Uncle Fester: Dementia, what a beautiful name.
Dementia: It means "insanity."
Uncle Fester: My name is Fester. It means "to rot."
Constitutional scholar Jack Balkin (Professor, Yale Law School) wrote a short chapter for the 2018 book Constitutional Democracy in Crisis?, edited by Mark A, Graber et al. Balkin's chapter 2, Constitutional Crisis and Constitutional Rot, explains the difference between the two concepts. The topic is timely because many people are concerned that the US is in or near a constitutional crisis in view of President Trump's divisive rhetoric and actions. Constitutional rot is a concept that most people are not aware of, while constitutional crisis is mostly misunderstood. Knowing the difference helps put America's political situation in much better context.
Constitutional crisis defined: Balkin and another scholar Sanford Levinson, have described what a constitutional crisis (CC) is and is not in a constitutional democracy. That is summarized in Balkin's chapter 2. There are three different kinds of CC. The Type One CC occurs when politicians and/or military officials announce they will not obey the constitution any more. That can happen when politicians and/or military officials refuse to obey a court order. Once refusal to adhere to constitutional rules has occurred, the constitution has failed.
The Type Two CC occurs when the constitution prevents political actors from trying to prevent an impending disaster. This is rare because the courts tend to find ways to allow political actors to avoid disasters. The Type Three CC occurs when many people refuse to obey the constitution. In these scenarios, there can be street riots, or, states or regions try to secede from the nation. This involves "situations where publicly articulated disagreements about the constitution lead political actors to engage in extraordinary forms of protest beyond mere legal disagreements and political protests: people take to the streets, armies mobilize, and brute force is used or threatened in order to prevail."
Balkin goes on to argue that most time when the term CC is used, it is hyperbole. Constitutions rarely break down.
Constitutional rot (CR): By contrast with a CC, CR arises when norms that held power in check fall, partisans play constitutional hardball and fair political competition comes under attack. We are seeing this now. For example, it was constitutional hardball by the Mitch McConnell to ignore President Obama's Supreme Court nomination of Merrick Garland. In CR, politicians favor short-term political gains over long-term damage to the constitutional system. As CR progresses, the political system becomes less democratic. State power becomes less accountable and less responsive to the public, while politicians become more beholden to backers who keep them in power. In essence, the country drifts into oligarchy.
While that is happening, the public loses trust in government and the political system because they have been abandoned: "When constitutional rot becomes advanced, and the public's trust in government is thoroughly undermined, people turn to demagogues who flatter the public and who stoke division, anger and resentment. Demagogues promise they will restore lost glories and make everything right again. They divert the public's attention to enemies and scapegoats within and without the republic. They divide the public in order to conquer it. They play on people's fears of loss of status. They use divisive rhetoric to distract attention, maintain a loyal set of followers, and keep themselves in power. There are always potential demagogues in a republic, but healthy republics restrain their emergence and ascension. When demagogues manage to take power and lead the nation, however, CR has become serious indeed."
Does any of that sound familiar?
The four horsemen of CR: Belkin describes the four horsemen of CR as (1) loss of trust in government and fellow citizens, (2) polarization that leads to people seeing fellow citizens as enemies of the state, (3) increasing economic inequality which foments anger, resentment and a search for scapegoats, and (4) policy disasters such as the Iraq war and the 2008 financial crisis, which undermine public trust in political leadership and constitutional governance. He argues that each one of these tends to feed into the one or more of the other factors. For example, polarization deflects public attention to symbolic and zero-sum conflicts, which allows wealthy interests to entrench their power and foster oligarchy. In turn, that tends to undermine public faith in a government that is drifting away from them and their interests. Rot begets more rot.
Belkin sees hardball politics and attendant destruction of norms of fair politics as leading to "a gradual descent into authoritarian or autocratic politics."
Regarding our current situation, Belkin sees it like this: "The United States is not currently in a period of constitutional crisis. But for some time--at least since the 1990s--it has been in a period of increasing constitutional rot. The election of a demagogue such as Trump is further evidence that our institutions have decayed, and judging by his presidential campaign and his first year in office, Trump promises to accelerate the corruption."
Sounds definitely like we're in for more CR and a descent into authoritarian, autocratic politics. How gradual the process may be is a matter open for debate.
Friday, May 24, 2019
Thursday, May 23, 2019
The US Constitution: A Source of Urban-Rural Polarization
Analysis by the New York Times indicates that the US Constitution itself is a significant source of urban-rural polarization. The NYT writes:
US rural areas will oppose constitutional and other changes to reduce the power imbalance. It looks as if American politics will stay unequally tipped in favor of conservative rural areas for quite some time. This is of concern for the US Senate. It is starting to seem unlikely that democrats will be able to retake the Senate in 2020. Given the way the polarization has destroyed normal functioning, it is reasonable to believe that any democratic president will have some or all nominations that require Senate consent blocked for all four years.
Flaws in the Constitution are becoming clear. Those flaws are leading the US from a liberal democracy to an anti-democratic, authoritarian system dominated by a minority conservative ideology. The rejection by President Trump of congressional authority to investigate him and his associates is undeniable evidence of America's slide toward a corrupt authoritarian system. Unless democrats step up their messaging and outreach, we just might be witnessing the beginning of the end for American liberal democracy, civil liberties and the rule of law.
But urban-rural polarization has become particularly acute in America: particularly entrenched, particularly hostile, particularly lopsided in its consequences. Urban voters, and the party that has come to represent them, now routinely lose elections and power even when they win more votes.The articles goes on to point out that European elections often allow for proportional representation and the urban-rural divide is softened by making geography less important than it is in the US. Underrepresentation of urban voters is a feature of any democracy that draws winner-take-all districts where the urban voters are concentrated in cities and at odds with rural voters. That is what happened in 2016 when Hillary Clinton won only three of eight congressional districts in Minnesota despite winning the whole state.
Democrats have blamed the Senate, the Electoral College and gerrymandering for their disadvantage. But the problem runs deeper, according to Jonathan Rodden, a Stanford political scientist: The American form of government is uniquely structured to exacerbate the urban-rural divide — and to translate it into enduring bias against the Democratic voters, clustered at the left of the accompanying chart.
Yes, the Senate gives rural areas (and small states) disproportionate strength. “That’s an obvious problem for Democrats,” Mr. Rodden said. “This other problem is a lot less obvious.”
In the United States, where a party’s voters live matters immensely. That’s because most representatives are elected from single-member districts where the candidate with the most votes wins, as opposed to a system of proportional representation, as some democracies have.
Democrats tend to be concentrated in cities and Republicans to be more spread out across suburbs and rural areas. The distribution of all of the precincts in the 2016 election shows that while many tilt heavily Democratic, fewer lean as far in the other direction.
As a result, Democrats have overwhelming power to elect representatives in a relatively small number of districts — whether for state house seats, the State Senate or Congress — while Republicans have at least enough power to elect representatives in a larger number of districts.
Republicans, in short, are more efficiently distributed in a system that rewards spreading voters across space.
US rural areas will oppose constitutional and other changes to reduce the power imbalance. It looks as if American politics will stay unequally tipped in favor of conservative rural areas for quite some time. This is of concern for the US Senate. It is starting to seem unlikely that democrats will be able to retake the Senate in 2020. Given the way the polarization has destroyed normal functioning, it is reasonable to believe that any democratic president will have some or all nominations that require Senate consent blocked for all four years.
Flaws in the Constitution are becoming clear. Those flaws are leading the US from a liberal democracy to an anti-democratic, authoritarian system dominated by a minority conservative ideology. The rejection by President Trump of congressional authority to investigate him and his associates is undeniable evidence of America's slide toward a corrupt authoritarian system. Unless democrats step up their messaging and outreach, we just might be witnessing the beginning of the end for American liberal democracy, civil liberties and the rule of law.
Truth Decay
Over the last couple of years, the RAND Corporation has been doing a deep dive into the political-social phenomenon they call truth decay. The study is part of an effort to "restore the role of facts and analysis in public life."
That sounds much like the anti-biasing anti-ideology, pragmatic rationalism, ideology that is advocated here at B&B. Two of the four core moral values that pragmatic rationalism is built on are (i) fidelity to trying to see objective facts and truths, to the extent they can be objectively based, with less bias and distortion, and (ii) fidelity to trying to apply less biased conscious reason (roughly, logic) to the facts one thinks one sees.
RAND's 326 page 2018 book, Truth Decay, can be downloaded for free here: https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RR2314.html [1]
In a summary post, RAND comments:
There are four trends that characterize Truth Decay:
1. increasing disagreement about facts and analytical interpretations of facts and data
2. a blurring of the line between opinion and fact
3. the increasing relative volume and resulting influence of opinion and personal experience over fact
4. declining trust in formerly respected sources of facts.
Most of these trends are not unprecedented in American history. But today's level of disagreement over objective facts is a new phenomenon.
RAND's findings so far point to the main drivers of truth decay as being (i) cognitive biases, (ii) the rise of social media and other changes to the information environment, (iii) demands on the educational system that limit its ability to keep up with changes in the information ecosystem, and (iv) political and social polarization. Political and social polarization can reasonably be seen as political and social tribalism that tends to be significantly fact- and logic-destroying or distorting for most people (~95% ?) most of the time.
A prior B&B discussion about a survey of experts of President Trump noted that he was ranked as the most polarizing President in US history, significantly out ranking Abe Lincoln, who came in a fairly distant second. Both RAND's sources of truth decay and its drivers seem be generally in accord with the political reality of at least the last 15 years or so, maybe the last 30 years or so.
