In case of emergency, break glass… (or not)

It is no secret that we, here on DisPol, are not all that fond of the rank and file Republicans.  “We see” mentally “dead people” out there, raising political hell, and we are concerned.  We feel totally justified in our concern and can present case after case of what we (and the media) see as the systematic crumbling of American democracy.  Like the religious eat, drink and sleep their religions, we here do the same with our politics.  Let’s face it, we’re just as fanatical.  We’re here virtually every day, investigating and showcasing what we see as political trouble/shenanigans.  BUT…

Out there in the real world, I have to wonder if the rest of the people (you know, “the real people” as Jack Nicholson called them in Cuckoo’s Nest) are all that taken in by what we here see as the blatant and nefarious shenanigans of the Republican Party.  Are we really in as dire shape, politically, as we think we are?

Questions: What do you think?  Do we overreact around here?  Or, is democracy indeed on the verge of falling and Everyman’s hair should be on fire?  Make your for/against case.

Thanks for posting and recommending.

Is reality politically biased?

A quick reflex answer to the question is no, reality is not politically biased. It just is what it is without regard for human concerns or biases. But is that a complete or even correct answer right now in the context of American politics and human biology and behavior? It's arguably not. In politics, humans often perceive their realities according to the dictates of various factors such as personal identity, tribe loyalty, personal biases, self-interests, life experiences, cognitive ability, education, etc.

In that context, there is a significant difference between the perceived realities of the modern FRP (fascist Republican Party and its supporters) and non-FRP people and groups who are not so radical. Clearly, most of the FRP and the most of the rest of Americans see and believe in quite different realities. Which perceived reality is closer to real reality? Based on my politics and perception of reality, the FRP vision is significantly more distorted than most of the non-FRP perceptions. But is that true or just biased and/or flawed reasoning?

A few years ago, the question came up at Quora and some interesting thoughts were posted there:

There are basically two schools of Conservative thought throughout history. There are the Traditionalists, who work to preserve the status quo, preserving the ways of life, the social institutions of the day, and the stability and continuity that brings to a culture and a civilization. And then there are the Reactionaries, who actively fight against not only change but fight against the basic premises of the present day, and seek to return to some previous "golden age".

So immediately, we have a problem with Reactionaries: they are most often trying to return to a fictionalized, cleaned up version of that past era they view today as a golden age. That's one break with reality already.

Liberalism tends to value liberty and equality, so it was very much at odds with the status quo, when it came into its own as a movement in the 1700's Age of Reason. Liberals were people who opposed Monarchy and Oligarchy, who opposed state religion, etc. This philosophy and eventually politics was embraced by philosophers, such as John Locke, and generated all sorts of frightening new ideas that challenged the status quo: natural rights of mankind, a government based on a social contract with its people, the rule of law applies to leaders and citizens alike, a demand for representative democracy, tolerance of others and other ideas, etc. So basically Liberalism on its modern creation was set as a force to oppose the status quo of the day. In it's day, the American Revolution and the Constitution were radically liberal things ... godless representative democracy, rule by the consent of the people, not the divine right of kings, that was crazy stuff.

Following the traditions of Conservatism and Liberalism in the USA, it's been the Conservatives all along opposing change. In the slavery debate, the conservatives of the day (the Democrats) supported slavery, the way things were already. The Liberals (the Republicans) felt that slavery was wrong (1865) and that slaves should have the rights of citizens to vote (1870). Sure, it wasn't until 1920 that women won the same right... again, in it's day, a very liberal cause. Liberalism was a big reason for the USA's ascendancy in the world. When the US began, founded on some of the most liberal thinking to come out of the Age of Reason, we were established here without king, without aristocracy, and of course, without a status quo.  

If you follow American politics, you have absolutely heard that many, perhaps most, conservative leaders are not just conservatives, they're reactionaries. Sure, they're in opposition to social change ... I mean, look at the right wing hissy fit that erupted over the ACA (aka, Obamacare), the idea that healthcare should be affordably available to all US citizens (not claiming it's a perfect law, it's not, but it has pushed us just a little more in the direction of Locke's Egalitarianism). Look at the claim that LGBT folks should have the same rights to marry or adopt as anyone else. That's plain old conservatism.  

But you've heard all the "want my country back", "return to a Constitutional rule of Law", etc. That's all magical reactionary thinking, and it's rampant in today's Republican Party. They want to move us back to a 1955 that never happened -- of course, ignoring the 94% top tax bracket and the misogyny that allowed every wife to remain barefoot, pregnant, and chained to the stove. In order to actually believe these philosophies, you have ignore the realities of history.

That is one argument in favor of the FRP being reactionary and less tethered to reality. And, if one believes the kinds of things I have posted here about Christian nationalism (CN) (book review, chapter 6 review, chapter 7 review, etc.) and its agenda and influence on the FRP, it seems reasonable to categorize the FRP as "reactionary." The central lie that CN fights hard to establish as a fake reality is that the US was established as a Christian nation. That is historically false, but the lie is central to reactionary CN ideology and tribalism or social cohesion. And, as one expert on the CN political movement (Katherine Stewart) put it, to get people to believe a big lie, there needs to be lots of little lies to go along with the big lie narrative.

