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When Anastasia was in second grade, I chaperoned a field trip with her class to the Smithsonian Museum of American History in DC. This was not the first field trip I had chaperoned, and I had learned that, for most teachers, museum field trips are not an ideal place to teach a lesson. Too many kids, too many strangers wandering around, not enough time, and it’s really hard to get the kids to focus.

I, on the other hand, am a huge history nerd, and I’m very good at getting children to listen to me. Years of retail taught me to project my voice like a drill instructor. Also, children love Ogres.

Two years previously, I had chaperoned Jordan’s class. I had given a really detailed tour of the museum and several fun lectures along the way to a small group consisting of Jordan and about four kids. This time, I had the entire class listening and delivered a lesson about racism in America while we were all standing around the 1960 Woolworth’s counter made famous in Greensboro, North Carolina, when a bunch of Black activists sat down at the “White’s Only” section and asked to be served.

Anastasia’s class, almost all of whom were minorities of one kind or another, was fascinated by the story I told of how some people didn’t want kids that looked like them to sit and eat lunch with kids that looked like my lily-white daughter. And how a group of people refused to allow that to keep happening.

Afterwards, Anastaisa’s teacher, Mrs. Hall, told me that several people had stopped to listen to me talking to the group of seven-year-olds. She was very pleased that the kids got a full history lesson, and I was just as pleased to deliver it.

Fast forward a decade, and the mediocre racist white men of the Trump regime would like to ensure that never happens again. That the only history children learn is white nationalist propaganda.

This is why, in the middle of an economy on the brink and a disastrous mess in the Gulf still unresolved, the regime is going to war against the very same Museum of American History I gave my lectures in:

In a broadside posted to its website just as fireworks celebrating America’s 250th birthday were lighting up skies on Saturday, the White House condemned the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History for what it said was a failure to celebrate the nation’s heritage, arguing it had become a political tool intent on denigrating the American story.

The 162-page report, by the White House’s Domestic Policy Council, represents a sweeping attack on the museum’s presentation of American history. It is the latest step in the Trump administration’s campaign to pressure the Smithsonian into conforming to what President Trump has described as “patriotic” history.

What, exactly, is the regime whining about? White people are being oppressed! American history that teaches about racism is racist! Against white people! Because, of course, that’s the (completely fabricated) problem:

Titled “Saving America’s Story: How Ideological Capture at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History Erases Our Heritage,” the report accuses the museum of anti-white bias and of minimizing and distorting the nation’s founding. Those actions, the report asserts, have shifted the museum’s mission “from straightforward historical education and scholarship toward an extreme political activism that seeks to transform our country.”

The museum, it says, “no longer treats the American story as a shared national inheritance to be taught or celebrated but as a political instrument to divide, dispirit and discourage our citizens.”

Fascists are not subtle. When they say our history is no longer a “shared national inheritance,” what they mean is that we are no longer telling history from the mediocre, racist white man’s point of view.

The right has long resented the fact that American education has been slowly telling the whole story of America. The pace has been glacial, but we’ve moved away from “Happy Slaves” to a more accurate depiction of who we are as a nation and how we can be better. This has terrified the right for decades. A history that isn’t whitewashed is a history that does not produce racists.

This, more than anything, is the driving force behind the right’s all-out war on public education. They’re not subtle about the racism driving them, either:

The demographics race we’re losing badly. We’re not generating enough angry white guys to stay in business for the long term. - Sen. Lindsay Graham

Not too long ago, Moms for Liberty, a fascist organization that tried to seize control of public education before being crushed by the voters, said the quiet part out loud:

The Hamilton County chapter of Moms for Liberty quoted Hitler’s remarks at a 1935 rally on the front page of its new newsletter on Wednesday. The quote, placed directly below the masthead, read: “He alone, who OWNS the youth, GAINS the future.”

There are a million different quotes that convey the same message. But they liked the Hitler version the most. Why? Because Hitler is their fucking guy, and returning to a whitewashed version of American history serves the singular purpose of generating more mediocre racist voters who will support the party of white nationalism. They’re telling us, out in the open, why they hate an honest accounting of America.

The right does not want history. They want anti-minority and anti-woman propaganda taught as the truth to children. Children who will internalize the lies and grow up to be mediocre racists who will view actual history as lies meant to make them feel bad. This is how you mass-produce Republican voters.

