Mike McCabe's Blog

American politics is growing more and more disconnected from American life. Problems get more complicated, promised solutions more simplistic. Times get tougher, the powers-that-be increasingly merciless, saying in effect “let them eat cake” before punting another political football.

One in four American households are living paycheck to paycheck, three-quarters of U.S. adults are feeling more anxious about the economy than at this time last year, over two-thirds are stressing more about health care, nearly as many are on edge about growing political tensions in the country. Another major source of worry is technology, with America leading the world in AI anxiety. Those in charge dismiss this working-class angst, insisting there’s no need for any course correction on economic policy and no cause to tap the brakes on AI.

With life and politics more and more disconnected, no wonder so many people are disillusioned and detaching from the democratic process. Curiously, as our society grows more diverse—racially, ethnically, culturally—the major parties in our country have become more homogenous. More flavors socially, far fewer politically.

Said it before, will say it again. There was a time long ago when the U.S. had a much wider variety of vibrant and impactful political parties, and that vibrancy brought about profound change when it was most needed.

Said it before, will say it again. There was a time not long ago when the major parties pitched considerably bigger tents than they do now. Seems like yesterday my home state of Wisconsin made the nation’s first gay rights law, signed by a Republican governor. Couldn’t happen today. There were Democrats opposed to abortion and Republicans favoring reproductive freedom. Not anymore. Dirt-road Democrats representing rural areas and big-city Republicans elected by urban voters. No longer.

Up until the last several decades, there were true-blue liberals like Nelson Rockefeller and Lowell Weicker in the GOP. In Wisconsin, Republican state lawmakers like John Manske were cut from this cloth. Progressives like Teddy Roosevelt and “Fighting” Bob La Follette once called the Republican Party home. As recently as the early 1980s, Wisconsin still had state legislators from this lineage like Clifford “Tiny” Krueger—a 425-pound one-time circus “fat boy” with a heart to match his girth.

There used to be Republican centrists. In the early 1980s, there was an abundance of them. Many were women who favored legal abortion and women’s rights, like Mary Panzer, Barb Lorman and Peggy Rosenzweig. Other middle-of-the-roaders were men like Dale Schultz and then-Governor Lee Dreyfus.

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These kinds of Republicans were in office at the time of my political baptism at the State Capitol. There were conservative Democrats, too. Nationally, they were known as Blue Dogs and Dixiecrats. In Wisconsin, right-leaning Democrats lacked a clever nickname, but their numbers were significant. Gervase Hephner of Chilton, Dale Bolle of New Holstein, staunch pro-lifer Joanne Duren of Cazenovia, malaprop master Lloyd Kincaid of Crandon. They had plenty of company in the state legislature. Other small-town Democrats included Tom Harnisch of Neillsville, Harvey Stower of Amery, Bill Rogers of Kaukauna and Bob Dueholm of Luck.

Their kind, long gone.

Northern abolitionists birthed the Republican Party and it became known far and wide as the party of Lincoln. Republicans abandoned that legacy in the 1960s and 1970s with their Southern strategy taking advantage of Democratic support for civil rights to flip the South from a Democratic stronghold to a rock-solid base of Republican support. This north-south political realignment pushed the GOP sharply to the right and set in motion ideological cleansing within both major parties.

Republicans purged liberals, progressives, and moderates from their ranks. Democrats parted company with conservatives in general and country folk in particular. Today’s GOP is a donut. No middle. The Democratic Party used to appeal to rural voters, but it sure doesn’t today. It has become solely an urban party.

Many a pundit now says liberalism in America is dying or already dead. Just as many or more say the same about conservativism. Any autopsy done on corpses lying around surely would rule these deaths by suicide.

All this is a telltale sign of a political system that is out of sync with American life. Something’s got to give. The system needs to be opened up, reconnected, made relevant to the masses again.

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The new mayor of New York City and Abraham Lincoln have something remarkable in common. Zohran Mamdani was just elected in one of the few places in the country that still allows a once-common practice called fusion voting, a practice that made Lincoln’s presidency possible.

Now largely forgotten outside of New York and Connecticut, fusion figures prominently in American history, having played a pivotal role at a most crucial hour by giving democracy a much-needed boost when preserving the union was at stake.

Fusion voting’s not complicated; it simply allows candidates for office to appear on the ballot as the nominees of multiple parties. The number of votes they receive on different party lines are added together—or fused—to arrive at the final tally.

Fusion voting was once used in every state in the nation including Wisconsin. It’s now widely banned. When it was allowed, fusion voting created political competition, so much that 171 years ago abolitionists were able to use it to put a major party out of business, replacing it with a new anti-slavery coalition.

