Bessette/Pitney’s AMERICAN GOVERNMENT AND POLITICS: DELIBERATION, DEMOCRACY AND CITIZENSHIP reviews the idea of "deliberative democracy." Building on the book, this blog offers insights, analysis, and facts about recent events.
While neither country commands broad support, China surpassed the United States in global approval ratings in 2025, with a median of 36% approving of China’s leadership, compared with 31% for the U.S. China’s five-percentage-point advantage over the U.S. is the widest Gallup has recorded in China’s favor in nearly 20 years.
The recent shift reflects a decline in U.S. ratings alongside an increase for China. Median approval of U.S. leadership fell from 39% in 2024 to 31% in 2025, returning to earlier lows, while China’s approval rose from 32% to 36%.
At the same time, disapproval of U.S. leadership rose to a record-high 48%, while China’s disapproval rating remained flat at 37%.
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Approval of U.S. leadership declined by 10 points or more in 44 countries between 2024 and 2025, while it increased by a similar amount in only seven. The declines were concentrated among U.S. allies, including many NATO partners.
Germany led the world in declines; its approval of U.S. leadership fell by 39 points, followed closely by Portugal (down 38 points). Several other long-standing U.S. partners — including Canada, the United Kingdom and Italy — also showed substantial decreases.
U.S. standing improved by more than 10 points among Israelis, marking an exception among U.S. allies. Approval of U.S. leadership in Israel, which surged after the October 2023 Hamas attack and then fell sharply in 2024, rebounded to 76% in 2025 after Trump’s return to the White House — a 13-point increase, among the highest levels globally.
Last August, as part of the federal government’s crackdown on people in the country illegally, the Trump administration sent states the names of hundreds of thousands of Medicaid enrollees with orders to determine whether they were ineligible based on immigration status.
But seven months later, findings from five states shared with KFF Health News show that the reviews have uncovered little evidence of a widespread problem.
Only U.S. citizens and some lawfully present immigrants are eligible for Medicaid, which covers health care costs for people with low incomes and disabilities, and the closely related Children’s Health Insurance Program. Both programs are administered by states.
Spokespeople from Pennsylvania’s and Colorado’s Medicaid agencies said, as of March, the states had found no one who needed to be terminated from Medicaid. That was after checking a combined 79,000 names.
Texas has reviewed records of more than 28,000 Medicaid enrollees at the Trump administration’s request and terminated coverage for 77 of them, according to Jennifer Ruffcorn, a spokesperson for the Texas Department of Human Services.
Ohio has checked 65,000 Medicaid enrollees, of which 260 people were disenrolled from the program, said Stephanie O’Grady, a spokesperson for the Ohio Department of Medicaid.
In Utah, 42 of the 8,000 enrollees identified by the Trump administration had their Medicaid coverage terminated, said Becky Wickstrom, a spokesperson for the state’s Department of Workforce Services.
Pope Leo XIV announced Sunday that he will lead a prayer vigil for peace on April 11 at St. Peter’s Basilica, using his first Easter Urbi et Orbi message to make a forceful appeal for an end to war and a renewed embrace of dialogue. https://t.co/crCqJdAzxd
Pete Hegseth, the U.S. defense secretary, has asked the American people to pray “every day, on bended knee” for a military victory in the Middle East “in the name of Jesus Christ.”
Pope Leo XIV, the first U.S.-born pontiff, has a starkly different take on what should be done in Jesus’ name.
In a homily during a Mass on Thursday morning before Easter, the pope said that the Christian mission had often been “distorted by a desire for domination, entirely foreign to the way of Jesus Christ.”
Since the United States and Israel began bombing Iran in late February, the pope has consistently called for an end to the violence and a return to dialogue to resolve the conflict. But without naming Mr. Hegseth, he has also pointed out the ways in which Christianity has been marshaled for purposes that the pope says do not align with Catholic teaching.
“We tend to consider ourselves powerful when we dominate, victorious when we destroy our equals, great when we are feared,” the pope said in a homily during a Holy Thursday rite at the Basilica of St. John Lateran, the cathedral of the bishop of Rome. “God has given us an example — not of how to dominate, but of how to liberate; not of how to destroy life, but of how to give it.”
In late March the pope warned against invoking the name of Jesus for battle, saying in a Sunday homily that Jesus “does not listen to the prayers of those who wage war, but rejects them.”
In Fiscal Year 2025, federal outlays totaled over $7 trillion across 52 general spending categories. Within each of these categories, we trace spending at the line item and subcategory level to assign a total of $4.4 trillion in spending across three age groups: retirees; working-age adults; children and young adults. We classify the remaining $2.6 trillion as “all ages” because they finance broad public goods.
Retirees (ages 65 and older) receive $2.7 trillion, or 62 percent of the $4.4 trillion in age-assignable federal outlays, driven mainly by Social Security and Medicare.
Working-age adults (ages 26–64) receive $1.2 trillion, or 28 percent of age-assignable outlays, spread across Medicaid, Social Security disability benefits, veterans benefits, and Marketplace subsidies.
Children and young adults (under age 26) receive $449 billion, or 10 percent of age-assignable outlays, concentrated in Medicaid, SNAP, child nutrition, and education programs.
The heavy expenditure share on retirees is consistent with a voting model from the field of political economy. The retiree share is predicted to increase even more with an aging population and fiscal strain.
