Category: Education

musk is a sociopathetic excuse for a human being: Elon Musk’s war on Social Security unmasks the GOP’s true disdain for retirees

Salon

Elon Musk’s war on Social Security unmasks the GOP’s true disdain for retirees

Amanda Marcotte – March 18, 2025

Elon Musk Patrick Pleul/picture alliance via Getty Images
Elon Musk Patrick Pleul/picture alliance via Getty Images

“Social Security is not being touched,” Republican Rep. Bill Huizenga tried to assuage his panicked Michigan constituents earlier this month. The congressman may be misinformed or simply lying. Either way, his words were not true. Social Security is facing an all-out assault from Elon Musk‘s “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE) — and voters know it.

“We worked our entire life,” one panicked retiree declared at Huizenga’s most recent town hall, held via teleconference. “But we can’t get any help because we can’t get through to anybody.” The former teacher was featured in an Associated Press report from the weekend detailing how angry and frightened Social Security recipients are storming town halls, begging their congressional representatives to stop Musk’s misnamed DOGE from taking away their benefits. Donald Trump won this part of the state with over 60% of the vote, but now voters are begging their Republican representative to save them from the consequences of their electoral choices.

As the New York Times reported Monday, Musk’s DOGE “has taken its chain saw to the agency’s operations,” trying to institute mass layoffs and office closures, which “could create gaping holes in the agency’s infrastructure, destabilizing the program.” There have even been efforts to destroy the phone service that allows beneficiaries to call the Social Security Administration for help. On Monday, Popular Info released a leaked memo from Trump’s management to Social Security workers, detailing how the administration is well aware that the planned cuts will dramatically increase “demand for office appointments” — even as Musk is shutting down offices, making those appointments even harder to secure. The result, according to Trump’s own appointees, will be “service disruption,” and “delayed processing” of payments to retirees.

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Musk loves to play word games when defending his assault on a program that helps keep millions of elderly and disabled people from falling into poverty. He insists he’s merely trying to attack “waste and fraud” in the program, falsely claiming that $700 billion a year can be categorized this way. (Reality-based assessments show that it’s likely less than 1% of that figure for the entire federal government, not just Social Security.) To justify this outright disinformation, Musk has insisted that “millions of people” getting Social Security checks are “definitely dead,” calling them “vampires” and declaring “tax dollars are being stolen.”Advertisement

It’s not true, and we can call this a lie, because Musk has repeatedly been told the retirees he calls “definitely dead” are very much alive. He refuses to back down or admit he was wrong. Instead, he disparages Social Security altogether. “Social Security is the biggest Ponzi scheme of all time,” he declared on Joe Rogan’s show earlier this month. Musk has long obsessed over the idea that low birthrates and the subsequent aging population are “the biggest danger civilization faces by far.” While he tends to emphasize the “more babies” part of the equation to fix this alleged problem, it’s not much of a leap to see that “fewer old people” would also get the job done. Musk is savvy enough to know better than to say this about the U.S., but he’s been happy to say it of France, denouncing the nation for having a retirement age of 62, only three years short of the U.S. He complains these retirement ages were “set when life spans were much shorter” and it’s “impossible for a small number of workers to support a massive number of retirees.”

Musk frames retired people in parasitical terms, not seeing them as those who have paid their dues and have earned their reward. In light of that, when he speaks of “waste” in Social Security, he’s hinting at this broader view that retired people are inherently illegitimate. While he couches language like “vampire” and “fraud” in false claims that he’s talking about illegal payments, the accumulated impact of his rhetoric is to demonize elderly people as a useless burden on society. When the end goal is “efficiency,” it’s easy to get to this view that retired people are an “inefficiency” and “redundancy” that should no longer be funded.

The ugly attitude towards elderly people is an inevitable result of the profoundly anti-human views and ideology of Musk and his compatriots in the tech billionaire world. Tech journalist Kara Swisher, who has covered Musk for decades now, explained to the New York Times that the billionaire views himself as “the person who matters the most,” and that “everybody else is an N.P.C. — a nonplayer character,” which is video game slang for preprogrammed characters in a video game.

