club since 2013. “I know in the past, when I’ve been asked about, whether it’s our name or the Chief Wahoo, I think I would usually answer and say I know that we’re never trying to be disrespectful.

“And I still feel that way. But I don’t think that’s a good enough answer today. I think it’s time to move forward. It’s a very difficult subject. It’s also delicate.”

Congratulations to the Cleveland ownership!

Tony

Dr. Jill Biden

Dear Commons Community,

A Wall Street Journal editorial shows that its head is in it’s a… for printing an editorial admonishing Jill Biden for using the title “Dr.” in front of her name even though she has an earned Ph.D. from the University of Delaware. As reported by The Huffington Post and other media.

“The Wall Street Journal faces a fierce backlash from future first lady Jill Biden’s camp and from her supporters over an editorial that admonished her for using the title “doctor.”

Biden indeed holds a doctorate degree ― in education, which she obtained from the University of Delaware in 2007 at age 55 after 15 years of work while raising her three children.

Sometimes news outlets (such as HuffPost) use the title only for people who are medical doctors, but there is nothing inherently wrong with using it, as Biden does, to highlight her achievement.

Journal editorial columnist Joseph Epstein, however, offered his unsolicited opinion on Saturday in a piece dripping with condescension.

“Madame First Lady — Mrs. Biden — Jill — kiddo,” Epstein began: “A bit of advice on what may seem like a small but I think is a not unimportant matter. Any chance you might drop the ‘Dr.’ before your name? ‘Dr. Jill Biden’ sounds and feels fraudulent, not to say a touch comic.” 

The columnist spoke at length about his own career before delivering a tirade against honorary degrees given to the likes of Stephen Colbert. But to reiterate: Biden earned her degree through more than a decade of study; it was not given as an honorary title.

Epstein encouraged Biden to “settle for the larger thrill of living for the next four years in the best public housing in the world as first lady Jill Biden.”

Biden has been a staunch and longtime advocate of public education; it is not clear why Epstein mentioned public housing. 

Epstein, for his part, does not have a doctorate; he has only a bachelor’s degree. 

Biden’s spokesman, Michael LaRosa, snapped back on Twitter at James Taranto, the Journal’s editorial features editor, who oversees the op-ed pages. 

″[Y]ou and the @WSJ should be embarrassed to print the disgusting and sexist attack on @DrBiden running on the @WSJopinion page,” LaRosa tweeted. “If you had any respect for women at all you would remove this repugnant display of chauvinism from your paper and apologize to her.” 

Biden’s communications director, Elizabeth Alexander, tweeted an even more succinct criticism: “Sexist and shameful. Be better @WSJ.”

Twitter users ― a group made up in part of lawmakers and celebrities, including actor Debra Messing ― prompted the word “doctor” to trend on the social media site by chastising the New York City–based newspaper for publishing Epstein’s editorial.

Doug Emhoff, husband of Vice President-elect Kamala Harris, offered support as well. “This story would never have been written about a man,” he tweeted. 

What an embarrassment for a what was once a hallowed American news institution.  Now it is operating more like a tabloid owned by Rupert Murdoch.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Jim Rutenberg and Nick Corasaniti have a featured article in today’s New York Times entitled, ‘An Indelible Stain’: How the G.O.P. Tried to Topple a Pillar of Democracy.  I think the title is too gentle.  What the 126 G.O.P. House members and 18 attorneys general who chose to side with Mr. Trump over the democratic process and signed onto the embarrassing lawsuit brought before the U.S. Supreme Court contesting the Trump’s loss in the presidential election was nothing short of disgraceful.  They are a cowardly group of politicians who put themselves and their party ahead of the country and its most cherished democratic values.  Here is an excerpt from the article.

“The Supreme Court repudiation of President Trump’s desperate bid for a second term not only shredded his effort to overturn the will of voters: It also was a blunt rebuke to Republican leaders in Congress and the states who were willing to damage American democracy by embracing a partisan power grab over a free and fair election.

The court’s decision on Friday night, an inflection point after weeks of legal flailing by Mr. Trump and ahead of the Electoral College vote for President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. on Monday, leaves the president’s party in an extraordinary position. Through their explicit endorsements or complicity of silence, much of the G.O.P. leadership now shares responsibility for the quixotic attempt to ignore the nation’s founding principles and engineer a different verdict from the one voters cast in November.

Many regular Republicans supported this effort, too — a sign that Mr. Trump has not just bent the party to his will, but pressed a mainstay of American politics for nearly two centuries into the service of overturning an election outcome and assaulting public faith in the electoral system. The G.O.P. sought to undo the vote by such spurious means that the Supreme Court quickly rejected the argument.

Even some Republican leaders delivered a withering assessment of the 126 G.O.P. House members and 18 attorneys general who chose to side with Mr. Trump over the democratic process, by backing a lawsuit that asked the Supreme Court to throw out some 20 million votes in four key states that cemented the president’s loss.

“The act itself by the 126 members of the United States House of Representatives, is an affront to the country,” said Michael Steele, the former chairman of the Republican National Committee. “It’s an offense to the Constitution and it leaves an indelible stain that will be hard for these 126 members to wipe off their political skin for a long time to come.”

Speaking on CNN on Friday, Gov. Chris Sununu of New Hampshire, a Republican, said, “What happened with the Supreme Court, that’s kind of it, where they’ve kind of exhausted all the legal challenges; we’ve got to move on.” It was time, he said, for Congress to “actually do something for the American people, surrounding the vaccines, surrounding Covid.”

With direct buy-in from senior officials like Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and the Republican leader in the House, Representative Kevin McCarthy of California, the president’s effort required the party to promote false theory upon unsubstantiated claim upon outright lie about unproved, widespread fraud — in an election that Republican and Democratic election officials agreed was notably smooth given the challenges of the pandemic.

And it meant that Republican leaders now stand for a new notion: that the final decisions of voters can be challenged without a basis in fact if the results are not to the liking of the losing side, running counter to decades of work by the United States to convince developing nations that peaceful transfers of power are key to any freely elected government’s credibility…”

The article concluded:

Tom Rath, a former Republican attorney general of New Hampshire, who opposed his party’s effort at the Supreme Court, lamented  “It’s very unfortunate,’’ he said, “that some people tried to live off chaos, perpetuate it and make it even more difficult for the average citizen to trust what government’s doing.”

Mr. Rath, who advised the presidential campaigns of George W. Bush and Mitt Romney, added, “We’re in a very bad place as a party.’’

A bad place indeed!

Tony