Incoming Feed Items

This article is read by Eunice Wong, a Juilliard-trained actor, featured on Audible's list of Best Women Narrators. Her work is on the annual Best Audiobooks lists of the New York Times, Audible, AudioFile, & Library Journal. www.eunicewong.actor

Subscribe now

Text Originally published Feb. 07, 2025

Does Equity Matter for City Government’s Dynamic Capabilities? Lessons from the City of Cape Town, South Africa

By Nai Lee Kalema

What does equity have to do with city governments’ cultivation of dynamic capabilities?

When it comes to examining city governments’ cultivation of dynamic capabilities in relationship to improved outcomes, service delivery, and public value, equity matters. Here, equity may refer to the extent to which those improvements are distributed across geographical areas and populations and put in service of diminishing highly disproportionate resource and burden allocations.

Notes on the Crises pivoted on February 1st into around the clock coverage of the Trump-Musk Treasury Payments Crisis of 2025. Today is Day Fifteen

Twenty years ago, my husband and I were at a party of grad students in Claremont, California, discussing the differences between Old Testament law and the New Covenant written on the hearts of man as described in the New Testament. At one point a male classmate jumped up, eyes wide with shock, saying “wait. WAIT…you guys actually believe this stuff? Like not ironically, not for the sake of the noble lie…. For real—you actually believe this?”

I remember nodding, and then laughing at the whole scene. His shock was genuine, and his comment carried no malice. He was an upper-class kid who had attended elite schools, and he had simply never met a young, devout intellectual before. The idea that a thinking person would openly, unabashedly believe in Christianity was shocking to him.

It’s difficult to remember now, but in the early 2000s young intellectuals on the Right did not dabble in religion. The dawn of a new millennium offered only two alternatives to the milquetoast, Clintonesque liberalism that had dominated the 1990s: libertarianism or George W. Bush’s evangelical “compassionate conservatism.” Tech bros or values voters.

Many times over the last several years, Donald Trump’s political opponents on the Right claimed he was a drag on the Republican Party’s political prospects. This argument was never very plausible. The reversals that congressional Republicans suffered over the last six years (such as losing the House and Senate by narrow margins) were well within the normal range of the vicissitudes of electoral politics. But whatever meager credibility such criticisms may have possessed has now been completely laid to rest by President Trump’s astonishing return to power, bringing with him Republican control of both houses of Congress—a feat accomplished in the face of unprecedented opposition from some of the most powerful forces in American political life. Trump has proven himself to be a potent political force and a boost to the fortunes of his party.

Trump, however, will only be around for four more years. If the American Right is to continue to succeed after he has left the scene, it will have to learn the secrets of his success. This means admitting that Trump’s impressive wins are the fruit not of mere luck, nor even of his extraordinary energy, but of his even more extraordinary political astuteness. As the pollster Patrick Ruffini remarked, simply but profoundly, in an election night X post: “Donald Trump understands what politics is about at a fundamental level.”

Jon Durfee and Michael Lee

There are a number of dimensions to the current, ongoing constitutional crisis in the United States, all of which arise from actions taken by the Trump regime. There is the burgeoning conflict between the federal executive and federal judiciary which is likely headed to a showdown over the executive's compliance with judicial orders. There is the executive branch's usurpation of the powers of the federal legislative branch, Congress. Then, there is the breakdown of rule of law and ethics within the federal Department of Justice itself. There have been developments on all three fronts today.

The U.S. Constitution does not assign the federal attorney general independence from the chief executive, the U.S. President. In this, the federal structure conspicuously diverges from the many state constitutions that call for elected state attorneys general who have authority, separate and independent from state governors, to pursue litigation. This distinct authority – derived from state constitutions, statutes, and common law predating the American Revolution – prevents state governors from interfering with the legal judgment of the attorney general, who has paramount responsibility for representing the interests of the state and its people in court.

The captains of the tech industry have rapidly warmed to Trump. But are they sincere? Or is the whole thing just a cynical display of fealty to the new leader, only to be reversed as soon as power changes hands? It’s probably a mix of both—not only across the industry, but sometimes even within a single person.

A helpful test is to ask when a given figure’s rightward lurch occurred. Those that happened after the election are much more likely to be transactional. Amazon’s Jeff Bezos and Sam Altman of OpenAI—who had previously been openly anti-Trump—seem to epitomize this category. Google’s Sundar Pichai likewise bent the knee, but was giving hostage-video vibes.