We identify a rise in educational polarization among members of the US Congress mirroring the educational polarization in the American mass public. Over the past half-century, the percentage of Republican representatives who attended elite educational institutions declined from 40% to 15%, and the percentage of similarly educated Republican senators declined from 55% to 35%, while the ranks of elite-educated Democrats rose in both chambers. These changes across the parties have mapped into observable differences in behavior and approaches toward lawmaking. We find that elite-educated legislators are much more liberal in their voting patterns, suggesting a link between the decline in elite-educated Republicans and ideological polarization in Congress. We also demonstrate that, in the House, elite-educated Democrats are especially effective lawmakers, but not so for elite-educated Republicans. In the Senate, we establish a link between the decline of elite-educated Republicans and the rise of partisan warrior “Gingrich Senators.” Overall, these patterns offer initial glimpses into how political elites are being drawn from different educational cohorts, representing an important transition in American governance.
This is the recurring illusion of overequipped leaders: Because they can map the battle space, they think they understand the war. But war is never merely a technical contest. It is shaped by grievance, sacred narrative, the memory of past humiliations and the desire for revenge. Those are not atmospheric complications added to an otherwise technical enterprise. They are what the war is about.
So the familiar errors appear. The war planners imagine that a regime can be decapitated into collapse, whereas external attack often does the opposite — binding a battered state more tightly to a society newly united by injury, humiliation and rage. They imagine that destroying conventional assets would settle the matter, as if legitimacy, wounded sovereignty and collective anger were secondary rather than the war’s actual terrain. Planners who took their adversary’s self-understanding seriously — rather than discounting it as propaganda — might have anticipated that an attack would not weaken the regime’s narrative but instead fulfill it. They might also have foreseen the paradox that systematic decapitation does not produce negotiators. It removes them.
The military theorist Carl von Clausewitz long ago recognized the delusion of reducing war to a kind of algebra. War, as he understood it, is never merely calculation. It is saturated with passion, uncertainty and political purpose. The algebra has grown more sophisticated. But the delusion is just as dangerous today as it was in the 19th century.
What this war exposes, then, is a failure not only of strategy but of literacy. Literature and history, at their most serious, train precisely the faculties these leaders lack: the capacity to grant that other minds are not transparent to us, and are governed by purposes not our own. A mind tutored by history and literature knows that actors in the grip of a sacred cause tend to mean what they say — and that bombing a founding myth is more likely to consecrate it than to dissolve it.
Cultural knowledge, of course, rarely prevents the catastrophes of war.
Athens at the height of its golden age sailed for Syracuse and lost an empire. Thucydides spent the rest of his life explaining why. The generals of 1914 were cultivated, well-read men, but those qualities did not save Europe. What has changed is not that culture once prevented blindness and no longer does. It is that culture has increasingly ceded authority to systems that mistake information for understanding and speed for judgment.
The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America. ...
The President shall be Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States, and of the Militia of the several States, when called into the actual Service of the United States...
He shall have Power, by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, to make Treaties, provided two thirds of the Senators present concur; and he shall nominate, and by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, shall appoint Ambassadors, other public Ministers and Consuls, Judges of the supreme Court, and all other Officers of the United States, whose Appointments are not herein otherwise provided for, and which shall be established by Law: but the Congress may by Law vest the Appointment of such inferior Officers, as they think proper, in the President alone, in the Courts of Law, or in the Heads of Departments.
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[He] shall receive Ambassadors and other public Ministers; he shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed, and shall Commission all the Officers of the United States.
"Allow the President to invade a neighboring nation, whenever he shall deem it necessary to repel an invasion, is to and you allow him to do so, whenever he may choose to say he deems it necessary for such purpose– and you allow him to make war at pleasure ...This, our convention understood to be the most oppressive of all Kingly oppressions; and they resolved to so frame the Constitution that no one man should hold the power of bringing this oppression upon us." -- letter to William Herndon, February 15, 1848
"Was it possible to lose the nation, and yet preserve the constitution? By general law life and limb must be protected; yet often a limb must be amputated to save a life; but a life is never wisely given to save a limb. I felt that measures, otherwise unconstitutional, might become lawful, by becoming indispensable to the preservation of the constitution, through the preservation of the nation." --letter to Albert G. Hodges, April 4, 1864
Since January 20, 2025:
Iran
Venezuela: boat bombings and capture of Maduro):
Yemen: Air strikes against Houthi militants
Counterterrorism Strikes in Iraq, Nigeria, and Somalia.
The president has a totally unchecked power to start a nuclear war. The process exists to authenticate the president's commands, not to challenge them.
James Comey: charges of making false statements to Congress and obstruction related to his 2020 testimony. The indictment was dismissed.
John Bolton: indictment for alleged unauthorized retention and transmission of classified information.
Letitia James New York Attorney General indicted in October 2025 on bank fraud and false statements charges. Case dismissed.
Jerome H. Powell said DOJ as opened a criminal investigation into Powell; prosecutors are looking at cost overruns.Threats: Regulatory Action and Funding
Universities and funding
Law firms representing Trump adversaries: contracts
Media companies and FCC license threats
Soft Power: "Power to Persuade"
Support from congressional Republicans and One Big Beautiful Bill
