Regarding Republican Motivated Reasoning: A Moral Question

Did Jane get it right? 

Or is she talking more about hypocrisy than morality, or about both ~equally?

When a citizen gives his suffrage to a man of known immorality he abuses his trust; he sacrifices not only his own interest, but that of his neighbor; he betrays the interest of his country. -- Noah Webster

Motivated reasoning: Emotionally-biased reasoning that produces desired justifications or decisions, but not necessarily ones that accurately reflect the evidence or sound reasoning; motivated reasoning is conscious and leads to reduced cognitive dissonance, which is discomforting for most people; it reflects the tendency to find facts or arguments in favor of conclusions we want to believe; in politics this often happens even when the facts or arguments are false or flawed, i.e., when truths are inconvenient

Context

Multiple sources are reporting that ongoing efforts to overturn the 2020 election is nonsense. The reporting is getting more pointed and critical. For example, the New york Times writes:

“The telephone call would have been laugh-out-loud ridiculous if it had not been so serious. When Tina Barton picked up, she found someone from President Trump’s campaign asking her to sign a letter raising doubts about the results of the election.

The election that Ms. Barton as the Republican clerk of the small Michigan city of Rochester Hills had helped oversee. The election that she knew to be fair and accurate because she had helped make it so. The election that she had publicly defended amid threats that made her upgrade her home security system.

“Do you know who you’re talking to right now?” she asked the campaign official.

Evidently not.

If the president hoped Republicans across the country would fall in line behind his false and farcical claims that the election was somehow rigged on a mammoth scale by a nefarious multinational conspiracy, he was in for a surprise. Republicans in Washington may have indulged Mr. Trump’s fantastical assertions, but at the state and local level, Republicans played a critical role in resisting the mounting pressure from their own party to overturn the vote after Mr. Trump fell behind on Nov. 3.”

CNN interviewed Senator Roy Blunt (R-MO) this morning about the president’s and GOP ongoing attacks on the election. In response, Blunt offered the standard radical right motivated reasoning to deflect and weasel out of giving direct answers. The interviewer (Dana Bash) tried hard to pin him down, but he was unpinnable and weaseled out. What little substance Blunt did offer was a combination of deflection and motivated reasoning. One source commented on the interview: 

“‘The President wants to see this process play out,’ Mr Blunt said. ‘The president-elect technically has to be elected president by the electors. That happens in the middle of December,’ the senator said, referring to the electoral college that is chosen to represent each state based on the results of its popular vote.”

Other major republican politicians have repeatedly defended the numerous verbal and court case attacks on the 2020 election in the name of massive voter fraud. That is a lie the republicans and president falsely claim to undermine the election and generate unwarranted but intense distrust amone rank and file republicans in both the election result and Biden’s legitimacy.

The moral question

The president and republican leadership have the right to continue to (i) lie about the election being seriously fraudulent or flawed, and (ii) undermine its and thus Biden’s legitimacy. Among other bad things, these tactics damage democracy, polarizes the republican rank and file and generates unwarranted distrust in elections and fellow citizens. Doing this is legal. But is it moral?

For people who believe that the ends justify means, including deceitful, divisive means like this, what the GOP leadership and president are doing is justified and thus morally acceptable. But that reasoning appears to be persuasive with only about 35-40% of adult Americans. Republicans do this dirty work in the name of party, tribe or some other ideal or political goal and that is good enough. 

For people who believe it is not justified to use deceit or to foment social division to create false beliefs, these tactics can reasonably be seen as immoral. 

Is there a different or better way to analyze this moral question? For example, does it matter that decades of relentless radical right propaganda smearing liberalism, democrats and the democratic party has created a false image of evil and corruption among some or most republicans and significant numbers of independents? Or is the rhetoric from the right basically accurate and thus deceit and social polarization, distrust and discord are acceptable collateral damage in politics?  Or, is morality not even a relevant concern, e.g., because morals are personal and subjective?

HOW TO SPELL S.U.C.K.E.R !!

 

Trump supporter who gave $2.5m to fight election fraud wants money back

Businessman Fredric Eshelman sues pro-Trump ‘election ethics’ group citing ‘disappointing results’ of effort to expose cheating

A Donald Trump supporter who donated $2.5m to help expose and prosecute claims of fraud in the presidential election wants his money back after what he says are “disappointing results”.