An existential threat?: Over at his blog, Neurologica, Steven Novella posited RAND's truth decay observations as possibly constituting an existential threat, presumably at least to modern civilization, and maybe to the human species itself. Novella writes:
The limited grasp of history I have says that social and international conflicts are usually (≥ ~95% of the time?) seeded by shrewd purveyors of truth decay to whip an up antagonistic us vs. them social mentality. That appears to be so common that one can argues there is a chain of logic with two necessary links in it. The first link is heavy seeding of the social milieu with vast quantities of truth decay or dark free speech. That seeding of the public with lies, deceit and irrational emotion is the necessary prelude to unnecessary violent conflict, at least by aggressors.
If that logic is sound, then from a moral point of view, one can argue that use of truth decay to deceive, mislead and foment the negative emotions needed for social acceptance of violence is the moral equivalent of the actual violence itself. One could even see truth decay as a form of violence because it relies on coerces minds into false and/or irrational beliefs.
When viewed in that way, fidelity to objective facts and truths, to the extent they can be ascertained (and they often cannot be fully ascertained, leaving some degree of ambiguity), can bee seen as one of the highest, most important moral values a human can hold. The same applies to the moral value of trying to be less biased in one's conscious reasoning about the facts and truths one thinks one sees.
So, the question is this: Is using truth decay or dark free speech to deceive and emotionally poison minds as immoral as actual unwarranted violence?
Footnote:
1. The first paragraph and a half of the book says this: "Much has been written about the growing disregard for facts, data, and analysis in political and civil discourse in the United States. Increasingly, it seems that important policy debates, both within the federal government and across the electorate, are as likely to hinge on opinion or anecdote as they are on objective facts or rigorous analysis. However, policy decisions made primarily on the basis of opinion or anecdote can have deleterious effects on American democracy and might impose significant costs on the public.
The current discourse about the diminishing role of, trust in, and respect for facts, data, and analysis is often hamstrung by the use of conflicting language and unclear or undefined terms. Without a common language with which to discuss the problem—which we are calling Truth Decay—the search for solutions becomes more difficult. This report seeks to address this gap by offering a clear definition of Truth Decay and an examination of its drivers and consequences—all with the aim of creating a foundation for more-meaningful discussion of the challenges to U.S. political and civil discourse."
That sounds much like the anti-biasing anti-ideology, pragmatic rationalism, ideology that is advocated here at B&B. Two of the four core moral values that pragmatic rationalism is built on are (i) fidelity to trying to see objective facts and truths, to the extent they can be objectively based, with less bias and distortion, and (ii) fidelity to trying to apply less biased conscious reason (roughly, logic) to the facts one thinks one sees.
RAND's 326 page 2018 book, Truth Decay, can be downloaded for free here: https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RR2314.html [1]
In a summary post, RAND comments:
There are four trends that characterize Truth Decay:
1. increasing disagreement about facts and analytical interpretations of facts and data
2. a blurring of the line between opinion and fact
3. the increasing relative volume and resulting influence of opinion and personal experience over fact
4. declining trust in formerly respected sources of facts.
Most of these trends are not unprecedented in American history. But today's level of disagreement over objective facts is a new phenomenon.
RAND's findings so far point to the main drivers of truth decay as being (i) cognitive biases, (ii) the rise of social media and other changes to the information environment, (iii) demands on the educational system that limit its ability to keep up with changes in the information ecosystem, and (iv) political and social polarization. Political and social polarization can reasonably be seen as political and social tribalism that tends to be significantly fact- and logic-destroying or distorting for most people (~95% ?) most of the time.
A prior B&B discussion about a survey of experts of President Trump noted that he was ranked as the most polarizing President in US history, significantly out ranking Abe Lincoln, who came in a fairly distant second. Both RAND's sources of truth decay and its drivers seem be generally in accord with the political reality of at least the last 15 years or so, maybe the last 30 years or so.
An existential threat?: Over at his blog, Neurologica, Steven Novella posited RAND's truth decay observations as possibly constituting an existential threat, presumably at least to modern civilization, and maybe to the human species itself. Novella writes:
What is the greatest threat facing human civilization? This question is obviously meant to be provocative, and is probably inherently unanswerable. But I think there is a reasonable argument to be made that perhaps the greatest threat is the deterioration of fact-based political and social discussion. The argument is that this is a meta-problem that keeps us from effectively addressing all other problems.The short chain of moral logic: Cognitive and social science both strongly argue that the human mind is inherently susceptible to truth decay or dark free speech such as lies, deceit, and unwarranted emotional manipulation, especially fomented negative emotions such as fear, anger, hate, distrust, intolerance and bigotry or racism, all of which are usually intentionally associated with a person's tribal identity. Use of truth decay to deceive and manipulate the public is common among people with low or essentially no decent moral values because it works. The purveyors of truth decay either don't care about the morality if it, or they believe the usually immoral proposition that the ends justify the means and is thus moral, at least when they do it (but it's not when the other side does it).
But of course we don’t want to assume anything, which would ironically be part of the very problem itself. We first need to ask – are these trends actually happening or are they just illusion and confirmation bias? Also, can we put these trends into historical context? RAND recently conducted a study looking at item #3 – the relative volume of opinion vs fact-based reporting in the media over the last 28 years.
They identified several trends, which may contribute to Truth Decay. The first is that prior to 2000 broadcast news tended to be more academic and fact-based. After 2000 the news became more narrative based – presented more as simplistic stories, with less complexity and nuance.
Over this same time there was a shift in viewership from broadcast to cable networks. The cable networks contained much more opinion-based reporting, and far less fact-based reporting. They were more likely to have people discussing the news rather than giving a prepared factual report of the news. So essentially we went from watching Walter Cronkite to The View.
In print they saw a similar pattern. Print newspapers have changed the least, but also have shifted toward a more narrative style (just not as much). Meanwhile there was a shift to digital print news, which is more personal and anecdote-based.
All of these trends verify the concern that the overall volume of information being consumed by Americans has shifted from fact-based reporting to personal stories, narratives, discussions and opinions. We are no longer content to have a talking head give us a prepared digested form of “Just the facts, Ma’am” (which is, ironically, itself a bit of false reporting). We want to be entertained with a story, we want our emotional buttons pressed.
The limited grasp of history I have says that social and international conflicts are usually (≥ ~95% of the time?) seeded by shrewd purveyors of truth decay to whip an up antagonistic us vs. them social mentality. That appears to be so common that one can argues there is a chain of logic with two necessary links in it. The first link is heavy seeding of the social milieu with vast quantities of truth decay or dark free speech. That seeding of the public with lies, deceit and irrational emotion is the necessary prelude to unnecessary violent conflict, at least by aggressors.
If that logic is sound, then from a moral point of view, one can argue that use of truth decay to deceive, mislead and foment the negative emotions needed for social acceptance of violence is the moral equivalent of the actual violence itself. One could even see truth decay as a form of violence because it relies on coerces minds into false and/or irrational beliefs.
When viewed in that way, fidelity to objective facts and truths, to the extent they can be ascertained (and they often cannot be fully ascertained, leaving some degree of ambiguity), can bee seen as one of the highest, most important moral values a human can hold. The same applies to the moral value of trying to be less biased in one's conscious reasoning about the facts and truths one thinks one sees.
So, the question is this: Is using truth decay or dark free speech to deceive and emotionally poison minds as immoral as actual unwarranted violence?
Footnote:
1. The first paragraph and a half of the book says this: "Much has been written about the growing disregard for facts, data, and analysis in political and civil discourse in the United States. Increasingly, it seems that important policy debates, both within the federal government and across the electorate, are as likely to hinge on opinion or anecdote as they are on objective facts or rigorous analysis. However, policy decisions made primarily on the basis of opinion or anecdote can have deleterious effects on American democracy and might impose significant costs on the public.
The current discourse about the diminishing role of, trust in, and respect for facts, data, and analysis is often hamstrung by the use of conflicting language and unclear or undefined terms. Without a common language with which to discuss the problem—which we are calling Truth Decay—the search for solutions becomes more difficult. This report seeks to address this gap by offering a clear definition of Truth Decay and an examination of its drivers and consequences—all with the aim of creating a foundation for more-meaningful discussion of the challenges to U.S. political and civil discourse."
Some Observations On propaganda
These quotes are from Hannah Arendt's 1951 book, The Origins of Totalitarianism. Her observations came from her research into the nature and origins of murderous 20th century totalitarianism in its savage 19th century anti-Semitic and imperialist roots. These sentiments remain generally relevant to American politics today.
“In an ever-changing, incomprehensible world the masses had reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and that nothing was true. ... Mass propaganda discovered that its audience was ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow. The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.”
“The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.”
“Before mass leaders seize the power to fit reality to their lies, their propaganda is marked by its extreme contempt for facts as such, for in their opinion fact depends entirely on the power of man who can fabricate it.”
“Caution in handling generally accepted opinions that claim to explain whole trends of history is especially important for the historian of modern times, because the last century has produced an abundance of ideologies that pretend to be keys to history but are actually nothing but desperate efforts to escape responsibility.”
“One of the greatest advantages of the totalitarian elites of the twenties and thirties was to turn any statement of fact into a question of motive.”
“True goal of totalitarian propaganda is not persuasion, but organization of the polity. ... What convinces masses are not facts, and not even invented facts, but only the consistency of the system of which they are presumably part.”
“In an ever-changing, incomprehensible world the masses had reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and that nothing was true. ... Mass propaganda discovered that its audience was ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow. The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.”
“The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.”
“Before mass leaders seize the power to fit reality to their lies, their propaganda is marked by its extreme contempt for facts as such, for in their opinion fact depends entirely on the power of man who can fabricate it.”
“Caution in handling generally accepted opinions that claim to explain whole trends of history is especially important for the historian of modern times, because the last century has produced an abundance of ideologies that pretend to be keys to history but are actually nothing but desperate efforts to escape responsibility.”