When the regime falls, a top priority for the Democratic president is to purge the right-wing propaganda from our schools and museums and other public spaces. Because while teaching white nationalist propaganda produces fascists, teaching the real history produces Americans. Americans who see this country not just for what it is but, more importantly, what it can become. The potential has always been there, and mediocre racist white men have been trying to snuff it out since our founding 250 years ago.

It took decades to get rid of the “Happy Slave” lie in schools. We can erase the right’s toxic white nationalist propaganda in a fraction of the time, and we must. We cannot afford an entire generation of children being poisoned by the fascist right. We will not go back, no matter how much the racists scream and stamp their feet.

I remember as a cadet at West Point wondering why the Academy waited until senior year to teach cadets a year- long class on military history. They called it “History of the Military Art.” We called it “Art” for short. I mean, we were there to study to become officers in the Army. You would think that they would start pumping you full of military history right from the start. That they didn’t was always a mystery to me.

Having lived through the 61 years since I entered West Point in 1965, I think I’ve figured out why West Point did it that way with military history. They waited until you had spent three years as a cadet receiving on the ground military training, during which you learned tactics and went through a kind of simulacrum of war. Then they taught you military history, so you could identify all the fuckups in wars as they happened through the centuries.

What kind of insane bullshit were the imperial ambitions of Alexander as he took his armies from Greece all the way through Persia to what is now India, laying waste to cities, murdering those who we would call prisoners of war and enslaving women and children along the way? We studied Alexander’s great battles, and then we moved on through the wars of the next two millennia, all in a semester, culminating with our own Civil War, in which tactics that dated back to Alexander were still employed to bottomless bloody effect, with great lines of soldiers facing each other across open fields, fighting and falling where they stood.

The second semester began the study of modern warfare with World War I, featuring frontal assaults – some with fixed bayonets and hand-to-hand fighting and huge losses – which after a time settled into the trench warfare we now think of as the primary feature of that war. What kind of insanity was trench warfare? Armies facing off against each other defensively, unable to move decisively on offense, the bodies piling up on both sides. Modern advances in weaponry, from machine guns to precision artillery to poison gas to early armored vehicles like tanks, made advancement on the ground so costly, neither side could maneuver and achieve victory.

World War I was just another form of warfare as madness with technology making winning more difficult, not less.

Which brings us to Russia’s war on Ukraine, the World War I of our era. The war, in its fourth year, has settled into trench warfare along a broad, 600-mile front, with neither Russia, the aggressor, nor Ukraine, the defender, being able to move decisively against each other. And once again, technology has stepped in to play a critical role. This time, it’s armed drones that keep the soldiers of both sides in a defensive crouch. In World War I, if you stuck your head up, you got shot. In Ukraine, if you move into the open, a drone targets you, and you’re dead.

Warfare never ceases to amaze in its dark perfection. Every advance is countered – replicated by both sides, deployed with nearly identical tactics, strategy drowned in piles of bodies and oceans of blood. The idea of “victory” in the era since the World Wars has been buried alongside the efficacy of warfare itself. Both Putin and Trump, their egos on the march, have proven that war is not worth fighting anymore. It doesn’t work. War does not achieve desired aims. All that Trump’s war on Iran has done is embarrass him. All that Putin’s war on Ukraine has done is weaken him.

The Center for Strategic & International Studies (CSIS) published a definitive study last week showing that the Russian -- Ukraine battlefield casualty rate is now 8 to 1. Russia has suffered 1.4 million casualties since it invaded Ukraine on February 22, 2022. More than 450,000 Russian soldiers have been killed in four years. During recent months, Russia has suffered 1,300 casualties each day. “Russian fatalities in Ukraine are more than four times greater than all U.S. fatalities in all wars combined since World War II, and more than nine times greater than all Soviet and Russian fatalities in all wars combined since World War II,” according to the CSIS report.

What the CSIS report does not discuss is the enormity of the problem of so many dead Russian bodies. Every Russian soldier who is killed must be recovered and buried. That is not happening. Facing the deadly threat of Ukrainian drones overhead, Russia has been leaving some of its dead where they lie, letting them rot on the battlefield. Some of the dead Russian soldiers who can be recovered have been buried in mass graves. Some have been cremated in mobile crematoriums. Russia has done everything they can to conceal the extent of its losses on the battlefield, but with so many casualties, and so many dead soldiers, families have to be either getting the news from returning wounded soldiers or reaching conclusions on their own when their sons have not returned after not just months, but years at war against Ukraine.