Musk hinted at this during his Rogan interview, complaining, “The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy, the empathy exploit.” While insisting “you should care about other people,” he made it clear this was rear-covering nonsense. His larger point was that empathy is “civilizational suicidal” and “the empathy response” is “a bug in Western civilization.” The larger interview painted a picture of a man full of contempt for other people, with all their needs and subjective experiences, when he would rather they be compliant automatons who fulfill his demands without resistance. He fantasized about replacing people with “artificial intelligence” and robots, even talking up the incel-inflected dream of replacing women with sex robots.

Musk and his fellow techno-fascists often cast themselves as the saviors of “civilization,” but that rhetoric is only there to put an ennobling gloss on a deeply sociopathic view: that human beings exist to serve the system, and not that the system is there to serve humanity. In this case, the system is capitalism, which has taken on a near-religious status to Silicon Valley’s billionaire elite. It’s an attitude that’s inherently eugenicist, measuring people’s value solely in terms of whether they can be utilized to make more money for the already-wealthy investor class. It’s why Musk has no respect for federal workers whose labor is centered around helping people, not profits. And it’s certainly not a worldview that has space for retirees, people who, by definition, are out of the paid labor market.

Causing people who have earned their Social Security to lose benefits doesn’t look like an unintended consequence of “efficiency.” It’s becoming clear that it is Musk’s end goal.

musk’s DOGE wants to punish children with reading disabilities; what would his own 14 children think about that: For So Many Children, This Is What Reading Feels Like

By James Robinson – March 16, 2025

CreditCredit…

Mr. Robinson is a video producer for Times Opinion and the author of the forthcoming memoir “Whale Eyes,” from which this article is adapted.

When you’re a struggling reader, there’s no amount of motivation that can power you through the sludge of an opening paragraph. Because no matter how intrigued you may be by the topic, when you get to around here, the words begin to fa l t e r.

T h e s e n t e n c e s s l o w d o w n.

Y o u ha ve t o co n cen trat e s o h a r d t o e n s u r e t h a tyo u ca n r em em ber th e b eg inn i n g o f th e sen t e n ce b y t h et i m e

y o um a k e i t t o t h e en d.

And you wonder: What would it be like to make it to the bottom of an article?

Your mind twists around a question: How is it possible that some people can do this so easily? Yet you can’t.

It’s a visceral experience. Of frustration. And raw insecurity.

A graphic of the word “Why?” repeated and jumbled to form a mass.

It feels like the words have given up on you.

It’s tempting to skip to a short paragraph. You should be able to make your way through that. But without context, even a short paragraph doesn’t make sense; you’re confused.

How is it that so many people use these forms to gain a grasp of the world? When you can hardly grasp each word.

I know this experience of reading because for much of my childhood it was my own. For me, the cause was alternating exotropia. I see out of one eye at a time, and every few seconds the words jump back and forth on the page. For others it is dyslexia or ADHD, or simply a lack of resources.

Since the onset of the Covid pandemic, America’s reading scores have plummeted. Students at the top are still succeeding. But a record percentage of eighth graders failed to meet even the lowest “basic” benchmark.

Thesearestudentsforwhomforwhomakingtheirwaythroughtexttheirwaythroughtextfeelslikethis.

These students are soon to be victims of America’s great reading absurdity: Precisely at the moment when reading scores have reached an all-time low, the Trump administration and the Republican Party are stripping away the protections and resources that help children who struggle to read.

A graphic composed of the words “Why is this so hard for me” repeated and jumbled to form a black cloud. The letters “A” “B” “C” “D” “O” “G” “E” are printed on top of the cloud.

On the federal level, Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency has already taken an ax to critical research initiatives. This includes canceling Education Department contracts with organizations such as the Regional Educational Laboratories, one of which played a major role in the “Mississippi Miracle,” helping the state jump from 49th to 29th in fourth-grade reading scores between 2013 and 2019. (The department has said it will enter into new contracts.) On Tuesday, more than 1,300 Education Department workers were fired, including almost half of the office responsible for enforcing anti-discrimination protections for students with disabilities.

At the state level, school voucher programs are siphoning hundreds of millions of dollars away from public school systems into private schools, which are not required to offer the same level of support to disabled students.

