Book banning and teaching revisionist history: Another front in the march of radical right authoritarianism against democracy

Burnt books in modern times

Dictators, fascists and other kinds of authoritarians like to control and suppress inconvenient information. The Republican Party is adopting this hallmark of authoritarianism that looks very much like fascism in the American context. The New York Times writes:

Texas State Representative Matt Krause, a Republican, emailed a list of 850 books to superintendents, a mix of half-century-old novels — “The Confessions of Nat Turner” by William Styron — and works by Ta-Nehisi Coates and Margaret Atwood, as well as edgy young adult books touching on sexual identity. Are these works, he asked, on your library shelves?

Mr. Krause’s motive was unclear, but the next night, at a school board meeting in San Antonio, parents accused a librarian of poisoning young minds.

Texas is afire with fierce battles over education, race and gender. What began as a debate over social studies curriculum and critical race studies — an academic theory about how systemic racism enters the pores of society — has become something broader and more profound, not least an effort to curtail and even ban books, including classics of American literature.

In June, and again in recent weeks, Texas legislators passed a law shaping how teachers approach instruction touching on race and gender. And Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican with presidential ambitions, took aim at school library shelves, directing education officials to investigate “criminal activity in our public schools involving the availability of pornography.”

“Parents are rightfully angry,” he wrote in a separate letter. They “have the right to shield their children from obscene content.”

“Education is not above the fray; it is the fray,” said Robert Pondiscio, a former teacher and senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a public policy group. “It’s naïve to think otherwise.”

In Texas, such battles recur. In 2018, an education committee proposed striking a reference to “heroic” defenders of the Alamo, describing it as a “value-laden word.” A roar of resistance arose and the board of education rejected the proposal. The Republican lieutenant governor this year pressured a museum to cancel a panel to discuss a revisionist book — “Forget the Alamo” — examining its slaveholding combatants.

“One minute they’re talking critical race theory,” Ms. Damon, the librarian, said. “Suddenly I’m hearing librarians are indoctrinating students.”

Mr. Krause, who compiled the list of 850 books that might “make students feel discomfort, guilt, anguish” because of race or sex, did not respond to interview requests. Nor did his aides explain why he drew up the list, which includes a book on gay teenagers and book banning, “The Year They Burned the Books” by Nancy Garden; “Quinceañera,” a study of the Latina coming-of-age ritual by the Mexican Jewish academic Ilan Stavans; and a particularly puzzling choice, “Cynical Theories” by Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay, which is deeply critical of leftist academic theorizing, including critical race theory.  

On the question of slavery, for instance, the Texas law prohibits teachers from portraying slavery and racism as “anything other than deviations from, betrayals of, or failures to live up to the authentic founding principles of the United States.” This conflicts with the views of many scholars who note that from America’s founding, slavery was woven into the structure of the nation and the Constitution.

The NYT goes on to point out that Texas law is ambiguous and vague, causing the list of bad books seems to send a chill through school boards. In the absence of clarity in state law, some librarians have been told to pre-emptively pull down books. A San Antonio school district took 400 books off the shelves for review.

 

It does seem naïve to think that the radical right will not target public education and inconvenient history and truth in Texas and everywhere else it can. Instead of critical race theory, something akin to White superiority theory will be taught. Texas law does not mention critical race theory, so there is ambiguity. The Texas radical right can play with that ambiguity as they socially re-engineer American society, government and law to fit the dominating neocapitalist and Christian nationalist ideologies that now dominate the radical right republican Party. A similarly vague law in Oklahoma has been challenged on grounds of vagueness

The Texas law states that teachers should “explore” contentious subjects such as slavery and treatment of American Indians “in a manner free from political bias.” However, it appears that the radical right has no real interest in anything other than indoctrinating students with their politically biased vision of reality and history. The right will self-righteously condemn any whiff of other points of view that do not accord with their sacred beliefs. That runs deep in Christian nationalist dogma.

Among other things, Christian nationalist ideology is rock solid in its dogmas that (i) heterosexual White men are God's chosen moral and political leaders, and (ii) America was Founded as a White Christian nation that God chose to rule over all other nations and racial groups. That literally is the history they teach in their religious schools. Christian nationalists want to force all public schools to teach the same thing as long as public schools exist.[1] 

Question: Is the radical right sincere about being unbiased in teaching, or is that just propaganda and lies? 

Footnote: 

1. Christian nationalists want all secular public schools replaced with private religious schools, and they want to force American taxpayers pay for all of it by law. That is core dogma among Christian nationalist elites and their legal strategy in the courts, not fringe crackpottery. This is no idle threat.