Prior to the Civil War, there were two major parties in the U.S., but not the ones we have today. At that time, there were Democrats and Whigs. Both parties were at peace with America’s original sin. Lincoln was a Whig, but grew increasingly frustrated with his party’s dysfunction, its ongoing accommodation of slavery, its inability to unify around a principled position on the issue.

Abolitionists couldn’t stomach either pro-slavery Democrats or the slave-tolerant Whigs, and formed anti-slavery parties like the Liberty Party and Free Soil Party, among others. None gained much traction.

On March 20, 1854 a small contingent of alienated souls assembled in a one-room schoolhouse in a Wisconsin settlement named Ripon. Some who entered the room were Whigs, some northern Democrats, others Free Soilers. Some identified as Know-Nothings, or Know-Somethings, or Anti-Nebraskans, or simply abolitionists. They entered the room splintered. They left fused, all calling themselves Republicans.

The Whig Party collapsed after a 20-year run because of the abolitionists’ fusion strategy. A new party was born, the offspring of fusion, in that Wisconsin settlement advertised to this day as the birthplace of the Republican Party. Not quite nine years later, a charter member of this new party, Abraham Lincoln of neighboring Illinois, issued the Emancipation Proclamation.

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After the Civil War, fusion voting expanded across the nation, and citizens who felt their interests were being disregarded by the two major parties could—and did—build impactful minor parties. So impactful that by the late 1890s, Republicans in Michigan moved to ban fusion voting. Yes, Gilded Age Republicans came to fear the influence of minor parties so much that they voted to outlaw the very tool that was used to build their party in the first place.

Southern Jim Crow Democrats joined in, and within a couple of decades, most states had copycat fusion bans in place. With fusion gone, minor parties were defanged. Today, candidates running under minor party banners are regarded as nothing more than “spoilers,” votes for them are considered wasted.

All these years later, in one of the only places in the U.S. still permitting fusion voting, Zohran Mamdani ran for mayor of New York City, against the wishes of establishment Democrats, appearing on the ballot twice as the nominee of two different parties. Democratic insiders were so spooked by his candidacy that they urged voters to back the state’s disgraced former governor, Andrew Cuomo.

Mamdani’s fusion strategy enabled him to best Cuomo for the Democratic nomination and then fend off Cuomo’s independent bid in the general election. Mamdani got more than 878,000 Democratic votes and over 157,000 votes on the Working Families Party ballot line, pushing his fused vote total over a million—more than 50% of all votes cast, giving him a clear mandate to govern.

Putting an exclamation point on his insurgent challenge to political orthodoxy, Mamdani let it be known that he voted for himself on the Working Families Party line.

At a time when most voters are intensely dissatisfied with both major parties, with the public’s frustration boiling over, voters nearly everywhere in America are denied a better choice, forced to hold their noses and try to decide which is the lesser of two evils, or opt not to vote at all. There is a way out of this trap. Worked for Abraham Lincoln way back when, worked for Zohran Mamdani just the other day.

I’ve labored to protect and fortify democracy for decades, have supported a wide variety of reforms over the years. Won some, lost some, watched hard-fought gains one year turn into gut-wrenching setbacks the next. Bringing about lasting change is devilishly difficult. There must be a thousand barriers to success. One of the biggest is having to convince officials who’ve gotten where they are under the current system to pass laws changing the system.

This reality I know so well is what makes the idea of bringing back fusion voting so appealing. No law has to be passed legalizing it. It can be re-legalized by getting fusion bans struck down in court as unconstitutional. A lawsuit aiming to do just that has been filed in Wisconsin, arguing that preventing parties from freely nominating candidates of their choice infringes on rights to equal protection, freedom of association, speech and assembly guaranteed under Wisconsin’s constitution.

The liberal majority on the Wisconsin Supreme Court struck a blow for electoral competition less than two years ago, tossing out rigged legislative maps and ordering fair district boundaries to be drawn. In doing so, the state’s highest court reopened a door that power-hungry politicians had locked, creating a new opportunity for the voters’ will to be done. The justices could further empower the citizenry and help nurse a badly ailing democracy back to health by re-legalizing fusion voting.

If things break right, Wisconsin could once again be home to a new birth of freedom. What’s old could become new again.

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Nobody asked for it, no one wants it, everybody hates it. That voice, coming out of the phone. Most often a woman’s because, you know, hers is soothing, naturally conciliatory. Lifelike, sort of. Hollow though, as hollow as one of those big chocolate Easter bunnies. The hole producing that tinny tone, is this where a soul is normally found?

“Which of the following options can I help you with?”

Square peg, round holes. Nuts.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t get your response. Which of the following options…”

Customer service representative, please.

