David J. Halperin on why UFOs tell us more about life on Earth than outer space

(RNS) — When David J. Halperin was 13 years old and struggling with the very earthly reality that his mother was dying of heart failure, he became obsessed with the out-of-this-world phenomenon of UFOs. 

Now 72, and a retired professor of religious studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Halperin never quite left behind a fascination with things in the heavens; he even wrote his Ph.D. dissertation on the biblical prophet Ezekiel’s vision of a chariot blazing across the sky.

But in his latest book Halperin has returned formally to the role of UFOlogist. “Intimate Alien: The Hidden Story of the UFO” was published last month by Stanford University Press.

Halperin long ago disavowed his teenage belief that UFOs actually exist. He now thinks of them as myths, but not in the sense that they are false or fake news. On the contrary, Halperin thinks they may contain deep and profound truths.

“Intimate Alien: The Hidden Story of the UFO” by David J. Halperin. Courtesy image

Drawing on psychology, anthropology and history, the book examines why so many people have these experiences and what that might say about people as individuals, and about our culture and our species. He finds parallels between those who have claimed to experience UFOs and other common psychological phenomena.

He tells the story of Barney and Betty Hill, a mixed-race couple that was driving home one night in 1961 when, they believed, they were briefly abducted by aliens who came out of a pancake-like craft in the sky. Halperin examines the transcripts of the Hills under hypnosis, concluding that they were enacting the experience of the entrapment and enslavement of 18th-century African Americans.

“Jointly they’d shaped a modern myth that, like all true myths, was also primordial and timeless,” he writes. “They planted it, seedlike, in the collective psyche of their nation.”

Halperin, who also blogs on the subject, spoke to RNS about his book and the similarities between UFOs and religious phenomena. The interview was edited for length and clarity.

UFOs were a coping mechanism when you were a teen and your mother was dying. Why return to it now?

Because in some way or another, the problems, the issues that were raised by UFOs, guided me in my research for decades afterwards. This is my life’s story that I keep wrestling with.

Is the landscape of UFOs different today than when you were growing up? Is interest in UFOs as high today?

It seems to have changed since the 2016 elections. UFOs are now respectable in a way they never were when I was a kid. In 2017 The New York Times published a pair of articles, one on the Pentagon’s secret UFO program and the other on videos of odd objects that Navy pilots had taken back in 2004. The stories were interesting, but to me what was earth-shattering is that this was in The New York Times. One of the three names on the byline was Leslie Kean, the author of a bestselling UFO book from 2010. When I was a kid, the Times would not talk about UFOs except to look down its nose in contempt. Now it's flipped around.

My sense is that there’s a political subtext. There was a sympathetic article in New York Magazine in 2018 in which some wit wrote ‘Every generation gets the abduction fantasy it deserves. Ours is ET vs. Trump.’ I think that’s what’s going on here. UFOs are being embraced by the liberal media, those opposed to Trump. They are suddenly taken seriously by people who would not have given them the time of day.

When did you begin to doubt UFOs and instead to see them as myth?

Author David J. Halperin. Courtesy photo

I didn’t so much stop believing in UFOs, as I gave up the idea that there was a point in researching them. There’s no adequate method to study them, and, I thought, we’ll know it when they get in touch with us, and in the meantime, let’s do something more useful with our lives. Only gradually did my belief fade.

Then in 1970 I met Jacques Vallee (the UFOlogist and astronomer who served as the model for the French scientist in Steven Spielberg's film "Close Encounters of the Third Kind"). He recognized that UFO sightings had a folklorish quality and yet they seemed to be real. They reflected the technology of their time.

This led me to reread (Carl) Jung’s 1958 book "Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Skies," which I had never understood. I realized that when Jung called UFOs a myth, he wasn't putting them down. He was stressing their importance. Now it started to make sense to me. Then I started doing research on Ezekiel's chariot, which is kind of like a UFO, for my  Ph.D.dissertation.

Why does sex turn up so much in alien abductions?

When I was a teen UFOlogist, we didn’t talk about that sort of thing. In the 1990s, when UFO abductions reached their zenith as a cultural phenomenon, the stories were shot through with sex. The UFOlogists explained that the space beings were doing research on our reproductive organs or that they were in the process of creating a mixed alien-human hybrid race that would rule the Earth.

I don’t find that even remotely plausible. I prefer to think that what’s reflected here is real experiences or fantasies that originally took place on a purely human plane.

Is alien abduction still a big deal for UFO enthusiasts?