Arguably, the same thing is happening right now regarding the ex-president's and FRP's big lie about a stolen 2020 election. A hell of a lot of little lies litter the FRP political landscape in support of the overall whopper. The fascist media put great emphasis on spreading and reinforcing the stolen election lie.[1]

So, the question remains, is there in modern American politics a liberal bias in facts, true truths and sound reasoning, or is that just another illusion emanating from a self-deluded person?

Footnote: 

1. New York Times columnist Paul Krugman wrote this opinion in December of 2017:

There are two central facts about 21st-century U.S. politics. First, we suffer from asymmetric polarization: the Republican Party has become an extremist institution with little respect for traditional norms of any kind. Second, mainstream media – still the source of most political information for the great majority of Americans – haven’t been able to come to grips with this reality. Even in the age of Trump, they try desperately to be “balanced”, which in practice means bending over backwards to say undeserved nice things about Republicans and take undeserved swipes at Democrats.

This dynamic played a crucial role in last year’s election; it’s one of the reasons major news organizations devoted more time to Hillary Clinton’s emails than to all policy issues combined. But it has been going on for years. It’s the whole story of Paul Ryan’s career: journalists trying to be centrists desperately wanted to show their neutrality by praising a Serious, Honest, Conservative, and promoted Ryan into that role even though it was obvious from the beginning that he was a con man.

And it’s still playing out, as we can see from what looks like a looming debacle in Facebook’s efforts to institute fact-checking.

Facebook wanted responsible fact-checking organizations to partner with, and several such organizations exist. But all of these organizations are constantly attacked by the right as having a left-wing bias – so it added The Weekly Standard, even though it clearly failed to meet internationally accepted standards for that role.  

So what’s the basis for claims that, say, PolitiFact is biased? Hey, The Weekly Standard itself has explained the criteria:

Surveys done by the University of Minnesota and George Mason University have shown that the supposedly impartial “fact checking” news organization rates Republican claims as false three times as often as Democratic claims and twice as much, respectively.

Notice the implicit assumption here – namely, that impartial fact-checking would find an equal number of false claims from each party. But what if – bear with me a minute – Republicans actually make more false claims than Democrats? (emphasis added)  

Take a not at all arbitrary example: tax policy. The GOP is deeply committed to the proposition that tax cuts pay for themselves, a view that has no support whatsoever from professional economists. Can you find any comparable insistence on a view experts consider false on the Democratic side?

Similarly, the GOP is deeply committed to climate change denial, despite the overwhelming consensus of scientists that anthropogenic climate change is real and dangerous. Again, where’s the Democratic counterpart?

 

But the facade is so familiar and comfortable . . . .

Blog note

Notices of comments are coming in delayed. I am just now getting some comments that people made three days ago. I do not know why there is a slow down. This lag has been slowly increasing over the last few weeks. I hope it goes away in due course.

Regarding conflicts of interest in government: The Clintons & their legacy

Conflicts of interest have long been a plague in government, probably forever. In the previous presidency, the plague morphed into an aggressive cancer. Rules of ethics were simply blown off. They were shown to be toothless norms. The ex-president kept his businesses operating and money flowing in, including from foreign governments. That constitutes either an actual conflict of interest or a perception of a conflict. Either way, it is often or usually impossible for the public to know with confidence what government and politician actions associated with money are corrupt and what are honest.

In view of recent history, a question that comes to mind centers on what role, if any, did the Clintons play in normalizing acceptance of real or apparent conflicts in government? In hindsight, they may have been significantly more important than one might have thought before the 2016 elections. Some reporting from the past helps put this in context. In 2015, MotherJones wrote in an article entitled Hillary Clinton Oversaw US Arms Deals to Clinton Foundation Donors: 

In 2011, the State Department cleared an enormous arms deal: Led by Boeing, a consortium of American defense contractors would deliver $29 billion worth of advanced fighter jets to Saudi Arabia, despite concerns over the kingdom’s troublesome human rights record. In the years before Hillary Clinton became secretary of state, Saudi Arabia had contributed $10 million to the Clinton Foundation, and just two months before the jet deal was finalized, Boeing donated $900,000 to the Clinton Foundation, according to an International Business Times investigation released Tuesday.

The Saudi transaction is just one example of nations and companies that had donated to the Clinton Foundation seeing an increase in arms deals while Hillary Clinton oversaw the State Department. IBT found that between October 2010 and September 2012, State approved $165 billion in commercial arms sales to 20 nations that had donated to the foundation, plus another $151 billion worth of Pentagon-brokered arms deals to 16 of those countries—a 143 percent increase over the same time frame under the Bush Administration. The sales boosted the military power of authoritarian regimes such as Qatar, Algeria, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, and Oman, which, like Saudi Arabia, had been criticized by the department for human rights abuses.