“I’m happy to help you, just let me know which of the following options you’re calling about…”

No service. Aargh!

“I know how frustrating it is to lose service. Let me fix that for you. Which of the following…”

For the love of God, put me out of my misery.

“I’m sure I can help you with that. Which of the following options…”

Call disconnected. What next?

I’m not the only one asking.

A former U.S. labor secretary warns of the end of employment as we know it. Robert Reich says there are essentially three kinds of jobs: making, thinking and caring. Workers who make stuff have already seen most jobs of this nature automated out of existence, and the days the remaining few will last are numbered. The thinking professions—your lawyers and doctors, the architects and engineers—are next. Hasn’t happened yet, but it’s only a matter of time before artificial intelligence supplants the actual kind in those occupations as well.

That leaves what Reich calls the caring jobs. He describes these as tasks “whose very essence is human—child care and elder care workers, nurses, psychotherapists, physical therapists, massage therapists, social workers, counselors, teachers, and everyone else in the empathy business.” Reich predicts most workers will be doing these kinds of jobs in 20 years. He considers them safe from AI.

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I’m not so sure. I mean, doesn’t customer service fall in the caring category? If it doesn’t, shouldn’t it? Even if it’s not, surely a bot can be programmed to fake nurturing and emotional connection if one can feign concern and helpfulness to exasperated customers.

Regardless, caring professions already tend to be the lowest-paying occupations, and with AI forcing more and more workers to seek positions in these occupations over the next couple of decades, an abundance of competition for such jobs will put ongoing and intensifying downward pressure on wages. And this, after all, is the default purpose of AI. To make corporations a fortune. To make billionaires into trillionaires. To replace humans with machines that don’t eat or sleep, never take vacations, have no need for health insurance, don’t expect a retirement pension.

Tens of thousands from the ranks of the living and breathing have signed an online petition warning of “human economic obsolescence and disempowerment, losses of freedom, civil liberties, dignity, and control, to national security risks and even potential human extinction” as a result of AI’s uncontrolled development.

Signers of the open letter—from Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak and former Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Mike Mullen to the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, from Nobel laureates and AI pioneers to right-wing political mastermind Steve Bannon and musician will.i.am—call for a timeout on the development of AI “superintelligence.” They say the moratorium should not be lifted until there is “broad scientific consensus that it will be done safely and controllably” along with “strong public buy-in.” Amen to that.

Problem is, the current regime wants nothing to do with any pause on AI’s breakneck development. For ruling Republicans, it’s full steam ahead, no guardrails. Scientific consensus and public buy-in be damned. Opposition Democrats are the proverbial deer in the headlights. Working-class voters can’t tell what Democrats stand for on this and most things. Even those partial to the party see Democrats as weak and unfocused.

For a party sorely in need of a guiding light, a North Star, AI’s ramifications are a supernova. Machine will either be servant or master, will be kept on a leash to humanity’s benefit or humans will be bent to technology’s will. A decision looms, or a selection will be made automatically in the absence of a choice.

Think of the purpose of government, now distill it to a single word, that word has to be protection. Protection of our rights and freedoms, our health and welfare, our safety and security. Protection of natural resources on which human life depends. And yes, protection from human economic obsolescence and disempowerment, from human extinction.

What the ruling regime offers is insulation, not protection. Insulation from the world beyond our borders, from trespassers, from social progress that cracks open doors through which the previously excluded can enter, from the possibility that someone else might get a little of what I once had all to myself.

This obsession with turning back the clock and turning away any who look or act the least bit different leaves the vast majority of Americans unprotected, vulnerable to attack. Not by foreign aggressors. Not by some imaginary enemy within. By machines.

Enemy troops are amassing, lifelike, sort of. The high ground is as yet unclaimed, but not for long. Time to roll out, take that ground.

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Asked a shirttail relative how he’s doing, he answered “living the dream.” His expression said otherwise. Looked out of place on such a young man’s face, weary, worn down, might even say old.

Homeownership is considered the cornerstone of the American Dream. More so than a successful career, having children, owning a car or truck. Over three-quarters of U.S. adults say so. That dream is fading fast.

In the span of barely a decade, the typical monthly house payment in the U.S. nearly tripled. To afford a home in 2025, an average American household needs to be bringing in close to $125,000 a year. A whole lot of families can’t swing it, as the median household income across the country is currently a bit below $78,000.

The U.S. has an acute housing shortage. The nation is short between 4 and 5 million homes. Insufficient supply drives up prices. Skyrocketing prices make it all the more difficult for families that already were in a less-than-ideal position to take on a mortgage. More than $1.6 trillion in student debt weighing on over 40 million Americans doesn’t help. Neither does the growing disconnect between economic productivity and worker pay producing gnawing wage stagnation that has the working class financially and emotionally distressed.