According to Pew research in 2020, half of Americans say the Bible should influence U.S. laws. 28% favor the Bible over the will of the people. Christian nationalists have made it clear that they do not care about majority public opposition to what they want to do. They are doing God's work and that trumps everything else including man's law, the US Constitution, public opposition, democracy and civil liberties. They are authoritarian.

Burning books about 80 years ago

Long haul COVID patients and their conditions

 The Washington Post looked at the situation for people who have long haul COVID-related symptoms such as brain fog and severe fatigue. About 750,000 to 1.3 million people are estimated to affected. Another  50 million have experienced some of these symptoms after a COVID infection to be able to return to work and a fairly normal life Research has begun to understand what causes the various symptoms and how to treat them. There is not much understanding at present about causes and treatments. One tragedy is that many of the people who are long haulers have lost their jobs first and then their health insurance, leaving them unable to afford whatever limited health care there is. Most of these people are hopelessly adrift in society. A few have fallen into poverty and homelessness.

At present, new cases of long haul are coming mostly from unvaccinated people, adding to the social and economic cost of a personal refusal to get vaccinated. The WaPo writes:

Long covid is testing not just the medical system, but also government safety nets that are not well suited to identifying and supporting people with a newly emerging chronic disease that has no established diagnostic or treatment plan. Insurers are denying coverage for some tests, the public disability system is hesitant to approve many claims, and even people with long-term disability insurance say they are struggling to get benefits.

“They are suffering in dramatic ways, and in ways that have altered their lives and placed them in financial peril,” said Harlan Krumholz, a cardiologist and scientist at Yale University and Yale New Haven Hospital.

Depression and anxiety that are part of the brutal mix of long covid symptoms are exacerbated by despair over vanishing income. 

Often referred to as “long haulers,” they experience mild symptoms to begin with, then get stuck with months of chronic fatigue, shortness of breath, confusion and memory loss, erratic and racing heartbeats, radical spikes in blood pressure, painful rashes, shooting pains and gastrointestinal problems.

The government calls it post-acute sequelae of SARS-CoV-2, or PASC. The National Institutes of Health is spending $1.15 billion to study the syndrome. The symptoms sometimes subside, lulling long haulers into a false sense of relief, only to come roaring back after performing simple chores like vacuuming a living room or raking leaves.

Even for those who do have insurance, treating long covid can be unusually complicated and costly, since it’s a new disease without an established diagnostic or treatment plan and coverage for certain tests may be denied.

Health insurance companies, citing the blizzard of tests being ordered, say they are waiting for data-driven protocols to emerge so they can match insurance coverage with the best testing and treatment strategies for long covid.

The cognitive and emotional impacts also make it difficult for patients to navigate the bureaucratic tangles required to keep health insurance and file disability claims after a job loss.

John Buccellato, 64, an emergency medicine doctor at an urgent care clinic on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, was hospitalized with the virus in March 2020, in the same hospital where his mother died of covid.

In a matter of days, he went from treating patients at a busy clinic to being engulfed in a health crisis as covid attacked his lungs and vascular system. Severe cognitive and emotional strain left him unable to manage his day-to-day affairs.

Overwhelmed by brain fog and the sense of loss over his career, he frequently sobbed on the phone as he described his struggles in an interview, including the loss of his employer-sponsored insurance.

Buccellato said he has tens of thousands of dollars in unpaid medical bills that accumulated when he first lost his health insurance. He has some property and savings, but no weekly cash flow, he said. He signed up for COBRA, which provides a continuation of health insurance after a job loss, but after congressionally approved waivers that made it free expired in September, it now costs $922 a month, he said.

Buccellato said he recognizes his career is prematurely over, but he can’t figure out how to dig himself out of his worsening financial predicament. A lawyer helped him file a disability claim with the Social Security Administration, which a member of his support team said was recently successful. Because he left work for medical reasons, he was not eligible for unemployment insurance.  

Patients, advocates and lawyers said private disability insurers, which offer long-term disability coverage through employee benefit plans, have also been denying many claims.

The WaPo goes on to point out that patients who apply for disability insurance benefits are initially denied and require lengthy appeals, partly because the medical community is still unable to diagnose the symptoms. The Social Security Administration has received 16,000 covid-related disability claims since December 2020, but it refuses to disclose how many of those were approved. Once again, secrecy shrouds government operations for unknown reasons.

And once again, the moral compass of America's for-profit health care system is on display. Profit is the sole moral value. Human life comes in a distant 2nd or 3rd, or maybe 4th behind whatever other factor(s) drives our grossly expensive, needlessly blindingly complex, opaque health care system. As time passes and the influence of radical right conservatism clamps down harder and harder on average Americans, the situation for most people will probably continue to deteriorate. 

