Rational politics: A Mission Statement

I need a short mission statement for a Rational Politics feed on Bluesky. What do you think about this?

Rational politics. There is a vision of democracy that is public interest-centered, honest, and reasonably transparent. That brand of politics can be less ideological and less dominated by special interests. It can be more rational, evidence-based, transparent and inclusive than what the two main parties and third parties offer. Public-interest-centered democracy can reasonably accommodate both the public interest and special interest needs by balancing conflicting goals. A search for reasonable compromise policies is possible and necessary. Public opinion has to have reasonable influence and power relative to America's current political situation. This vision of democracy has to stand in steadfast opposition to the opacity, special interest power, corruption, ideological fantasies and self-dealing that permeates the main parties. Special interests include the Democratic and Republican parties themselves. 

Word count: 126

Suggestions? Is it too wordy, wonky or corny? Not specific enough? Too specific? Appealing as seriously overcooked broccoli? Mention morals, if so which ones, facts, true truths and sound reasoning?

Post election analyses: A second narrative about what just happened

A NYT opinion by Masha Gessen, a Russian reporter who witnessed the fall of Russian democracy to Putin, offers her narrative (not paywalled). I've quoted Gessen's Nov. 2016 warning about DJT here several times, maybe many. But here it is again:

“Thank you, my friends. Thank you. Thank you. We have lost. We have lost, and this is the last day of my political career, so I will say what must be said. We are standing at the edge of the abyss. Our political system, our society, our country itself are in greater danger than at any time in the last century and a half. The president-elect has made his intentions clear, and it would be immoral to pretend otherwise. We must band together right now to defend the laws, the institutions, and the ideals on which our country is based.” 

That, or something like that, is what Hillary Clinton should have said on Wednesday [in her concession speech to Trump].

I find this analysis appealing because it directly raises the question of morality and values. Gessen's analysis:

For those bewildered by why so many Americans apparently voted against the values of liberal democracy, Balint Magyar has a useful formulation. “Liberal democracy,” he says, “offers moral constraints without problem-solving” — a lot of rules, not a lot of change — while “populism offers problem-solving without moral constraints.” Magyar, a scholar of autocracy, isn’t interested in calling Donald Trump a fascist. He sees the president-elect’s appeal in terms of something more primal: “Trump promises that you don’t have to think about other people.”

Around the world, populist autocrats have leveraged the thrilling power of that promise to transform their countries into vehicles for their own singular will. Vladimir Putin and Viktor Orban vowed to restore a simpler, more orderly past, in which men were men and in charge. What they delivered was permission to abandon societal inhibitions, to amplify the grievances of one’s own group and heap hate on assorted others, particularly on groups that cannot speak up for themselves. Magyar calls this “morally unconstrained collective egoism.”

Trump’s first term, and his actions in the four years since, tracked the early record of Putin and Orban in important ways. Looking closely at their trajectories, through the lens of Magyar’s theories, gives a chillingly clear sense of where Trump’s second term may lead.

Magyar is Hungarian, and has extensively studied the autocracy of Orban. Like Trump, Orban had been cast out of office (in 2002, in a vote his supporters said had been fraudulent); he didn’t regain power until eight years later. In the interim, he consolidated his movement, positioning himself and his party as the only true representatives of the Hungarian people. It followed that the sitting government was illegitimate and that anyone who supported it was not part of the nation. When Orban was re-elected, he carried out what Magyar calls an “autocratic breakthrough,” changing laws and practices so that he could not be dislodged again. It helped that he had a supermajority in parliament. Trump, similarly, spent four years attacking the Biden administration, and the vote that brought it to the White House, as fraudulent, and positioning himself as the only true voice of the people. He is also returning with a power trifecta — the presidency and both houses of Congress. He too can quickly reshape American government in his image.

