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Archive for the ‘Politics’ Category

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Dumbocracy – Face it, America, we suck at this.

In Politics on November 8, 2024 at 8:52 am

As I write this, it is just three days since the 2024 Presidential election, and the pundits and talking heads and “election experts” are going at it hammer and tongs to explain how an orange-faced, seventy-eight-year-old, unhealthy, increasingly demented, ignorant, hate-spewing, fascist, male felon managed to win election over a highly qualified, highly intelligent, demonstrably competent, healthy, sixty-year-old woman.

I suspect that, as you read that last sentence, you have already begun to form your own opinions about the reasons.  And the reasons you will come up with are probably the same as the ones being proposed by the swarm of analysists now converging on the subject.  I haven’t even read or listened to any of it, but the headlines are to ubiquitous not to be seen, and I already know what they are saying.  It was her sex, her racial and ethnic heritage; it was the economy; it was Gaza; it was her choice of running mate; and on and on ad infinitum.  

The way I see it, however, is that while all of those things may have had some influence, none of them, nor all of them together are the real reason Donald Trump won the election.  They are the symptoms, not the problem?

So, what, you may ask, is the real problem, then, oh great and all-knowing person sitting in my living room and offering no qualifications whatsoever on which to base my opinions.

Thank you for asking.

The problem is that, for some time now Americans have sucked at democracy.  We do it badly.  We do it stupidly. We do it in ways that fling us out and reel us in between right and left like some bizarre existential yoyo trick.

Allow me to explain.  Or don’t.  I’m going to, anyway.

—  First, as a general rule, Americans pay remarkably little actual attention to our democracy.  (I know, we’re not “really” a democracy, we’re a democratic republic, a constitutional republic, a representative constitutional democratic republic.  Whatever.  It’s irrelevant what you want to call it.)  Most of us ignore it.  We go about our daily business until we are called upon every two or four years to vote for the people who will do the actual business of governing – or not.  And we congratulate ourselves for our neglect.  “I don’t like politics.” We announce proudly, justifying our dislike and inaction by claiming that all politicians are the same, both major parties are the same, it doesn’t make any difference, it doesn’t affect me.  None of which is actually true.  The majority of people in politics and government are good, hard-working people doing a difficult, frustrating job through the best of times and the worst.  (The Tale of Two Cities reference was deliberate, in case you missed it, or were wondering.  I’ll get back to it later.) 

— When we do pay attention, every two or four years at election time, we let ourselves think that voting is all that’s required of us.  And we complain about having to do it at all.  We let all kinds of things keep us from it.  We put our elections on a day when people have to work, but don’t insist that voting day be a national holiday.  (Note that the root meaning of “holiday” is “ holy day.”  If we’re going to treat anything as sacred, shouldn’t a day of direct involvement in our of/by/for the people democracy be a good choice?)  We ty to solve that by allowing things like mail-in voting, on-line voting, and early voting; then we accuse those of being fraudulent, we say they shouldn’t count, we make them as inconvenient and difficult as regular voting.  And we complain about how the news is suddenly all politics, politics, politics, and can’t we talk about something else for a change?

— When it comes to politics and the actual state of our democracy, we decided a long time ago that ignorance is, in fact, bliss.  No ifs about it.  And we want our democracy to be blissful.  We want someone else to take care of it.  You know, the politicians.  Those corrupt, self-serving, probably criminal people we keep electing to take care of it.  So, we don’t have to worry.  And we help ourselves in our blissful ignorance by latching onto sound-bite reasoning gleaned from simplistic infotainment news and, more recently, social networks.  It’s the economy, stupid.  We know that because we were told it fifty years or so ago; and we know it’s true because we remember that a loaf of bread cost, like, fifty cents when we were kids.  And clearly, the President is charge of all that, right?  The President can do stuff, right?  We don’t know what, because we really don’t know how it all works, but that’s the President’s job.  Right?  Any problem we have, small or large, anything that threatens to interfere with that bliss we believe is our right in a democracy is something the President should be fixing.  I won’t go into all the many issues of things like health care, individual rights, and so on, but pick any issue and we’d rather be ignorant than uncomfortable.  Quick democracy hack – if a Presidential or any other political candidate mentions a problem and says they’ll absolutely fix it, they’re lying.  What they will actually do is take some sort of action.  Won’t be a solution, because solutions are difficult and not blissful, but an action.  We like actions.  The more simplistic and immediate, the better.  Especially if we don’t have to do anything in particular, ourselves.

— When we do have to actually know about a problem, we go straight to the most important question: who do we need to blame?  Second question: who else can we pick to solve the problem, or take action, whatever?  To put it another way, who can we pick to blame for the problem next time, once we’ve gotten rid of the people we blamed this time.  Not all our blame is for politicians or government, of course.  We have lots of usual suspects.  The Others.  People whose color, or religion, or traditions, or culture, or choices about the way they live their lives are always available for blame.  Tell us how we aren’t the problem, tell us that we are the real Americans, tell us that God, but not Allah, has chosen us specially, and we will pick you to fix the problems.  This time.

— Oh, and by the way, since we don’t really want to know about the real issues, give us lots of non-issues to help us keep our ignorant bliss.  Facts are so boring.  Especially facts about thins like how the economy really works, or how government really works, or how biology really works, or how, really, anything important really works.  We welcome any random squirrel that comes along to take our attention away from all of that boring knowing about important things.  And random distractions allow us to become excited or enraged without having to actually know stuff.  We listen to all the noise around us (and the noise is, itself, part of the problem), so we know that the really important issues are whether a candidate can prove that she did a short-term, minimum wage job fifty years ago, or whether a candidate’s time vacationing and leading student groups in China was during or after Tiananmen Square. (When was that, exactly, anyway?  I think I remember hearing about that at the time, or I was supposed to read about it in history class, or something.  It was a bad thing, right? Those evil Communists did it, right?)  Oh, and we need to wonder if the guy who went there might be a secret communist agent, like, you know, in that movie, the one with, who was it?  Doesn’t matter.  Could be true, though, right?

All right.  I could go on, and I sincerely appreciate those of you who have paid attention, or at least stayed around this long.  So, let me finish with one last, I don’t know, recommendation, piece of advice?