It will be interesting to see how this aspect of the pandemic plays out and what the social and economic cost will amount to, assuming the COVID pandemic ever ends.

Questions: 

1. Given the cost, is America's health care system (i) probably more concerned with profit than human life and/or (ii) too complex and opaque?  

2. Should COVID long haulers who had the opportunity to get vaccinated but refused always be treated just like all other patients, i.e., first come, first served? Or do they not deserve priority when it crowds out similar care to other kinds of patients because the local health care system is overloaded? 

Neoliberalism coddles bad nursing homes in comforting secrecy

Neoliberalism: a political approach that favors free-market capitalism, deregulation, and reduction in government spending; neoliberalism is a political development of capitalism and a political and economic ideology that seeks to (i) maximize the freedom of the market by removing barriers to the private accumulation of wealth, and (ii) become a power over and above the state directed to the ends of profit without government interference; neoliberalism opposes regulation over which it has no control; the controlling ethic of capitalism is prudence which leads to wealth, but the ethic of neoliberalism is the accumulation of wealth for its own sake which leads to political power; neoliberalism, as the de facto only available political and economic option has had catastrophic effects on society and the environment 

The effects of the neoliberal influence on the Democratic and Republican Parties is usually manifest as deregulation of commerce and wealth with a concomitant flow of power from government and its ability to protect and serve public interests. Power flows to special interests and owners of wealth who gain advantage and use it over the public and public interests to their own benefit. Secrecy is a necessary and major aid in the power shift. Special interests and neoliberal politicians deny that this power shift happens, but they are liars. As we all know, an ignorant public is more compliant and profitable than an informed public. --- Germaine, 2021

Politicians love opacity and secrecy. So do lobbyists. So do courts. Businesses too. Obviously, fine citizens like tax cheats, embezzlers and drug dealers really like lots of secrecy. Everyone with things to hide loves secrecy. That runs the gamut from hiding merely embarrassing boo-boos to hiding shockingly illegal, cruel and/or lethal activities. That is why non-disclosure agreements are the norm in many or most businesses. That is why many or most consumer products and services come with a demand that disputes be settled by arbitration in secret. That is why most major lawsuits that settle before a court decides a case in public are settlements that demand secrecy of the terms. Usually the defendant demands secrecy from the plaintiff.

And it's always the same game: Those with power demand secrecy. Those without power, like the public interest and consumers, are forced to accept secrecy to the advantage of those with power over them. That is how neoliberalism works for people and interests in power, usually (always?) to the detriment of the public and its interest.

All that wonderful neoliberal secrecy allows the crooks, liars, and thugs an opportunity to downplay and lie about what they did, how bad it was and exactly who was responsible. The stench of plausible deniability for the bad guys is overpowering. The public is left free to decide what, if anything it wants to believe. Facts just cannot get in the way of forming false beliefs based on lies because the public remains ignorant of the truth. 

A New York Times article, How Nursing Homes’ Worst Offenses Are Hidden From the Public, provides a wonderful example of of what neoliberal government often produces. The NYT writes:

In Arizona, a nursing home resident was sexually assaulted in the dining room.

In Minnesota, a woman caught Covid-19 after workers moved a coughing resident into her room.

And in Texas, a woman with dementia was found in her nursing home’s parking lot, lying in a pool of blood.

State inspectors determined that all three homes had endangered residents and violated federal regulations. Yet the federal government didn’t report the incidents to the public or factor them into its influential ratings system. The homes kept their glowing grades.

A New York Times investigation found that at least 2,700 similarly dangerous incidents were also not factored into the rating system run by the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, or C.M.S., which is designed to give people reliable information to evaluate the safety and quality of thousands of nursing homes.

Many of the incidents were uncovered by state inspectors and verified by their supervisors, but quashed during a secretive appeals process, according to a review of thousands of pages of inspection reports and nursing home appeals, which The Times obtained via public-records requests. Others were omitted from the C.M.S. ratings website because of what regulators describe as a technical glitch.

The Times this year has documented a series of problems with Medicare’s ratings system. Much of the data that powers the system is wrong and often makes nursing homes seem cleaner and safer than they are. The rating system also obscures how many residents are receiving powerful antipsychotic drugs.

On the rare occasions when inspectors issue severe citations, nursing homes can fight them through an appeals process that operates almost entirely in secret. If nursing homes don’t get the desired outcome via the informal review, they can appeal to a special federal court inside the executive branch. That process, too, is hidden from the public.