Fredric Eshelman, a businessman from North Carolina, said he gave the money to True the Vote, a pro-Trump “election ethics” group in Texas that promised to file lawsuits in seven swing states as part of its push to “investigate, litigate, and expose suspected illegal balloting and fraud in the 2020 general election”.

But according to a lawsuit Eshelman filed this week in Houston, first reported by Bloomberg, True the Vote dropped its legal actions and discontinued its Validate the Vote 2020 campaign, then refused to return his calls when he demanded an explanation.

Trump 'voter fraud hotline' inundated by prank calls

Read more

The founder of Eshelman Ventures llc, a venture capital company, said he asked “regularly and repeatedly” for updates, the lawsuit asserts, but that his “requests were consistently met with vague responses, platitudes, and empty promises”.

The lack of success of True the Vote’s efforts to challenge the outcome appears to mirror that of the president himself, whose team has lost 38 court actions since the 3 November election, most recently in Pennsylvania where a federal appeals court panel blasted Trump’s legal team for filing a case with no merit.

True the Vote did not immediately return an email from the Guardian seeking comment. True the Vote did not respond to Bloomberg’s request for comment, but posted a statement on its website, attributed to the group’s founder and president, Catherine Engelbrecht, seeking to blame outside forces for the failure of its efforts.

“While we stand by the voters’ testimony that was brought forth, barriers to advancing our arguments, coupled with constraints on time, made it necessary for us to pursue a different path,” the group said, announcing that it had withdrawn legal filings in Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. All four states were won by Joe Biden, the Democratic president-elect.

“Our mission is much bigger than just one election. It is about repairing the system for all future elections,” it continued.

Like the Trump campaign’s own legal filings, which have been based on scant evidence, however, the True the Vote statement did not detail any of the proof it claimed it had to support the allegations of election fraud.

Eshelman, the former chief executive of a pharmaceutical company, claims in his lawsuit that the non-profit offered to refund him $1m if he would drop his plan to sue the group. He is seeking the return of the full $2.5m that he says he wired on Engelbrecht’s instructions in chunks of $2m and $500,000 on 5 and 13 November.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/nov/28/trump-donor-election-fraud-sues-money-back

How to "fix" politics...

In response to Germaine’s OP, I have been brainstorming (with myself) about what it would take to fix our toxic U.S. politics.  I’m thinking, the only way to fix the whole is to identify and fix the constituent parts.  We can’t expect the machine to run smoothly on flawed parts.  So what are the (faulty) parts?  I can think of some.

I just knocked out this list below and, granted, it’s far from polished.  But what do you think?  What is wrong with my (pie-in-the-sky?) suggestions, when it comes to the problems associated with politics, here in the U.S.?  

Give your own solutions to the cited problems.  Feel free to add to, or correct, my ad hoc list.  Thanks!

And thanks for recommending.

Craziest gerrymandering
 

The President's Toxic Legacy

Is the president an elitist?

Troye described one COVID-19 task-force meeting in which she said the president — a known germophobe — remarked that the pandemic might be a "good thing" because it prevented him from having to shake hands with "disgusting people." -- Business Insider, Sept. 17, 2020

Building the authoritarian radical GOP deep state

A Washington Post article describes an effort the president is making to enable mass firings of federal employees he deems to have been disloyal. If he succeeds, they will be fired for being ‘underperformers’ or agents of the deep state. Fortunately, Biden can undo most of the damage by executive action because the damage is being done be executive action. Also, since the employee protections were put in place by congress, a lawsuit claims that the apparently intended mass firings are illegal. WaPo writes:

“The outgoing Trump administration is racing to enact the biggest change to the federal civil service in generations, reclassifying career employees at key agencies to strip their job protections and leave them open to being fired before Joe Biden takes office.

The move to pull off an executive order the president issued less than two weeks before Election Day — affecting tens of thousands of people in policy roles — is accelerating at the agency closest to the White House, the Office of Management and Budget.

By fast-tracking a process that gave agencies until Jan. 19 to identify affected jobs, the administration appears to be signaling its intent to leave as big an imprint as possible on a workforce it has long mistrusted. Democrats on Capitol Hill are trying to block the effort.