A dictator such as Putin can handle bad news with repression, punishing anyone who spreads “lies” that are actually truths about Russia’s war. Eventually, however, it’s going to catch up with Putin. Ukraine is killing Russians at a rate that they cannot replace by recruitment or even kidnapping young men to force them into uniform. According to CSIS, Russia can replace battlefield losses at a rate of about 27,000 new recruits a month. But Russian casualties are at 30,000 per month, rising to 34,000 in May and June. There is a word for these numbers: “unsustainable.”

These are damning numbers. On the ground, Russia has been losing territory, about 400 square kilometers recently. Which doesn’t sound like much until you realize that Russia has been able to move its front, such as it is, at an average rate of 50 to 90 meters a day in the tightly contested areas of Pokrovsk and Sloviansk, rather than achieving the kinds of gains it was able to make previously, that were measured in kilometers in past months and years. When you factor in Ukraine’s recent drone attacks deep into Russian territory against oil infrastructure, supply depots, military aircraft and naval vessels in the Black Sea, it can be said for the first time that Russia is suffering a defeat in Ukraine, even though the front lines have not significantly moved in months, even years.

Donald Trump lost his war on Iran for any number of reasons, but a big one is that he made a strategic decision to wage war entirely by air, and no bombing campaign has ever proved decisive in a war for territory. Iran simply isn’t going to give in because they’re being bombed. Trump’s focus on Iran’s nuclear program turned out to be sheer folly. Iran’s nuclear weapon is its coastline on the Strait of Hormuz, allowing Iran to close the Strait to ship traffic at will.

Game, set, match. Lucky for Trump, because if Iran didn’t have that stranglehold on international trade in oil, natural gas, helium, and other precious materials, the war could have dragged on for months, if not years.

Putin hasn’t had that kind of luck against Ukraine. Four years of stalemate, and this against a country a tenth its size without Russia’s natural resources, population, or gross domestic product.

Wars have this wonderful way of biting those who wage them in the ass. Trump’s copious ass got bitten by his hubris, that he is all-powerful, that nobody can tell him what to do, that everyone has to march to his drum. Putin’s ass has been bitten by Ukraine’s incredible fighting spirit and their rapid development and employment of drone warfare. Russia has tried to match Ukraine’s drones, even using Iranian help to build its own factories to manufacture Iran’s Shahed drones, which are cheap, accurate, and effective.

But not decisive. Putin is left, as Trump was in Iran, looking for an exit that will not weaken himself at home to an extent from which he cannot recover. There have to be rivals of Putin who are just standing there waiting in the wings for him to stumble. Because that’s the thing about dictators: they are all powerful until they are not. Authoritarian states don’t move in predictable ways, depending on the consent of the governed as expressed in political campaigns and elections. Putin’s end could come suddenly, or not at all. In which case, the dead bodies will continue to need to be hidden, the wounded will be bandaged and recycled back to the front, and the bloody stalemate will go on.

As war becomes both deadlier and cheaper, we are reaching a point where war will become either obsolete or everywhere all the time all at once and forever. Of course, in order for wars to be waged, there must be egomaniacal leaders to start them. We know from both reading history and watching the world around us today that there will never be a shortage of them.

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I wrote this short essay about the “pursuit of happiness” for the editorial page of the StarTribune newspaper, where it was published on July 3.

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Opinion | What did the founders mean by the pursuit of happiness?

The authors of our founding document were deadly serious about a goal we might see as whimsical.

By Timothy Taylor

When the five-person committee that drafted the U.S. Declaration of Independence declared it to be “self-evident” that there was a right to “the pursuit of Happiness,” what manner of happiness did they have in mind?

In a declaration explaining why the signers felt compelled to commit treason against their existing government and to prevent “the establishment of an absolute Tyranny,” it seems unlikely that they were foreshadowing the whistling cheeriness of the 1988 Bobby McFerrin hit, “Don’t Worry, Be Happy.”

When you are announcing that you “mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor” for the purpose of fighting a Revolutionary War, it seems unlikely that they were thinking of the giddy, throbbing happiness of the 1986 Beastie Boys hit: “You gotta fight for your right to party.”