Even when the citations are upheld by this federal court, some never make their way onto the Medicare website, known as Care Compare. In November, for example, the court sustained a major punishment against Life Care Center of Kirkland, Wash. — the nursing home that faced the first coronavirus outbreak in the United States — yet the citation is absent from the Medicare site. The facility has a five-star rating.

The pattern gives nursing homes a powerful incentive to pursue every available appeal. Even if they lose, the process eats up time and reduces the odds of damaging information ever becoming public.

“There is every advantage to the facility not to have an opinion issued for as long as they could possibly delay, and there’s no advantage to the public for that to occur,” said Richard Routman, a lawyer who represented the federal government in nursing home appeals until 2014.

“Once I realized that people wouldn’t see cases that are on appeal, I thought, why would anybody ever look at this again?”  

Representatives of the nursing home industry say it is only fair that they be allowed to appeal citations before they are made public, especially since many end up getting overturned or downgraded. But The Times found that the appeals process can be one-sided, excluding patients and their families.  

There’s big money at stake. Because of the weight that people place on the star ratings, researchers have found a connection between better inspection results and greater profits. The Times analyzed nursing homes’ financial statements from 2019 and found that four- and five-star facilities were much more profitable than lower-rated facilities. (For-profit companies own about 70 percent of all U.S. nursing homes.) 

For decades, federal watchdog agencies have criticized state inspectors for taking a light touch with the nursing homes they oversee.  

Inspectors rarely deem problems to be serious enough to harm homes’ star ratings. From 2017 to 2019, The Times found, inspectors wrote up more than 2,000 five-star facilities at least once for not following basic infection-control precautions, like having employees regularly wash their hands.

At 40 other five-star homes, inspectors determined that sexual abuse did not constitute actual harm or put residents in immediate jeopardy.  

“I feel sometimes the things I cite don’t mean anything because it gets tossed out at the state level or they determine it not to be as severe,” an unnamed inspector said in a 2013 survey conducted by the Center for Medicare Advocacy, a consumer rights group. “Sometimes it makes you wonder why we spin our wheels on a problem.”

One can clearly see the influence and power of economic incentives to do bad things when they are shrouded in secrecy. If the public never hears about bad things and no significant penalties attach, the bad stuff effectively did not happen. There is every reason to keep doing bad things that help make money, even if people are harmed or killed in the process. Power and wealth are the only moral values inherent in neoliberalism. Human and environmental destruction and death are not major factors in the profit equation unless government steps in and gives those those things major weight.

Ranking existential threats

Unwarranted secrecy and neoliberalism arguably are existential threats to liberal democracy, the rule of law, modern civilization via wealth inequality and maybe even the existence of the human species on Earth. Unwarranted secrecy is necessary for subversion of democracy and the rule of law. 

A ranking of threats to global democracy and the rule of law should help at least some to put this in context.

1. Nuclear war

2. Corruption and subversion of government by special interests

3. Unwarranted secrecy

4. Dark free speech and social media disinformation

5. Political polarization

6. Authoritarianism, neoliberalism and Christian theocracy

7. Wealth inequality (an aspect of American authoritarianism, neoliberalism and Christian theocracy)

8. Environmental damage (also an aspect)

9. Weak public education

10. Overpopulation

 

There is overlap among at least some of these things. Note that unwarranted secrecy is usually a major component of corruption and subversion of government by special interests, dark free speech and political polarization. This ranking just intended to give a general idea of how secrecy might fit into an existential threat assessment. Opinions on this will vary. For example, some or most conservatives might put the BML movement, critical race theory, the Democratic party and/or socialism/communism on the top 10 list of threats.

Questions: 

1. Why does the government allow secrecy to protect nursing homes, neoliberalism, fairness to nursing homes, and/or something else, or is secrecy not a significant factor here?

2. Is it more likely than not that unwarranted secrecy is a significant existential threat to democracy and the rule of law?

How an anti-abortion advocate sees the current Supreme Court and life after legalized abortion

It is good to consider various good faith points of view. Crackpottery doesn’t deserve much if any serious consideration, other than as a means to assess how deranged some people are. 

Considering other points of view, asserted facts and reasoning provides some understanding of why and how people think and draw their conclusions. A New York Times editorial by Erika Bachiochi, a conservative legal scholar, a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center and a senior fellow at the Abigail Adams Institute is staunchly anti-abortion. She has argued that Roe v. Wade should be overturned. She takes comfort in what the the current Supreme Court is likely about to do to abortion rights.