UFO mythology is very complex. Our conventional image that someone looks up in the sky and there’s a silvery disk zooming overhead is just a small part of it. The belief in abductions has its germ in the early 1960s but then blossoms in the 1990s. It then fades as an important part of the mythology, while other parts that need not involve UFO sightings in the conventional sense, take its place, like "Men in Black," which plays out entirely on Earth.

There’s much more interest now in the alleged coverup of UFOs than in the objects themselves, possibly because that’s more amenable to investigation.  We might imagine that some WikiLeaks will produce a cache of memos saying, 'keep the UFOs secret.' The fact that WikiLeaks has never produced anything of the kind is part of my reason for thinking it doesn’t exist.

When did UFOs become a recognized phenomenon in the culture?

June 24, 1947. A private pilot named Kenneth Arnold was flying over the Cascade Mountains and saw nine silvery objects flying at terrific speeds. He described their motion as ‘like saucers skipping over water,' which the press turned into flying saucers. The term UFO, possibly originating with the military, first circulated in the 1950s and supplanted flying saucers in the 1970s.

Do you find that a lot of people who have UFO visions don’t have a traditional religious upbringing?

There’s certainly anecdotal evidence of that. Jung thought the UFO represents a reassertion of the yearning for spirituality that’s repressed and ignored in a material civilization. Whether you can demonstrate that non-anecdotally, with statistics, I don’t know. There are different kinds of entanglements between UFOlogy and religion. I don’t know how I would generalize that into a pattern. UFOs are about transcending boundaries.

What are you doing now with your interest in UFOlogy?

I’ve lost much of my taste for travel, so I don't go to UFO events. But last October, I blogged about "Storm Area 51" (a supposed raid of the top-secret U.S. Air Force base rumored to host alien spacecraft suggested by Facebook users that became a festival in Rachel, Nevada). The few thousand people there had a good time. Nobody stormed anything. Blacks and whites mingled. One woman talked about how she had a good conversation with someone wearing a MAGA hat. And I thought, UFOlogy can unify the country!

So what’s your thinking now about what UFOs are all about?

You asked when UFOs became a cultural phenomenon, and I answered June 24, 1947. But I left off the second half of the answer. June 1947 was also the month that the Doomsday Clock first appeared on the cover of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. I believe there’s a link. At its most basic, what the UFO is about is death — the ultimate alien but also the intimate alien. Because your death is an intimate part of you. But it’s the most alien thing you can possibly imagine, or struggle to imagine.

So it seems significant to me that UFOs became a cultural phenomenon when the possibility of the collective death of the species through nuclear warfare became real. It began to sink into people. It’s significant that it's enjoyed a tremendous resurgence since Donald Trump was elected, and the possibility of another collective death, through climate change, came a notch closer to reality. That has become something that haunts us.

What’s going to happen now that we have this foretaste of collective death with the coronavirus? Some things are already happening. Belgium has experienced its greatest wave of UFO sightings since 1990. We know what those UFOs are. They’re Starlink Satellite trains. But people are looking up, seeing peculiar lights and thinking “UFO.” In that sense, the cultural and psychological sense, they are UFOs. So where’s the UFO going to go now? Let's talk again in a year or five years and see.

https://religionnews.com/2020/04/17/david-j-halperin-explores-the-mythical-reality-of-ufos-in-new-book/

ADDED NOTE: GERMAINE likes intellectually stimulating books, so this should be right up his alley.

Nobody says it like Steve

To the envy of many of us, Steve Schmidt is a wordsmith… par excellence.  Or, to put it in the crude vernacular of the day, “he knows how to rip new ones,” and with surgical precision.  :-O  Steve calls himself a former Republican:

“29 years and nine months ago I registered to vote and became a member of The Republican Party which was founded in 1854 to oppose slavery and stand for the dignity of human life. Today I renounce my membership in the Republican Party. It is fully the party of Trump.”

