November 11, 2025

Is it ethical for Democrats to keep SNAP recipients in a protest without their consent?

]https://erichensal.substack.com/p/consent-for-protest?utm_source=democraticunderground&utm_medium=forum&utm_campaign=consent_for_protest&utm_content=discussion_post

How ethical is it to make children go without food for a political fight without any consent?

For every person talking about senators “caving” to Trump—you are not getting call after call about hungry children back home. If your voicemails were filled with people pleading for food, your attitude on “caving” would change if you could prevent that hunger. If a progressive screams about Schumer f’cking up without giving consent to protest serious thought, we must discuss ethics in political strategy—now.

It is immoral enough that shutdowns injure federal employees, putting them into difficult financial situations and creating unwarranted family stress. But within the civil service culture there has been for decades an understanding that shutdowns are always possible. These are never a surprise, giving workers time to plan and save to get through one. Then, at the end, federal employees will be paid. So, while powerless to prevent shutdowns and often forced to work without pay, it is, sadly, a hazard people knowingly accept when swearing their oath to the Constitution as civil servants. And we should thank them for their service.

For the rest of us, a shutdown presents a range of inconveniences we do not choose, from air travel reductions to closed national parks. However, Social Security checks go out and essential functions continue. But the trauma Trump inflicts on people receiving SNAP is different. Accepting SNAP benefits is not a political decision, but one made for survival. There is no history of SNAP being cut off during a shutdown. This is new ground to fight on, and people on SNAP did not sign up to fight in the first place.

**SNIP**

November 7, 2025

Why Passports have Sex -- Trump v Orr, SCOTUS, Bad Habits, and Imagination

https://open.substack.com/pub/erichensal/p/why-passports-have-sex

Why do we list sex at all on a passport? Obscure treaty obligations aside, what’s the benefit? Before photos and biometric data, sex helped confirm identity along with height or hair color. But are we still listing sex simply out of habit—one born more than a century ago?

“Habit is the flywheel of society,” said William James in his Principles of Psychology at the last century’s turn. For those less mechanical, a flywheel is a heavy wheel within an engine that is hard to get spinning but, once moving, keeps an engine’s power steady. Habit does the same for society—a set of routines we learn once, then repeat without thought. If, one day, everyone had to relearn how to bank, drive, or even when to say “good morning,” society would collapse.
Bad Habits

Social habit is necessary but also enforces oppression with a flywheel’s constancy. Consider Jim Crow. Southerners did not everyday carry an apartheid rule book on oppression; rather, they had expectations, received from their mothers and fathers, of Black folks’ place, and vice versa—this was the foundation for Jim Crow injustice.
Bias breeds bias

Progressives must see how habit holds onto our racism, sexism, classism, and every bias that oppresses someone else. People just hold onto habits and assumptions that feel so fundamental no one questions them. But questioning assumptions is critical for ending injustices. Let us take a simple, not life-or-death, example—why do girls play softball?

**SNIP**

November 5, 2025

Science Proves Pundits No Better Than Coin Flips--No Matter What They Say

https://erichensal.substack.com/p/hedgehogs-and-foxes-cover-election

An election night is a good time to remind everyone of Philip Tetlock’s expert opinion research from 2005. Over two decades, he analyzed 82,361 predictions by 284 pundits. Even the clear subject-matter experts with PhDs were little different from an informed neighbor—or a coin flip. Tetlock did find that the more famous the pundit, the worse the predictions. It turns out news programs prefer confidence and confrontation over accuracy. Surprise.

Tetlock put forward a continuum from Hedgehog commentators to Foxes. Hedgehogs had one big idea they used to explain everything—think trickle-down economics or immigration policy. Hedgehogs make predictions to fit their single idea, using it to explain everything. If you only have a hammer, every problem is a nail. Foxes, contrariwise, borrow from many disciplines and perspectives, are intellectually flexible and skeptical, and can improvise in ways Hedgehogs cannot. Over time, Hedgehogs keep returning to their core principles, while Foxes incorporate new information, change their minds, and move on.
**SNIP**

October 31, 2025

What Do these MAGA Fascists Want? Trump billionaires want Project 2025 to break government and restore the Gilded Age

https://erichensal.substack.com/p/what-do-these-maga-fascists-want

Today’s politics are a puzzlement to me. We say “fascism,” and that works well enough to understand our immediate challenges. But when you turn its aspects against the background of history, our politics become much less intelligible. Why attack the size of the bureaucracy and starve it of resources in a government shutdown when fascism historically has taken a different turn.

As opposed to the Project 2025 public-sector gutting or Steve Bannon’s deconstruction of the administrative state, Hitler—after purges—increased public employment. He enforced orthodoxy but built overlapping, competing bureaucracies. Mussolini did likewise in Italy. Classic fascism depends on a strong state apparatus to impose its will. Trump does not, except through ICE. His agenda is not party-building but progressive-destruction.
What is Trump doing?

Take the Department of Education, for example. Why would a classic fascist government dismantle an agency that could crack local control over education to install a national curriculum? Overall, the United States has a large, sophisticated bureaucracy that a Hitler would have purged in part, but otherwise grow substantially. So why is a fascist Trump and Project 2025 all about downsizing government when fascists usually grow government to build support using public jobs and oppress through new state enforcers.

From the bizarre cacophony of white supremacy, Christian nationalism, Opus Dei fetishists and Q-Anon hangers-on that compose MAGA red hats writ large, there emerges one unifying notion in Trump’s actions. I do not believe the power and money behind Trump’s 2nd ascendancy cares for any of these ideologies the left frets about. Nor do they want to rule through a fascistic party structure—it would be too much work. The real goal is to return to an era in the United States where property and capital were despotic kings back in the 1890s.

*snip*