When families wanting to buy homes can’t, it has harmful ripple effects. They continue renting, keeping the number of renters higher than it would be if more people found it possible to move on to home ownership, fueling fierce competition for available rental properties, pushing rents ever higher.

As for solutions, neither major party has a clue. Neither has the courage to act boldly. Democrats promise abstractions like refundable tax credits and zoning reforms. Republicans keep telling their old fairytale that the free market will work its magic.

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The market isn’t working. Mortgage interest rates have been dropping, which should be making it easier for more families to buy a home, yet the nation’s home ownership rate also is falling. Many would-be homebuyers are getting cold feet, pulling purchase offers off the table. One in six have given up the search altogether. Younger generations in particular—Millennials and Gen Z—have little or no hope they’ll be able to afford that cornerstone of the American Dream.

Neither party is saying we need to do what the free market is failing to do, namely build more housing. Neither party has been serious about addressing intensifying economic injustice. Republicans are in charge at the moment and are doing the exact opposite, pouring more fuel on the inequality fire. It’s been a long, long time since either party made an earnest attempt to make the super-rich pay their fair share. Grotesquely unfair taxation has not only been engineered by Congress and whoever’s been in the White House for the last couple of generations. In nearly every state in the union, the richest are taxed at lower rates than everyone else.

Hardly anyone is talking about the harm being done to the housing market by real estate speculators engaged in flipping. This practice—part parasitic, part predatory—involves buying up homes to quickly resell them for profit. Flippers typically pay cash for houses and waive common purchase agreement contingencies like home inspections to give them a leg up on other prospective homebuyers.

The heightened competition for properties these middlemen create and the profits they extract from their transactions do nothing but put additional upward pressure on housing prices. Yet the idea of prohibiting hedge funds, private equity firms and other speculators from buying up houses and driving up prices for families is not up for discussion in the halls of Congress or in state legislatures. It should be. The American Dream is at stake.

Ban flipping. Attack the housing shortage, don’t count on private real estate developers picking up the pace. Tax the rich, make sure more money finds its way into the pockets of blue-collar workers. Now that’s the housing debate we should be having, the housing agenda our country needs.

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Nostalgia is childish. Longing for some simpler time is born of youthful bliss, being shielded as we all once were from life’s complications and contradictions by parents uneager to burst bubbles and shatter innocence. Life used to be simpler, the old days were good, we’re sure of it. This lovely illusion takes root in our minds not because of an absence of harsh realities back then but rather the presence of kindly caretakers who spared us the full picture.

Cynicism is equally childish. Expecting the worst is born of suspended adolescence, an inability to shake the disappointment experienced once the full picture comes into focus. It’s easy—too easy—to let what should be temporary disillusionment morph into permanent dissatisfaction. It’s common—too common—for bitterness to fill us, deadening our taste for the sweet and savory.

In this current moment, America is being childish. The prevailing national mood is the offspring of a doomed matrimony, a marriage of nostalgia and cynicism. The perma-adolescent fell head over heels for the lovely illusion, the two wasted no time, got hitched, made babies. Of us all.

Our nation is trying to drown its sorrows in a toxic brew, a mixture of certainty that life was a better deal before and the conviction that it’s a raw one now. Thing is, sorrows are skilled swimmers, not easily drowned, might as well put down the bottle, push away from the bar. A bright future for the nation hinges on it advancing into adulthood.

Adulthood means no flinching when the full picture presents itself, no looking away. Accepting there’s ample quantities of both good and evil out there, recognizing there’s a choice to make between the two, a stand to take. Understanding that living generations are not the first to encounter hardship and won’t be the last. Fathoming that happiness doesn’t mean never being sad.

Speaking as someone with a whole lot more in the rear-view mirror than up ahead, these realizations do not come easily or dawn on us naturally with age, but I do think maturity at least brings us to their doorstep.

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Hoops legend Kareem Abdul-Jabbar wrote recently that youth and old age “are both about coming to terms with your limitations. Youth is about limitations on freedom—the strong and passionate body’s actions being confined and controlled by adults. Age is about having control of your actions, but being confined and controlled by the waning body.”

Kareem’s right about the limitations, but life’s beginning involves steady growth and gain while the back end brings with it the inevitability—and vulnerability—of decline and loss. Decline in bodily function, physical dexterity and mental acuity, loss of memory, loved ones, independence. Kareem describes it as “a feeling that some essential part of ourselves is constantly leaving the body. It shrinks, not just in size but in the sense of our presence in the world. We are always getting smaller—in terms of how others see us as oldsters and in how we see our own self-worth.”

