‘The general welfare’ too oft disregarded in 2024 state session | HUDSON |

The Trump-Biden years have proven a bonanza for the commentariat class. Publishers have released confessionals, critiques, polemics and biographies in a torrent. Donald Trump likes to brag about how he has been good for television ratings, but he’s also buttressed book sales as well. The negative assessments have vastly outnumbered encomiums, probably 10-to-1. In fact, no normal reader can keep up with them. It’s hard to imagine many have proven profitable. Liz Cheney’s impeachment account, “Oath and Honor,” spent nearly three months atop the New York Times bestseller list, but most others appeared for a week or two and then vanished from sight.

Perhaps because a presidential election is looming, authors are turning to explorations of voters and their motives. Whether you loathe Trump or Joe Biden (or both — the double haters), there has to be curiosity as to why anyone can justify casting their ballot for the candidate you hate. The most recent release is New York Times columnist Frank Bruni’s “The Age of Grievance,” which postulates an electorate consumed with resentments. A few weeks earlier Tom Schaller and Paul Waldman released “White Rural Rage,” a title which explains itself. It was followed by psychologist Jonathan Haidt’s “The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness.”

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The latter pair have generated substantial blowback from critics. The fact that rural defenders rely on the argument they are no more pissed off than voters in the suburbs may be true. This hardly undermines the validity of Schaller and Waldman’s thesis. Haidt, of course, points his finger at smart phones and social media as culprits in roiling the emotional lives of teenagers. Though he may overlook other contributors to juvenile anxiety, the bestselling author of “The Coddling of the American Mind” has a record of getting more things right than wrong. The notion of “phone-free” classrooms is attracting a growing legion of supporters among teachers, parents and therapists. A phone-dependent childhood cultivates addiction to clickbait as a substitute for friendships — a poor bargain by any measure.

I am currently reading Richard Rhodes’s biography of Edmund Wilson, the naturalist and entomologist whose scientific writings earned him two Pulitzer Prizes and recognition as the 20th century’s intellectual heir to Charles Darwin. While still in elementary school, Wilson was among the first to recognize the presence of Argentinean fire ants in an empty lot next to his home in Mobile, Alabama — carried to the Unites States aboard a freighter. This pestilential scourge soon spread across the southern half of the country. Without a twitter account to distract him, Wilson became the world’s greatest ant specialist closing his career with a 750-page accounting of ants and their complex social lives. His fascination commenced by poking anthills with a pointed stick.

Last week I attended a military recognition concert featuring the Air Force Academy band and cadet choir in Colorado Springs. You only had to witness the fifteen enlisted soldiers and sailors honored for outstanding performance to apprehend the diversity within military ranks today. Half were women and more than half were Asian, African-American, Filipino or Hispanic. Col. Michael Willen, concert conductor, took the opportunity to quote from the preamble to the U. S. Constitution in the context of lamenting the profound divisions in our country, reciting: “We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty….” He then concluded by observing, “We are, after all, the United States of America,” which was greeted with raucous cheers.

The phrase that jumped out to me and which is frequently forgotten or ignored was, “…promote the general welfare.” Many of the current grievances, much of the anger and all of the disdain voters express toward politics and politicians stem from a failure to focus on the “general welfare.” American politics too frequently appears little more than a coddling of elites. Examples of this were evident in Colorado’s recently adjourned legislative session. A bipartisan coalition of legislators wished to require social media platforms confirm the age of account applicants. Gov. Jared Polis, for vague reasons, was opposed and threatened sponsors he would veto any bill requiring mandatory age verification. Utilizing strong-arm tactics characterized as “Putin-esque” by a lobbyist,…