An article in The Hill from 2015 reported:

The State Department under Hillary Clinton authorized arms sales to countries that had donated millions of dollars to the Clinton Foundation, according to a new report.

State approved $165 billion worth of weapons sales to 20 foreign governments during Clinton's tenure, the International Business Times reports. Among the countries involved in the sales were Algeria, Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.

The Clinton Foundation received between $54 million and $141 million in donations from the foreign governments and defense contractors involved in those sales, the report says.

Certain defense contractors also paid her husband, former President Bill Clinton, for speaking engagements during that time.

While the report does not allege a direct connection between the arms sales and the donations, the activities of the Clinton Foundation have become a growing headache for Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign.

A new book by Peter Schweizer, Clinton Cash, questions whether foreign governments sought to curry influence with the Clintons by making donations to the foundation.

The Clinton campaign has dismissed the book as a hit job by a conservative author, arguing it is filled with "sloppy research and attacks pulled out of thin air. 

A 2015 article by Vox, 4 experts make the case that the Clinton Foundation’s fundraising was troubling, also focused on this issue:

During and before the four years Hillary Clinton was secretary of state, the Clinton Foundation run by her husband took tens of millions of dollars from foreign governments and corporations.

Many of these donors had a lot riding on Clinton’s decisions. Saudi Arabia gave the foundation up to $25 million, and Clinton signed off on a controversial $29 billion sale of fighter jets to the country. Oil companies gave the foundation around $3 million, and Clinton approved a lucrative gas pipeline in the Canadian tar sands they’d long sought.

We've known the basics of this story for months now. But another media feeding frenzy over the foundation kicked off again on Monday, when the State Department was forced to release emails showing that the foundation’s leadership tried to land its top donors meetings with the secretary of state.  

How do we know foundation donors really did get better access to Clinton’s State Department? Well, it’s impossible to prove — no Clinton staffer was stupid enough to write, "Thanks for giving $10 million to Bill! Now we can get coffee!"

There’s no evidence that donors to the Clinton Foundation did anything like buy off Clinton, and there’s no definitive proof that they got access to the State Department because of their donations. But the circumstantial evidence is pretty strong.   

But the money in politics experts argued that these aren't the only standards of wrongdoing by which we can or should judge Clinton. To them, the fact that the Clintons allowed for an appearance of a conflict of interest — that the suspicion could be reasonably raised — is itself a major shortcoming worth criticizing.

"What's so troubling is that these revelations suggest that if you want to see the secretary of state, it helps to make a large donation — that’s the perception this gives," says Larry Noble, general counsel for the Campaign Legal Center.  

[Quoting Noble:] "Politicians like to say things like, "I would have given the lobbyist for Exxon a meeting regardless of their donation," and that might be true. But the problem is that it’s impossible to know if the meeting would have happened anyway, if the meeting was given out of a favor, or what. 

So they don’t get the benefit of the doubt. It’s their job to make sure they avoid the appearance of a conflict in interest in the first place — because if a politician has made a decision that affects a major donor [whose money they want], then it becomes basically impossible to sort out why they did it. It calls into question the decision even if it’s totally legitimate and the best one they could make. 

That’s why the very idea that access to government depends on how wealthy you are — and how much you give — is so dangerous. What the Clintons did here helps create the impression that if you’re a small-business person who wants to talk to the secretary of state, then you’re out of luck. But if you donate a few million dollars to her husband’s charity, you can talk to her." 

In other words: Since it’s so difficult for anyone to ever prove a quid pro quo, it’s incumbent on politicians to recuse themselves so it can’t even look like they’re swapping favors for private donations — or to not take those donations in the first place. 

By that standard, Hillary Clinton clearly failed.

In hindsight

Consider the ex-president’s moral compass over his adult life. What was his level of concern about conflicts of interest, real or not? He could not have cared less about conflicts. From the moment he was sworn into office, he was awash in obvious major conflicts. What was the effect, if any, of the Clinton’s conflicts of interest, real or not? One can reasonably argue that in the ex-president’s mind, what the Clintons did constituted precedent and cover for him ignoring the issue. 

Would it have made any difference if what the Clintons did was irrelevant and the ex-president would have acted no differently? That is possible, probably likely, but it ignores the fact that corruption stemming from her real or perceived conflicts of interest was used to attack Clinton in the 2016 election. That probably cost her some votes. It was a legitimate attack on Clinton’s moral character[1] that drove some people away from supporting her.

Question: Is it reasonable to believe that the Clintons moral failings, including Bill’s sleazy antics while in office and money flowing to their charitable Foundation, played some non-trivial role in the rise and/or behavior of the ex-president?

Footnote: 

1. Yes, the ex-president had no moral character in 2015-2016 and thereafter. All he ever had as an adult was an immoral character. But in authoritarian radical right tribal politics that morphed into fascist cult politics on and after the 1/6 coup attempt, moral or immoral character made and still makes no difference to the tribe, then cult. Morals are beside the point when it comes to a sacred tribe or cult leader and their sacred cause.