That sensation must hit hard for someone whose seven-foot, two-inch frame was once the picture of grace and towering strength. He calls it the burden of age, but goes on to say the “best way to cope with shrinking is to not mind. We are important to those who love us, but not in the same way we were…. Where once we were bosses with responsibility, or formidable athletes running for hours, we now plod along as others rush past us like we were inconvenient obstacles rather than people. Better to embrace that rather than rage against it. It is the emptying of the ego and all its insecure needs to take on a new, more realistic identity.”

Wise words for a nation behaving childishly, raging against it all. Life is hard and hurts sometimes, but there’s an abundance of beauty in it. There will be losses along the way, but also much to gain. Maturity is not nostalgic, nor is it cynical. It is realistic, resilient, hopeful, secure in the knowledge that hard times often visit but never stay.

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Like thunder after the flash, those bygone words echo still. Reciting the pledge was mandatory at the start of each meeting. Done by rote, phrases repeated without thinking, ironic considering the pledge’s first line.

I pledge my head to clearer thinking,
my heart to greater loyalty,
my hands to larger service, and
my health to better living,
for my club, my community, my country and my world.

Have no idea how many times I mouthed that pledge as a 4-H member in my youth. Surely dozens, most likely hundreds. Had no idea as a boy that the ideals expressed in that vow would become scarcities in the community, country and world I inhabit as a retirement-age man.

Didn’t ponder it much then, but that pledge was about establishing a state of mind, one to lean on when treachery and depravity come knocking on the door later in life. They’re knocking now. Controlling one’s own state of mind is the best and perhaps only defense. Remaining cheerful when so many are filled with fear and loathing, being thankful in the midst of so much ingratitude, seeking to mend when others around you aim to fracture, these are powerful acts of defiance.

As industrious as we humans are, we also have quite the knack for destruction. We build things up, turn around, tear things down. We’re handy with tools, quick to take up arms. Our ingenuity knows no bounds when it comes to weaponry. We subdue and batter and maim with tasers, batons, nunchucks, brass knuckles, knives, swords and daggers. We wound and kill with arrows, pistols, revolvers, shotguns and rifles. We obliterate with grenades and mines and bombs of every sort, some of such complex design we can’t remember their full names and shorten their identities to acronyms—TNT, IEDs. We invent ever more sophisticated ways to deliver explosives to our targets. Cruise missiles, drones, still more acronyms—SAMs, ICBMs.

There are the poisons produced in laboratories—from pepper spray to tear gas, anthrax to ricin, cyanide to sarin—to irritate the eyes, disrupt respiration, debilitate the central nervous system. There are the toxic agents concocted in darkened hearts—lies, propaganda, scare tactics, hate—to contaminate the mind, disable the spirit. The latter being put to use more often now than at any time in living memory.

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Never has there been a greater need to put heads, hearts, hands and health to those pledged purposes. Five other H-bombs with sufficient force to overpower the inventions of our darkest impulses come to mind: Honesty, honor, humor, humility and hope.

Candor is the antidote for deceit, truth the only known cure for lies and propaganda. Corruption must be confronted with integrity. Humor has a way of disarming spite and malice, and works hand in hand with modesty as a corrective for conceit. Hate and the violence it rouses is not a fire that can be fought with fire. Kindness is a highly effective anti-inflammatory, but hope is hate’s kryptonite.

Even as visions of doomsday dance in our heads, we all have these weapons of mass construction at our disposal. And much more. In chapter 21 of my novel Miracles Along County Q, there’s this:

The power to hurt comes naturally. Everyone knows how. Why is it so hard to believe that all of us might also have the power to heal?

Why so hard indeed. The recipe, not complicated. Ingredients, at the ready in our emotional pantries. What fear pollutes, courage cleanses. Trust and faith bind up gaping wounds. Empathy and compassion promote recuperation.

We have allies in this fight. For starters, nature. Regular doses of the outdoors soothe stress, restore calm, boost physical and emotional well-being. Medical clinicians and mental health providers have taken to prescribing nature to patients, with good reason. Parks are proving better than pills at treating our society’s most menacing afflictions.

An accompanying therapy for time spent indoors is reading. When raging storms of fear and hate and brutality pound our shores, put us under siege, make us frantic, cracking a book slows us down, pulls us away from those sources of agitation. Like that walk in the park, reading is leisurely, relaxing, peace inducing. At the same time, a good book gets us thinking, sparks the imagination.

Once sparked, it’s not that hard imagining the old pledge becoming present practice. Clear and honest thinking, heartfelt devotion to common decency, service to others. Weapons we all possess, deadly only to cruelty and despair.

