A patriotic message in these troubled times...

 

Click here.

We may disagree on politics, but can we really disagree on this message of restoring decency to a troubled nation?  What part did Obama get wrong??

Thanks for listening and recommending.

So what is it?

(Societal extremes)

This morning, someone on Twitter asked:

 “For all of you celebrating your stock portfolios today, a reminder that there are millions of Americans out of work and unable to afford the basics.”

In response, another person then asked:

“Is there a term for an economy where the markets hit an all time high but half of the country is desperately worried about paying rent and keeping groceries on the table?”

So, what do you call that? 

I call it “Capitalism Gone Awry.”  I read many others saying a version of that too.  Granted, much is in play, but are we fundamentally wrong?

Thanks for posting and recommending.

Senate Investigation into 2016 Russian Interference: It Happened!

Multiple sources are reporting that an investigation by the Republican-led Senate intelligence committee concluded that Russia did interfere. The AP writes:

"The Trump campaign’s interactions with Russian intelligence services during the 2016 presidential election posed a “grave” counterintelligence threat, a Senate panel concluded Tuesday as it detailed in a report how associates of the Republican candidate had regular contact with Russians and expected to benefit from the Kremlin’s help. 

The report, the fifth and final one from the Republican-led Senate intelligence committee on the Russia investigation, describes how Russia launched an aggressive, wide-ranging effort to interfere in the election on Donald Trump’s behalf. It says Trump associates were eager to exploit the Kremlin’s aid, particularly by maximizing the impact of the disclosure of Democratic emails that were hacked by Russian military intelligence officers. 

The conclusions mark the culmination of a bipartisan probe that spanned more than three years and produced what the committee called “the most comprehensive description to date of Russia’s activities and the threat they posed.” 

The findings echo to a large degree those of special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation, with the report’s unflinching characterization of furtive interactions between Trump associates and Russian operatives contradicting the Republican president’s claims that the FBI had no basis to investigate whether his campaign was conspiring with Russia.  

A group of Republicans on the panel submitted “additional views” to the report saying that it should state more explicitly that Trump’s campaign did not coordinate with Russia. But Democrats on the panel submitted their own views, arguing that the report clearly shows such cooperation."

What was mildly surprising to me about this is that the GOP senators apparently decided to go with the overwhelming evidence of interference. They seemingly did not fabricate evidence to make the president's false claims of no Russian interference look real. I can only assume that was because there are some democrats on the intelligence committee.

Another authoritarian shoe I have been waiting to drop is the GOP resorting to fabricating evidence to make the president's dismal record look better. They might try to do that with the bogus investigation of Biden in the Ukraine. They could also try it in Barr's bogus DoJ investigation into the origins of the FBI investigation into Russian interference. Or, maybe GOP evidence fabrication will happen in the crackpot conspiracies the president likes to blither about, e.g., Obamagate, the president's false claim that Obama illegally spied on him in the 2016 election.

Is the Will of the People Sufficient to Govern?

“Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.” -- H.L. Mencken

In a 2003 article, Is “Popular Rule” Possible? Polls, political psychology, and democracy, political scientist Larry M. Bartels considers whether the will of the people can ever suffice to run a government. Bartels is co-author of the 2016 book, Democracy For Realists: Why Elections Do not Produce Responsive Governments (book review here). Bartels thinks the answer is no. He writes:

“Leaders may ignore the dictates of public opinion, but they are assumed to do so only with good reason—and at their electoral peril.

My aim here is to suggest that this conventional view of democracy is fundamentally unrealistic. Whether it would be desirable to have a democracy based on public opinion is beside the point, because public opinion of the sort necessary to make it possible simply does not exist. The very idea of “popular rule” is starkly inconsistent with the understanding of political psychology provided by the past half-century of research by psychologists and political scientists. That research offers no reason to doubt that citizens have meaningful values and beliefs, but ample reason to doubt that those values and beliefs are sufficiently complete and coherent to serve as a satisfactory starting point for democratic theory. In other words, citizens have attitudes but not preferences—a distinction directly inspired by the work of psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky.

Kahneman and Tversky have called attention to “framing effects”—situations in which different ways of posing, or “framing,” a policy issue produce distinctly different public responses. Framing effects are hard to accommodate within a theory built on the assumption that citizens have definite preferences to be elicited; but they are easy to reconcile with the view that any given question may tap a variety of more or less relevant attitudes. The problem for democratic theory is that the fluidity and contingency of attitudes make it impossible to discern meaningful public preferences on issues of public policy, because seemingly arbitrary variations in choice format or context may produce contradictory expressions of popular will.”

An example of a framing effect making a major difference in public opinion relates to the first Gulf War in 1991-1992. When people were polled, a big majority said there were unwilling to “go to war”, but a solid majority said it was acceptable to “engage in combat.” That war was then posited to the American people as an acceptable combat engagement, not an unacceptable war.


A democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch. -- John Adams and Alexander Hamilton


Bartels cite another example of how framing changes opinions. When a first group in a study was asked, “Do you think the United States should let Communist newspaper reporters from other countries come in here and send back to their papers the news as they see it?”, 36% said yes. A second group was asked the same question but only after they were first asked whether “a Communist country like Russia should let American newspaper reporters come in and send back to America the news as they see it.” In this group, 73% agreed that Russian reporters should be allowed in the US to report as they saw fit. Posing the first question to the second group led those people to apply reciprocity despite strong anti-communist attitudes.

In one large survey at times when welfare was viewed negatively by many Americans, about 20-25% percent said that too little was being spent on “welfare”, but 63-65% said that too little was being spent on “assistance to the poor.” Even for issues that seem simple and easy to be consistent about, e.g., abortion, framing effects are easy to elicit. The human mind evolved to be quite sensitive  to how information if framed. Intelligent propagandists know this very well and exploit it ruthlessly to their advantage.

That is just one of several major mental traits that make it hard to know what people want. How are political leaders to decide what the will of the people is?

Bartels is not optimistic that this fundamental aspect of democracy can be adequately addressed. He writes:

“Perhaps these apparent contradictions in public opinion would disappear if political discourse were somehow elevated—but I doubt it. Political elites have had about as much chance of providing a clarifying debate on abortion as they have on any issue before the American public .... 

More generally, the hopeful assertions of democratic theorists regarding the positive effects of deliberation are largely unsupported by systematic empirical evidence. Indeed, most observers of political deliberation have painted a much less rosy portrait than philosophers of deliberative democracy. New England town meetings apparently involve a good deal of false unanimity, with most important decisions settled in advance through informal networks reflecting preexisting inequalities in social status and political power. The atmosphere of public-spiritedness and mutual respect central to theorists’ accounts of democratic deliberation may be difficult or impossible to achieve in societies burdened by sexism, racism, and fundamental cultural schisms.  

The most obvious alternative to theoretical progress along these lines is a much-diluted version of democratic theory in which the ideal of “popular rule” is replaced by what William Riker once characterized as “an intermittent, sometimes random, even perverse, popular veto” on the machinations of political elites. If that sort of democracy is the best we can hope for, we had better reconcile ourselves to the fact. On the other hand, if we insist on believing that democracy can provide some attractive and consistent normative basis for evaluating policy outcomes, we had better figure out more clearly what we are talking about.”

Is it time for the rise of the popular veto?

“Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it whether it exists or not, diagnosing it incorrectly, and applying the wrong remedies.” -- Ernst Benn