We all need to do better.  We need to pay attention more closely, more of the time.  We need to be involved in and knowing about our democracy and our reality.  And we need to do it all the time, not just during elections.  We need to insist that our sources of information tell us the truth, based on relevant and compelling facts and rational thinking.  We need to shut out the noise and focus.  We need to have uncomfortable, but necessary conversations about our democracy, about our history, about our humanity. 

These things may become increasingly difficult over the next four years, but they will be necessary if this democracy we are so exasperatingly bad at is to survive.  And we need to start doing this right away, because we will have an opportunity in just two years for a course correction.  Presidential power is still limited by our tri-partite government.  The party now in power has shown us how difficult it is for a President to do whatever a President might want to do, when one or both houses of Congress are controlled by the other political party.

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You’ll Be Told A Lot Of Things Over The Next Few Weeks; Try Not To Listen.

In PeaceAble, Politics on July 22, 2024 at 12:36 pm

Now that Joe Biden has dropped out of the 2024 Presidential election, we may expect to see several storylines being promoted by the parties and the press.  We should at least ignore and probably protest all of them.  And the Democrats should actively resist becoming part of them.

The first story is that Biden’s stepping down is a sign that the party is in disarray, or that there will be a chaotic, divisive, disorderly convention.  This is predicated on two other stories.  One is that the Democrats don’t want VP Harris as their candidate and will try to replace her.  This story will persist in spite of the fact that nearly all the major alternative candidates have already endorsed Harris.  The second is that essentially making Harris the candidate without a contested convention would somehow disenfranchise those who voted for the Biden/Harris ticket in the primaries.  But Harris has been a heartbeat away from the Presidency for three-and-a-half years now.  And that is because the voters put her there.

Another story, being pushed by the Republicans is that Biden should not just bow out of the election, but step down from the Presidency.  If he can no longer run for office, they say, then he must also no longer be fit to govern.  This will persist even though it is patently ridiculous argument.  Of course he is fit to finish out his term.  He didn’t leave the campaign because he can’t function; he left because he became convinced that he couldn’t win.  And those promoting this idea undercut their own argument by also saying that he shouldn’t be allowed to drop out.  Again, there could be a whole slew of reasons why a candidate may not finish a campaign they started.  One big one would be if someone assassinated them.  So, if DJT had been killed after choosing Vance as his running mate, how would the Republicans move forward?  And if Biden leaves the campaign, for any reason whatsoever, it is his decision, and the normal course of action would be to nominate the VP.

There is also the story that Harris can’t be elected because she is a multi-racial woman.  Corollary to this story is one that says the Democrats can’t pick someone like Governor Whitmer as VP because “the country isn’t ready” for an all-woman ticket.  The democrats as a party, including their more progressive wing, and the U.S. as a whole have long suffered a blatant hypocrisy around the idea of new achievements for anyone who is not a white male.  When the question arises, there is an immediate cry of “if not now, when; if not this person, who?”  Which is immediately followed by “well, of course, we don’t necessarily mean that we should pick this person now; it’s just a hypothetical.”

All of us need to reject these stories and write a new one.

The Democrats should stop worrying about running against Donald Trump.  Aside from regularly showcasing what a truly horrible person he is, and how badly he is declining both physically and mentally; they should ignore him.  They should focus more loudly and vigorously on Project 2025; on the Republican opposition to abortion, to LGBTQ+ rights, to diversity and equity initiatives; on the Republican economic platform; and on plans to dismantle or hobble the departments of Homeland Security, Education, Energy; and to destroy the FDA, the NLRB, unions generally; and their desire to make loyalty to the President (which will really be loyalty to the authoritarians and oligarchs who are propping him up) a condition of serving in government, the military, and the judiciary.

This cannot be run as simply a race between Harris and Trump.  It needs to be remade in the public’s view as a choice between two diametrically opposed visions of America’s future.  Do we want a Chisto-fascist vision of a faux democracy, ruled by white men, under a banner of Christian Nationalism, in which even the most personal, most fundamental decisions are dictated by nominally religious pronouncements; or do we want to move toward an America which is inclusive and welcoming, and which seeks just and equitable opportunities for all its citizens, and for all human beings, in the economy, in  access to health, in the enrichment of life through the arts, in the benefits of all that America has to offer.  Electing Donals Trump or the Republican party would seem to guarantee the first American future.  Electing Harris and her running mate will certainly not immediately usher in the second; but it keeps it alive as a goal that we can all continue to work on together.

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OFFICIAL AXE: THE CONSTITUTION, THE RULE OF LAW, AND PRESIDENTIAL IMMUNITY

In Politics on July 2, 2024 at 7:59 am

Most of what is terrible about the Supreme Court decision declaring that Presidents have immunity from prosecution will be discussed at length for months, especially as the 2024 Presidential election draws closer.  Let me suggest some important points to remember.

You will hear a lot about the rule of law, but there has never been a clear idea about what that means.  Lawyers have always gotten rich, and the rich have always found a way in the effort to twist and turn the law to mean what suits them, while those without sufficient means have been forced to make plea bargains even when there is simply a possibility that they might be convicted, regardless of their actual guilt.  Every law on the books has been written by flawed human beings, who have relied on language that is never absolute in its meaning.  The rule of law is a rule that says, “whatever the law says, guilt and punishment are a function of class, not of the law.” 

There will be much discussion, also, of the court’s “conservatives.”  Don’t be fooled by the word.  This decision is not a conservative one, it is a radical one, arrived at by justices who have expressed extreme right-wing views on a wide range of issues, and who have no interest in setting their views aside to adjudicate the Constitution, nor in recusing themselves when there are obvious conflicts of interest.  At least four of them were appointed to the court specifically so that they might wreak havoc with what had been established law and Constitutional rights.

It would be pointless, in fact, to look for the Constitutional underpinning of this decision, though many pundits may try.  The majority didn’t really even try to justify the ruling on Constitutional grounds.  The principal arguments for the ruing involve an imagined future in which Presidents will be afraid to make bold, decisive decisions and take necessary actions because they will fear prosecution when they leave office.  Yet, in more than 200 years, over the terms of 46 different Presidents, only one has ever felt the need for this kind of protection against legal accountability.  And he wants the Presidency back, with this new lack of constraints that will allow him to become a dictator.