Meanwhile, 17 states sued the Department of Health and Human Services last year in response to updated Biden administration regulations, asking the courts to declare Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act — the bedrock of disability rights legislation in the United States — unconstitutional. The suit poses a threat to the roughly 1.6 million children in America who depend on the law for accommodations like assistive technology and modifications to testing procedures. (While many of the attorneys general on the lawsuit have since said they are not seeking to overturn Section 504 entirely, some legal experts are skeptical.)

Collectively, these measures amount to an attack on those struggling to read — those who, at this point, would not be able to identify the position of this article, its core argument, or what is at stake.

F o r ast r u ggli ng r e ade r, r ea c hin g t h e b ot tom o f the pa ge ca n fe el like a dre am.

You wonder if there will ever be a time when your eyes reach this point on the page and you’ll carry with you an understanding of all the words stacked above.

For decades, Republicans and Democrats have agreed that no matter where you grew up or how your brain sees and processes these shapes, our public school system should help you to understand the words on this page. Reading is a basic right.

But as long as our answer to low scores is to slash support for struggling readers, we risk turning this right into a privilege.

A Dark Day For Our Country:

Spineless republi-cons in congress fail their country and even their own families.

Senator Adam Schiff – March 15, 2025

The Founders Were Afraid for the Country, Too

Jamelle Bouie – March 15, 2025

A statue of Benjamin Franklin in the U.S. Capitol.
Ben FranklinCredit…Jonno Rattman for The New York Times

While writing my column this week, I was reminded of Benjamin Franklin’s famous quip about the outcome of the 1787 constitutional convention in Philadelphia. As the story goes, Franklin was leaving the hall after signing the Constitution when he approached by Elizabeth Powel, a close friend of George Washington’s. She asked whether the delegates had decided on a monarchy or a republic.

“A republic,” Franklin replied, “if you can keep it.”

This anecdote comes to us by way of James McHenry, a delegate from Maryland who later served as the United States’ third secretary of war. It was recorded in “The Records of the Federal Convention of 1787” and has had remarkable staying power in the decades and centuries since it entered popular memory.

The reason, I think, is that it captures better than almost anything else the apprehension and uncertainty that marked the first decade of the American republic.

Somewhat lost to history in our memory and mythology of the founding fathers is the fact that their optimism regarding their capacity to make the world anew was tempered by a deep pessimism born of past precedent and their own experiences as statesmen and politicians.

The framers were more than aware of the fragile and short-lived nature of republican government. “It is impossible to read the history of the petty republics of Greece and Italy without feeling sensations of horror and disgust at the distractions with which they were continually agitated, and at the rapid succession of revolutions by which they were kept in a state of perpetual vibration between the extremes of tyranny and anarchy,” Alexander Hamilton observed in Federalist No. 9, voicing the conventional wisdom of many of his peers. “If they exhibit occasional calms, these only serve as short-lived contrast to the furious storms that are to succeed.”

Accordingly, their own choices were informed by the examples of the past. They would avoid the direct democracy of Athens in favor of a system of representation; they would blend representation with the aristocratic elements of the Roman republic; and they would create a new office, the presidency, that would tether the executive power to the rule of law.

The product of human failings and human frailties, despotism could not help but lurk around every corner. The best the framers could do was to design their new government to be as resilient as it could be in the face of ambition and the will to power.

But, of course, there was no guarantee that it would work.

There is a wonderful book by the political scientist Dennis C. Rasmussen, titled “Fears of a Setting Sun: The Disillusionment of America’s Founders,” that both captures and explains the pessimism of the revolutionary generation.

George Washington, for instance, feared that the nation would be pulled apart by faction and partisanship. “I have, for sometime past, viewed the political concerns of the United States with an anxious, and painful eye,” wrote Washington near the end of his life in a letter to none other than the aforementioned McHenry. “They appear to me, to be moving by hasty strides to some awful crisis; but in what they will result — that Being, who sees, foresees, and directs all things, alone can tell.”

Hamilton, who devoted his life in politics to building a strong national government, feared that the political system was too weak to secure a strong future for the nation. “Truly, My dear Sir, the prospects of our Country are not brilliant,” he wrote to Rufus King after Thomas Jefferson took office, complaining that the new president pushed a vision of “No army, no navy, no active commerce … as little government as possible.”