Yesterday, on Twitter, Steve let it all hang out:

Discontent with leading the most inept and lethal response to a life and death crisis in American history, Trump reached for a new low today by igniting what will soon be known as a “liberation movement.” The “Libbers” are here. A new chapter of crazy in American life is born(1)

Soon we will start to see repeats of the lunacy in Michigan and Ohio all over the country. Get ready for the noxious blend of Confederate flags, Semi-automatic weaponry, conspiracy theorists, political cultists, extremists and nut jobs coming to a state Capitol near you. (2)

They will be stoked by Trump every step of the way as they help make the air fertile for his blame gaming, scapegoating, evasions of responsibility, populist fulminations and nationalist incitement’s. They will be on TV every night storming the (3)

Battered ramparts of our politics and civics. Growing Food lines, skyrocketing unemployment, bankruptcies and the reality that PPP is too small and failing will metastasize within our toxic political culture. Americans are increasingly out of money and face ruin while Trumps (4)

Administration continues to lie, fumble and flounder. None of this had to be, but here it is, and it will get worse because Trump is unsteady. He is erratic, indecisive and incompetent at a stunning level. From his slovenly sartorial appearance and lack of physical fitness to (5)

His sloppy verbal meanderings, non sequiturs and dissembling Trump represents a confluence of nearly every repugnancy that can be listed on the catalogue of undesirable human traits that render leaders as unfit in moments of great crisis and testing. Tragedy has come to America (6)

It is so much worse for having come when America had the misfortune of being saddled with Donald Trump. He stands alone, triumphant in ignominy as the most hapless and incompetent leader the American people have ever seen in action. Recovery will take years. (7)

He is unfit to lead us out of the danger. His failure is epic. He is a clear and present danger to America’s future and our prosperity. 200 days until Election Day (8)

 Whoa.  That’s a slap-upside-the-head, and then some.  So, what do you think?

-Do you agree with Schmidt that soon "Libbers" will start popping up all over the country?

-Do you agree that the Republican Party is now the Party of Trump?

-Is America in worse trouble than we even think?  If yes, how so?

-And most important of all, will Trump get re-elected?  (Or, as I prefer to put it, “Are we really that stupid?”)

Thanks for posting and recommending.

Concepts in Politics: Liberty and Freedom

Liberty and freedom tend to be used interchangeably in political discourse, but they are not the same thing, at least according to some sources. Wikipedia describes the difference like this:

“Sometimes liberty is differentiated from freedom by using the word "freedom" primarily, if not exclusively, to mean the ability to do as one wills and what one has the power to do; and using the word "liberty" to mean the absence of arbitrary restraints, taking into account the rights of all involved. In this sense, the exercise of liberty is subject to capability and limited by the rights of others. ..... Liberty entails the responsible use of freedom under the rule of law without depriving anyone else of their freedom. Freedom is more broad in that it represents a total lack of restraint or the unrestrained ability to fulfill one's desires. For example, a person can have the freedom to murder, but not have the liberty to murder, as the latter example deprives others of their right not to be harmed. Liberty can be taken away as a form of punishment. In many countries, people can be deprived of their liberty if they are convicted of criminal acts.”

Thus liberty is constrained by the rule of law and to a lesser extent constraints that flow from things like social and tribal norms and loyalties. The concepts are important in politics because many people consider rule of law constraints to be unjustifiable or unconstitutional. Differences of opinion arise because both liberty and freedom are essentially contested concepts. They are not definable with universal authority and probably never will be. People will endlessly disagree about what is a proper liberty or freedom and what is not.

This is important because an ideology such as libertarianism leads many libertarians to believe that there are far too many burdens on individual freedoms that should never be subject to the rule of law. Some libertarians argue that many or most laws are illegal because they are unconstitutional. A sociologist who worked as a financial advisor for multi-millionaires and billionaires commented on how many of those people viewed the rule of law and thus the scope of their own liberties:

“The lives of the richest people in the world are so different from those of the rest of us, it's almost literally unimaginable. National borders are nothing to them. They might as well not exist. The laws are nothing to them. They might as well not exist. ..... About a quarter of the people I interviewed [financial advisors to billionaires] really seemed to believe quite unironically in the justice of protecting the wealth of their clients from taxation. They literally view taxation as theft, and they view government as incompetent at best and corrupt at worst. They are deeply suspicious of any sort of welfare state programs because they see it as destroying initiative.” 

A lot of those wealthy people cheat on their taxes with no qualms whatever about it.

With that kind of an anti-law mindset, it is easy to see how the urge to make government so small it can be drowned in a bathtub would be appealing. Of course, we are witnessing the downside of that attitude at work in the staggering incompetence and failures of our shrinking federal government to deal competently with the coronavirus pandemic. Before the current disaster is recovered from, that anti-government, unrestrained freedom attitude will cost the US economy and taxpayers trillions, maybe $10 trillion, maybe a lot more.