But the most disturbing thing about this ruling is that its justification ignores a simple fundamental idea, that a bold and decisive action is not the same thing as a criminal one, and never should be.  The court has essentially argued not that Presidents need to be able to act boldly, but that they need to be able to act illegally, with abandon.  A President with immunity is a President who does not have to think carefully about their decisions, weighing not just the actions, but all of the larger implications and consequences.  Such a President need only decide that their actions suit them.

Apparently, the Court has given themselves the power to determine when a President’s actions are within the realm of their official responsibilities.  This means that any attempt to prosecute a President (in or out of office) would invariably hinge on proving that the actions were not official, and then having to argue that through the entire legal system until it eventually reaches the Supreme Court where it could simply be tossed out.  How many Attorneys General or prosecutors would be willing or able to spend that much time and tax-payer dollars on what would likely be a fruitless task?

The decision is not now absolute for all time, though it will not be easy to fix.  It is, however, more imperative now than ever that the 2024 election reject the right-wing extremists decisively.  We need to elect Democrats to keep the White House, keep control (and expand it) in the Senate, and retake the House of Representatives with a clear majority.  We also need to keep or take leadership and control of governments at the state level in a large enough majority of states to pass a Constitutional amendment, and that amendment needs to state as clearly and unequivocally as possible, that Presidential actions, regardless of their justifications, regardless of their official nature, may be prosecuted if they are perceived to be violations of the Constitution or the law.  Presidents shall never be above the law, but will have the rights and responsibilities as every other citizen, including the right to be considered innocent until proven guilty, and to defend themselves in a court of law – or ask for a plea bargain.

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THE STORIES WE ARE TOLD  — AND THE DANGER OF BELIEVING THEM

In Politics on June 28, 2024 at 6:39 am

In approximately the 1970s, the major networks decided that their news programs weren’t making enough money, so they turned over management of the news to their entertainment divisions.  This had several consequences.

First, it meant that the news had to become entertaining, in order to attract viewers and advertisers.  News, told simply and honestly, it turns out, isn’t entertaining.  The only people who watched it were people who actually wanted to know things, learn things.

As a result, we went from “news” to “news stories.”  It literally became necessary for news programs to wrap every fact, every event, in a story.  Those stories, in addition, had to be entertaining.  And they had to have a consistent, coherent narrative.  Such a narrative, of course, as every fiction writer knows, must have a controlling theme.  The problem with this is that most raw news is random and disconnected, so news “writers” had to create the controlling narrative, themselves.

 Also, the development of news as stories to attract viewers and advertising dollars meant that network news programs began to compete with each other, which now no longer meant having the most complete and honest reporting of the news, but meant, instead, having the most entertaining or compelling story.

(As an aside:  Newspapers had wrestled with this same problem earlier in the 19th and 20th centuries, but newspapers never had the ubiquity, or public impact that television and radio have.  They were simply to slow and cumbersome, and readers always had the ability to self-select what and how much of their content to consume.)

In contemporary news “coverage,” we can see that the media develop their story, and its controlling narrative early and are reluctant to change it.  They also have an incentive to make that narrative as compelling as possible.

Which brings me to modern politics and the Presidential election. 

Note that there is a tendency to call it a “race,” rather than an election.  An election is a story about a choice, in which it is important to know what is relevant to that choice.  A race is about who’s winning and losing.  As such, it is in the interest of the news to make the race as exciting as possible.  The really important parts of electing the President – such as the actual state of the economy and it’s effect on the country as a whole, or issues of race, gender, health care, and so on – are useful in elections, but aren’t particularly relevant to the question of who’s winning, unless they can be presented in dramatic tones, with less emphasis on the facts and more on how people feel about them, which is circular because people will feel about them according to how dramatically they’re reported and what the stories are.

The controlling narrative of this election was decided long ago, at least as long ago as 2016, when the choice was between Trump and Clinton.  Now, the news networks will try to tell you that the issue is competence, but that is, at best misleading, at worst a lie.  Competence requires a narrative definition, because the actual definition is simply the ability to do the job the way it’s supposed to be done.

So, instead, we talk about age, on the one hand, and bluster on the other.  When the news talks about Biden, it presents his age, not as a marker of his experience and his accomplishments, but as a question of his competence, despite the fact hat he is only 2 years older that Trump, whose age is never reported on.  When Biden is showing his age – his gait is slower, his voice is raspy and his stutter is ore apparent, for example – the questions are about his competence.  Or more accurately, about how the public should view his competence, because those who actually work with him all the time, both domestic and foreign, have no doubts about his ability to do the job.  When Trump blusters and lies and rambles his way through incomprehensible word salads, the reporting is not about his competence, it’s about his power over his party and his base.  We are told the lie that power is, itself, competence, without enough emphasis on the source of the power or its potential use and potential danger.

Trump is the more dramatic of the candidates, which means that he better suits the news networks need for dramatic story-telling.

We need, also, to understand that it is in the interest of the entertainment news to keep the race close.  The story of a runaway winner lacks drama in an election.

If this election were being reported simply and honestly on the most important issues, there is no reason for it to seem so close.  In terms of accomplishments with regard to economic issues, infrastructure issues, issues of individual rights and freedoms, issues of health care, issues of international relations, and the future of the American democratic republic, there should be no reason for it to be this close an election.

The question the news media want you to ask is “do you want the old guy or the obnoxious guy?”

What we should be asking is, “do we want the candidate whose record shows that he will at least try to advance policies that will benefit us as a nation, or the candidate whose promises nothing more than the power of gaslighting, narcissistic posturing, retribution against his perceived enemies and virtual dictatorship founded on his own ego and the allegiance of Christian nationalists and neo-fascists.

We need to start seriously tuning out the 24-hour news/opinion/punditry narrative and focus on the real issues.  Stop worrying about Biden’s age.  He’s only one part of the whole picture.  What do you want to accomplish over the next four years?  Which candidate is more likely to try to do those things?  No candidate is going to be able to do all of it.  Who are you electing to Congress?  Who are you electing locally or state-wide?  The U.S. government is a vast, interconnected system.  It is not supposed to be one man.  And it is especially not supposed to be an egotistic, irrational, power-obsessed, would-be dictator who seems to believe that it IS supposed to be one man and that man is himself.