“One of the greatest advantages of the totalitarian elites of the twenties and thirties was to turn any statement of fact into a question of motive.”
“True goal of totalitarian propaganda is not persuasion, but organization of the polity. ... What convinces masses are not facts, and not even invented facts, but only the consistency of the system of which they are presumably part.”
The Power of Irrational Emotion to Make People Irrational
An article in the Independent says this about the power of hate and bigotry to lead people into irrational beliefs.
That shows the power of irrational bigotry and hate to shut down logical thinking. This is why ideologues, demagogues and tyrants routinely resort to dark free speech (lies, deceit, unwarranted opacity to hide truths, unwarranted emotional manipulation to foment negative emotions, especially fear, anger, hate, intolerance, bigotry, racism, distrust, etc.). By fomenting an irrational, emotion-dominated mindset, ideologues, demagogues and tyrants can better create false realities as they make their run for ideological dominance, power and wealth.
Does that mean such people are stupid? No. It does mean they have been deceived and used in service to the agenda of others who don't care about adverse consequences to the deceived and used people. That is what divisive dark free speech-driven politics is doing to American society today. We all know who is doing this to us.
Do we need to rename Arabic numerals as American numerals?
Seventy-two per cent of Republicans oppose Western world's standard numeric system, according to research designed to 'tease out prejudice among those who didn't understand the question'.
Fifty-six per cent of people say the numerals should not part of the curriculum for US pupils, according to research designed to explore the bias and prejudice of poll respondents.
The digits 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 and 9 are referred to as Arabic numerals.
The system was first developed by Indian mathematicians before spreading through the Arab world to Europe and becoming popularised around the globe.
A survey by Civic Science, an American market research company, asked 3,624 respondents: “Should schools in America teach Arabic numerals as part of their curriculum?” The poll did not explain what the term “Arabic numerals” meant.
Some 2,020 people answered “no”. Twenty-nine per cent of respondents said the numerals should be taught in US schools, and 15 per cent had no opinion.
John Dick, chief executive of Civic Science, said the results were “the saddest and funniest testament to American bigotry we’ve ever seen in our data”.
That shows the power of irrational bigotry and hate to shut down logical thinking. This is why ideologues, demagogues and tyrants routinely resort to dark free speech (lies, deceit, unwarranted opacity to hide truths, unwarranted emotional manipulation to foment negative emotions, especially fear, anger, hate, intolerance, bigotry, racism, distrust, etc.). By fomenting an irrational, emotion-dominated mindset, ideologues, demagogues and tyrants can better create false realities as they make their run for ideological dominance, power and wealth.
Does that mean such people are stupid? No. It does mean they have been deceived and used in service to the agenda of others who don't care about adverse consequences to the deceived and used people. That is what divisive dark free speech-driven politics is doing to American society today. We all know who is doing this to us.
Do we need to rename Arabic numerals as American numerals?
Pragmatic Rationalism: An Anti-Biasing, Anti-Ideology Ideology
Cognitive and social science research shows that political and other ideologies often foster distortion of perceptions of reality and truths and conscious reasoning about what is perceived, true, false or ambiguous. That can and often does generate irrational politics and policy. The problem is generally more pronounced for hard core ideologues and authoritarians, neither of which can tolerate the cognitive dissonance between what unbiased reality, truth and reason lead to compared to what the ideology or authoritarian mind needs these things to be. For most of those people, fact, truth and reason fall to ideological beliefs and authoritarian goals when they are at odds.
Living in a society that is awash in lies, deceit and irrational emotional manipulation makes matters worse, but that cannot be avoided in a liberal democracy. That often makes what is false and irrational seem real and acceptable. That reflects the mental workings that evolution conferred on the human species. We can't help being what we are. The best that can be done is to acknowledge our 'flawed' biological traits and try to deal with them as rationally as our minds allow.
The other pragmatic rationalisms: At least two pragmatic rationalism (PR) ideologies appear to exist. One is posited as a general theory of the human world that is grounded in (i) physics; (ii) mathematics; (iii) philosophy; and (iv) the algorithmic part of human knowledge, which could be computerised, whatever that means. The author describes his all-encompassing theory of everything in abstract terms. It doesn't seem to have much to do with mass politics.
The other PR looks to be much more relevant to mass politics. That one is posited as an inquiry into understanding how scientific knowledge variably influences formulating and implementing political policies depending on the policy at issue. That PR is getting close to the PR this discussion is focused on.
This pragmatic rationalism: The PR political ideology posited here is intended to work as an anti-bias, anti-ideology ideology. It is built on is built on four, easy to understand, core or highest moral political values. The moral values are (1) fidelity to try to see relevant objective facts and truths, to the extent they can be ascertained (they are often not fully ascertainable) with less bias, (2) application of less biased conscious reasoning (roughly, logic) to the facts and truths, (3) applying the facts and reasoning in service to the public interest, and (4) willingness to engage in reasonable compromises in view of political, social and other relevant factors. Service to the public interest is envisioned to constitute a transparent competition of fact- and reason-based ideas.
This PR attempts to account for sources of bias and irrationality in politics by (i) forcing a larger role for more objective, less biased, less distorted fact, truth and logic in politics, (ii) ignoring standard ideologies, making them of secondary importance, (iii) induce some power and influence to flow from powerful special interests to the public interest, and (iv) forcing compromise onto the process as a bulwark against the rise of both single party rule and authoritarianism.
This variant of PR is thus an ideology that is more constrained by facts, truths and logic than all other ideologies, which tend to promote distortion of facts, truths and logic to fit the needs of the ideology. This amounts to an effort to build a mindset open to politics based more on objectivity, to the extent it can be ascertained, and less on subjective factors such as personal morals and identification with irrational tribalism.
Whether nations or whole societies can accept and/or adopt such a PR mindset is an open question. It asks a lot of people to set aside their prejudices and sacred beliefs when they are at odds with objective reality and reason. Maybe the human species cannot rise to a higher level of mental performance because the cognitive load is just too high. It is an experiment that needs to be tried to know if it would lead to more rational and efficient, but less conflict-prone politics and outcomes.
Living in a society that is awash in lies, deceit and irrational emotional manipulation makes matters worse, but that cannot be avoided in a liberal democracy. That often makes what is false and irrational seem real and acceptable. That reflects the mental workings that evolution conferred on the human species. We can't help being what we are. The best that can be done is to acknowledge our 'flawed' biological traits and try to deal with them as rationally as our minds allow.
The other pragmatic rationalisms: At least two pragmatic rationalism (PR) ideologies appear to exist. One is posited as a general theory of the human world that is grounded in (i) physics; (ii) mathematics; (iii) philosophy; and (iv) the algorithmic part of human knowledge, which could be computerised, whatever that means. The author describes his all-encompassing theory of everything in abstract terms. It doesn't seem to have much to do with mass politics.
The other PR looks to be much more relevant to mass politics. That one is posited as an inquiry into understanding how scientific knowledge variably influences formulating and implementing political policies depending on the policy at issue. That PR is getting close to the PR this discussion is focused on.
This pragmatic rationalism: The PR political ideology posited here is intended to work as an anti-bias, anti-ideology ideology. It is built on is built on four, easy to understand, core or highest moral political values. The moral values are (1) fidelity to try to see relevant objective facts and truths, to the extent they can be ascertained (they are often not fully ascertainable) with less bias, (2) application of less biased conscious reasoning (roughly, logic) to the facts and truths, (3) applying the facts and reasoning in service to the public interest, and (4) willingness to engage in reasonable compromises in view of political, social and other relevant factors. Service to the public interest is envisioned to constitute a transparent competition of fact- and reason-based ideas.
This PR attempts to account for sources of bias and irrationality in politics by (i) forcing a larger role for more objective, less biased, less distorted fact, truth and logic in politics, (ii) ignoring standard ideologies, making them of secondary importance, (iii) induce some power and influence to flow from powerful special interests to the public interest, and (iv) forcing compromise onto the process as a bulwark against the rise of both single party rule and authoritarianism.
This variant of PR is thus an ideology that is more constrained by facts, truths and logic than all other ideologies, which tend to promote distortion of facts, truths and logic to fit the needs of the ideology. This amounts to an effort to build a mindset open to politics based more on objectivity, to the extent it can be ascertained, and less on subjective factors such as personal morals and identification with irrational tribalism.
Whether nations or whole societies can accept and/or adopt such a PR mindset is an open question. It asks a lot of people to set aside their prejudices and sacred beliefs when they are at odds with objective reality and reason. Maybe the human species cannot rise to a higher level of mental performance because the cognitive load is just too high. It is an experiment that needs to be tried to know if it would lead to more rational and efficient, but less conflict-prone politics and outcomes.
Are Rural Areas In Unavoidable Economic Decline?
In 2103, the New York Times published an article, The Russia Left Behind: A journey through a heartland on the slow road to ruin. The article noted that there were hundreds of towns shrinking into villages and villages decaying into forest. That was intentional Soviet Union policy. The Soviets cut off support during efficiency drives in the 1960s and ’70s. Towns and villages were categorized as “promising” or “unpromising.” The unpromising ones were cut off from support and left to shrink or revert to primeval forests with roving packs of wolves.
In 2017, the New York Times published a related article, Russia’s Villages, and Their Way of Life, Are ‘Melting Away’, indicating that Russia's population is declining. Many small towns and villages are simply going extinct in terms of people living there. After restrictions on movement relaxed after the fall of the Soviet Union, many young people fled resource-starved parts of the countryside for big cities. Researchers estimated that out of 8,300 area villages in 1910, 2,000 no longer have permanent residents.