The authors of the declaration — Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Roger Sherman, and Robert R. Livingston — were not being playful, whimsical or ironic. They were deadly serious about “the pursuit of happiness.”

Drawing on a long philosophical tradition going back to ancient Greece, they believed that happiness was the result of living a virtuous life. Franklin wrote that “virtue and happiness are mother and daughter.” Jefferson later wrote: “Happiness is the aim of life. Virtue is the foundation of happiness.”

Naturally, any self-respecting modern American will quickly stand up and declare: “No virtue-monger gets to tell me what cookie-cutter set of rules I am obligated to follow.”

For 21st century Americans, this notion of happiness as virtue may seem self-contradictory. After all, isn’t virtue almost by definition dry and boring: that is, about discipline and abstemiousness, not the freedoms of fun and pleasure?

But as understood by the authors of the declaration, happiness isn’t about the feels. Instead, in a tradition going back to Aristotle, virtue was understood to be developed through a lifetime of practice. The goal is a deeper and richer satisfaction gained as a person grows into a full and flourishing existence. It’s about taking seriously the idea that you can pursue a version of your best self.

Of course, the pursuit of happiness may not succeed. Real life is messy. Personal goals can change. Families can quarrel. Marriages and friendships can crumble. Health and finances can go sour. Happiness, virtue and flourishing are never guaranteed.

The Nobel-prize winning novelist V.S. Naipaul, who was born in Trinidad in 1932 and lived there for 18 years before receiving a scholarship to Oxford and moving to the United Kingdom, offered a paean to “the beauty of the idea of the pursuit of happiness” in a 1991 essay, in which he wrote:

“Familiar words, easy to take for granted; easy to misconstrue. This idea of the pursuit of happiness is at the heart of the attractiveness of the civilization to so many outside it or on its periphery. I find it marvelous to contemplate to what an extent, after two centuries, and after the terrible history of the earlier part of this century, the idea has come to a kind of fruition.

“It is an elastic idea; it fits all men. It implies a certain kind of society, a certain kind of awakened spirit. I don’t imagine my father’s parents would have been able to understand the idea. So much is contained in it: the idea of the individual, responsibility, choice, the life of the intellect, the idea of vocation and perfectibility and achievement.

“It is an immense human idea. It cannot be reduced to a fixed system. It cannot generate fanaticism. But it is known to exist; and because of that, other more rigid systems in the end blow away.”

The Declaration of Independence proclaims the “Right of the People … to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.”

Americans have disagreed for 250 years over how best to enunciate the foundational principles of their government and how to organize its powers, and it seems right and proper to me that such disagreement should continue. But the lodestar of such discussions is that people have a “self-evident” and “unalienable” right to pursue their own concept of their own happiness. The concept was radical then, and remains so today.

Timothy Taylor is managing editor of the Journal of Economic Perspectives, based at Macalester College in St. Paul.

The post What Does the Declaration Mean by Pursuit of Happiness? first appeared on Conversable Economist.

We have a new living constitutionalist gun-slinger in town, and he’s gonna tell us what’s in the Constitution and how it should be applied in this modern day and age when we’ve got problems the framers could not have foreseen. So, bye-bye textualism and bye-bye originalism, c’mon over here and meet ol’ Six-Pack himself, Brett Kavanaugh.

I read this idiot’s birthright citizenship concurrence and dissent. It reads like it was written by someone so arrogant, he doesn’t expect anyone to look up his recitation of bullshit and see if any of it comports with reality or history or anything else, for that matter.

Kavanaugh has succeeded in making himself famous for voting with the majority to overturn Trump’s executive order on birthright citizenship, but not because it violates the 14^th Amendment. No, our Brett-boy has found himself a couple of obscure federal laws from the 1940’s and 1950’s that he says are violated by Trump’s order, and because Trump broke the law but did not violate the Constitution, his executive order should be made null and void.

Kavanaugh wants us to believe that the 14^th Amendment doesn’t mean what it clearly states: All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. There is a lot of stuff in the Constitution that isn’t very clearly stated. Even the First Amendment’s guarantee of freedom of religion is quibbled over between the “free exercise” clause and the “establishment clause” and what they mean. But to say straight up that if you’re born in this country or have been naturalized, you are a citizen…what’s the problem with that, Brett?