The news-as-entertainment media are not going to easily abandon their chosen narrative.  We must change the narrative ourselves, and show them that their narrative is both wrong and irrelevant.

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White Men Can’t Assimilate

In PeaceAble, Politics on January 16, 2021 at 4:55 pm

It’s been a problem right from the start. 

Before white men arrived on the shores of what they thought was India, the American continents had thriving, sophisticated, complex civilizations.  They had all the things that Europe had, albeit their own versions of those things.  They had agriculture, industry and commerce; they had art, literature, music, and dance; they had sports; they had religions; they had class structures.  They even had war.

But in an instance of irony of nearly cosmic scale, the white men who came to exploit and then to conquer, who brought deadly weapons and deadlier diseases, who raped and murdered, saw only savages. 

White men have, of course, never sought to assimilate with their inferiors.

Since then, white men have always insisted that the burden of assimilation is on the people we have tried to save from the curse of non-whiteness.  We have been successful at this rather bizarre insistence on our self-assigned superiority for hundreds of years across all the continents of the planet except Antarctica, which has escaped only because it had the good fortune not to be previously occupied by humans, though the penguins have not escaped unscathed.

This, of course, is because white men invented race, but exempted ourselves from the consequences which we assigned to it.  We even went so far as to remove the mention of our own whiteness as a qualifier of our accomplishments.  We were not so much a race ourselves as a default identity, referred to primarily when necessary to justify our behavior towards other races. 

The result was that we lost the ability to see ourselves as the other.

In fact, it may be that fundamental to everything else white men fear we will lose in a more diverse and equal world is the loss of the ability to ignore our own racial otherness and to never need to assimilate.  If white men should no longer be the center of the racial universe, but just one of the many races we have, ourselves, created, then we will have to accept the equal humanity of all people.  And we will have to learn to live among them, rather than assuming that they must always live among us.

The first step may be simply to acknowledge that there are more of them.  There always have been. 

In the past, we have been able to imagine that it didn’t matter, but as technology and information have shrunk the world, we can no longer pretend.  White men are a minority in the world, and we must acknowledge that and surrender our unearned privilege and our imagined superiority.

What we really fear, of course, is that we will reap what we have sown.  If we become the other, then we will be treated according to the rules we have made for how the “other” is to be treated.  This signifies two unspoken assumptions: first, that the others are just like us, not different at all; and then, that they may be just as angry with us as we imagine we would be had the shoe been on the other foot all that time, and they will be looking for revenge. 

Also, there is the sense that equality is ours to grant.  We hear that every time a white man complains that the other wants “special privileges,” and that’s not fair.  Why, goes the question, should we give them affirmative action, why should we give them equal pay, why should we give them the same access to the voting booth, that we have?  Why should we, white men, give the gift of being equally human to the others?

And then we ask, “why can’t we just start, fresh, OK?”  We promise to be “color blind” from now on.  Everyone’s the same.  That way, we don’t have to give you anything.  We’ll all start equal, starting today.  Of course, we’ll still have nearly all the wealth, nearly all the power, and all the existing social and cultural norms; but, hey, all the others have to do is work hard, and not cause any trouble, and they can earn their own stuff.

Except the norms, of course.  We’ll hold onto those, because, well, tradition and values and the American way, and God, you know.

What we don’t want to admit is that the problem isn’t what we have to give, it’s what we have to give up.

That’s what assimilation is, after all.  It’s giving up things, so that we can live harmoniously and peaceably with others who are, in fact, different from us.  We have to share our toys.  We have to stop whining about fairness when someone else gets something we wanted. 

We have to stop trying to control the conversation, and just listen for a while.

And we have to stop expecting the others to accommodate to our superiority and our privilege, to protect us from the consequences of our history.

It’s going to be difficult.  It will, especially if we continue to resist it, be painful at times.  We will not do it well; not at first, anyway.  We have no experience in it.  It’s foreign to us.  There’ll be a learning curve.  But if we work hard and try to stay out of trouble . . . well . . . you know.

One day at a time.  That’s what addicts are told when they’re trying to quit.  Superiority, privilege, and the invisibility of our own racial culpability are our addictions.  They are what we need to quit.

And so, let us begin, we white men.  One day at a time.  Every day, we need to give up a little more of our dependency on being white.  Acknowledge the problem, take responsibility for it, and actively seek solutions.

It’s been said recently that it’s not enough to strive to be non-racist.  We must become anti-racist.  We white men cannot simply take back race as though we’d never invented it, never practiced it, have not had our whole lives shaped by the reality of it.  We have to tear it down, brick, by brick.  We built it.  We own it.  And it will, ultimately be we who will have to give it up.  We will have to take an active part in the demolition. The only other choice is to have it torn down around us, and that will almost certainly mean the realization of our worst fears.

The world is no longer Euro-centrically male and white, and we will have to assimilate.

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THE DISUNITED STATES

In PeaceAble, Politics on December 12, 2020 at 10:46 am

Perhaps we should have seen it coming.  Maybe it was always inevitable.  Possibly the plan was fatally flawed from the very beginning.

America.  No, wait.  The United States of America.  Sure, we regularly use the shorthand, but the 50 states and 5 unincorporated, permanently inhabited territories are not America.  They are, in fact, not even most of America, which refers properly to two continents that comprise nearly all of the western hemisphere.

I bring this up because the 2020 presidential election, following four years of a presidency that has ripped the sheets off deep and abiding divisions and enflamed them nearly to the breaking point, has led to what may seem impossible-to-heal polarization.  On the left there is talk of never forgiving those who have so egregiously wounded the fundamental bonds of democracy; and on the right there is talk of a new civil war, of secession.  Each side is throwing around charges against the other of sedition and treason. 

How very “American” of us.

We call ourselves the “United States,” but a degree of disunity has always been there, has always lingered in the shadows, waiting for its chance to break things apart.

Each of the “united” states has individual sovereignty.  We have always been a federation of sovereign states, not a nation with a unitarian identity.  Our differences and divisions have been part of who we are since before the revolution, and have been codified by the Constitution and the courts since the 18th century.