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It’s telling that schooled once meant becoming educated, today it’s slang for getting humiliated.

Two hundred and nine years ago, in an infant republic, a great American president observed: “If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.”

One hundred and sixty-three years ago, another great American president signed the Morrill Act establishing land grant colleges. This was done the year after the Civil War commenced, a matter of months before the Emancipation Proclamation was issued. He signed the legislation over the objections of senators like Minnesota’s little-remembered Henry Mower Rice, who squealed “we want no fancy farmers, we want no fancy mechanics.” That great American president knew what needed to accompany the end of slavery. Speaking in Milwaukee, he declared: “Free Labor insists on universal education.”

Eighty-seven years ago, with the Great Depression wreaking havoc and world war looming on the horizon, a third great American president identified the principal weapon required to ward off fascism: “Democracy cannot succeed unless those who express their choice are prepared to choose wisely. The real safeguard of democracy, therefore, is education.”

Nowadays, poll after poll show increasing numbers of Americans are losing faith in higher education, questioning whether it’s worth the cost. More and more Americans are cooling on schooling despite one analysis after another showing higher education remains a good investment that pays a handsome return. That suits today’s American president just fine and has for some time. Nine years ago, he said: “We won with poorly educated. I love the poorly educated.”

Keeping people uneducated is a dog-eared page in every despot’s playbook. The power-hungry are forever on the lookout for ways to control people and ignorance has always been a reliable handmaiden of tyranny. What’s curious is how, in the last decade or two, scholars themselves started telling young people they might be better off skipping college.

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I’ll grant you that college is not for everyone. I’ll also grant you that there are many paths that can lead to a happy and successful life. But I still find it weird that so many Americans have grown so skeptical and dismissive of higher education. And I find it downright dangerous that America chose to more or less stop teaching civics. As a nation, we tuned out the timeless wisdom of Jefferson, Lincoln and FDR and put a man who is at war with higher education in the office they once occupied.

The whole purpose of schooling has been downsized, whittled from the broad enrichment of civil society to the narrow aim of workforce preparation. With business and industry cheering them on, policymakers formulated school-to-work programs that were all the rage in the 1990s. They flopped.

The next scholastic fashion trend was STEM, focusing students on science, technology, engineering and mathematics to prepare them for a successful career. This fad isn’t faring any better. There’s nothing more STEM than computer science. Big Tech needed coders, software developers, hardware engineers. A generation of kids were funneled into the field. Once the tech industry discovered it could use artificial intelligence to perform these tasks and began employing AI tools, the jobs these kids trained for started evaporating.

The cratering of tech industry jobs is a cautionary tale. Business and industry have jobs that need doing, and they want schools to churn out workers with the skills they demand. Catering to this by making vocational training the primary if not sole mission of schools is a mistake, especially here at the dawning of the age of AI. Much of today’s work will soon be technologized out of existence.

When the training students receive becomes obsolete, business and industry don’t care and don’t take responsibility, they just carp about educators failing to keep up with changing times. Odds are the lesson parents and politicians take from all the complaining is there’s a pressing need for some new fad putting schools ever more in the service of the economy. Here’s hoping we beat the odds, because this would be both a horrible waste and a missed opportunity.

The future direction of American education should be based on the message our nation’s youth sorely needs to hear: Don’t train for today’s jobs, they’ll be gone tomorrow. Develop lasting skills that equip you to adapt to rapidly evolving conditions. Don’t dwell on memorizing information, concentrate on learning how to think, analytically, strategically, imaginatively, compassionately. Learn the scientific method. Learn how the world works. Study history. Study economics and politics. Learn what makes people tick. Study human behavior, study language. Cultivate creativity, resist the temptation to let a machine substitute for your own artistry. Do these things, you’ll not only make a good living, you’ll make a fulfilling life, you’ll keep a democracy, you’ll stay free.

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For something so extensively studied and elaborately discussed, it’s still an elusive phenomenon. Leadership, that is.

There are close to 60,000 books out there with the word “leadership” in the title, with four more on the topic churned out daily. There are an estimated 600 million blogs worldwide, making up nearly a third of total websites. According to a top RSS feed on the subject, hundreds of thousands if not millions of them focus on leadership. There are over 3 million podcasts with more than 400 million listeners globally. That landscape is littered with shows about leadership.

Read enough books and blog posts, listen to enough podcasts, it becomes clear the list of critically important leadership traits is endless. There’s overlap in the characteristics that experts emphasize, but no two lists ever seem to be the same. Yet when we go looking for it in real life, it’s striking how often we gravitate toward two traits above all others—strength and charisma.