John Adams saw a lack of virtue among the people and feared that they would not be able to resist the temptations of a demagogue. “If there is any Thing Serious in this World, the Selfishness of our Countrymen is not only Serious but melancholy, foreboding ravages of Ambition and Avarice which never were exceeded on this Selfish Globe,” he wrote to his son, John Quincy Adams,. “You have seen much of it. I have seen more.…The distemper in our Nation is so general, and so certainly incurable.”

Interestingly, the founding father who lived longest into the 19th century, James Madison, retained a great deal more optimism about the future of the American Republic. “A Government like ours has so many safety valves, giving vent to overheated passions,” he wrote to the Marquis de Lafayette, commenting on the Missouri crisis, “that it carries within itself a relief against the infirmities from which the best of human Institutions cannot be exempt.”

To take the pessimism of the founders seriously — to really engage with their fears — is to see the extent to which they weren’t all wrong.

Washington’s warnings about the dangers of faction are, these days, well taken, especially as we observe in real time the ways that narrow political allegiance and fear of party censure can supersede a lawmaker’s commitment to anything broader than immediate partisan interest. How might Republicans in Congress deal with the illegal, unconstitutional and anti-constitutional actions of the White House if they weren’t so concerned with winning the next primary or raising money for the next campaign?

We can both recognize that modern democracy is inconceivable without the political party — it is a necessary coordinating institution — while also giving due credit to Washington who could see, even in those early years, the dangers that factional behavior and blind partisanship could pose to even a well-ordered political system.

Adams’s warnings about the consequences of a lack of virtue land especially hard in light of the rampant dishonesty that almost defines American politics at this moment in time. This isn’t the more ordinary fudging of truth that attends politics in most places and at most times; no, this is the kind of blatant and unapologetic lying that degrades public life itself. This is going before the American people and telling them things you know are not true to gain power, and then using that power to pursue your own interests against the public good.

Or look at the extent to which too many Americans indulge the worst forms of conspiratorial thinking, who indulge the worst fantasies about their political opponents and believe anything they’re told, as long as it flatters their prejudices and preconceptions about people on the other side of a political or cultural divide. This, too, is a rejection of civic virtue, of the good faith and good will that we ought to show our fellow citizens because we are not engaged in a winner-take-all struggle as much as we are a collective effort to live together as peacefully as we can.

Hamilton’s fears about anarchy were mostly about his disdain for democracy. And yet, as we bear witness to an aggressive attempt to dismantle the federal bureaucracy, we may find that he was right about the dangers of a weak state for the peace and security of the nation.

Against all of this, there is Madison’s optimism. And I have to say that I am inclined by disposition to stand with Madison.

Many groups of Americans — especially those who, because of race or religion, have found themselves outside the so-called mainstream — have faced challenges far worse than those at hand. They have had to survive as second-class citizens under authoritarian rule, or as supposed enemy nationals confined to internment camps, or as dangerous radicals suppressed and surveilled by their government.

The United States, it suffices to say, has been far from benign toward many of its own citizens. But even in the face of real oppression, those Americans (and their allies) had the capacity to fight for equality, to fight for democracy, to fight to make this country so much more than what it is often content to be.

After surveying the many difficulties facing the country, Madison wrote, at the very end of his life, that he was “far however from desponding, of the great political experiment in the hands of the American people.” Madison had seen and experienced a lifetime’s worth of political turmoil. Through it all, however, the republic endured. And as his time on this earth came to a close, he still believed in the strength of the system he had helped to create.

I’m not so sure about the strength of that system. (It should be said that a generation after Madison’s death, his Constitution collapsed under the weight of the slave system that gave him his livelihood.) I’m a little more optimistic about the American people themselves. Democracy is our birthright — it’s part of who we are. At our best, we are jealous of our freedom and eager to expand our collective liberty for the sake of a more egalitarian society.

We have a would-be despot in the White House. But even with a rotting Constitution on the verge of crisis, this is still a Republic, and the people are still sovereign. The task, then, is to make this clear to those in power who would like to pretend otherwise.

What Trump and Musk Want With Social Security

The Atlantic

What Trump and Musk Want With Social Security

Lora Kelley – March 14, 2025

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.

The idea that millions of dead Americans are receiving Social Security checks is shocking, and bolsters the argument that the federal bureaucracy needs radical change to combat waste and fraud. There’s one big problem: No evidence exists that it’s true.