Lots of problems, says the man who has shed his previous belief in textualism, the theory holding that the words in the Constitution as written are what matter, and his belief in originalism, that the meaning of the Constitution should reflect the beliefs and circumstances of the Constitution when it was written. Hell, Kavanaugh eagerly signed onto his pal Clarence Thomas’ decision in the big Second Amendment case, New York State Rifle & Pistol Association, Inc. v. Bruen, that we shouldn’t have any laws that don’t follow the so-called “history and tradition” of the laws at the time that the Second Amendment was written.

Got that? These fuckers are saying they’re so in love with the original meaning of the Constitution that they’re not going to put up with any laws that aren’t exactly like the laws were in 1791, when the Bill of Rights was added to the Constitution.

But then along comes Donald Trump and his obsession with what he and his brown-people-remover Stephen Miller call “illegal immigration,” and so Trump just up and says the 14^th Amendment doesn’t apply to kids whose parents are not either citizens themselves or in this country with some sort of “legal status.”

Kavanaugh says, yep, that’s right: the 14^th Amendment doesn’t apply because “significant illegal immigration into the United States is a new circumstance that was largely unknown as of 1868.” Of course it was, you drooling doofus. There weren’t any laws making immigration “illegal” in 1868 because we had open borders and we were taking anyone who wanted to come to these shores and work hard and pitch in and help us expand the country. No less than 12 of the states that currently have stars on the flag didn’t even exist in 1868. We needed people to populate the virgin territories and start businesses and plow fields and harvest crops…if only because after 1865, we didn’t have slaves to do that hard work anymore.

Kavanaugh dives into a couple of cases to show how the Supreme Court has read the Constitution to go along with the changes of the modern world. Why, goodness, Supreme Court justices had to find a way to interpret how the Fourth Amendment applied to searches of cars, because there weren’t any cars in 1791 or 1868! I’m not kidding. You have to read this shit to believe it. Listen to this quote from Kavanaugh: “In First Amendment cases, courts apply free speech protections to the Internet notwithstanding that the Internet did not exist in 1791 or 1868.”

Really, Brett? There was no internet when the First Amendment was written, so the Supreme Court had to read the Constitution in such a way as to take into account all this modern shit that’s come along? He even quotes a case from 2024 cautioning that we can’t allow our Constitution to be “trapped in amber.”

What happened to Thomas’ amber guns of 1791, Brett? Or Alito’s “amber” that the word “abortion” isn’t found in the Constitution, and there were anti-abortion laws on the books back in the day when the 14^th Amendment’s “equal protection of the laws” was written?

All that’s out the door for our Brett-boy, so he can come down on the side of the man who appointed ol’ Six-Pack to the court on the birthright citizenship issue. Kavanaugh tells us that birthright citizenship doesn’t apply to children born to illegal immigrants because “Framers of the Fourteenth Amendment could not have fully anticipated” all these brown people coming across the border. He even tells us that the framers would have seen it as an “odd result” for citizenship to be granted to “foreigners” who have children in the United States.

No, you blathering, dissembling liar. Everyone was a “foreigner” in 1868, unless you were a native American. The framers of the 14^th Amendment were themselves the descendants of “foreigners” who came to these shores from other lands. That’s why they wrote the opening words of the 14^th Amendment. They wrote “all persons,” on purpose. They didn’t write “the following persons,” or “the persons of whom we approve,” or “the persons with this skin color but not that one.” Kavanaugh even says that “changes in travel” couldn’t have been foreseen by the framers, so that makes everything different today. They can fly on jets across oceans! They can drive cars across borders! The framers couldn’t have seen that coming!

Kavanaugh, and the rest of the right wingers who have had their undies in a wad over the court’s interpretation of the 14^th Amendment to mean exactly what it says, want it both ways. They want no abortion now, because it was illegal then. They want no gun control laws now, because there weren’t any gun control laws then. But when it comes to babies born in this country to people who are here on temporary visas or no visas at all, they don’t want ‘em. That the babies themselves didn’t have any say in the matter about where they were born doesn’t concern these so-called “conservatives.” To them, fetuses have a “right to life,” but babies born to immigrants or even to temporary visa holders don’t have the rights granted to them in our own Constitution.