In a 1944 speech, federal judge Learned Hand commented on how he saw the liberty vs freedom difference, the danger of unrestrained freedom and how he struggled to define the undefinable concept of liberty:

“What do we mean when we say that first of all we seek liberty? I often wonder whether we do not rest our hopes too much upon constitutions, upon laws and upon courts. These are false hopes; believe me, these are false hopes. Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women; when it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can even do much to help it. While it lies there it needs no constitution, no law, no court to save it. And what is this liberty which must lie in the hearts of men and women? It is not the ruthless, the unbridled will; it is not freedom to do as one likes. That is the denial of liberty, and leads straight to its overthrow. A society in which men recognize no check upon their freedom soon becomes a society where freedom is the possession of only a savage few; as we have learned to our sorrow. ..... What then is the spirit of liberty? I cannot define it; I can only tell you my own faith. The spirit of liberty is the spirit which is not too sure that it is right; the spirit of liberty is the spirit which seeks to understand the mind of other men and women; the spirit of liberty is the spirit which weighs their interests alongside its own without bias; .....” 

That language expresses sentiments that are rarely voiced in modern political discourse. Among many conservative and populist Americans, the idea of weighing the interests of others along with personal interests without bias is probably seen as naive, goofy or maybe even immoral. That attitude is unfortunate. There is nothing naive, goofy or immoral about having some concern for one’s fellow citizens and people in general.

One can see the danger inherent in elevating the concept of freedom and/or liberty to a position that negates the rule of law and any other constraints that tend to impede the rise to power of demagogues, tyrants, plutocrats, oligarchs, kleptocrats, murderers, crooks and liars.

Spiderbait, Most Boys Suck

Did Gender Keep Democratic Women From Winning The Primary?

Elizabeth Warren has now fully thrown her support behind former Vice President Joe Biden in the presidential race. She's even said, without question, that she would serve as his vice president.

It's been a little over a month since Warren dropped out of the race. At the time, only Biden and Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, two older white men, were left as the viable candidates for the Democratic presidential nomination, highlighting that the Democratic Party would not diversify the top of the ticket this year.

And yet, the Democratic Party had its most diverse candidates of all time this cycle, including the largest group of women ever. That six-woman wave of candidates came after four years of buildup – years that featured Democratic women getting mad, getting organized, getting on the ballot and getting elected in record numbers in 2018.

And Democrats sure seemed excited about women in the abstract: As of November, 83% of Democrats said they were "enthusiastic" about voting for a woman. Only 53% said they were "enthusiastic" about white men.

But then, it was never assured, or even widely assumed, that a woman would win the nomination. Biden and Sanders went into the race with high name recognition among Democrats and significant bases of support, whether among party activists or the establishment.

And as it turned out, the race came down to those two white men. So ... what happened? Gender was definitely a factor in this year's Democratic primaries. How could it not be after what the party has seen over the last four years? But the ways in which attitudes about gender impacted the outcome are varied, and of course more than a bit complicated.

What we know: Democrats' electability "freak out"

When Elizabeth Warren bowed out, she was explicit in calling out sexism.

"If you say, 'Yeah, there was sexism in this race,' everyone says, 'Whiner!'" Warren said. "If you say, 'No, there was no sexism,' about a bazillion women think, 'What planet do you live on?'"

I've spent more than a year asking voters about gender and sexism in this presidential race, and I can say with confidence that Democratic voters who don't want to vote for a woman (or, at least, who will say such a thing out loud) are rare to nonexistent.

In a January Ipsos/USA Today poll, 84% of people who planned to vote in Democratic primaries said they agreed with the statement that they'd be "comfortable with a woman president."

But that leaves 1 in 6 potential voters in another category. That group includes the 5% who said they disagreed.

Perhaps 5% is a sliver, but especially in tight primaries it is meaningful if 1 in 20 voters are biased against the women candidates. (Furthermore, there is the question of what the other 11% of voters meant when they said they "neither agree nor disagree.")

And then there's this: Only 33% of likely voters of any party said they thought their neighbors would be comfortable with a woman president.

This is something that many journalists (myself included) heard over and over in interviews with voters – not sexism itself driving voters' choices, but fears about other people's sexism.

"I have a friend at work — she's like, 'You're not progressive.' She thinks that I don't want a woman president," Anita Burgess told NPR in March 2019. "I do! But I don't think they're going to do it! And so I can't waste my vote either, because we have to get the orange man out. I'm sorry — orange man got to go," she said, mocking President Trump's appearance.

And that feeling persisted in the Democratic electorate through the primaries.