The most obvious manifestations of this have always centered around racism and slavery, but have expanded to include all kinds of arguments involving every kind of human characteristic that distinguishes white men as the natural ruling class; wealth as the equivalence of superior intelligence and ability; nominally Puritan ideas about sex, gender, matrimony and general morality as normative; protestant Christianity (itself rife with internal division) as the institution of authority for all things called god; and Manifest Destiny as the final word on the United States’ proper place in the world.

We are, in other words, not really designed to be a nation at peace with itself, with a singularity of purpose or vision.

In some ways, this has been our strength.  We gave ourselves permission, whether the founders knew it or not, to become incredibly diverse, to become a melting pot, to become a home to so many who found themselves homeless in other nations. It gave us a foundation on which to build arguments of justice and freedom and fairness for non-whites, for immigrants, for the differently-abled, for LGBTQ+ individuals, for followers of a broad range of religious beliefs and doctrines or none at all, and all kinds of educational, economic, and cultural classes, communities, practices and personal choices.

But it has also allowed us to hang onto deeply rooted prejudices, and normalized discrimination.  It has allowed us to abuse, disenfranchise, dehumanize our own citizens.  It has allowed us to make self-aggrandizing claims of freedom, equality and justice while maintaining embedded exploitation, inequality, and injustice.  Freedom has come to mean a measure of anarchy; equality has come to embrace the idea that the false is equal to the true and the harmful equal to the healthy; and justice has been reimagined as the rule of authoritarian law.

This is the great dilemma that must ultimately be resolved.  Are we to be a single nation?  Will we embrace in reality our idealistic pledge of indivisibility?  Can we at last find a way to reconcile and repair our violent, bloody past and the long-festering, unhealed wounds of intolerance, bigotry, and human exploitation?  Can we, in the 21st century, use this moment of open – even honest in its own way – polarization to become what we have fantasized ourselves to be?

Have we, at last, hit bottom?

For the moment, the ball is in the Progressives’ court.  If meaningful change, lasting change, substantive change, is to happen, it will be because Progressives are able to seize this moment without rancor, without vengeance, without exacerbating the divisions that plague us, but by finding intelligent and effective solutions and advocating tirelessly for their implementation.  It will require perseverance, patience, and genuine adherence and fidelity to our most important principles, even when we have to apply them to people we have heretofore denigrated as deplorable and dismissed as irredeemable.

I sincerely hope that we are up to the task.

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COMPARING RACISM

In Politics on October 23, 2020 at 10:45 am

It is, to put it plainly, ridiculous to argue over which of two white American men in their seventies is more racist.

Comparing degrees of racism is like comparing how much “special ingredient” Minny put in our pie.  I mean how much should we be okay with?

Now, if we accept the idea that it is nearly impossible to find an adult white American male who is completely free of racism, then we can begin to address the more complicated issue: what are we going to do about it?

And I say this as a white American man in my seventies.

From my admittedly privileged perspective on issues of race, I would argue that there are two kinds of institutional and systemic racism: white supremacist and white privileged.

White supremacist racism ranges from the overt acts of racism by proud white nationalists to the small daily doubts of people who grew up in overtly racist times and can’t quite free themselves of the occasional racist response.  It is the second group that needs to be helped.  The first group will need to eventually die out – or not.

A lot of the white privileged group are sincere, kind, honest, and loving people who have tried very hard to change, and may even be convinced that they are no longer or have never been racist.  They have lots of professional and social interactions with non-whites.  Their circles are broadly diverse.  They may even intermarry, or genuinely celebrate the inter-racial relationships of their friends and family.  They may even work very hard to advance social change around things like ghettoization, income and work inequality, unequal treatment in interactions with the legal system, hate speech and hate crime, and so on.

But.

Every once in a while, there is a moment when they wonder if “black on black crime” may be a fair point; or they have to fire up Google to fact-check whether Black communities really do have an “absent father” problem that white communities don’t.  Every once in a while, they may listen with a moment of sympathy or thoughtful intellectualism to a debate about whether the principal cause of the Civil War was rooted in slavery or in economics or in states’ rights, before it kicks in that the economic history of America is inseparable from slavery and the states’ right being fought about was the right to own slaves.  Every once in a while, they realize that they are far more aware of, and concerned with, in ways both small and large, the race of their non-white friends than their white ones.

Racism is part of our national character.  We have all been affected by it.  Even non-whites raised in America have internalized it. It’s a disease that lingers in us, and occasionally erupts into noticeable sores. We have learned to live with it, but we would be so much better off if we could find a cure.

What cure?

I don’t want to overstate it or give the wrong impression, but the current COVID-19 pandemic may provide a useful, though flawed, analogy.

We have to start by understanding that racism is highly contagious; can be debilitating or even fatal; requires us to assume for our own safety that everyone we come into contact with may be infected; and even asymptomatic carriers can transmit the disease.

To fight the disease, we will need to watch ourselves carefully.  Try to stay away from people and places where it is likely to be spread.  Especially avoid potential super-spreader events, like certain political gatherings.  Know who in your personal bubble is less likely to be putting themselves in harm’s way, and self-isolate within that bubble. When you must venture out, take precautions.  Sanitize regularly; every time you have had contact with anyone or anything that is suspect, wash your hands of it.  When your “crazy uncle” tells a “Mexican” joke, tell him it’s not funny and you won’t have any part of it.  When a white acquaintance tries to “whitesplain” the BLM movement. Refuse to cooperate.

And here’s what may be the hardest part.  Wear a mask to reduce the possibility of your inadvertently spreading the disease.  Think before you speak, before you act.  If you’re about to argue with a non-white person about their described experience of being non-white in America, stop yourself; and just listen instead.  Remind yourself regularly that even the smallest droplets of racism you might unconsciously breathe into your surroundings can spread the disease.

There won’t be any vaccine any time soon.  We aren’t going to discover any miracle cure.  Herd immunity is clearly not going to happen.  The disease will be with us for a long time.  It will continue to be a drag on our society, our economy, our lives in myriad ways.  We may need to shut some things down for a while.  Some radical surgery may be needed, such as tearing down memorials to racism or racists, such as cutting irredeemable racists out of our social and political and economic systems, such as cutting our own ties with those persons or institutions that are helping to spread the disease.