Despite being told by agency staff last month that this claim has no basis in fact, Elon Musk and President Donald Trump have continued to use the talking point as a pretext to attack America’s highest-spending government program. Musk seems to have gotten this idea from a list of Social Security recipients who did not have a death date attached to their record. Agency employees reportedly explained to Musk’s DOGE team in February that the list of impossibly ancient individuals they found were not necessarily receiving benefits (the lack of death dates was related to an outdated system).

And yet, in his speech to Congress last week, Trump stated: “Believe it or not, government databases list 4.7 million Social Security members from people aged 100 to 109 years old.” He said the list includes “3.5 million people from ages 140 to 149,” among other 100-plus age ranges, and that “money is being paid to many of them, and we’re searching right now.” In an interview with Fox Business on Monday, Musk discussed the existence of “20 million people who are definitely dead, marked as alive” in the Social Security database. And DOGE has dispatched 10 employees to try to find evidence of the claims that dead Americans are receiving checks, according to documents filed in court on Wednesday.

Musk and Trump have long maintained that they do not plan to attack Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, the major entitlement programs. But their repeated claims that rampant fraud exists within these entitlement systems undermine those assurances. In his Fox interview on Monday, Musk said, “Waste and fraud in entitlement spending—which is most of the federal spending, is entitlements—so that’s like the big one to eliminate. That’s the sort of half trillion, maybe $600, $700 billion a year.” Some observers interpreted this confusing sentence to mean that Musk wants to cut the entitlement programs themselves. But the Trump administration quickly downplayed Musk’s comments, insisting that the federal government will continue to protect such programs and suggesting that Musk had been talking about the need to eliminate fraud in the programs, not about axing them. “What kind of a person doesn’t support eliminating waste, fraud, and abuse in government spending?” the White House asked in a press release.

The White House’s question would be a lot easier to answer if Musk, who has called Social Security a “Ponzi scheme,” wasn’t wildly overestimating the amount of fraud in entitlement programs. Musk is claiming waste in these programs on the order of hundreds of billions of dollars a year, but a 2024 Social Security Administration report found that the agency lost closer to $70 billion total in improper payments from 2015 to 2022, which accounts for about 1 percent of Social Security payments. Leland Dudek, a mid-level civil servant elevated to temporarily lead Social Security after being put on administrative leave for sharing information with DOGE, pushed back last week on the idea that the agency is overrun with fraud and that dead people older than 100 are getting payments, ProPublica reported after obtaining a recording of a closed-door meeting. DOGE’s false claim about dead people receiving benefits “got in front of us,” one of Dudek’s deputies reportedly said, but “it’s a victory that you’re not seeing more [misinformation], because they are being educated.” (Dudek did not respond to ProPublica’s request for comment.)

Some 7 million Americans rely on Social Security benefits for more than 90 percent of their income, and 54 million individuals and their dependents receive retirement payments from the agency. Even if Musk doesn’t eliminate the agency, his tinkering could still affect all of those Americans’ lives. On Wednesday, DOGE dialed back its plans to cut off much of Social Security’s phone services (a commonly used alternative to its online programs, particularly for elderly and disabled Americans), though it still plans to restrict recipients’ ability to change bank-deposit information over the phone.

In recent weeks, confusion has rippled through the Social Security workforce and the public; many people drop off forms in person, but office closures could disrupt that. According to ProPublica, several IT contracts have been cut or scaled back, and several employees reported that their tech systems are crashing every day. Thousands of jobs are being cut, including in regional field offices, and the entire Social Security staff has been offered buyouts (today is the deadline for workers to take them). Martin O’Malley, a former commissioner of the agency, has warned that the workforce reductions that DOGE is seeking at Social Security could trigger “system collapse and an interruption of benefits” within the next one to three months.

In going anywhere near Social Security—in saying the agency’s name in the same sentence as the word eliminate—Musk is venturing further than any presidential administration has in recent decades. Entitlement benefits are extremely popular, and cutting the programs has long been a nonstarter. When George W. Bush raised the idea of partially privatizing entitlements in 2005, the proposal died before it could make it to a vote in the House or Senate.