"I really like Elizabeth Warren, but I just don't think a woman is going to win this election, unfortunately," UCLA student Brook Rosenberg told NPR as she stood in line to vote in California's primary. "Also, I don't want Trump to tear her down."

Polling showed how widespread this fear was. In that January poll, 50% of people who planned to vote in the Democratic primaries said they agreed that a woman would have a tougher time running against Trump than a man. Half as many — 24% — disagreed.

It's important to keep in mind that while a wide field of women candidates is a relatively new phenomenon, this kind of amateur political strategizing is nothing new.

"The Democrats always freak out about electability," former presidential contender and Democratic Rep. Pat Schroeder told me (with a heavy sigh) in December. "I mean, I remember every single primary, everybody starts, [gasp] 'Who are we going to get?'"

"Of course," she added, "this year, we're having a bigger freak-out than normal just because people are so obsessed about, 'How do we get rid of Trump?'"

It's not just that Democrats desperately want to unseat Trump, though. For some voters, the very fact not just that a woman lost in 2016, but that this man won – someone with a track record of insulting and objectifying women, who also has a long list of sexual misconduct claims against him (all of which he denies) – is a sign of how much sexism their fellow voters are willing to put up with.

"I don't think it's right, but I think that the fact that we have the person in the White House that we do, it is evidence that the country is not quite totally ready for a woman," New Hampshire voter Patti Rutka told me in March 2019.

Or as Mother Jones' Pema Levy more pithily opined, "Trump's greatest trick was convincing voters women can't win elections."

And so, as Democratic organizer Karine Jean-Pierre explains it, voters thought about who seemed like they could be president.

"They're thinking, 'We have to beat Donald Trump. What's the best way to do it?'" she said. "OK. Maybe someone who is of his age, someone who has been the closest to being presidential, if you think about being a vice president, being the number two to the president being in the Oval Office, having all of those visuals."

On the Democratic side, Biden has grappled with gender in ways that have disappointed some feminists. Early in his campaign, multiple women accused him of invading their personal space. He eventually apologized... around the same time that he joked about the matter on stage at a campaign event.

In addition, some news outlets have reported more recently about a more serious allegation against the former Vice President.

Biden also reported early in 2019 that he had apologized to Anita Hill for her treatment when she accused Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas of sexual harassment in his Senate confirmation hearings. As chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee at the time, Biden chaired those hearings.

Hill told the New York Times that she didn't feel Biden had apologized to her for his own role in her treatment.

"I cannot be satisfied by simply saying, 'I'm sorry for what happened to you,'" she said. "I will be satisfied when I know that there is real change and real accountability and real purpose."

The "hostile sexism" factor

Here's one more thing we know: that higher levels of sexism were associated with a greater likelihood of supporting Biden and Sanders, as well as a lower likelihood of supporting Warren.

Political scientist Brian Schaffner attempted to measure sexism by having pollsters ask Democrats if they agreed with phrases including "women are too easily offended" and "most women fail to appreciate fully all that men do for them." In a separate interview, pollsters asked those same people whom they preferred in the primary.

"There is a very strong relationship between how people responded to the questions that are meant to measure sexism and whether they were likely to vote for Elizabeth Warren," Schaffner said. "And it was the least-sexist Democratic voters who supported her the most. But her support dropped off very quickly among those who registered higher levels of sexism."

Schaffner found something similar in the 2016 general election – that there was an association between sexism, as he defined it, as well as racism – and voting for Trump. But he says that these associations mean something different in a Democratic primary.

"In a primary election, you take party out of the equation," he said. "You have a bunch of candidates who have very similar positions who are running against each other. And people tend to rely on what they can, that differentiates these candidates who otherwise look fairly similar to them. And gender is definitely one of those things."

Furthermore, while Schaffner found this correlation – and, to be clear, attempted to control for a range of factors, like ideology – his study doesn't mean that a bunch of voters walked into the voting booth with straightforwardly sexist ideas driving their votes. He recognizes that the relationship is subtler.

"I think a lot of this plays at a subconscious level for voters," he said. "They may not be really aware that the things that they think grate on them about Warren are actually things that wouldn't bother them if it was a man doing the same things."

The presidency may be different

But then, hold on. We do know that women candidates often do just fine at winning races – in fact, studies show that women congressional candidates win at roughly the same rates as men do. ("When women run, they win," is a common refrain among groups that work to elect more women.)

One possibility, as Democratic pollster Celinda Lake told NPR last year, is that voters treat the presidency differently from other offices.

