Between Hell and High Water

My Journey With Steve Chapman Along the Arc of American Journalism

By Mike Koetting September 13, 2022

I moved to Illinois in the mid-70s. I lived in Springfield and worked for, first, the Legislative Budget Office, and then the Executive Budget Office. I always read the Springfield paper—virtually a company newsletter at the time–but also kept loose track of both the Chicago dailies, the Chicago Tribune and the Chicago Sun Times, which both had substantive Statehouse Bureaus, as did UPI and others. Later, I moved to Chicago, then to Boston for a couple of years. When I returned to Chicago in 1985, I became a religious reader of the Tribune. Every morning with my breakfast.

While I was a gone, the Tribune introduced a new columnist, Steve Chapman. I didn’t like him much. Too conservative Republican for my tastes. Still, I periodically read him.

Declining Public School Enrollment

By Mike Koetting August 30, 2022

Schools are now underway for the year, so this is a timely spot for a post on education. While there are many possible topics, I have been specifically thinking about something a little wonkish: declining public school enrollment.

The Decline

A recent New York Times article proclaimed “Plunging Enrollment a ‘Seismic Hit’ to Public Schools”. It went on to state that “America’s public schools have lost at least 1.2 million students since 2020.” This did not surprise me. The country’s fertility rate has declined by almost 18% since 1990. In the last 10 years, this decline included Latin and Black populations. Combined with declining immigration rates, dropping enrollments would be expected. But the drop has been uneven. Nationwide, a large portion of the recent sharp decline in public school enrollment is in pre-kindergarten and, to a lesser extent, kindergarten. Some of this is due to declining fertility, but it has been clearly aggravated by specific responses to the Covid pandemic. Aside from this, it seems that the aggregate slide in enrollment is minimal.

When Do We Get Serious About Environmental Issues?

By Mike Koetting August 14, 2022

When I began this blog five years ago, I chose the title “Between Hell and High Water” as a metaphor for the complexity of trying to develop politics that reflected the difficulty of executing policies toward progressive results.

I didn’t plan to make it a literal description of the American climate situation.

Judicial Review and Democracy

By Mike Koetting August 1, 2022

Given the abject rottenness of recent Supreme Court decisions—and visions of more to come–it is reasonable to raise the question of whether the entire model of judicial review is a bad idea.

It is clear there is something peculiar (to use a modest word) to give so much power to a small group of people who are not only un-elected, but in fact may have been appointed by a party that has lost multiple elections since they were appointed or which has repeatedly lost the popular vote or both.

Most other countries have some judicial review, but in virtually none is it as extensive or important as in America. The role of judicial review in America does not—directly—spring from a power granted by the Constitution. Indeed, the power of judicial review specifically stems from a Supreme Court decision, Madison v. Marbury, decided in 1803. Thus, it might correctly be observed that the power of judicial review is something the Supreme Court granted to itself. It would fail a test of strict originalism. The decision in point concerned a purely political issue, that was ultimately side-stepped, but the opinion had far-reaching consequences since it established the principle that the Supreme Court could invalidate an act of Congress.

Notes from the Big Apple

By Mike Koetting July 19, 2022

Last weekend my wife and I took our 10 year old grandson to New York City. It was a great trip, but it left me without time or motivation to write my usual blog. So I thought I would share some thought snippets from the trip.

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Manhattan is kind of a Disneyland in the real world. (In fact, Manhattan is only half the size of Disney World, though quite a bit larger than the original Disneyland.) It isn’t the artificial world of the Disney enterprises. On the contrary. It is as absolutely real world as you can get. But there were fun things to do from morning till night. And many of them were the originals—the Statue of Liberty, Times Square, the Empire State Building—that have been borrowed countless times for every commercial purpose imaginable to the human mind. I was compelled to teach the grandkid what “iconic” meant.

Reflections at the Fourth of July

By Mike Koetting July 3, 2022

Well….it’s not a great week to be writing a Fourth of July blog. As has often come through in these posts, I hover between hope for and despair with this country. This week my despair has the upper hand.

One has to remember that democracy is not the default state for societies. Throughout recorded history, some form of authoritarian figure has been far and away the dominant mode. (What happened in un-recorded history is much less clear; there have been some recent writings that suggest a lot of different models were tried.) Authoritarians have been more or less authoritarian from place to place and the degree of tolerance within those regimes likewise varied, but they were the modal form of government. The idea of democracy as we think about it is at best 1000 years old, and more likely only around since the Enlightenment. The explicit terms with which the fledgling United States—at that point not much more than an almost ad-hoc collection of disparate colonies–spelled out a democratic creed really was revolutionary. The echoes still redound.

As we all know, the initial effort was an imperfect effort, blinkered as it was by a self-referencing notion of what it meant to be human. But, even so, the language they used was, and remains, catalytic:

Imagine the Worst to Protect Ourselves

By Mike Koetting June 21, 2022

Post before last I asked people what they thought we should do about the electoral dilemmas I raised.

On the specific issue, there was virtual unanimity in favor of ending party primaries and using completely open primaries with the top two proceeding to the “final”. Another suggestion, was to end “winner take all” awarding of electoral votes, something I have previously supported. One person suggested it might be easier to get these reforms passed if they had a long lead time so current incumbents wouldn’t feel so threatened.

On the broader issue of how to address the depth of the political division in America, the prevalent attitude was some version of “Hang on….it will get better.”

Is It Possible to Regulate Corporations in America?

By Mike Koetting June 7, 2022

I am fascinated how in the current political landscape the culture wars have obscured almost everything else, including economic issues, which in most times are one of the major functions of a national government.

The Most Fundamental Issue

The New Deal is justly known for its structural innovations—Social Security, the Tennessee Valley Authority, the WPA, the FDIC, the SEC, recognition of unions, and so forth. But more important than any of these specifics was the underlying assertion of a governing ideology that raw economic power could not be left to itself, but must be tempered by, sometimes subordinated to, fairness, justice and equity.

Ronald Reagan worshipped at a different alter. He fully embraced the neo-liberal belief, popularized by Milton Friedman, that government should just get out of the way of individual enterprise. In this view of the world, “efficiency” was the sole criterion. Parallel, the neo-liberals argued that the only duty of a corporation was to make profit for shareholders.

In the Doom Loop

By Mike Koetting May 23, 2022

The problem with linked essays when you post the first before you have written the second is that you may find you have jumped—with no place to land.

That seems to have happened to me.

In my last post, I argued that the compromise-required architecture of our governing system when combined with the two-party, winner-take-all nature of our political structure has led to hyper-partisanship and a subsequent democratic gridlock.

At the end of that post, I suggested today’s post would address what to do about it. Unfortunately, on reflection, the things I had in mind seem completely out of reach.

The Road to Gridlock

By Mike Koetting May 8, 2022

Months ago, I asserted that democracies require two mutually reinforcing things to survive—a wide spread belief in the importance of democracy and a sense that the government was actually working. I then reviewed some data that showed a weakening of the democratic imperative in the minds of voters and postponed the question of belief in the efficacy until a later day.

That day is today.

I don’t know how exactly one would decide whether a government is “working” or not. America has not descended into the absolute chaos of some clearly failed governments. On a day-to-day basis, we manage to keep things plausibly together. One can point to issues not being well addressed—many are big and important—but when one looks around the world, most other nations are struggling with the same issues. They are hard issues.

Nevertheless, it seems confidence in the American system is flagging. Most Americans tell pollsters the country is on the verge of failure. Many go on to say the problem is hyper-partisanship. I believe that is indeed the source of both many of the real failures in governing and the widespread perception of failure.