But the first, and most important step is to recognize both the severity and the inevitability of the disease itself, and to take responsibility for our own part in it.  The second step is to take whatever action we can to root it out and deal with it both within ourselves and within the culture.  The third step is to demand the kinds of systemic, institutionalized, and culturally normative changes that will be necessary to someday eradicate the disease.  And all of these steps need to be taken simultaneously.

Now let me reiterate.  I’m a white American male in my seventies.  I am, by definition, a carrier of the disease.  It is my responsibility to do whatever I can to treat the disease in myself, reduce the spread of it to others, and advocate for treatments now and a cure in the future.

I can’t be certain, of course, that I am speaking for anyone else, or reflecting a perspective that others will find useful, or even valid.  What I am certain of is that if I don’t say something, do something, try something, then I will never fully recover.  And if we, none of us, do, say, or try, then there is a real possibility that the disease will prove terminal for us all.

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WAITING FOR THE PUNCHLINE – AND WANTING TO PUNCH SOMEONE

In Politics on March 29, 2020 at 11:01 am

We have relied, for the past several years, on the network and cable comedy shows to help keep us sane in these difficult times. Often, it seems as though John Oliver, Trevor Noah, Stephen Colbert, and the other late-night hosts have been a more reliable source of the truth about what’s happening in this country and the world than the main stream media.
And yet.
And yet.
Now that all the shows have been put online without audiences, I have been unable to bring myself to watch them. I see the Daily Show videos, the Colbert monologues, and I can’t bring myself to watch them.
I can no longer allow myself the luxury of relying on comedy to get me through this. It is too great a privilege.
I am a 72-year-old white male, retired, living at home with my wife, who is also retired. I can afford to sit at home and laugh through my anger and fear. I’m not being deprived of a wage that was already less than a living wage. I don’t have to figure out what to do about my children. I have books and television and radio and my cell phone and my computer. I can be isolated and not alone. I don’t have to go to work every day and risk my life. I don’t have to strip off my clothes before entering my house, then deny myself and my family even the simplest intimacies.
I am fortunate and I am privileged.
I even have reason to believe that even if I got sick I could afford testing and treatment.
My wife and I are social-distancing, self-isolating. We go out only to pick up a few things at the grocery store, where she goes in because she is younger than I and all the advisories say that I am more at risk if one of us gets infected. She is also required by family obligations to go out more than I. Of course, we must assume that if one of us were to become infected it is most likely that we both would.
Still, we follow the protocols. We clean everything that comes into the house. We leave groceries on the porch until we can sanitize the packages as best we can. We wipe down the mail. When we go for a walk outside with a friend, we stay 6 feet apart. We wash our hands frequently. We have reviewed all the guidelines. We live in a rural community where the virus has not yet been shown to be present, but assume it is only a matter of time.
We do this not simply because the government or the CDC or WHO or anyone else has required it, but because we want to be as safe as possible and we want others to be safe as well.
We worry about our sisters and brothers, our children and grandchildren, our friends and neighbors, many of whom may be more at risk than we are.
We live in ignorance of the facts. Like everyone else, we cannot really know the extent or location of the virus because testing is not being done as broadly or efficiently as it should. Was that dry cough a reaction to my blood pressure medicine or was I sick? Is there always a fever, or could I have been carrying the virus asymptomatically? Were our grandchildren infected before the schools were closed; before their soccer practice or games were suspended?
Will the measures now, finally, being taken mean that this crisis will be behind us by summer or still with us at Christmas?
How long? How much?
And that is why I cannot look right now at the comedy.
I’m too angry.
I can no longer laugh at Donald Trump. I can no longer see his daily displays of ignorance, pettiness, self-aggrandizement, lack of empathy or compassion, attacks on anyone and everyone who dares to suggest he might be wrong, might do better, might have some genuine responsibility to something other than himself, and not feel frightened for the future of our country, our democracy, our way of life.
I am way past the time to allow myself to believe that black humor, trench humor, can help us. These are dangerous times; not just because of the coronavirus, but because we are witnessing the willingness of the people in power openly and wantonly to destroy the Constitution in order to enrich themselves with both money and political power.
While we sit in our houses or suffer through our lives in the shadow of COVID-19, Our government is conspiring to stack the federal courts with unqualified, ideologically driven judges. They are arranging to give away hundreds of billions of taxpayer money to multi-billion-dollar corporations. They are stealing land and stealing the vote from the First Nations. They are carrying out petty vendettas. And they are dragging their feet on addressing the COVID-19 crisis because of unrelated, unimportant, fringe beliefs and issues. They are spinning lies and conspiracy theories and distortions rather than dealing directly with the very real issues of life and death.
And I want to go into the streets. I want all of us, by the millions to be in the streets. And we can’t be. The coronavirus has not just made us into hermits, it has robbed us of our most important power as citizens.
I expect I will get my sense of humor back. I do see some hopeful signs, good things swirling around in the chaos with everything else. I am, however, afraid that November may be too late for far too many of us. What will be left by then? And will we be able to come back from this?
We must stay engaged. We must stay afraid. We must stay angry. We must stay safe. When the doctors and the health experts tell us it is safe enough, we must go into the streets. And when the Fall does come around, we must take our fear and our anger to the voting booth in numbers that will make it loud and clear that we are not fooling around any longer.

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Why the Democrats Could win this Election and Lose the Next