Ms. Bachiochi writes:

.... over the past two presidential election cycles, I felt a strong sense of relief that I was free from the hard trade-offs of voters in battleground states and could just cast my vote for a write-in candidate.

Yet listening to oral arguments in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization last week, I realized more clearly than before how grateful I am to those pro-lifers who did what I did not, would not, could not: cast a vote for Donald Trump.

Politics is an art of prudence, and what I regarded as a deal with the devil they took to be a prudential act to achieve an essential end. For ending the abortion regime must be the keystone of standing against the individualistic libertarianism that characterizes our politics, left and right — and privileges the powerful over the weak and dependent. Ironically, and perhaps accidentally and certainly boorishly, Mr. Trump may have brought about what others could not.

While oral arguments are no perfect indicator of how the court will vote, Justices Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett, all appointed by Mr. Trump, seem ready to join Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito (and perhaps Chief Justice John Roberts) in sending the issue of abortion back to the people to resolve. While Justice Kavanaugh homed in on the Mississippi solicitor general’s argument that the Constitution is neutral on abortion, Justices Gorsuch and Barrett (as well as Chief Justice Roberts) worked to discern if there was any way to uphold the moderate Mississippi ban without striking down both Roe and Planned Parenthood v. Casey. (Both sides agree: There is not.)

If Roe goes, the pro-life movement can begin where it left off in 1973, working to convince fellow citizens (especially in blue states like mine) that we owe dependent and vulnerable unborn children what every human being is due: hospitality, respect and care.

But it’s not only that. Mr. Trump’s economic populism (at least in rhetoric) blasted through the libertarianism that has tended to dominate the Republican Party, a libertarianism that has made its alliance with pro-lifers one of strange bedfellows indeed. If the Republican Party wants to be of any relevance in a post-Roe world — after all, with Roe gone, those single-issue voters will be free to look elsewhere — it will have to offer the country the matrix of ethnic diversity and economic solidarity that Mr. Trump stumbled upon, but without the divisiveness of the man himself.

So what is the path ahead that he has now likely made possible? A post-Roe America will need to move beyond its wrongheaded obsession with autonomy. It will need to align both its rhetoric and its policies better with the realities of human existence and so should work to bring forth a renewed solidarity instead. We humans are not best understood as rights-bearing bundles of desires who progress through life by the sheer force of our autonomous wills. We are beings who are deeply dependent on one another for every good in life — first and foremost for our very existence, as we did not come to be by an act of our own will.

The Democrats were once a closer fit for the solidaristic vision, which is why before Roe, pro-lifers once happily made their home in the Democratic Party. Franklin D. Roosevelt’s party was one that long sought to put the culturally essential caregiving, character-shaping work of the home at the very center of the economy, ensuring that families enjoyed economic security while they did that most important work. Democrats once sought a family wage and saw the importance, as the Progressive-era feminist reformer Jane Addams put it, of the “family claim over the social claim.”

But today’s Democratic Party — though rightly intent to provide robust economic support to struggling families — seems also intent to contract out the nurturing of infants and toddlers to “caregivers” rather than attempt to ensure, as their predecessors did, the kind of economic security that enabled (especially) mothers to care for their young children themselves.

Support for the abortion license over the past half century helped transform the Democrats from the party of the family wage to the party of academic, technocratic and corporate elites. The abortion regime has been deeply complicit in preserving a modern economy built not around the needs of families but on the back of the unencumbered worker who is beholden to no one but her boss.

Individual and societal reliance on abortion for women’s participation in economic and social life was the linchpin of the Supreme Court’s decision to reaffirm Roe in its 1992 decision Planned Parenthood v. Casey. As such, it was perhaps the strongest argument in the abortion-rights lawyers’ arsenal at the Dobbs oral arguments. But as even Planned Parenthood’s Alan Guttmacher foresaw in a 1968 speech, reliance on abortion as a backup to contraception tends to discourage contraceptive use and otherwise increase sexual risk taking, with women, not men, left to manage the asymmetrical risks.

Meanwhile, Casey’s claim that society has relied on abortion for women’s progress at once discounts the legion of anti-discrimination laws passed over the past century — while capitulating to the demands of an increasingly hegemonic market. After all, easy access to abortion (not to mention egg freezing and other technopharmacological interventions) helps businesses ensure that women are readily available to meet the all-encompassing needs of the globalized marketplace, thereby delaying real accommodations for time-consuming (and sometimes unexpected) parenting, especially for those women at the lowest socioeconomic levels in our society.