In 2016, the National Review published an article by Kevin Williamson that ferociously attacked the allegedly self-inflicted misery, immorality and self-deceit about life in rural areas slowly dying from lack of economic activity. Williamson's article pointed to the immorality of belief in Trump's campaign promises because it masked reality:
In 2018, the New York Times published an article, The Hard Truths of Trying to ‘Save’ the Rural Economy, that asked if economic rural decline is inevitable. The NYT wrote: "There are 60 million people, almost one in five Americans, living on farms, in hamlets and in small towns across the landscape. For the last quarter century the story of these places has been one of relentless economic decline. ... the United States has grown by 75 million people since 1990, but this has mostly occurred in cities and suburbs. Rural areas have lost some 3 million people. Since the 1990s, problems such as crime and opioid abuse, once associated with urban areas, are increasingly rural phenomena."
It may be that unfavorable economic trends make it impossible to sustain many rural populations in the US and elsewhere. Rural decline is underway in Canada. Agriculture continues to automate, so that is probably not a major source of rural job growth.
The political ramifications aren't clear. Rural population loss suggests there could be a decline in republican party affiliation as urban areas tend to be more democratic and independent than rural areas. How to deal with economic decline is not clear either. Some evidence shows that urban areas tend to subsidize rural areas, although most conservatives vigorously dispute that. Regardless, rural economic decline seems to be real and it seems to be a major source of social and political antagonism. This problem just might not be fixable by anyone. Economic trends have a way of going where economic forces make them go, politics and ideology be damned.
In 2017, the New York Times published a related article, Russia’s Villages, and Their Way of Life, Are ‘Melting Away’, indicating that Russia's population is declining. Many small towns and villages are simply going extinct in terms of people living there. After restrictions on movement relaxed after the fall of the Soviet Union, many young people fled resource-starved parts of the countryside for big cities. Researchers estimated that out of 8,300 area villages in 1910, 2,000 no longer have permanent residents.
In 2016, the National Review published an article by Kevin Williamson that ferociously attacked the allegedly self-inflicted misery, immorality and self-deceit about life in rural areas slowly dying from lack of economic activity. Williamson's article pointed to the immorality of belief in Trump's campaign promises because it masked reality:
It is immoral because it perpetuates a lie: that the white working class that finds itself attracted to Trump has been victimized by outside forces. It hasn’t. The white middle class may like the idea of Trump as a giant pulsing humanoid middle finger held up in the face of the Cathedral, they may sing hymns to Trump the destroyer and whisper darkly about “globalists” and — odious, stupid term — “the Establishment,” but nobody did this to them. They failed themselves.
If you spend time in hardscrabble, white upstate New York, or eastern Kentucky, or my own native West Texas, and you take an honest look at the welfare dependency, the drug and alcohol addiction, the family anarchy — which is to say, the whelping of human children with all the respect and wisdom of a stray dog — you will come to an awful realization. It wasn’t Beijing. It wasn’t even Washington, as bad as Washington can be. It wasn’t immigrants from Mexico, excessive and problematic as our current immigration levels are. It wasn’t any of that.
Nothing happened to them. There wasn’t some awful disaster. There wasn’t a war or a famine or a plague or a foreign occupation. Even the economic changes of the past few decades do very little to explain the dysfunction and negligence — and the incomprehensible malice — of poor white America. So the gypsum business in Garbutt ain’t what it used to be. There is more to life in the 21st century than wallboard and cheap sentimentality about how the Man closed the factories down.
The truth about these dysfunctional, downscale communities is that they deserve to die. Economically, they are negative assets. Morally, they are indefensible. Forget all your cheap theatrical Bruce Springsteen crap. Forget your sanctimony about struggling Rust Belt factory towns and your conspiracy theories about the wily Orientals stealing our jobs. Forget your goddamned gypsum, and, if he has a problem with that, forget Ed Burke, too. The white American underclass is in thrall to a vicious, selfish culture whose main products are misery and used heroin needles. Donald Trump’s speeches make them feel good. So does OxyContin. What they need isn’t analgesics, literal or political. They need real opportunity, which means that they need real change, which means that they need U-Haul.
If you want to live, get out of Garbutt.
In 2018, the New York Times published an article, The Hard Truths of Trying to ‘Save’ the Rural Economy, that asked if economic rural decline is inevitable. The NYT wrote: "There are 60 million people, almost one in five Americans, living on farms, in hamlets and in small towns across the landscape. For the last quarter century the story of these places has been one of relentless economic decline. ... the United States has grown by 75 million people since 1990, but this has mostly occurred in cities and suburbs. Rural areas have lost some 3 million people. Since the 1990s, problems such as crime and opioid abuse, once associated with urban areas, are increasingly rural phenomena."
It may be that unfavorable economic trends make it impossible to sustain many rural populations in the US and elsewhere. Rural decline is underway in Canada. Agriculture continues to automate, so that is probably not a major source of rural job growth.
The political ramifications aren't clear. Rural population loss suggests there could be a decline in republican party affiliation as urban areas tend to be more democratic and independent than rural areas. How to deal with economic decline is not clear either. Some evidence shows that urban areas tend to subsidize rural areas, although most conservatives vigorously dispute that. Regardless, rural economic decline seems to be real and it seems to be a major source of social and political antagonism. This problem just might not be fixable by anyone. Economic trends have a way of going where economic forces make them go, politics and ideology be damned.
Evidence of Trump's Obstruction in the Mueller Report
Writing for Lawfare blog, Quinta Jurecic published a great analysis of evidence of President Trump's obstruction of justice in the Mueller report. The analysis looks to be sufficient to support at least indictment of Trump for obstruction of justice on four different occasions. Since impeachment is a political process, not a legal process, the level of evidence needed is possibly lower. Here's Jurecic's analysis, which shows four instances of obstruction of justice:
Ms. Jurecic writes on Trump's effort to fire Mueller, item E in the table above: Obstructive act (p. 87): Former White House Counsel Don McGahn is a “credible witness” in providing evidence that Trump indeed attempted to fire Mueller. This “would qualify as an obstructive act” if the firing “would naturally obstruct the investigation and any grand jury proceedings that might flow from the inquiry.”
Nexus (p. 89): “Substantial evidence” indicates that, at this point, Trump was aware that “his conduct was under investigation by a federal prosecutor who could present any evidence of federal crimes to a grand jury.”
Intent (p. 89): “Substantial evidence indicates that the President’s attempts to remove the Special Counsel were linked to the Special Counsel’s oversight of investigations that involved the President’s conduct[.]”
She also points to a similar analysis by another expert another legal expert, Richard Hoeg, which shows five instances of obstruction of justice.
Since impeachment is a political process and not a legal one, the standards of evidence that apply can be different. The House can decide that there was enough evidence of impeachable obstruction on more than five occasions, each of which constituting a separate impeachable offense. Given the evidence in Mueller's report, if the House decides to start impeachment proceedings on the grounds of obstruction, they would choose whatever evidence in the report they wish. The House could also decide there was an illegal conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russia, but the evidence for that may be less solid.
If these analyses are reasonably reliable, the evidence shows that Trump actually tried to obstruct justice more than once. Only the adults in the room, e.g., his counsel Don McGahn, kept him from stopping Mueller's investigation.
Ms. Jurecic writes on Trump's effort to fire Mueller, item E in the table above: Obstructive act (p. 87): Former White House Counsel Don McGahn is a “credible witness” in providing evidence that Trump indeed attempted to fire Mueller. This “would qualify as an obstructive act” if the firing “would naturally obstruct the investigation and any grand jury proceedings that might flow from the inquiry.”
Nexus (p. 89): “Substantial evidence” indicates that, at this point, Trump was aware that “his conduct was under investigation by a federal prosecutor who could present any evidence of federal crimes to a grand jury.”
Intent (p. 89): “Substantial evidence indicates that the President’s attempts to remove the Special Counsel were linked to the Special Counsel’s oversight of investigations that involved the President’s conduct[.]”
She also points to a similar analysis by another expert another legal expert, Richard Hoeg, which shows five instances of obstruction of justice.
Since impeachment is a political process and not a legal one, the standards of evidence that apply can be different. The House can decide that there was enough evidence of impeachable obstruction on more than five occasions, each of which constituting a separate impeachable offense. Given the evidence in Mueller's report, if the House decides to start impeachment proceedings on the grounds of obstruction, they would choose whatever evidence in the report they wish. The House could also decide there was an illegal conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russia, but the evidence for that may be less solid.
If these analyses are reasonably reliable, the evidence shows that Trump actually tried to obstruct justice more than once. Only the adults in the room, e.g., his counsel Don McGahn, kept him from stopping Mueller's investigation.
Tuesday, May 14, 2019
Can the Radical Right Destroy the Democratic Party From WIthin?
Then, sounding almost as if he were taking aim directly at the corporate plutocrats like those gathered in Indian Wells, Obama declared that "the nation cannot prosper long when it favors only the prosperous." . . . . The enterprise started small but exploded as antagonism toward Obama built among the 0.01 percent on the right. While they largely hid their ambitious enterprise from the public, avoiding all but the minimum legally required financial disclosures, the Kochs portrayed their political philanthropy inside their circle as a matter of noblesse oblige. "If not us, who? If not now, when?" Charles Koch asked in the invitation to one such donor summit . . . . .
As the Washington Post's Dan Balz observed, "When W. Clement Stone, an insurance magnate, gave $2 million [about $11 million in 2016] to Richard M. Nixon's 1972 campaign, it caused public outrage . . . . . In contrast for the 2016 election, the political war chest accumulated by the Kochs and their small circle of friends was projected to be $889 million . . . . The clout of the participants at the retreats served to burnish the Koch's reputations, conferring a new aura of respectability on their extreme libertarian political views . . . . 'We're not a bunch of radicals running around and saying strange things, David Koch proudly told Continetti. 'Many of these people are very successful and occupy very important, respected positions in their communities!'" Jane Mayer, Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right, discussing the secrecy of the radical right movement and its capacity to buy political influence with money, 2017
In a long article, The Intercept discusses the politics of 2nd term New Jersey democratic congressman Josh Gottheimer. In some respects, Gottheimer sounds very much like the kind of person in congress that radical right authoritarians and its extreme libertarian mercantilist ideology can get behind. Gottheimer is leading opposition to the progressive wing of congressional democrats and he opposed Pelosi as House Speaker. He is vehemently pro-Israel and he is paid by lobbies that represent Israel and Saudi Arabia.