When we think leader, we think drum major. We’re suckers for the peacock, rarely seeing through posers adept at feigning toughness and dazzling audiences with performative orchestration. Those elected to be our nation’s leaders may be proving themselves allergic to actual leadership these days, but they can tell which way a parade is heading, and they know enough to run to the front and grab a flag. They’re good at strutting, flexing, flourishing their plumes.

I don’t claim to have compiled anything resembling a definitive list of leadership traits, but I do believe this: True leaders give credit and take blame, and you may have noticed most elected and appointed officials routinely do the exact opposite. Authentic leaders care for those in their charge, serve them, stand behind them through thick and thin, help them succeed, then step out of the spotlight and let them bask in the glow.

Dick Bennett is nothing if not authentic. In his coaching days, he made a habit out of taking struggling basketball programs and turning them into winners, first at various high schools, then small colleges, eventually in the Big Ten, one of the premier conferences on the national collegiate landscape.

My alma mater, the University of Wisconsin, is now a men’s basketball powerhouse. At one point, the Badgers made 19 straight appearances in the NCAA tournament, including three trips to the Final Four and one run to the national championship game. That streak started under Coach Bennett.

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The Wisconsin program’s success was built on a foundation of Bennett’s five pillars: humility, passion, unity, servanthood and thankfulness. In fact, those five words to live by are literally cemented in the foundation of the Kohl Center, the arena the Badgers call home. Before it opened in 1998, before the flooring even went in, Bennett placed a laminated card bearing his five pillars in the sand under the concrete that was poured.

University of Virginia’s men’s basketball team, under the direction of Dick’s son Tony, won the 2019 national championship a year after becoming the first top-seeded team to lose to a 16-seed in the NCAA tournament’s history just one year earlier. Taking a team to the very top without a single five-star recruit or McDonald’s All-American on the roster, no one-and-done players making a quick stop in the college ranks for a single season before going pro, was surely an impressive feat.

That lofty accomplishment is both pale by comparison and directly related to how the younger Bennett handled the previous season’s shocking loss in the tournament’s first round at the hands of small conference underdog University of Maryland, Baltimore County. Can’t help but marvel at how gracious and poised and classy Bennett was after a historically humiliating defeat.

Tony learned his dad’s leadership lessons well, expressing thankfulness for the privilege of watching his team excel during the regular season and earn their spot in the postseason tournament, marrying humility to servanthood in acknowledging the superiority of their opponent that day while not throwing his team under the bus, preserving unity by having their backs, thereby fueling passion for a championship run the following season.

Father and son served young men, helping them succeed on a hardwood floor much in the same way a legendary military leader enabled young men to prevail on a bloody battlefield. In his D-Day message to the troops on June 6, 1944, General Dwight Eisenhower told them the “eyes of the world are upon you” and reflected on the extraordinary demands placed on the Allied force assembled for Operation Overlord.

Eisenhower did not tell the troops in his charge that he also prepared a second message taking full responsibility in the event the invasion failed. “My decision to attack at this time and place was based upon the best information available,” Eisenhower wrote. “The troops, the air and the Navy did all that Bravery and devotion to duty could do. If any blame or fault attaches to the attempt it is mine alone.”

Eisenhower understood the duties that came with his role, that credit is given, blame taken. He put his troops at the forefront, underscoring their importance and courage, but was prepared to assume full responsibility if things went sideways. Good fortune and heroic effort spared Eisenhower from ever having to deliver that second message. Still, the fact that he had it at the ready proves he knew that leading is best done not from out front but from behind.

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People are either hearing him, watching what he’s doing, or talking about what he says and does, pretty much nonstop. You have to admit, the man has a gift, an uncanny ability for getting himself in the spotlight and staying there.

This is the 175th article in this online journal of mine, only 10 make any mention of he-who-lives-rent-free-in-millions-of-minds. That’s no accident or oversight, it’s a choice, one made deliberately, one that undoubtedly has cost me readership and subscribers. When you’re not belaboring what nearly everyone is obsessing over, quite a few will tune you out. I can live with that.

We worry he’s tightening his grip. Sorry, that ship sailed a long time ago, he’s had us in his grip for years now. Love him, hate him, doesn’t matter, he’s the story. We blame the media for creating a monster by making him the perpetual center of attention. Sorry, journalists report on what’s considered newsworthy, defined as what their readers or viewers or listeners want to know. With so many of us fixated on him, journalists naturally are too. If they aren’t, they risk getting tuned out. Most of them can’t live with that.

The news might be unflattering one day, may put him in a good light the next. Doesn’t matter. Either way, he’s still the story. Brings to mind a book, Don’t Think of an Elephant, written more than two decades ago by a fellow named George Lakoff. The book’s title is a nod to the main takeaway from a mental exercise Lakoff challenged his readers to perform. When commanded not to think of an elephant, what does your mind’s eye see? An elephant, of course.