Such abortion-for-equality arguments are a far cry from the revolutionary vision Betty Friedan and Pauli Murray enunciated in the original statement of purpose for the National Organization for Women in 1966. Therein, one finds not calls for abortion on demand (or abortion at all) but instead for the country to “innovate new social institutions which will enable women to enjoy the true equality of opportunity and responsibility in society, without conflict with their responsibilities as mothers.” The statement urged not only robust anti-discrimination law, which would come to pass, but also better recognition of the “economic and social value of homemaking and child care,” which would not.

If the Supreme Court overturns Roe, the pro-life movement will need to redouble the efforts of pro-lifers on the ground who for a half century have offered support, assistance and care to pregnant women and their children, both born and unborn. And crucially, it should call men to task.

But it can also take its rightful place in the post-Trump Republican Party — if the party, especially in red and purple states, can prove itself capable of policymaking on behalf of workers and their families. This will require that Republicans not fall back to doing the bidding of the business class whose own daughters will be, in the near term, anyway, a short flight or car ride away from legal abortion even after Roe.

Unpacking that vision of reality and reasoning

I will assume that Bachiochi is sincere and take her at her word in what she wrote. She starts with the fact that she could not vote for the ex-president. But she is grateful for the anti-abortionists who voted for him did by making a deal with what she calls the devil. That means was to achieve an essential end, namely overturning Roe and getting rid of abortions. This brings up a point argued here repeatedly. Specifically, many Republicans believe the ends justify the means, including voting for the devil. From what I  can tell, Bachiochi makes a principled and moral stand. That makes her a rare thing in the Republican Party.

Maybe she will be RINO hunted out of the GOP for calling the ex-president the devil.

Next, she refers to a fetus as (i) the weak and dependent, and (ii) dependent and vulnerable unborn children. That is a standard anti-abortion rhetorical tactic. One humanizes a non-sentient fetus by calling it the weak and dependent or a child and by making pregnant women who want an abortion listen to little fetus heartbeats, even before there is a functioning heart. She does not believe that the rights of the fetus are any less than the rights of the mother. That is open to debate, but in her mind it isn’t.

Bachiochi looks forward with enthusiasm to what needs to be done once the court overturns Roe and Casey. What needs to be done include (i) convincing the unconvinced that unborn fetuses are morally due hospitality, respect and care, (ii) convince the Republican Party to offer the country ethnic diversity and economic solidarity, or a working-class brand of conservatism, and (iii) somehow give economic security to enable especially mothers to care for their young children themselves. Point i sounds like a rather hard sell, but it is legitimate politics. The anti-abortion folks are free to try to convince the unconvinced.

But on points ii and iii, Ms. Bachiochi is way off the GOP reservation. The Republican Party is about as laissez-faire capitalist as it is Christian nationalist. Bachiochi is clearly in the Christian nationalist wing of the party, but the capitalists are not going to accept her advice because of power and money. She is OK with women staying home to raise the children while dad is out hunting for food to put on the table. That is a bit of central Christian nationalist dogma. But providing economic security so mother can stay home amounts to redistribution of wealth. That is contrary to infallible Republican dogma that demands power and wealth to be concentrated with the elite White men and big industry. Can one feel a RINO hunt coming on? Hard to tell.

Her argument that women do not rely on abortion is not credible (to me). The tens of thousands of women who get abortions each year are in fact relying on an abortion to prevent having an unwanted child. Despite the thick clouds of smoke that conservatives spew on this issue, access to easy adoptions or not, women necessarily rely on abortion to prevent an unwanted birth. Adoption access is irrelevant.

Her argument about what the women’s movement in 1966 stood, moms stay home and raise kids, for is interesting. She argues that recognition of the “economic and social value of homemaking and child care” has not yet had tangible economic impact. Who is to blame for that? Not the Democrats. Her own party stand firmly in the way. Is abortion really mostly just about working for capitalists and women would to stay home if they could afford to as she argues? Could the GOP actually be capable of policymaking on behalf of workers and their families, as she hopes? Have women changed from what they were in 1966 and society really is static and she clearly implies?

As a whole, Bachiochi’s facts and reasoning are not persuasive. Some of it is incoherent. Her own party will not lead to the vision of America she advocates. Her Christian nationalism blinds her to what her party really stands for, and it isn’t what she wants. Once Roe is overturned or gutted but left barely alive, the anti-abortion people are not going to come out and do outreach. They have been told and now most believe that pro-abortion people and Democrats generally are evil socialists and communists who want to impose tyranny and make Christianity illegal. On top of those inconvenient truths, her own party sure as death and taxes is not going to make things economically easier for women. Christian nationalist dogma stands directly in the way of that and so does laissez-faire capitalism, i.e., just about the entire GOP ideological framework and mindset. 