The Intercept writes: "His definition of too progressive is startlingly broad. As the Democratic chair of the so-called Problem Solvers Caucus, he led a push against Nancy Pelosi as she ran for House speaker last year. He has consistently voted against the party even on procedural motions, threatening to hand control over the House to the GOP. This spring, he was one of just a handful of Democrats at a private retreat on Sea Island, Georgia, hosted by the conservative American Enterprise Institute, mingling with Vice President Mike Pence, Donald Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, and other Republican heavyweights.
Gottheimer’s intervention in the effort to end the Saudi-led war in Yemen takes on new resonance in the context of his longstanding links to Saudi money. Gottheimer is a protege of Mark Penn, a notorious Democratic operative who has become a leading Trump cheerleader on Fox News. Penn’s companies, where Gottheimer has held senior positions over the years, have long been on Saudi Arabia’s payroll.
But Gottheimer is showing no signs of receding into the background. In the first quarter of 2019, he raised an astounding $830,000, almost none of it from small donors, giving him some $5 million cash on hand. Aside from the campaign cash he rakes in from the pro-Israel and pro-Saudi lobbies, he cultivates Wall Street openly."
Is the democratic party vulnerable? -- No DINO hunts: Seeing how both the radical right movement and Gottheimer operate, the always shrewd and patient Koch brother radical movement would not hesitate to try to flip democrats to the radical libertarian mercantilist cause. The cause the Kochs founded, funded and built dates at least back to the 1954 Supreme Court Brown v. Board of Education decision that tried to desegregate public schools. The radical movement is patient, ruthless, anti-democratic and authoritarian. For the movement, the ends justify the means.
According to historian Nancy MacLean, the radical right movement the Kochs built has succeeded in overpowering and controlling the GOP. They instituted RINO hunts that successfully executed an ideological cleansing movement, leaving the GOP far more ideologically narrow and intolerant than the democrats. To the extent that former GOP moderates and conservatives are unhappy with the always vulgar and offensive President Trump, their only place to go is the democratic, libertarian or Green parties, or they are consigned to the relative wilderness of independent status.
Could the radical right movement take advantage of democratic ideological openness to begin building a radical right movement in the democratic party? The knee jerk response is 'of course not'. But why not?
First, the Kochs can spend vast amounts of money. In all likelihood that money cost them nothing after the republican-Trump 2017 tax cuts for the rich. To the top 0.01% of the right, raising $887 million or even $1 billion is probably just the cost of defending much more than that. The radical right money is not going to go away. In the process of cleansing the GOP, the radical movement used cash to oppose republicans that did not toe their line. They can do the same for democrats, at least in purple states or voting districts.
Second, the radical movement is ruthless and intelligent. There are probably ways of laundering Koch campaign contributions through groups that sound like they are democratic but are really authoritarian and pro-mercantilist. The propaganda the radical movement uses is persistent and effective. Some voters who helped put Gottheimer in office feel they were misled (that is not to say Gottheimer has any connection with the Koch's radical right movement -- yet). The radical movement can mislead voters wherever they choose.
Third, the democrats have not done ideological cleansing, at least not yet. There are democrats who are socially liberal but probably somewhat or mostly sympathetic to the radical movement's vehement anti-government, anti-regulation message. If the Kochs can see potentially useful allies among democrats, why not try to buy them? The movement has an endless stream of staggering amounts of cash to help assuage any moral or other qualms a moderate or conservative democrat might have.
How likely is the radical right movement to make a move on some democrats if the politics is right? Arguably, it is certain if the movement believes it can contain the political fallout and win more than lose. The movement's propaganda machine is superb. If there appears to be a politically viable way to infiltrate and co-opt the democratic party from within, they will probably try. If there is a way to win, not trying would amount malpractice and the Kochs don't do malpractice.
As the Washington Post's Dan Balz observed, "When W. Clement Stone, an insurance magnate, gave $2 million [about $11 million in 2016] to Richard M. Nixon's 1972 campaign, it caused public outrage . . . . . In contrast for the 2016 election, the political war chest accumulated by the Kochs and their small circle of friends was projected to be $889 million . . . . The clout of the participants at the retreats served to burnish the Koch's reputations, conferring a new aura of respectability on their extreme libertarian political views . . . . 'We're not a bunch of radicals running around and saying strange things, David Koch proudly told Continetti. 'Many of these people are very successful and occupy very important, respected positions in their communities!'" Jane Mayer, Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right, discussing the secrecy of the radical right movement and its capacity to buy political influence with money, 2017
In a long article, The Intercept discusses the politics of 2nd term New Jersey democratic congressman Josh Gottheimer. In some respects, Gottheimer sounds very much like the kind of person in congress that radical right authoritarians and its extreme libertarian mercantilist ideology can get behind. Gottheimer is leading opposition to the progressive wing of congressional democrats and he opposed Pelosi as House Speaker. He is vehemently pro-Israel and he is paid by lobbies that represent Israel and Saudi Arabia.
The Intercept writes: "His definition of too progressive is startlingly broad. As the Democratic chair of the so-called Problem Solvers Caucus, he led a push against Nancy Pelosi as she ran for House speaker last year. He has consistently voted against the party even on procedural motions, threatening to hand control over the House to the GOP. This spring, he was one of just a handful of Democrats at a private retreat on Sea Island, Georgia, hosted by the conservative American Enterprise Institute, mingling with Vice President Mike Pence, Donald Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, and other Republican heavyweights.
Gottheimer’s intervention in the effort to end the Saudi-led war in Yemen takes on new resonance in the context of his longstanding links to Saudi money. Gottheimer is a protege of Mark Penn, a notorious Democratic operative who has become a leading Trump cheerleader on Fox News. Penn’s companies, where Gottheimer has held senior positions over the years, have long been on Saudi Arabia’s payroll.
But Gottheimer is showing no signs of receding into the background. In the first quarter of 2019, he raised an astounding $830,000, almost none of it from small donors, giving him some $5 million cash on hand. Aside from the campaign cash he rakes in from the pro-Israel and pro-Saudi lobbies, he cultivates Wall Street openly."
Is the democratic party vulnerable? -- No DINO hunts: Seeing how both the radical right movement and Gottheimer operate, the always shrewd and patient Koch brother radical movement would not hesitate to try to flip democrats to the radical libertarian mercantilist cause. The cause the Kochs founded, funded and built dates at least back to the 1954 Supreme Court Brown v. Board of Education decision that tried to desegregate public schools. The radical movement is patient, ruthless, anti-democratic and authoritarian. For the movement, the ends justify the means.
According to historian Nancy MacLean, the radical right movement the Kochs built has succeeded in overpowering and controlling the GOP. They instituted RINO hunts that successfully executed an ideological cleansing movement, leaving the GOP far more ideologically narrow and intolerant than the democrats. To the extent that former GOP moderates and conservatives are unhappy with the always vulgar and offensive President Trump, their only place to go is the democratic, libertarian or Green parties, or they are consigned to the relative wilderness of independent status.
Could the radical right movement take advantage of democratic ideological openness to begin building a radical right movement in the democratic party? The knee jerk response is 'of course not'. But why not?
First, the Kochs can spend vast amounts of money. In all likelihood that money cost them nothing after the republican-Trump 2017 tax cuts for the rich. To the top 0.01% of the right, raising $887 million or even $1 billion is probably just the cost of defending much more than that. The radical right money is not going to go away. In the process of cleansing the GOP, the radical movement used cash to oppose republicans that did not toe their line. They can do the same for democrats, at least in purple states or voting districts.
Second, the radical movement is ruthless and intelligent. There are probably ways of laundering Koch campaign contributions through groups that sound like they are democratic but are really authoritarian and pro-mercantilist. The propaganda the radical movement uses is persistent and effective. Some voters who helped put Gottheimer in office feel they were misled (that is not to say Gottheimer has any connection with the Koch's radical right movement -- yet). The radical movement can mislead voters wherever they choose.
Third, the democrats have not done ideological cleansing, at least not yet. There are democrats who are socially liberal but probably somewhat or mostly sympathetic to the radical movement's vehement anti-government, anti-regulation message. If the Kochs can see potentially useful allies among democrats, why not try to buy them? The movement has an endless stream of staggering amounts of cash to help assuage any moral or other qualms a moderate or conservative democrat might have.
How likely is the radical right movement to make a move on some democrats if the politics is right? Arguably, it is certain if the movement believes it can contain the political fallout and win more than lose. The movement's propaganda machine is superb. If there appears to be a politically viable way to infiltrate and co-opt the democratic party from within, they will probably try. If there is a way to win, not trying would amount malpractice and the Kochs don't do malpractice.
When the Radical Right Coalesced to Control the GOP
After President Obama won the 2008 election, wealthy radical libertarian conservatives held a summit in January of 2009 to decide how to respond to the grave threat that Obama posed to their agenda. They bitterly opposed government, taxation, civil liberties and Obama himself. The Koch brothers called the billionaires together. They had been building the radical movement ever since the 1954 Supreme Court Brown v. Board of Education decision that attempted to desegregate public schools.
At the summit, two republican senators, John Cornyn (R-TX) and Jim DeMint (R-SC), were invited to speak about what to do to oppose Obama and trends in government that threatened their wealth and power, especially the rise of civil liberties and environmental regulations. For the radical right, Obama's election was the last straw. It was time to fight all out war against the federal government and civil liberties by any means possible.