The DOGE plan to cut $1 trillion in spending while leaving entitlements, which make up the bulk of the federal budget, alone always seemed implausible. In the November Wall Street Journal op-ed announcing the DOGE initiative, Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy (who is no longer part of DOGE) wrote that those who say “we can’t meaningfully close the federal deficit without taking aim at entitlement programs” are deflecting “attention from the sheer magnitude of waste, fraud and abuse” that “DOGE aims to address.” But until there’s clear evidence that this “magnitude” of fraud exists within Social Security, such claims enable Musk to poke at what was previously untouchable.

How Far Gone Are We?

Jamelle Bouie – March 13, 2025

Hands entwined with an American flag.
Credit…Eric Lee/The New York Times

The question of the day is whether the United States is embroiled in a constitutional crisis.

Consider the circumstances. Congress has essentially surrendered its power of the purse to an unelected co-president who has seized control of much of the federal bureaucracy. The actual president has asserted a unilateral executive authority so powerful and far-reaching that it threatens the republican character of the American political system. And that president has taken actions — such as an attempt to unravel birthright citizenship — that blatantly and flagrantly violate the Constitution.

But as critics of the crisis view note, for all of his lawbreaking, transgression and overreach, the president has yet to take the steps that would clearly mark a constitutional crisis — openly defying a lower court order or, more significantly, a judgment of the Supreme Court.

One thing the language of crisis captures, however, is the degree to which the American political system is under a tremendous amount of stress. And to the extent that this stress threatens the integrity of the constitutional order, it is because the American system is, and has been, in a profound state of disrepair. If we are in or approaching a constitutional crisis, it has been a long time coming.

In 2009 the legal scholars Jack M. Balkin and Sanford Levinson published an article on constitutional crises titled, aptly enough, “Constitutional Crises.”

The aim of their argument was to distinguish ordinary (or even extraordinary) political conflict from a breakdown in the operation of the constitutional system.

“When constitutional design functions properly — even if people strongly disagree with and threaten each other — there is no crisis,” Balkin and Levinson explained. “On the other hand, when the system of constitutional design breaks down, either because people abandon it or because it is leading them off of the proverbial cliff, disagreements and threats take on a special urgency that deserves the name of ‘crisis.’”

A crisis occurs, to put it a little differently, when a constitution fails to achieve its primary task, which is to channel political disagreement into ordinary politics. It’s when disagreement begins to break down into violence — into anarchy or civil war — that you have a constitutional crisis.

From here, Balkin and Levinson offered a typology of democratic constitutional crises (primarily in the United States, although this extends to other constitutional democracies as well). There is the “Type 1” crisis in which political leaders have publicly claimed “the right to suspend features of the Constitution in order to preserve the overall social order and to meet the exigencies of the moment.” In this kind of crisis, a president has essentially claimed the sovereign power to declare a state of exception, acting, in Locke’s words, “without the prescription of the law, and sometimes even against it.”

No president has ever claimed the right to act outside the Constitution. Instead, those presidents who have sought to expand their power tend to frame their actions as the necessary exercise of legitimate authority. Prominent examples include Abraham Lincoln at the start of the Civil War and, more recently, George W. Bush after the Sept. 11 attacks.

In the “Type 2” crisis, political leaders do not abandon the Constitution so much as refuse to break with a failing constitutional order. “If Type 1 crises feature actors who publicly depart from fidelity to the Constitution,” Balkin and Levinson wrote, “Type 2 crises arise from excess fidelity, where political actors adhere to what they perceive to be their constitutional duties even though the heavens fall.”

If there is a paradigmatic example of this crisis in American history, it can be found in the secession crisis of 1860 to early 1861, when President James Buchanan stood by as Southern secessionists seized federal armories and prepared for war.

The third and final category of constitutional crisis that Balkin and Levinson discussed involves a situation in which “the relevant actors all proclaim their constitutional fidelity” but “disagree about what the Constitution requires and about who holds the appropriate degree of power.” What distinguishes this from ordinary disagreements is the willingness to go outside of normal politics to resolve the conflict, up to and including the use of violence.

You can see this type of crisis in the struggle over Reconstruction, when recalcitrant Southern white people took up arms to challenge and overthrow the postwar biracial political order.

“Constitutional Crises” was something of an incongruous argument to be making, given the rise of Barack Obama, whose presidency opened with a sense of promise and optimism about the future. The mood and circumstances were a little more appropriate eight years later when, at the start of the first Trump administration, Balkin followed up on this exploration of constitutional crises with an article on what he evocatively termed “constitutional rot.”