In Politics on March 20, 2020 at 11:19 am

I feel fortunate to live in a state that is extremely unlikely to give its electoral votes to Donald Trump in 2020. As a result, I could probably choose to vote third party and not change the outcome of the general election. Nonetheless, I am committed to voting for the Democrat in November, even if it is Joe Biden, whom I do not believe will be a strong effective President and whose policies both current and historically are nowhere near to what I can enthusiastically support. I will do so because I think that it is important that the Donald Trump presidency needs to be overwhelmingly rejected both in the electoral college and in the popular vote.
(If you are a Trump supporter please stop reading this now and do not respond with some sort of pro-Trump MAGA nonsense. This discussion is not for you and not about you.)
But if either of the old white men currently leading in the primaries is ultimately chosen as the candidate, and the party does not select a running mate who is significantly younger, progressive, FEMALE, and – as a bonus – non-white, the Democrats may win this election, but lose their majority going forward.
Let’s be honest. The Democratic Party of 2020 is a center-right party. The left wing of the party, represented at its extreme by Bernie Sanders, would be simply center-left if our major parties actually reflected the spectrum of the American people, their values, their priorities, and their needs.
And if we continue to be honest with ourselves, we need to recognize that the rightward drift of the Democrats is neither historically all that distant a drift. The Democrats are as stuck in the past as the Republicans; and though the Democratic party still offers a greater likelihood that the kinds of progressive policies I support may eventually be realized, they cannot count on that small likelihood to sustain them after 2020.
It’s comforting for some in the party to believe that the party’s rightward shift was politically necessary, that they needed to shift right because that’s where the country was going, so the shift was needed to win elections. What they don’t say out loud, however is that the party establishment actually believed that it was the correct direction for the party to go in ideologically. In other words, they thought that the Republicans weren’t entirely wrong.
The rightward movement of the American people was always a myth created by the media after Ronald Reagan was elected. It was a way of explaining both Reagan’s success and Carter’s rejection. A time magazine article at the time of Reagan’s election analyzed it as some kind of extreme rightward change in America. To prove it, they did a survey. They asked a lot of general questions designed to elicit expected responses that could be analyzed as conservative. But when they asked, in the same survey, more specific questions about support for abortion rights, gun regulations, civil rights, women’s rights, and so on, the results were almost entirely left of center by sixty to seventy percent or more. Their conclusion: the country is in a major conservative swing . . . but there is still some disagreement about the issues.
The Democrats have long counted on the left wing of the party having nowhere to go. Minor party voting has long carried a risk of electing regressive right wing politicians and slowing even the modest progress that was being made to address gender, race, religious, and economic inequalities and inequities and injustices that have persisted throughout American history. And this has encouraged the conservatives who control the party to keep moving to the right while promising slow, delayed, “eventual” progress on the issues important to progressives; then asserting that the left has to vote democrat.
2018 showed us that there is not only enough progressive enthusiasm and power to move the party back to the left, there is also enough to seriously suggest that it would be possible to create a new, left of center, Democratic Socialist party that would be a major party rather than a third party spoiler. If the center right Democrats win the White House in 2020, but fail to deliver on progressive issues for the next four years, they may forever lose the support of the progressives.
But here’s the thing. If that meant the practical demise of the Republican party as a major party in this 2-party system of ours, it might be a good thing. Poll after poll show that the political center of the country on issues such as women’s health and abortion access, on taxation of the very wealthy, on income equity and a living wage, on Social Security and Medicare, on LGBTQ issues, on universal health care, and so on, is significantly left of where the Democratic party’s “centrists” are.
If we are to be a system that depends on two major political parties, then those parties should offer more than just two choices on the same side of the political spectrum. One should be able to represent the right of center and the other the left, so that there is a balance between left and right that allows for progress to be made, but compromises, also.
So, I am somewhat torn. I would love to see the Democratic party move back toward the left, embrace the Democratic Socialists, start in 2020 to restore what we have lost, and begin to make real substantive progress beyond that. On the other hand, I would love to see the white supremacists, racists, oligarchs, religious zealots and exclusionists of the far right, and the current Republican party that embraces them reduced to fringe political existence; and the rise of a new, powerful, progressive party to replace them.
For that reason, I will vote blue in November even if the candidate is not even my fourth or fifth or worse choice among the primary contenders who started. And I will work to help elect genuine progressives at the local and state level and into both houses of Congress.

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Donald Trump and the Democratic Plot to Destroy the GOP

In Politics, Uncategorized on December 4, 2019 at 11:40 am

 