In her 2017 book, Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right, journalist Jane Mayer writes about two visions of how to proceed as argued by Cornyn and DeMint. Cornyn represented the republican establishment and DeMint represented an aggressive far right, non-compromising anti-government ideology that would not tolerate dissent or ideological diversity. Mayer writes:
Obama's cluelessness: If one accepts that description of Obama's vision as accurate Obama was full of "wishful thinking" as Mayer put it. He was clueless about what happened to the GOP after his election. The radical right's propaganda and Trump supporters absolutely reject that as Obama's vision and they still hate Obama. To this day they still see him as racist and intentionally divisive while working to enslave the American people under the tyranny of big government.
Koch's raging hypocrisy: Mayer goes on to recount that no one at the summit defended Cornyn's plea for a big tent and cooperation with Obama. Cornyn was met with stony silence, while the billionaires cheered DeMint on. People at the summit assumed that the Kochs opposed the TARP bailout because of their hard core free market ideology. Their political machine, Americans For Prosperity, openly opposed TARP. As it turned out, the Kochs had quietly switched sides and supported the bailout after, as Mayer put it, "the bottom began to fall out of the stock market, threatening the Koch's vast investment portfolio." In this regard, the Kochs were perfectly willing to use government to defend their own interests, but vehemently opposed to government defending other interests if it presented a threat, real or imagined, to their wealth and power in any way.
Koch's hypocrisy ran even deeper than that. One former insider in the Koch machine saw Koch donor summits before Obama's election as a shrewd way to coax others into engaging in political battles that wound up boosting Koch company profits. The aide asserts that the seminars were an extension of the company's lobbying efforts. The summits were, as Mayer put it, "staffed and organized by Koch employees and largely treated as a corporate project." What the Kochs did not anticipate for that January 2009 summit, was overwhelming fear and animosity that Obama and his election generated among the billionaires. That summit morphed from a modest pro-Koch movement into a much bigger radical movement that pushed the Kochs into the leadership role. The meeting planners were overwhelmed. According to one the the planners, "Suddenly they were leading the parade. No one anticipated that."
Where we are today: Essentially no one on the right will accept Mayer's version of events or the authoritarian goal of the radical right to neuter the federal government, gut regulations, quash civil rights and install an oligarchy of billionaires with proclivities to kleptocracy and brass knuckles laissez-faire capitalism. The radical right sees very little room for government spending on social safety nets. Those things just increase their tax burden and they vehemently reject it. Whatever social good may come from that safety net spending, just like contrary public opinion, is of no concern whatever to the radical right. This is crowd has no compassion for anything except the oligarchs at the top.
The radical right propaganda machine has done its work superbly. Most rank and file republicans, populists and Trump supporters (~98%?) firmly believe that getting rid of government will free them and make them better off. They simply cannot see that freeing wealthy special interests from taxes and regulations is not going to free average people because those things do not directly impinge on average people. Most of the freed-up power and wealth (~90%?) will flow from government and the masses to the special interests. Under laissez-faire capitalism as little trickles down as the oligarchs can get away with. A corrupt oligarchy vision of reality is something that rank and file people on the right completely reject out of hand as pure leftist lies and propaganda.
Today, America is in a big mess. Whether the country can get itself back on track is an open question. If the oligarchs gain enough power, they will never let it go without a fight.
At the summit, two republican senators, John Cornyn (R-TX) and Jim DeMint (R-SC), were invited to speak about what to do to oppose Obama and trends in government that threatened their wealth and power, especially the rise of civil liberties and environmental regulations. For the radical right, Obama's election was the last straw. It was time to fight all out war against the federal government and civil liberties by any means possible.
In her 2017 book, Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right, journalist Jane Mayer writes about two visions of how to proceed as argued by Cornyn and DeMint. Cornyn represented the republican establishment and DeMint represented an aggressive far right, non-compromising anti-government ideology that would not tolerate dissent or ideological diversity. Mayer writes:
"The highlight of the Koch summit in 2009 was an uninhibited debate about what conservatives should do next in the face of electoral defeat. As the donors and other guests dined [...] they watched a passionate argument unfold that encapsulated the stark choice ahead. . . . . Cornyn was rated the second most conservative republican in the Senate . . . . But he was also, as one former aide put it "very much a constitutionalist" who believed it was occasionally necessary to compromise in politics.
Poised on the other side of the moderator was the South Carolina Senator Jim DeMint, a conservative provocateur who defined the outermost antiestablishment fringes of the republican party . . . . Before his election to congress, DeMint had run as advertising agency in South Carolina. He understood how to sell, and what he was pitching that night was an approach to politics that according to historian Sean Wilenz would have been recognizable to DeMint's forebears from the Palmetto state as akin to the radical nullification of federal power advocated in the 1820s by the slavery defender John C. Calhoun.
. . . . Cornyn spoke in favor of the Republican Party fighting its way back to victory by broadening its appeal to a broader swath of voters, including moderates. . . . . the former aide explained . . . . "He believes in making the party a big tent. You can't win unless you get more votes."
In contrast, DeMint portrayed compromise as surrender. He had little patience for the slow-moving process of constitutional government. He regarded many of his Senate colleagues as timid and self-serving. The federal government posed such a dire threat to the dynamism of the American economy, in his view, that anything less than all-out war on regulations and spending was a cop-out. . . . . Rather than compromising on their principles and working with the new administration, DeMint argued, Republicans needed to take a firm stand against Obama, waging a campaign of massive resistance and obstruction, regardless of the 2008 election outcome.
As the participants continued to cheer him on, in his folksy southern way, DeMint tore into Cornyn over one issue in particular. He accused Cornyn of turning his back on conservative free-market principles and capitulating to the worst kind of big government spending, with his vote earlier that fall in favor of the Treasury Department's massive bailout of failing banks. . . . . In hopes of staving off economic disaster, Bush's Treasury Department begged Congress to approve the massive $700 billion emergency bailout known as the Troubled Asset Relief Program, or TARP.
Advisers to Obama later acknowledged that he had no idea of what he was up against. He had campaigned as a post-partisan politician who had idealistically taken issue with those who he said "like to slice and dice our country into red states and blue states." He insisted, "We are one people," the United States of America. His vision, like his own blended racial and geographic heredity, was one of reconciliation, not division."
Obama's cluelessness: If one accepts that description of Obama's vision as accurate Obama was full of "wishful thinking" as Mayer put it. He was clueless about what happened to the GOP after his election. The radical right's propaganda and Trump supporters absolutely reject that as Obama's vision and they still hate Obama. To this day they still see him as racist and intentionally divisive while working to enslave the American people under the tyranny of big government.
Koch's raging hypocrisy: Mayer goes on to recount that no one at the summit defended Cornyn's plea for a big tent and cooperation with Obama. Cornyn was met with stony silence, while the billionaires cheered DeMint on. People at the summit assumed that the Kochs opposed the TARP bailout because of their hard core free market ideology. Their political machine, Americans For Prosperity, openly opposed TARP. As it turned out, the Kochs had quietly switched sides and supported the bailout after, as Mayer put it, "the bottom began to fall out of the stock market, threatening the Koch's vast investment portfolio." In this regard, the Kochs were perfectly willing to use government to defend their own interests, but vehemently opposed to government defending other interests if it presented a threat, real or imagined, to their wealth and power in any way.
Koch's hypocrisy ran even deeper than that. One former insider in the Koch machine saw Koch donor summits before Obama's election as a shrewd way to coax others into engaging in political battles that wound up boosting Koch company profits. The aide asserts that the seminars were an extension of the company's lobbying efforts. The summits were, as Mayer put it, "staffed and organized by Koch employees and largely treated as a corporate project." What the Kochs did not anticipate for that January 2009 summit, was overwhelming fear and animosity that Obama and his election generated among the billionaires. That summit morphed from a modest pro-Koch movement into a much bigger radical movement that pushed the Kochs into the leadership role. The meeting planners were overwhelmed. According to one the the planners, "Suddenly they were leading the parade. No one anticipated that."
Where we are today: Essentially no one on the right will accept Mayer's version of events or the authoritarian goal of the radical right to neuter the federal government, gut regulations, quash civil rights and install an oligarchy of billionaires with proclivities to kleptocracy and brass knuckles laissez-faire capitalism. The radical right sees very little room for government spending on social safety nets. Those things just increase their tax burden and they vehemently reject it. Whatever social good may come from that safety net spending, just like contrary public opinion, is of no concern whatever to the radical right. This is crowd has no compassion for anything except the oligarchs at the top.
The radical right propaganda machine has done its work superbly. Most rank and file republicans, populists and Trump supporters (~98%?) firmly believe that getting rid of government will free them and make them better off. They simply cannot see that freeing wealthy special interests from taxes and regulations is not going to free average people because those things do not directly impinge on average people. Most of the freed-up power and wealth (~90%?) will flow from government and the masses to the special interests. Under laissez-faire capitalism as little trickles down as the oligarchs can get away with. A corrupt oligarchy vision of reality is something that rank and file people on the right completely reject out of hand as pure leftist lies and propaganda.
Today, America is in a big mess. Whether the country can get itself back on track is an open question. If the oligarchs gain enough power, they will never let it go without a fight.
Monday, May 6, 2019
Sources of Modern Conservative Anti-Democratic Authoritarian Government
Tax breaks for religion -- Source: Washington Post, 2013
While restlessly rummaging about the interwebs for answers to what the heck is going on in American politics, B&B's vaunted research division blindly stumbled across the Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy. A reference to that journal asserted it is a key voice for the powerful Federalist Society (FS). That woke B&B up real quick, or wiki wiki as some would say.