If a constitutional crisis is an acute event — brought on by external shock or internal breakdown — then constitutional rot is something like a chronic illness. It is, Balkin wrote, “the degradation of constitutional norms that may operate over a long period.”

You may, at this late date, be tired of talking about norms, but it is true that constitutional democracies depend on them for their survival. A successful republic rests on well-functioning institutions that structure ambition and the acquisition of political power. It demands a certain amount of forbearance from both political leaders and ordinary citizens when it comes to the use of that power. Politics cannot be a winner-take-all game.

Above all, constitutional democracy requires a broad commitment to the public good, or what we might describe as civic virtue — a particular obsession of America’s revolutionary generation. This includes ordinary people, who have a responsibility to keep themselves informed and engaged, as well as elected officials, who are entrusted with the public good and thus the obligation to further the common interest rather than the most narrow concerns of themselves or their allies. Even our system, designed to harness ambition so that the “interest of the man” is “connected with the constitutional rights of the place,” according to Federalist No. 51, depends on a certain amount of selflessness from those who choose public service.

Constitutional rot is when all of this begins to deteriorate. It’s when government officials reject the public good in favor of the private interests of their supporters and financial backers, when institutions fail to address public problems, when political actors embrace a nihilistic ethos of winning regardless of the damage it might do to the overall health of the political system, and when politicians reject any and all limits on their use of power and try to insulate themselves from accountability, democratic or otherwise.

Each dynamic eats at the foundation of constitutional government. And like the rot that afflicts the sill plate of an old home, it will undermine the entire structure if left to grow and fester.

If we use the typology Balkin and Levinson outlined, then it is a little hard to say that the United States is experiencing a constitutional crisis. For as much as Donald Trump has centered his second term on a radical assertion of executive power, he has not yet claimed to be above or beyond the Constitution. His view, in fact, is that he has “an Article 2 where I have the right to do whatever I want as president.” (This is wrong, of course, but it means something, even still, that the White House is trying to ground its claims within the existing political order.)

The Constitution also isn’t, at this moment, faltering on the shoals of a political, social or economic crisis, and our political leaders have not turned to extraconstitutional methods to try to resolve their conflicts.

Reasonable people can disagree about whether the current circumstances constitute a constitutional crisis. But it is extremely difficult to deny the extent to which the constitutional order is rotting from the inside out.

You can see it in the wide and widening gap between what the public wants from its government and what that government is able to deliver. You can see it in the vulgar influence peddling and outright looting that passes for normal behavior in Washington. You can see it in the catastrophic weakness of both political parties, whether it’s a Republican Party so hollowed out by extremism and in thrall to the ultrarich that it was easy pickings for a populist demagogue and his wealthy backers or a Democratic Party whose feckless leadership class is more concerned with securing its personal influence than building the kind of organization that can construct and mobilize popular majorities.

You can see it in the failure of the American political class to deal with the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol — a system-level threat to constitutional government whose ringleader was allowed to run, a third time, for president — and you can see it in that president’s easy seizure of the power of purse. The fact that Elon Musk, a de facto prime minister acting with the authority of the president, can cancel federal programs without a peep from the majority in Congress is a sign of constitutional rot. The fact that Republicans in Congress would rather beg Musk for a reprieve than assert the power of their institution is also a sign of constitutional rot setting in even further. And the fact that so many of our institutions are treating Trump’s executive decrees as laws — bending to and indulging his whims as if he were sovereign, as if he were a king and not a president — is a sign of constitutional rot.

Constitutional rot can lead to constitutional crisis. At the same time, not every house that rots at its foundation falls apart. Some become uninhabitable even as they appear otherwise. So it goes for a republic. We may retain the appearance of a constitutional democracy even as the rot corrodes the freedoms and values that give that term its weight and meaning. We’ve already reached the stage, after all, where the ruling regime attempts to deport one of its most vocal and vulnerable critics.

With a house, there is only one thing to do about rot. Tear it up. Remove it. And replace it with something new. If our political system — if our constitutional order — is too rotted through to secure freedom, equality and the blessings of liberty, then perhaps it’s time to rethink what it is we want out of American democracy.

Assuming, of course, that we can keep it intact.