"Voters are very, very willing to send women, younger candidates, people of color, LGBTQ candidates to Congress," she said. "But for president or executive office in general, we know from the data that people are much, much more cautious and tend to second-guess themselves much more."

In addition, there's evidence that women face a "performance premium" in running for office – that, yes, they may win at similar rates to men at the congressional level, but that they have to be better candidates to do it.

Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar said something to this effect at the November debate, contrasting the women candidates to the then-37-year-old South Bend, Ind., Mayor Pete Buttigieg: "Do I think that we would be standing on that stage if we had the experience that he had? No, I don't. Maybe we're held to a different standard."

Of course, it's impossible to know on an individual basis whether any particular candidate is more successful because they're a man (or less so because they're a woman).

But there was another memorable debate line, this one from Warren, that threw this into relief. At a January debate, Warren noted that she and Klobuchar were the only two candidates on stage who had never lost a race.

In addition, New York Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand and California Sen. Kamala Harris had never lost an election until this year's primaries, either.

It is, of course, possible to become president with a loss or two on one's record. But this cycle, America only saw competitive women candidates with long resumes and perfect down-ballot records.

Unanswered questions

Knowing exactly how much gender played into voters' decisions this year may never be possible because it's so deeply mixed into how people think.

"We know that what's really happening in most cases is gender is informing a lot of the different aspects or predictors of a candidate's success," says Kelly Dittmar, professor at Rutgers University's Center on American Women and Politics. "And so to try to pinpoint how much sexism mattered becomes much more difficult. Instead, I try to think about it as, what are the ways in which gender shapes the dynamics of the race?"

Dittmar uses Kamala Harris as an example: When she dropped out, the California senator said one reason was that she didn't have enough money to carry on.

"Was that solely because she was a woman or because she was a black woman? No. There were other challenges at play, in terms of the strength of support for her candidacy," Dittmar said. "But were gender and race and the interaction of those things probably a factor in how much she was able to gain support, interaction with donors? That's very likely."

Jean-Pierre also evidence of a higher standard in Harris' rise and fall.

"She started off with 20,000 people at her at her rally in Oakland. She raised tons of money very early on, and she never made it to Iowa. She never made it to certain early states," Jean-Pierre said. "I do believe that there is just a different way that women are treated. There is a different way that women of color are treated. And there are these barriers that are so much higher that they have to jump over and cross."

Of course, no candidate lost purely because of their identity (just as Biden didn't win purely because of his). Voters raised substantive questions of all of the women candidates in this race:Harris' record as a prosecutor angered some progressives. Klobuchar was too moderate for some progressives, and she also faced allegations that she was abusive to her staff. Gillibrand has swung from moderate positions to progressive ones during her career. Warren's early answers on how she would pay for "Medicare for All" struck some as evasive.

But it's possible that women were punished more for these things than men would have been.

"I think it's compatible to think both that it was sexist and that there's really some substance to those criticisms," says Kate Manne, Cornell University philosophy professor and author of Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny. "And here, it's not that the criticism is illegitimate because it's sexist. It's that we're soft-pedaling the criticism, albeit unwittingly, when it comes to a male counterpart who's done something very, very similar."

The comparison between Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren on paying for Medicare for All is an excellent example of just how difficult it is to tell what was driving voter attitudes and expectations.

On the one hand, Sanders put forth a list of funding options, but never came out with an exact way to pay for his own Medicare for All plan. Warren, meanwhile, faced heavy scrutiny over how she would pay for his plan, which she backed. To Manne, that is plainly unfair.

"Reasonable minds can disagree about whether her plan for implementing Medicare for All was a good plan," she said. "[But] it's kind of remarkable that she got lambasted for the content of her plan while his non-plan played much better."

Then again, Warren had made "having a plan for that" her brand. So one could also argue that she naturally had additional expectations here.

But on top of that, there's another potential layer: was Warren forced to run as the hyper-competent, plan-for-everything candidate because she's a woman? Or, put another way: could a woman candidate run as a revolutionary, the way Sanders did, and get as far as he did?

Gender still matters

The presidential race will be one white, straight man versus another white, straight man. But that doesn't mean gender, as well as other parts of a candidate's identity, is no longer a factor, Dittmar points out.

"The more that you see candidates move away from simply masculinity as the sort of measure by which president reality is determined right or valued, we see that then leads to hopefully some progress in which women don't have a distinct set of challenges," she said.

She points to a 2006 memo strategist Mark Penn wrote for Hillary Clinton's first presidential run, in which he warned her against being seen as too soft and nurturing: "[Voters] do not want someone who would be the first mama... But there is a yearning for a kind of tough single parent."