The journal is put out by Harvard law school students and is published in three issues per year. It describes itself like this: “The Journal is one of the top five most widely circulated law reviews and the nation’s leading forum for conservative and libertarian legal scholarship. The late Stephen Eberhard and former Senator and Secretary of Energy E. Spencer Abraham founded the journal forty years ago and many journal alumni have risen to prominent legal positions in the government and at the nation’s top law firms.”
One of the articles in the current issue, by Grant M. Newman, presumably a student, The Taxation of Religious Organizations in America, seemed likely to provide some insight about something of interest. The 30 page paper says this:
“Christ taught his disciples to “[r]ender to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s.” The Supreme Court has, to an extent, rendered to God what is God’s by repeatedly acknowledging that it will not involve itself in the internal affairs of religious organizations. Nevertheless, the extent to which religious organizations remain vulnerable to involvement from other branches of government remains a pertinent question, especially with regards to the government’s power to tax.
This Note investigates the extent to which religious organizations are vulnerable to such involvement. A prime example of such involvement is Congress’ ability to use the Internal Revenue Code to the detriment of religious organizations. As it ensures that what is Caesar’s (i.e., taxes) is rendered to Caesar (i.e., the federal government), any policy of Congress and the Internal Revenue Service (I.R.S.) that thwarts the faithful from rendering to God what is God’s has the potential to impose a prohibitive burden on the operation of religious organizations. The potential to hinder the work of religious organizations through taxation is great. Indeed, “the power to tax involves the power to destroy.” Insofar as Congress retains the power to tax religious organizations, it likewise maintains the power to destroy.
In short, religious organizations benefit tremendously from their tax-exempt status. However, this tax-exempt status is not a given; the tax-exempt status for religious organizations is neither a right that was found to be in existence prior to the formation of the United States and therefore enshrined in the Constitution, nor is it a right created by the Constitution. Rather it is a status that is based on the consent of Congress and listed deep in the bowels of the United States Code. Therefore, religious organizations and their allies must remain vigilant in ensuring that their representatives in Congress and officials in the executive branch uphold those portions of the Tax Code that exempt religious organizations from tax obligations.
In order to understand the threat to religious organizations from adverse changes to tax law, it is important to first understand the provisions in the Internal Revenue Code on which religious organizations are granted tax-exempt status, as well as the legislative history behind these sections of the Tax Code.”
As discussed here by Tokyo Jones previously, the issue of giving tax breaks to religious organizations arguably is unconstitutional as a violation of the constitution's Establishment Clause.
Several things stand out as important in Mr. Newman’s paper. First, this paper presumably represents leading edge Federalist Society thinking and it's vision of what that ideology, presumably some form of an anti-democratic authoritarian libertarianism (ADAL), deems important to defend. That makes sense because devout Christians are a necessary core support group for ADAL ideology. President Trump’s move to install two hard core white male Christian judges to the supreme court accords with what the FS and ADAL ideology stand for.
Second, Newman’s paper displays an obvious defensiveness for the tax breaks that religious organizations use to establish and maintain themselves. That is consistent with what I have experienced over the years with the matter of tax breaks for religion comes up. Religious folks demand their tax breaks, often incorrectly seeing it as dictated by the constitution. In 2013, the Washington Post published an article based on data by Ryan T. Cragun, a sociologist at the University of Tampa at that time, indicating that the value of tax breaks for religious organizations was about $82.5 billion/year.[1] I wrote to Cragun and asked about how solid his estimate was. He indicated that it was a soft, conservative estimate because churches tend to be secretive about their finances and, if I recall correctly, his guess was that the tax benefit was probably closer to at least about $120 billion/year. That kind of money is definitely something to be defensive about.
Third, it was surprising to see how honest Newman is about (1) the tenuous basis in law that religious tax breaks rely on, and (2) how those breaks must be defended, calling loss of tax breaks “the threat to religious organizations.” Another rather blunt bit of honesty relates to the government's power to tax according to Mr. Newman: “At the federal level, all income to a person, be it to a corporation or to a non-corporation individual, is taxable by default.” That kind of thinking is not mainstream among rank and file ADAL adherents, including many or most Trump supporters. If Newman’s honesty and clarity of thought is mainstream among FS members, their legal reasoning is significantly out of synch with the irrational chaos of mainstream conservative-populist rhetoric and belief.
Footnote:
1. Newman cites the same Washington Post article. My searches on the value of religious tax breaks turns up very little. Either I've missed information that is out there, or this is an area that needs more research.
B&B orig: 5/3/19
Tyranny Technology Update: Artificial Intelligence for Facial Recognition
Chinese policewoman using facial-recognition sunglasses linked to artificial intelligence data analysis algorithms while patrolling a train station in Zhengzhou, the capital of central China's Henan province
A series of B&B discussions is focused on the technology that China is bringing to bear on how the tyrants there are applying technology in an effort to build a deep surveillance state to control both behavior and minds. China is exporting an array of technology to other countries, who can use it to help tyrants remain in power under cover of reducing crime. A key part of the behavior and mind control effort is the use of artificial intelligence (AI) technology to help power facial recognition. Police in China are being equipped with glasses that scan faces. The is sent data to computers with AI-powered facial recognition capacity.
Tech Xplore reports that researchers at the University of Bradford in the UK attained 100% accuracy in facial recognition based on both three-quarter, top half and right half face images. This technical advance permits identification of a person using less than a full frontal face image. Images of the bottom half of the face was correctly recognised 60% of the time, while images of only the and eyes and nose dropped to 40% accuracy. The original article, Deep face recognition using imperfect facial data, was published in the journal Future Generation Computer Systems.
It is reasonable to believe that China is well ahead of the West in this kind of technology development. This is a critical component of China's massive social engineering experiment in building an unassailable tyranny. Obviously, this technology can be used for legitimate law enforcement and security purposes. Nonetheless, it is obvious that this can be used for any purpose where facial recognition is employed, legitimate or not.
B&B orig: 5/6/19
Saturday, May 4, 2019
26 USC 6103(f) and Trump's Tax Returns
“The tragic paradox of the electoral route to authoritarianism is that democracy’s assassins use the very institutions of democracy—gradually, subtly, and even legally—to kill it. . . . . One of the great ironies of how democracies die is that the very defense of democracy is often used as a pretext for its subversion” How Democracies Die, Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, 2018
By now it is obvious that President Trump is making a run at establishing a full-blown corrupt, anti-democratic tyranny. His past statements make it clear that he wants to be a dictator for life. His recent statements make it clear that he will resist any further attempts by congress to exert its oversight authority by conducting any further investigations related to him. What was the republican party is now the Trump Tyranny Party (TTP), so there is essentially no possibility they oppose Trump's plan. For practical purposes, the TTP is just as corrupt, anti-democratic and authoritarian as Trump. The last stand of democracy just might come from congressional democrats exerting their congressional oversight authority. The recent assertion that Trump can fire any prosecutor he believes is investigating false allegations against him is tyrant rhetoric. There is nothing democratic about it.
Democratic norms that had been in place since the end of World War 2 are mostly gone now. The stunning weaknesses of democracy in the face of a committed tyrant are obvious. The TPP was fully complicit in their fall. The 2020 elections could turn out to be a sham if Trump gains tyrant power before those elections. The odds of that outcome are low, but now significantly higher than they have been in a very long time. claims that 'we have been through this before and we'll be OK' ring hollow. America has never been through this before. There has never been a time when (1) American society was this divided, (2) one party in power was fully in accord with the tyrant president, (3) America's enemies were relentlessly attacking society and democracy with endless sophisticated, effective propaganda, and (4) the leader of a hostile foreign power, Vladimir Putin, bribing, blackmailing and/or cajoling a virulently anti-democratic US president to do his bidding in foreign and probably also domestic policy. That combination of circumstances has never existed in US history. Absolutely no one can know that 'we'll be OK'. We just might not turn out OK. we might wind up another kleptocratic police state like Russia wants us to be.
It is possible that House of Representatives demands to see Trump's tax returns will trigger a crisis that leads to the fall of American democracy in the coming months or years. He will resist allowing any member of congress from seeing his returns, presumably because they contain evidence that he is a felon and a traitor. Given those stakes and his obvious authoritarian character, it is logical for Trump reject all congressional oversight authority from now until his last day on Earth.
Congress can demand to see tax returns under 26 USC 6103(f): In the early days, all US taxpayer returns were public. That is still the case in some European countries today. Newspapers routinely published the taxes paid by the wealthy. That amounted to transparency that went away over time. The wealthy have always been able to defend themselves from transparency and they will always try very hard to remain shrouded in secrecy.
After those days, only the president had the power to look at anyone's tax returns. That ended after the 1921-1923 Teapot Dome scandal in Warren Harding’s administration. In the wake of Teapot Dome, congress passed legislation in 1924 that expanded the power to review tax returns to congress. That legislation reclaimed the right of congress to review private tax returns. Just as the legislative branch has the power to tax and spend, it also has the power to review personal tax returns as fully within its rights and oversight obligations.
26 USC 6103(f) is long and detailed but the first part of it reads as follows:
(f) Disclosure to Committees of Congress (1) Committee on Ways and Means, Committee on Finance, and Joint Committee on Taxation: Upon written request from the chairman of the Committee on Ways and Means of the House of Representatives, the chairman of the Committee on Finance of the Senate, or the chairman of the Joint Committee on Taxation, the Secretary shall furnish such committee with any return or return information specified in such request, except that any return or return information which can be associated with, or otherwise identify, directly or indirectly, a particular taxpayer shall be furnished to such committee only when sitting in closed executive session unless such taxpayer otherwise consents in writing to such disclosure.