If one considers her words carefully, one can almost hear a Democrat asking for economic justice. She asserts that “this will require that Republicans not fall back to doing the bidding of the business class whose own daughters will be, in the near term, anyway, a short flight or car ride away from legal abortion even after Roe.” At least she realizes and publicly admits that inconvenient truth about the Republican Party, especially its laissez-faire capitalist wing. That seems to make Bachiochi a heretic in her own party. 

Questions: 

1. Is this unpacking of Bachiochi’s vision of facts and morality mostly reasonable, mostly unreasonable or is it mostly too hard to tell because reality and and morals about abortion are basically subjective and personal?

2. If one believes that reality and and morals about abortion are mostly subjective and personal, and an anti-abortionist refuses to compromise[1] by demanding the overturn of Roe, does that make them more democratic than authoritarian on that issue, or vice versa? 

Footnotes: 

1. Leaving Roe mostly intact, not overturned or gutted into near-oblivion, is a compromise between the competing interests in the woman and the state[2] that has stood since the case was decided in 1973. The Roe compromise was to leave the decision to the woman until viability, after which point the state could ban abortion. The alternative of forcing a woman to give birth against her will is no compromise at all. Overturning Roe destroys the compromise and shifts power to the state from the people.

2. The anti-abortion side strenuously argues the state has an interest in protecting the fetus and that state interest trumps the woman's interest in not wanting to give birth against her will. They have to argue that, because that's all they have got that isn't subjective and personal. I do not understood that argument as the anti-abortionists frame it. It just makes no sense to me. The state arguably does have an interest in seeing to it that a pregnant woman does not harm a fetus at any time during a pregnancy after a woman becomes aware, e.g., by taking drugs and bearing a baby that is drug addicted and/or brain damaged. Those harmed babies tend to impose significant burdens on society. But by what facts or logic does the state have any other interest in what a woman decides to do before her fetus is viable? That is why anti-abortionists have to, and do, strenuously argue that the rights of a non-sentient fetus attach from the moment of conception. 

The point of viability compromise in Roe has to be rationalized away somehow by anti-abortionists. Attaching constitutional personhood to a fertilized human egg is the core reasoning of what anti-abortionism and its refusal to compromise stands on. I find that reasoning to be deeply immoral because it is authoritarian and logically unjustified. It is a partisan political argument clearly grounded in subjective “religious logic” disguised as secular logic. Words such as God, Christ, and Christianity appear nowhere in Bachiochi’s attack on Roe and abortion rights. Obviously, that is not logical. It is theocratic, not secular and not democratic.

Money in politics dislikes transparency

Politicians can think up excuses to say that special interest money does not affect them. They dislike being asked about this. They prefer to operate in secrecy so that voters 'don't get the wrong impression,' or see conflicts of interest when there are actual conflicts, etc. The excuses for opacity are endless. In the case of the US Supreme Court, the absolute need for secrecy of its decision-making are said by the court to be obvious, but no judge has ever articulated what those obvious reasons are. It's like porn, you can't describe it, but you know it when you see it.

The New York Times writes on one current example of political corruption in operation in an article entitled De Blasio Fought for 2 Years to Keep Ethics Warning Secret. Here’s Why.:  

When Bill de Blasio first took office as mayor of New York in 2014, he called two powerful real estate developers who had active projects in the city, and asked them to donate money to a nonprofit organization that he had created to advance his political agenda.

The request to help his nonprofit, the Campaign for One New York, seemed to violate the city’s ethics law, and a ban against asking for contributions from people who had business pending with the city. Within months of his solicitations, Mr. de Blasio was formally warned by the city’s Conflicts of Interest Board — in a previously undisclosed letter — not to repeat the behavior.

But even after that warning, the mayor continued to hit up well-connected donors for money, according to documents that the city has now released after years of an extraordinary legal campaign by the de Blasio administration to keep the documents secret.

The new details of Mr. de Blasio’s outreach to donors were contained in a pair of secret letters from the city’s Conflicts of Interest Board to the mayor. In the first letter, dated July 2014, the board said the mayor had violated ethics laws with his two fund-raising calls to developers and warned him not to do it again.

The second letter, sent in September 2018, found that Mr. de Blasio had continued the practice and included a forceful reprimand of the mayor. The letters were released this week, after the State Court of Appeals denied a final effort by the mayor’s office to keep the documents secret.

The city had, for more than two years, fought The New York Times’s efforts to obtain the board’s correspondence with the mayor, denying an initial Freedom of Information request and then fighting a lawsuit filed by The Times.