These conversations have largely centered around the Democratic Party, which has had more — and more successful — women presidential candidates than Republicans have.

And when Republicans do have another opportunity to nominate a woman, those women might run differently than Democratic women. That's because Democratic voters tend to be more receptive than Republican voters to identity-based campaigning.

In 2018, and again in the 2020 Democratic presidential field, women ran more firmly as women, with more overtly feminist messages tailored to speak to women's experiences. Warren's story of struggling to find childcare as a law student was a standby on the stump. Similarly, Klobuchar told voters the story of being kicked out of the hospital 24 hours after giving birth.

However, Republican strategist Alice Stewart, who has worked on multiple presidential campaigns, including Michele Bachmann's in 2012, says that it's nevertheless telling that her party has yet to nominate a woman.

"I truly believe Republicans will say gender doesn't matter: 'I would vote for the person based on their qualifications, whereas others might say gender is a factor.' But they evidently are not following through with that," she said.

Even if a woman will not win the presidency this year, the 2020 field represented progress, in a diverse range of women candidates finding a range of ways to be themselves on the trail.

And progress could still come from the men in the race, Dittmar adds.

"I think it's just important to remember that the gender dynamics of the race are still very much at play," she said. "And so in terms of the value we place on masculinity, it's something for us all to be continually evaluating with the men who are left. How do they navigate gender?"

The question is doubly relevant considering that Biden's opponent is someone who weaponizes masculinity in his campaigning. Biden has done so himself on occasion – "If we were in high school, I'd take him behind the gym and beat the hell out of him," he said of Trump in 2018.

Women candidates also aren't out of this campaign yet: Biden has promised to put a woman on the ticket with him. Were Biden to win the presidency, that woman would be the highest-ranking female elected official in American history.

It would be progress. Just slower than some Democrats would have hoped.

https://www.kpbs.org/news/2020/apr/17/did-gender-keep-democratic-women-from-winning-the/

Fraying Nerves + Flaring Tempers = Rising Irrationality

“Ever since college I have been a libertarian—socially liberal and fiscally conservative. I believe in individual liberty and personal responsibility. I also believe in science as the greatest instrument ever devised for understanding the world. So what happens when these two principles are in conflict? My libertarian beliefs have not always served me well. Like most people who hold strong ideological convictions, I find that, too often, my beliefs trump the scientific facts. This is called motivated reasoning, in which our brain reasons our way to supporting what we want to be true.” -- prominent libertarian Michael Shermer, 2013


Rationale: a set of reasons or a logical basis for a course of action or a particular belief

Some of the news from the last few days reports a harsher undertone among some of the public and from conservative pundits. State stay at home orders prompted a large protest in Michigan, with mostly conservative people protesting and demanding for workplaces to be reopened immediately. The Washington Post writes:

“For miles, thousands of drivers clogged the streets to demand Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D) ease restrictions and allow them to go back to work. They drowned downtown Lansing, Mich., in a cacophony of honking. They blared patriotic songs from car radios, waving all sorts of flags from the windows — President Trump flags, American flags and the occasional Confederate flag. 

But in the massive demonstration against Whitmer’s stay-at-home executive order — which they have argued is excessive and beyond her authority — the pleas from organizers that protesters to stay in their vehicles went unheeded. Many got out of their cars and crashed the front lawn of the capitol building, with some chanting, ‘Lock her up!’ and ‘We will not comply!’

Right-wing media joined in the chorus. Tucker Carlson of Fox News described Whitmer’s actions as ‘petty authoritarianism,’ accusing her of putting on a show in an effort to be former vice president Joe Biden’s running mate. On Wednesday, Rush Limbaugh, a conservative talk-show host and Trump favorite, applauded the protesters, saying Democrats like Whitmer are ‘being coached by Nancy Pelosi and [Charles E.] Schumer to push this harder than they might normally feel is appropriate.’ 

Local law enforcement on Wednesday even joined the conservative criticism, as four county sheriffs wrote an open letter informing residents they would not be “strictly” enforcing Whitmer’s new order.”

Conservative allegations of political motives are not accompanied with any evidence, rendering rhetoric more irrational partisan dark free speech based on unsubstantiated, probably false conspiracy theories. Multiple sources are reporting that conservatives are now arguing to reopen businesses along these lines: “I'm no doctor but, some businesses can reopen right now. Retail stores can reopen now. There is no reason to keep businesses closed.” So far, none of those arguments I am aware of has even acknowledge the fact that America is still unable to conduct large scale testing for the virus and for antibodies to the virus.