The executive order has a flip side, too. The administration could use it to assign current political appointees to the new personnel category, giving them a more permanent status than they currently have — although Biden could easily fire them.”

In other words, a new GOP precedent is the building of a true deep state by demanding federal employees be loyal to the president before being loyal to the constitution, the law, the public interest or truth. At present, those values are above loyalty to the president. What we had is, more or less, the opposite of a deep state. What the president wants is the epitome of a deep state. And, by its acquiescence the GOP leadership accepts this apparent new normal. It is now fair to call the GOP leadership the head of a deep state, radical right Christian nationalist ideology. Most rank and file republicans would not see it that way, but that's what it is.

Before the 2016 election, a few observers predicted that such back and forth changes seemed to be inevitable when a president from the other party came to power after an election. The first president would be reversed as much as possible by a new president in the other party. The ping-pong game of doing and undoing would go on for as long as the two-party system remains hyper-partisan, broken and paralyzed like it is now.

Reinforcing the radical right mirage and hypocrisy of concern for the little guy 

Political theorist Hannah Arendt was familiar with the demagogue dictator propaganda tactic of lying so outrageously and often that people started to believe the lies. The main ‘rationale’ for the phenomenon is purely human: No one could possibly make up such incredible whoppers, so they had to be true. 

The GOP is now fully engaging with this toxic tactic. Demagogues, dictators and totalitarians of the past have used it with great but lethal success. Packaged with the toxicity is blatant hypocrisy.  The WaPo writes on the latest whooper:

“President-elect Joe Biden, a state-college graduate who was once the poorest man in the U.S. Senate, is facing accusations of elitism from Republicans after defeating a billionaire incumbent with an Ivy League degree — a sign of how the politics of populism have been upended and redefined by President Trump.

In recent days, Republican lawmakers have sought to describe Biden’s early Cabinet selections as well-heeled and well-pedigreed but out of touch with the kinds of problems facing everyday Americans.

After Biden won the presidency in part by claiming a larger share of college-educated suburban voters, some of his GOP foes see his early moves as an opportunity to brand him as an elitist president catering to the nation’s coastal professionals at the expense of its heartland laborers. The burgeoning dynamic underscores how the battle over populism is likely to animate the nation’s politics even after Trump leaves the White House and is replaced by a man who has called himself ‘Middle Class Joe.’

While Trump’s populism often manifested in style rather than substance, he was able to appeal to a unique coalition of voters that politicians from both parties are now aiming to capture in a post-Trump era, said Amy Walter, national editor of the nonpartisan Cook Political Report.

‘It’s this us-versus-them mentality — a belief system that there’s a real America, and we’re the only party fighting for it,’ Walter said. ‘I think that’s where Trump was the most successful, and I don’t know how well anyone else is going to be able to do that.’

‘Biden’s cabinet picks went to Ivy League schools, have strong resumes, attend all the right conferences & will be polite & orderly caretakers of America’s decline,’ Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) wrote on Twitter. ‘I support American greatness. And I have no interest in returning to the ‘normal’ that left us dependent on China.’”

Elitist president recently playing golf as he quite often does

(since inauguration, at least 145 golf outings, most recently Nov. 26, 2020; 

total taxpayer cost to date: ~$142 million)

Apparently, Rubio forgot that the GOP was fully on board with ‘normal’ policies that left us dependent on China.’ He helped get us here.  Rubio himself wanted more trade with China and he supported the TTP multilateral trade agreement before he was against them. Not surprisingly, he is a lying hypocrite about this, just like most of the rest of the GOP leadership.

This hypocritical elitism criticism is purely hyper-partisan GOP dark free speech intended to deceive and further polarize the American people. The GOP never complained about the millionaires, billionaires, lobbyists and ethically challenged and conflicted business executive elites he larded his incompetent, corrupt administration with and/or took his orders from. 

Conclusion

Both matters discussed here point to the same thing. Hyper-partisanship, polarization and partisan distrust and intolerance are not going to go away. Neither is the contempt for truth and sound reasoning the authoritarian radical right GOP has to rely on to keep from being swept away by natural demographic and social change. In its deep immorality, the radical right will continue to poison American society and the minds of tens of millions of Americans. This does not bode well for the health of democracy, the rule of law, truth or social healing. What, if anything, can snap the GOP leadership out of the toxic authoritarian hold that the president and ruthless radical right ideology has trapped it in?