Other provisions include these:
(5) Disclosure by whistleblower: Any person who otherwise has or had access to any return or return information under this section may disclose such return or return information to a committee referred to in paragraph (1) or any individual authorized to receive or inspect information under paragraph (4)(A) if such person believes such return or return information may relate to possible misconduct, maladministration, or taxpayer abuse.
(h) Disclosure to certain Federal officers and employees for purposes of tax administration, etc. (h) Disclosure to certain Federal officers and employees for purposes of tax administration, etc. (1)Department of the Treasury Returns and return information shall, without written request, be open to inspection by or disclosure to officers and employees of the Department of the Treasury whose official duties require such inspection or disclosure for tax administration purposes.
(2)Department of Justice In a matter involving tax administration, a return or return information shall be open to inspection by or disclosure to officers and employees of the Department of Justice (including United States attorneys) personally and directly engaged in, and solely for their use in, any proceeding before a Federal grand jury or preparation for any proceeding (or investigation which may result in such a proceeding) before a Federal grand jury or any Federal or State court, but only if— (A) the taxpayer is or may be a party to the proceeding, or the proceeding arose out of, or in connection with, determining the taxpayer’s civil or criminal liability, or the collection of such civil liability in respect of any tax imposed under this title; (B) the treatment of an item reflected on such return is or may be related to the resolution of an issue in the proceeding or investigation; or (C) such return or return information relates or may relate to a transactional relationship between a person who is or may be a party to the proceeding and the taxpayer which affects, or may affect, the resolution of an issue in such proceeding or investigation.
At least some knowledgeable people believe that congress has legitimate power to ask for Trump's tax returns, e.g., former Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers and some (not all) legal scholars.
Trump's counterattack and the fallout: Trump is clear that he will resist all further inquiries into him and his administration. He will attack the law allowing congress to see his tax returns as unconstitutional, not applicable to a sitting president, not a matter of legitimate congressional inquiry, and/or whatever other defense Trump's team of attorneys will devise. Given the fact that Trump has nominated anti-democratic authoritarian federal judges to the federal bench, with Senate TTP consent, it is likely that the Supreme Court will find that one or more of Trump's attacks on 26 USC 6103(f) to be persuasive. That will allow Trump to keep his crimes and treason shrouded in secrecy. On the propaganda front, Trump will be able to employ the powerful tool the white collar criminal always uses to defend himself, plausible deniability, to its maximum extent.
That will lead to the typical response in current polarized politics. Trump supporters will see total, absolute vindication of Trump. They can go back to chants of Lock Her Up! in their enthusiastic never-ending pursuit of Hillary and her alleged crimes. Trump opponents will see the grave threat to democracy and the rule of law. Another group, maybe 4-10%, will be undecided, confused and/or apathetic. How that social stew will play out is unknowable. Maybe there will be violence and police state repression of the free press and public political protest. More likely, the remaining pro-democracy obstacles fall to the tyrant and the TTP as Levitsky and Ziblatt described in 2108.
Trump: I Can Fire Any Prosecutor I Want
Saturday, May 4, 2019
In congressional testimony a few days ago, Attorney General William Barr commented that President Trump has the power to legally fire any prosecutor he believed was investigating false charges against him. Presumably, his comments were limited to federal prosecutors, but given Trump's ongoing run for tyranny, maybe that applied to all prosecutors in his mind.
Slate writes:
That Trump is truly making a run at being a tyrant cannot be much clearer. Of course, if Trump declares martial law, shuts the “enemy of the people” press down, arrests democrats in congress, and orders the US military to machine gun protestors down in the streets, then it would be about a clear as it can get.
The question is obvious: How much clearer does this need to be for Trump supporters and the republican party (the Trump Tyrant Party, not the GOP) to see what is happening before their eyes, or do they actually want tyranny? It is hard to imagine that by now hardly any Trump opponents do not see the grave danger that American democracy and the rule of law are both in. Or, does that overstate the situation?
In congressional testimony a few days ago, Attorney General William Barr commented that President Trump has the power to legally fire any prosecutor he believed was investigating false charges against him. Presumably, his comments were limited to federal prosecutors, but given Trump's ongoing run for tyranny, maybe that applied to all prosecutors in his mind.
Slate writes:
That defense was shocking not simply because it had nothing to do with the legal questions of conspiracy and obstruction before Mueller and Barr, but also because it seemed to have explicitly adopted and accepted the Trumpist worldview that holds any attempt at oversight or investigation deemed by the president to be unjustified harassment is illegitimate. This is, by the way, pretty much the same legal theory being invoked this week to reject the authority of congressional oversight and subpoenas. As Steve Vladek observed this past weekend, the defense that absolutely everything is a witch hunt and thus not legitimate is not a specific constitutional claim. It is, however, a recipe for a constitutional crisis.
Then, in response to questions from Sen. Dianne Feinstein about why it was that Trump ordered former White House counsel Don McGahn to end the Mueller probe, Barr seems to have again taken the legal position that the president’s anger and frustration over press reports that he had instructed McGahn to fire Mueller somehow made this directive permissible. Barr seemed to be saying that Trump could not have committed obstruction by asking McGahn to fire Mueller, so long as he was attempting to forestall further negative press. As Barr put it: “If the president is being falsely accused, which the evidence now suggests that the accusations against him were false [which is a lie], and he knew they were false, and he felt that this investigation was unfair, propelled by his political opponents and was hampering his ability to govern, that is not a corrupt motive for replacing an independent counsel.”
That Trump is truly making a run at being a tyrant cannot be much clearer. Of course, if Trump declares martial law, shuts the “enemy of the people” press down, arrests democrats in congress, and orders the US military to machine gun protestors down in the streets, then it would be about a clear as it can get.
The question is obvious: How much clearer does this need to be for Trump supporters and the republican party (the Trump Tyrant Party, not the GOP) to see what is happening before their eyes, or do they actually want tyranny? It is hard to imagine that by now hardly any Trump opponents do not see the grave danger that American democracy and the rule of law are both in. Or, does that overstate the situation?
Thursday, May 2, 2019
Book Review: On Tyranny
'People Would Revolt' if Trump is Impeached is Not His Opinion, it's an Instruction to commit violence
Unilateral surrender: Snyder's first lesson, do not obey in advance, makes the point that in the face of the tyrant or tyrant wannabe, many people simply let their own freedom go. Power flows from the people to the tyrant. Snyder writes: "Most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given. . . . . A citizen who adapts in this way is teaching power what it can do." Examples include a willing transfer of power by the people to Hitler in Germany in 1932 and to the communist tyrants in Czechoslovakia in 1946.
Institutional defense: Snyder argues that democratic institutions do not defend themselves, people defend them: "We tend to assume that institutions will automatically maintain themselves against even the most direct attacks. This was the very mistake that some German Jews made about Hitler and the Nazis after they had formed a government." Snyder asserts that many Americans are making this same mistake again today. He suggests people pick an institution such as a pro-democracy law, a court, a newspaper or a labor union and defend it publicly.
It is worth noting that a court or labor union would need to be defended. Courts strike many as a rock solid and unassailable institution. However, Trump and senate republicans are packing the federal courts with radical authoritarian ideologue judges. The time is coming when more temperate courts and court decisions will be attacked and the tyrant will foment both public and executive branch resistance to those courts, judges and decisions. We are seeing the beginnings of that right now.
Also consider the proposition that, unless they are co-opted and/or corrupted, labor unions are pro-democratic institutions. Powerful, persuasive arguments by other careful observers make this case. Both Nancy MacLean in her 2017 book, Democracy In Chains: The Deep History Of The Radical Right's Stealth Plan For America, and Jane Mayer in her 2016 book, Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right, make it clear that a key target of anti-democratic authoritarians is labor unions. Powerful billionaires exemplified by the radical right political movement built and still funded by the Koch brothers have a raging, visceral hate of labor unions. Labor unions allow collective action, which is pro-democratic in that they represent some collective power and wealth. That literally enrages the radical libertarian, authoritarian right. Before reading Snyder on this point, the idea of labor unions being a democratic institution seemed out of synch with reality for me at least. But on reflection, Snyder makes an excellent point. He's right.
Resist toleration of violence: Some of Snyder's lessons seem far-fetched. But on consideration, maybe they are not far fetched at all. His lesson six, be wary of paramilitaries, brings this point home: "When the men with guns who have always claimed to be against the system start wearing uniforms and marching with torches and pictures of a leader, the end is nigh. When the pro-leader paramilitary and the official police and military intermingle, the end has come. . . . . For just this reason, people and parties who wish to undermine democracy and the rule of law create and fund violent organizations that involve themselves in politics." Snyder points out that non-authoritarian governments try to hold a monopoly on violence mediated by official police, secret services and sometimes the military, but always constrained by the rule of law. Snyder defines a paramilitary broadly, and it can include an authoritarian leader's personal bodyguard. People in Germany and Austria made the grave mistake of tolerating paramilitary intimidation and violence, and many of the survivors among them came to regret it.
Snyder points to Trump as an example: "As a candidate, the president ordered a private security detail to clear opponents from rallies, but also encouraged the audience itself to remove people who expressed different opinions. . . . . . At one campaign rally [Trump] said, 'There's a remnant left over. Maybe get the remnant out. Get the remnant out." When the pro-Trump mob tried to do that, Trump was pleased, saying: "Isn't this more fun than a regular boring rally? To me, it's fun." Other recent events have made it clear that Trump is actively fomenting violence by his supporters against political opposition.
So, after announcing his candidacy for president in 2020, Joe Biden's opening attack on Trump led with "Charlottesville", referring to the fascist, white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, South Carolina, he was directly attacking a core tyrant tactic. Trump had defended the fascists by calling them 'good people'. Biden threw that directly back in Trump's face as he should have.
Snyder's book is useful to help put tyranny and Trump in better historical and current context. It makes Trump look even more threatening than viewing him without the context.
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