(Satire . . . or is it?)
The Premise:
We have always assumed that it is the GOP who know how to take the long view, to play the long game. The Democrats are always looking to solve some specific social “problem” or other, but don’t know how to plan for what comes next. The roots of the rise of the right that put Trump in office can be seen in Dick Cheney’s choice of himself as Vice-President, and in Karl Rove’s pledge to create a permanent GOP majority, and in Gingrich’s “revolution,” and Reagan’s trickle-down economics and Nixon’s war on drugs. The failure of the left to make lasting, systemic progress on civil rights, women’s rights, abortion access, universal health care, LGBTQ+ rights, separation of church and state, and so on can be seen in how easily those things have been to dismantle, sideline and cripple since 2017.
But what if the so-called “centrist” Democrats who have systematically moved the party further and further to the right since the 1970s have actually developed a long game of their own that is so clever and so subtle, though hiding in plain sight, that it may destroy the GOP as early as 2020 and leave the Democratic establishment, with its oligarchy and pandering to the poor, the middle class, and minorities of every stripe?
Now stay with me here. I don’t have a whiteboard behind me, so you’ll have to follow along without charts or illustrations. I promise it will make sense in the end.
The Plot:
The Democrats had assumed all along that Hillary Clinton would be President from 2009 to 2016. But when Barack Obama took the nomination, they saw, instead of disappointment and defeat, opportunity. This was a black man who had presented himself as an agent of enormous social change, while actually being only barely left of the new center that had been crafted by the Dems during the Reagan years and solidified by Bill Clinton. The idea was to promote modest tax increases as radical departures from the Republicans’ corporate and oligarch friendly economic policies; and to promote small, cautious, baby steps on social issues as radical left-of-center progressive change. This would allow them to continue to attract the backing (and money) of corporations and wealthy donors while simultaneously creating the illusion of enormous political and philosophical distance between themselves and the GOP.
Perhaps Hillary had lost to Obama this time, but there was no one else who could stop her in 2016. Obama would give them liberal street cred and Hillary would keep solidify the right-of-center centrist control for decades to come.
The Gift That Was Donald Trump:
When the 2016 election got under way, the Dems assumed that Clinton would be their nominee and Jeb Bush would be the Republican candidate. So, they began to plan for that. But when Donald Trump, who had always claimed to be a Democrat, entered the race as a Republican and began to do surprisingly well, despite being a crude, proudly ignorant, arrogant, misogynistic, racist narcissist, they saw an opportunity to not only win the election, but destroy the GOP. Let Trump be Trump, make him the face of the Republican party, and put Clinton in the White House for eight years so they could build a middle-of-the-road political legacy they could paint as both populist and highly progressive – compared to the extreme right-wing brush with which they would paint the entire GOP.
When Republican resistance to Trump began to collapse, the plan got an added boost. Fusion GPS came to the DNC and said, “The GOP had us dig up all this dirt on Trump, but now they don’t want it anymore. How about you?” Corruption, playing footsie with Putin, the pee tape . . . it seemed as if the gods were on the side of the Dems. This stuff would give them decades of dirt to throw at the GOP for the mistake of choosing Donald Trump.
The Big Gamble:
Putting Clinton in the Presidency seemed almost too easy. And that wasn’t good. If she won too easily it would seem as if it was just politics as usual. People would assume she had won it because it was simply her turn. It would allow the GOP to use Trump’s loss as a reason to repudiate him and his extremism in public while recognizing privately that they could use his ideas to solidify their hold on the very policies of oligarchy, racism, xenophobia and misogyny that had helped them turn the South and Center of America red. Clinton was certainly a flawed candidate. She and her husband both had a long political history full of potential problems. If they played them carefully enough, they could keep the race close, proclaim victory, then begin the process of showing how the nation had just barely escaped the evils that would surely have descended on us all if Trump had been elected. And the closeness of the race would be evidence that the GOP was, in fact, the party of Trump. This would have the added benefit of showing the party that if a centrist like Clinton had just barely survived, then the wisdom of not going with a socialist like Bernie Sanders would be obvious.
So, when Mitch McConnell blocked the Garland SCOTUS nomination and refused to join Obama in making the Russian election interference public, all they Dems needed was something to keep their electorate from getting too complacent about Clinton’s election. They needed something that they could allow to seem troubling, but also connected to something so obviously ridiculous that it wouldn’t actually make a difference. The answer was right in front of them. The disgraced, then rehabilitated, then re-disgraced Anthony Weiner had a laptop. If someone leaked out that it might have some files of Huma Abedeen’s that might be, somehow, related to Clinton’s e-mails, or Benghazi, or something, then they would have a “scandal” far enough removed from Clinton to be safe, and easily debunked and ridiculed if it got too close. All they needed was for the head of the FBI to make the discovery public and announce the re-opening of an investigation. Nothing in particular would be alleged, no crimes would be uncovered, no Clinton misdeeds revealed. It would look like just more GOP dirty tricks. It seemed perfect.
Loss and Turning Lemons Into Lemonade:
But the risk was misjudged, Michigan and Wisconsin were missed, and there was more discontent among the progressives in the party than had been anticipated. Clinton lost. And the Republicans still controlled Congress. Things were looking grim. And then they got worse. Trump and the GOP began dismantling decades of progress on voting rights, women’s rights, health care, LGBTQ rights, minority rights and climate action; and they began to reshape the judiciary in ways that further threatened those rights.
And the centrist Dems saw an opening. The GOP was calling Nancy Pelosi a socialist and anyone even a step to her left was suddenly a communist. The establishment Dems could finally say that, with the far right, fundamentalist swing of the GOP base in full view, they were the center after all. But how to capitalize on it?
Bernie Sanders was still running for President, and a full roster of left-of-center candidates, minority non-white candidates, gay candidates, and self-proclaimed Democratic Socialists were gearing up to run for Congress, governorships, and state legislatures all over the country. Ocasio-Cortez showed that they could win even against establishment, big-money Dems in places like New York and the Midwest and even in the South. If enough of them could win, not too many, just enough, then the Dems could bring home the left wing of the party that had abandoned them in 2016.
2018 became the year to show that the Democratic party had truly become the party of diversity, of change, of progress – and Donald Trump was giving them room on the right to also be the party of populism, patriotism, and the average American.
The End Game:
2020 was now set up to be the year the centrist Dems could lower the boom on the GOP for a generation or more. All they needed was a good, business-friendly, non-controversial, establishment candidate for President. Anyone who said the right things about minorities and gays and women and saving the ACA and doing something, anything, about guns could beat Donald Trump. And it would leave the GOP as essentially little more than a fringe group in the electorate. The Dems would own the middle.
It would have an additional benefit. The left would have only two choices. They could stay with the Dems and accept whatever they got, or they could form a new party and get less. With the Dems controlling the broad center and the GOP stuck far right, the Democratic Socialists would simply mirror them on the left. America would have a three-party system with one major party, the Dems. And all the centrists would have to do is begin a careful, step-by-step restoration of what had been the progressive status quo before Trump and they’d be seen as hugely progressive by comparison. Meanwhile, they could continue to court big money and big business, offer token tax increases, and token social progress while continuing to support the oligarchy, the military, and the churches.
The Conspiracy Theory:
Now just suppose that it was all a set-up from the beginning. What if Trump has been part of it all along? Trump wasn’t going anywhere near the White House until Barack Obama made fun of him. If you’re a Trump supporter who thinks Trump is a genius, doesn’t this make a whole lot more sense than the idea that a billionaire business man would exhibit so many crude, stupid, irrational, and dangerous tendencies, still win big, openly flout constitutionality and convention, have so many corrupt and crazy associates in his administration, send Rudy Giuliani onto the major news networks to undermine him at every turn, be allowed to make a fortune off of the Presidency, and risk impeachment? You’ve been played. Trump is a Manchurian candidate, all right; but not for Putin – for the Democrats, the party he belonged to before deciding to run as a Republican – something he said would he could do because he thought Republican voters were stupid enough to support him.
Will It Work?:
Who knows, really. But the centrist Dems are having some unexpected difficulties. Joe Biden, their preferred candidate, is unlikely to be nominated. Same with booker and Steyer. Pete Buttigieg may hang on for a while, but he’s no shoo-in. Kamala Harris is gone. They’ve thrown Bloomberg and Patrick at the wall, but it’s not clear either one will stick. Meanwhile, Bernie is still very much in the fight, and it’s the social democrats who are creating the most excitement in the electorate. They might be able to work out something with Warren, but she’s a loose cannon as a centrist and the oligarchs don’t like her. The wealthy would almost rather have Bernie if they could get a fairly centrist congress.
But for the Republican electorate the bottom line is this. Do you want your party to survive? Then you have only one course of action. Abandon Trump, send Pence home to mother, and let someone like Bill Weld run for President. He practically looks like a centrist Dem already, but a Republican Congress could keep him in line.