This is pure fascism. It is exactly what Hitler did in Germany in the 1930’s. He was the one who said who could be citizens of Germany and who couldn’t, who had rights and who didn’t. It’s exactly what Stephen Miller and Trump want. They want to be the ones who get to say “we will allow the following people into our country.” Look who they define as refugees they will admit to this country. White South Africans and nobody else. Not Black South Africans. Not real refugees from places like Haiti and Somalia. But white people who come from a country that oppressed an entire people for centuries? Hey, come on in! You’re our kind of folks!

Some of the experts in the legal community are calling Kavanaugh’s “concurrence with exceptions” an invitation to revisit the birthright citizenship issue in the future. His refusal to read the 14^th Amendment to say what it so clearly says created a decision with a 6-3 majority to overturn Trump’s executive order, but only a 5-4 majority to do so on Constitutional terms according to the way the document was written. This is going to turn into another campaign like the one they launched against abortion. It took them 50 years to get a Supreme Court that would give them the Dobbs decision saying there is no constitutional right for women to control their own bodies. It may take them another 50 years to get a court that will effectively amend the Constitution so the 14^th Amendment isn’t a part of it anymore. They would like nothing better than to go after the 14^th Amendment’s guarantee of due process and equal protection of the laws. That would be the way they could overturn Brown v. Board of Education, which they’ve wanted to do since the day the decision came down in 1954.

This country will not survive the Supreme Court as it is presently constituted. The 6-3 majority will go after every law passed by a Congress and a President from the Democratic Party when they are in power. If Democrats want their party, and our democracy for that matter, to survive into the next century, they’re going to have to expand the court to 15 justices, and they’re going to have to write laws that constrain the court using other powers granted to the Congress under Article III. That won’t guarantee that the Republicans won’t get elected and tilt-a-whirl the Supreme Court back the other way, but it would be a start.

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Jorge Elozar, head of Democrats for Education Reform (a group started by hedge fund managers to convince Democrats to support education privatization), has been lobbying hard for the federal voucher program, with most of their talking points gathered into a single post here offering ten reasons that the Dems should not repeal the federal vouchers; the list corresponds to the reasons DFER thinks Democratic governors should sign on.

Let's look at the list.

1. It helps public school students.

Note that this is different from the claim that it helps public schools, which is slightly more honest than Elorza's suggestion elsewhere that public schools might benefit from this. 

But as usual, the list of expenditures includes things that public school students should and do provide, like transportation, special education services, and career training. This only makes sense if the public schools somehow manage to off-load some services to federal funding, which would be bad news for local control and for students who need those services. But it would be good news for those policy leaders looking for ways to dismantle public education and sell off the parts.

2. It Can Bring Significant New Resources Into Public Education

Again, the hint public school systems will benefit from these programs. But come on- if the feds really wanted to inject funding into public schools, it would be far easier to just offer tax credits for supporting a public school. A complicated set up with "scholarship granting organizations" is only useful if you are trying to launder public money so that you can legally give it to a religious organization.

Families are asking for more options, more support, more tutoring, more enrichment, and more help for their children. The FSTC provides all of those things.

This skips over the most important question, which is what would be the best way for the feds to provide those things? Because this isn't it, and to pretend that this program, carefully designed as a tax shelter than funds private schools, is somehow a big boon for public schools and public school families is baloney. 

The DFER argument is like saying, "Yes, an AK-47 assault rifle will let you mow down a bunch of fleshy, vulnerable human beings, but let's not be hasty. You could do useful things with it, too, like cut down shrubbery or open a door you accidentally locked. Really, I don't understand why you don't fully embrace the AK-47 bush trimmer."

Elorza also throws in a bonus myth-- governors should opt in "to keep resources in the state." In that construction, "keep" is doing some heavy lifting, since we are talking about redirecting funds that were already bound for the bottomless money pit that is DC. 

DFER is presenting a backwards-engineered argument. They start with the policy they want to pursue; now they've searched for an argument, landing on "This will solve Problem X" rather than start with Problem X and asking what a good solution for that would be. DFER wants to dismantle and privatize education, and federal vouchers are set up to further that cause of converting a shared societal responsibility into an individual shopping problem.

None of this, unfortunately, means that more states won't sign up for some free federal money. The bare minimum we can hope for is some actual guardrails and restrictions on how the money would be used. Maybe even an actual out loud conversation about the steady erosion of the country's promise of public education. But I don't expect any of that from DFER.