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Lakoff is what’s known as a cognitive linguist, his specialty being message framing, the subconscious influences affecting how we absorb what we’re told. Like a painting hanging on the wall—a frame around it, establishing its boundaries, showcasing its features—words with any kind of power are framed, putting them in context, making them emotionally and intellectually relevant to us.

Curiously, even when the frame is negated, it’s evoked. Whatever you do, do not think of an elephant, an elephant instantly comes to mind. That’s our subconscious at work. When the floodwaters of the Watergate scandal were about to pull Richard Nixon under, he took to the airwaves to plead his case.

Lakoff’s book explains why Nixon’s words fell on deaf ears. The president did not know what Lakoff’s research revealed some 30 years later. Negating the frame still evokes the frame. Nixon did not say “I am innocent,” he gamely insisted “I am not a crook” and unwittingly got his audience subconsciously thinking of crooks, associating him with crooks.

Somewhere along the line, he-who-lives-rent-free-in-millions-of-minds learned this stuff and uses it to his advantage in a way Nixon never could. He clearly has a dictator fetish, admires tyrants greatly. So, what does he do? Two days in a row fairly recently, he assured Americans he’s not one. “A lot of people are saying, ‘maybe we like a dictator,’” he surmised before quickly adding, “I’m not a dictator.”

Lakoff calls that evoking the frame. Plumbers and mechanics call it priming the pump. He-who-lives-rent-free-in-millions-of-minds does it to slowly but surely warm people to chilling aims and wear down those resistant to warming. Love him, hate him, doesn’t matter, he’s on everyone’s mind. Good news, bad news, same difference, he’s the story.

We worry the grip is tightening. Well, there’s a way to pry it loose. Reframe the picture. A mental image forms when mere mention is made of—take your pick—honesty, freedom, equality, common decency, kindness, generosity, justice, the American Dream, national heroes, angels among us. Try preventing the image from forming. Go ahead, try, your subconscious will prove you incapable.

Instead of constantly thinking and talking about him, we can choose to think and talk about our shared experiences as Americans, our cares, our concerns, our strengths, our weaknesses, our hopes, our dreams. Dare you.

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Those willing to succumb to hate best choose carefully, for they eventually become the very thing that’s the original object of their contempt. No one sees it coming, no one thinks it’ll happen this time, to them, but it always does. It’s an immutable law of hatred.

Hate in enough hearts inevitably morphs into authoritarianism, the statehood of vehement intolerance for any way of living other than one’s own. The road each and every hater opts to travel leads to a crossroads. Turn left at that intersection, proceed far enough, you arrive at totalitarianism. Turn right, go down that road, there’s dictatorial rule at that dead end as well.

This isn’t theory, it’s history. Just in the span of the last century, give or take a few decades, millions of people living in dozens of different countries have turned left at the intersection and at the completion of their road trip pulled into the driveway of a totalitarian regime, namely communism. Over roughly that same period of time, millions of people living in dozens of different countries turned right and drove until they arrived at the doorstep of an authoritarian regime, known as fascism.

I’m so old I remember a time when referring to our country as a liberal democracy was a point of pride, when the first word in that phrase was universally known as a synonym for free. Ours was a nation conceived the moment a king was overthrown, a nation committed to freedom, devoted to democracy, a foe to tyrants everywhere.

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So many have lost faith in democracy since that time I remember so well. And look what’s been done to the name of freedom. That universally understood synonym for free was slowly but surely turned into a cursed word, an insult, cause for suspicion. Over time, an infection spread, making this once-robust liberal democracy fall deathly ill. Among the many symptoms was an intense fever, brought on by metastasizing intolerance. Some called it a cancel culture. And what did those who did the naming do to treat this particular condition? The very thing they claimed to loath. They’re canceling up a storm.

Look at what’s now being done in the name of freedom. You’re free to live here if you look like us, love like us, speak our language, worship our god. You can tell jokes as long as we think they’re funny. We’re free to trample your rights, you can’t place any limit on ours. We’re free to do as we please, you step a toe out of line and it’ll cost you your livelihood. Our crimes are pardoned, yours are severely punished. We’re right in what we do, no matter what that might be, because our cause is good and just. You’re wrong, you’re a threat, you need to be done away with, in the name of freedom.

This is America, becoming the very thing that was the original object of our contempt. Outlaws once wore masks, now agents of the state do. Cages are constructed, filled as fast as they’re built. Still, shots ring out, once, twice, so many times we lose count. They are not stopped. Comedians, now they must be stopped. They can joke no more, their shows canceled.

All in the name of freedom.