“By soliciting these three donations from firms with business pending or about to be pending before executive agencies,” the second letter said, referring to the mayor’s 2018 fund-raising efforts, “you not only disregarded the board’s repeated written advice, but created the very appearance of coercion and improper access to you and your staff that the board’s advice sought to help you avoid.”

The NYT goes on to point out that the mayor’s spokeswoman, Danielle Filson, said in writing statement that “the calls the mayor was making at this time were to support affordable housing legislation and his effort to achieve universal pre-K for every child in New York City, which is now a national model. He has consistently acted in good faith and followed the process set out for him. The board closed these cases and determined no enforcement action was necessary.” 

Filson also claimed that the mayor made “appropriate disclaimers” during his fund-raising calls. She asserted that potential donors were told that they would not benefit or be punished if they chose to give or not give money. But de Blasio did not do that.

One disappointing thing here is that, once again prosecutors flat out refused to prosecute a sitting politician. Some of the companies that broke lobbying laws were just wrist slapped with fines. When it comes to politicians and companies or rich people making illegal donations, the rule of law has mostly simply collapsed and vanished. Ethics is irrelevant. Laws are irrelevant. Democracy and the rule of law are crumbling before our eyes.

Another disappointing thing is that the NYT had to fight in court to get access to the two incriminating letters from the ethics board. If there was nothing to hide, then why did de Blasio spend tax dollars to fight in court to keep them hidden? 

Questions: 

1. Should campaign contributions be outlawed and public financing of major elected offices be made mandatory? Or, do campaign contributions affect nothing and are good because the cash is just innocent free speech?

2. Is de Blasio's assertion of acting in good faith plausible or more likely just a politician’s lie?

The allure of democracy: Even tyrants claim to be democrats

North Korea is among the world's most repressive dictatorships. The dictators named the country the Democratic People's Republic of Korea. The DPRK holds elections and if you don't vote, you get shot dead, or maybe spoken to in stern terms. If you don't vote for the dictator, you get shot dead or put in work camps and worked to death. Voter turnout is above 95% and votes for the dictator are at least about 99%.

That is real democracy in action. Or maybe not.

Now, China is claiming that it is a better democracy than America. The New York Times writes:

As President Biden prepares to host a “summit for democracy” this week, China has counterattacked with an improbable claim: It’s a democracy, too.

No matter that the Communist Party of China rules the country’s 1.4 billion people with no tolerance for opposition parties; that its leader, Xi Jinping, rose to power through an opaque political process without popular elections; that publicly calling for democracy in China is punished harshly, often with long prison sentences.

“There is no fixed model of democracy; it manifests itself in many forms,” the State Council, China’s top governing body, argued in a position paper it released over the weekend titled “China: Democracy That Works.”

It is unlikely that any democratic country will be persuaded by China’s model. By any measure except its own, China is one of the least democratic countries in the world, sitting near the bottom of lists ranking political and personal freedoms.

Even so, the government is banking on its message finding an audience in some countries disillusioned by liberal democracy or by American-led criticism — whether in Latin America, Africa or Asia, including in China itself.  

China’s paper on democracy was the latest salvo in a weekslong campaign seeking to undercut Mr. Biden’s virtual gathering, which begins on Thursday.  

In speeches, articles and videos on state television, officials have extolled what they call Chinese-style democracy. At the same time, Beijing has criticized democracy in the United States in particular as deeply flawed, seeking to undermine the Biden administration’s moral authority as it works to rally the West to counter China.  

On Sunday, the foreign ministry released another report that criticized American politics for what it described as the corrupting influence of money, the deepening social polarization and the inherent unfairness of the Electoral College.

Here, China is making an obvious dark free speech ploy. People, including some or many Americans, are openly questioning the value and viability of democracy. That idea has been promoted for years by Russia, China and the American radical right, especially the Republican Party at least since the 1980s. China can and probably will convince nearly all of its people that it is a real democracy, and one that works better than American democracy. 

China's blast is another example of an intense global and radical right internal attack on true democracies. China and Russia attack us online all the time by sowing social distrust, disinformation and polarizing propaganda and lies. In the US, Republicans do the same, while they hob knob with European dictators, thugs and kleptocrats. They like what the see in dictatorship and kleptocracy, i.e., power and wealth. What could be more appealing to politically ambitious people with big egos than power and wealth?

Questions: 

1. Is American democracy under attack by China, Russia and the Republican Party?

2. Is China an honest democracy or a lying dictatorship?

Democracy in action -- see! Everyone agrees!