That ‘rationale’ is not rational on several levels. First, it is even not a rationale because it is not based on facts. Instead, it is based on ideologically inspired opinions that real facts contradict. Real experts, not ideologically blinded political blowhards, uniformly assert that it is still too early to relax social distancing measures at present. Those measures now appear to be having a significant effect in slowing the spread of the virus. Second, America is still unable to do the large scale testing that is absolutely needed to guide rational decisions about when it is safe and who is safe to relax containment rules for. People who test positive for antibodies may have immunity from reinfection and are thus reasonably believed to be safe to release back to the workforce.

Regarding testing, the New York Times writes today:

“As President Trump pushes to reopen the economy, most of the country is not conducting nearly enough testing to track the path and penetration of the coronavirus in a way that would allow Americans to safely return to work, public health officials and political leaders say.

Concerns intensified on Wednesday as Senate Democrats released a $30 billion plan for building up what they called ‘fast, free testing in every community,’ saying they would push to include it in the next pandemic relief package. Business leaders, who participated in the first conference call of Mr. Trump’s advisory council on restarting the economy, warned that it would not rebound until people felt safe to re-emerge, which would require more screening. 

And Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo of New York reiterated his call for federal assistance to ramp up testing, both for the virus and for antibodies.
‘The more testing, the more open the economy. But there’s not enough national capacity to do this,’ Mr. Cuomo, a Democrat, said at his daily briefing in Albany. ‘We can’t do it yet. That is the unvarnished truth.’ 

At his own briefing later in the day, Mr. Trump boasted of having “the most expansive testing system anywhere in the world” and said that some states could even reopen before May 1, the date his task force had tentatively set. Twenty-nine states, he added, ‘are in good shape.’”

Ideology beats truth

Once again, American conservatism and rigid ideology are at odds with scientific facts and the facts fall to irrational beliefs based on no stated rationale. There is an unstated rationale. It is true that sooner or later the social distancing and lockdown rules will need to be relaxed. The economic damage so far has been very high. The damage could be catastrophic and long-lasting if rules are not relaxed fairly soon, maybe as soon as the middle or end of May.

Experts talk, political ideologues walk

It is now time for economic experts, not political blowhards, to start laying out scenarios for how much longer our economy can withstand this shutdown without incurring cataclysmic injury and how to reopen it with or without enough testing data to make informed decisions. Economic estimates will need to include as a factor, the fact that we still cannot do widespread testing and thus may be forced to reopen while flying mostly blind about the extent of the infection or how many more people will die.

The president’s constant uninformed blithering that facts contradict are damaging. That kind of dark free speech makes it harder for real experts to speak with authority the public will accept. When president keeps irrationally undermining experts, many people disbelieve their advice. At present, experts are giving the best advice they can based on data that is significantly limited due to the president’s astonishing incompetence in dealing with the pandemic from the beginning to this very day.

To assert that our president is unfit for office, is almost an equally astonishing understatement. The main problem here is the president, not the experts. Our president should be impeached for his incompetence and failures, especially including his failure to get large scale testing in place weeks ago.

Redistributing Wealth to the Top

The Washington Post writes: “More than 80 percent of the benefits of a tax change tucked into the coronavirus relief package Congress passed last month will go to those who earn more than $1 million annually. ..... The provision has fueled criticism by congressional Democrats and some tax experts who have called it a giveaway to the wealthy and real estate investors, who frequently face large losses on their investments. ..... An analysis by the JCT found suspending the limit overwhelmingly benefits higher earners. About 82 percent of the benefits of the policy go to about 43,000 taxpayers who earn more than $1 million annually. Less than 3 percent of the benefits go to Americans earning less than $100,000 a year, the analysis found.” The data was released by the nonpartisan congressional Joint Committee on Taxation (JCT).

Senate Republicans inserted a change that temporarily suspends a limitation on how much owners of businesses formed as “pass-through” entities can deduct against their nonbusiness income. That will cost taxpayers about $90 billion in 2020. Other tax changes will add about $170 billion to the national deficit over the next 10 years. 

Income data for the top 1% of earners are summarized here for each state. Income research indicates that income inequality increased in all states since the 1970s. Also, inequality increased in most states in the post–Great Recession era.

It is no wonder that the president and the Trump Party want to keep this kind of government spending as hidden as possible. These optics are not good.