2020 Was Too Unprecedented for Just One Word of the Year

 

We talked about the environment, social justice, and mostly the pandemic.

If someone asked you for one word to describe 2020, chances are you might come up with something profane. But even if your vocabulary was a little less colorful, you might have difficulty limiting your selection to just one word.

That’s the same problem the publishers of the Oxford English Dictionary had when they were debating on their annual Word of the Year. Last year, they settled on "climate emergency," and in 2018, their pick was "toxic."

But they said, “Given the phenomenal breadth of language change and development during 2020, Oxford Languages concluded that this is a year which cannot be neatly accommodated in one single word.”

So instead they analyzed their continually updated database of about 11 billion words to highlight the “words of an unprecedented year.”

Of course, the majority of them revolve around the pandemic. In fact, the use of the word “pandemic” itself increased by more than 57,000% over last year.1

The word “coronavirus” dates back to the 1960s, but not many people outside of the medical and scientific fields dropped it in casual conversation until early this year. By March, it was one of the most frequently used nouns in the English language.

“COVID-19” wasn’t even a word until Feb. 11 when the World Health Organization named the mysterious new disease. By May, people were using it more often than coronavirus, Oxford notes.

In March and April, new phrases and words became common parts of our conversations. We had “social distancing” and “lockdown,” “stay at home,” “self-isolating” and “self-quarantine.” Throughout the year, so many pandemic-related terms have continued to surface from PPE (personal protective equipment) to face coverings. And we all learned what it meant to try to “flatten the curve” and many of us were concerned about “superspreader” events.

But because this has been a year of unending news, we’ve talked about so much more than the virus.

How We Talked About the Environment

In January, one of the top keywords was “bushfire” because of the Australian fires that devastated the country at the end of 2019 and through the early part of this year. Other climate-related events include the catastrophic wildfires in California, a record-breaking Atlantic hurricane season, and historic Arctic sea ice loss.

“And yet, with a few exceptions, climate change has not received nearly the amount of media attention as it has in previous years, as Covid-19 and other issues have dominated the news,” according to Oxford.

“Last year, the Oxford Languages Word of the Year was ‘climate emergency,’ with a shortlist composed entirely of words relating to climate and environmental issues. In March this year, the frequency of climate, global warming, and related terms plummeted in our corpus.”

By March, the frequency of the word “climate” plunged by nearly 50% from where it was at the start of the year.1

There is good news for the environment. “Climate” and related terms are becoming more popular again, as is “net zero.” The change in attention is partly due to the pledge by China’s President Xi Jinping in September that the country will be carbon neutral by 2060.2

Social Movements and Politics

The Oxford report highlighted phrases related to social movements and social justice. This year we discussed “Black Lives Matter” and “BLM.” We used “BIPOC” as an abbreviation of black, indigenous, and other people of color. There was talk of “wokeness” and “systemic racism” while the use of “cancel culture” also soared.

And of course, there were politics. We talked a lot about “impeachment” in January, “acquittal” in February, and “mail-in” voting in August.

Words at Home

Because so many people started work at home and staying at home more this year, the language reflected that. They’re not new at all, but “remote” and “remotely” saw a huge surge in use since March. Along with it, the word “unmute” saw a 500% rise. 1(What’s the use of being on Zoom if no one can hear you?)

But not only were we talking about Zoom, we now know what “Zoombombing” is when people infiltrate Zoom calls for disruptive purposes.

“The English language, like all of us, has had to adapt rapidly and repeatedly this year,” the Oxford lexicographers write, when sharing their vast list.

"I’ve never witnessed a year in language like the one we’ve just had," said Oxford Languages President Casper Grathwohl in a statement. "It’s both unprecedented and a little ironic—in a year that left us speechless, 2020 has been filled with new words unlike any other."

And we still have more than a month to go.

https://www.treehugger.com/2020-too-unprecedented-one-word-year-5088823

WAIT A BLOODY MINUTE!

Definitely 2020 revealed to the world that the USA definitely has way too many SNOWFLAKES!