Trump and his supporters have shown tremendous hostility to civic institutions — the judiciary, the media, universities, many nonprofits, some religious groups — that seek to define and enforce our obligations to one another. Autocrats such as Orban and Putin reject that deliberative process, claiming for themselves the exclusive right to define those obligations. If those two leaders, and Trump’s own first term, are any indication, he will likely begin by getting rid of experts, regulators and other civil servants he sees as superfluous, eliminating jobs that he thinks simply shouldn’t exist. Expect asylum officers to be high on that list.

A major target outside of government will be universities. In Hungary, the Central European University, a pioneering research and educational institution (and Magyar’s academic home), was forced into exile. To understand what can happen to public universities in the United States, look at Florida, where the administration of Gov. Ron DeSantis has effectively turned the state university system into a highly policed arm of his government.

Civil society groups — especially those that serve or advocate for immigrants, formerly incarcerated people, L.G.B.T.Q. people, women and vulnerable groups — will be attacked. Then they may come for the unions.

In an Opinion article in The Washington Post, the publisher of The Times, A.G. Sulzberger, laid out some probable scenarios for a Trump administration’s war on the media. I would add that, like Orban — and like the first Trump administration — this president will reward loyal media with privileged access and will attack critical media by targeting its owners’ other businesses. That is a particularly effective tactic, one that we may have seen at work even before Trump was re-elected, when the billionaire owners of The Los Angeles Times and The Washington Post decided to nix their publications’ presidential endorsements. (Explaining their decision, the owners cited reasons not related to deference to Trump.)

I am going to go way out on a limb and say that along with high levels of discontent with our opaque, two-party, pay-to-play system, there is a lot of hunger for a stronger sense of morality that can at least partly bind liberals, conservatives and other kinds of non-authoritarians together. In my opinion, that moral hunger is important to be mindful and respectful about. The trick is figuring out how to appeal to it and make it grow.

Post election analyses: One narrative about what just happened

Dozens of narratives about what just happened and why are floating around out there. Many more will probably be forthcoming. The narratives from radical right authoritarians, self-professed MAGA “conservatives” are quite different from those coming from non-MAGAlandia. I plan to post at least two non-MAGAland narratives to give people a sense of the kind of thinking that is going on outside MAGAlandia. This one is by Ben Rhodes, formerly in the Obama administration. Tomorrow I'll post Masha Gessen's narrative. 

In a NYT opinion Ben Rhodes, deputy national security adviser to Barack Obama, offers his take on the election (not paywalled):

[In 2019] I met with a [Hong Kong pro-democracy] government official preparing to resign and told him I was writing a book about the rise of authoritarian nationalism. “The nationalism in the U.S. and Europe is somewhat different,” he told me. “Yours started with the financial crisis in 2008. That’s when liberalism started to lose its appeal, when people saw this wasn’t working. The narrative of liberalism and democracy collapsed. This spilled over into China, too. This is when China started to think — should we really follow a Western model?” We were sitting in a hotel lounge, the invisible forces he described surrounding us: capitalism, but not democracy; cultural elites cloistered away from the working class. “The nationalist movements in East and West were both a response to the collapse of the Western model,” he added.

Everything I’d experienced told me he was right. Eight years serving in the Obama White House after the financial crisis felt like swimming upstream, against the currents of global politics. A radicalized Republican Party rejected liberal democracy at home, mirroring far-right leaders like Prime Minister Viktor Orban of Hungary who spoke about installing “illiberal democracy” (a polite term for “blood and soil” nationalism) across Europe. In Russia, Vladimir Putin set out to undermine — if not dismantle — the liberal order helmed by the United States. In China, Xi Jinping began to shift Beijing’s strategy from rising within that order to building a separate one, drained of democratic values.

In the West, neoliberalism — that blend of free trade, deregulation and deference to financial markets — hollowed out communities while enriching a global oligarchy. Meanwhile, a homogenized and often crass popular culture eroded traditional national and religious identities. After 9/11, the war on terror was embraced by autocrats such as Mr. Putin, who used it as a frame to justify power grabs while forever wars fueled mass migration. The financial crisis came through like a hurricane, wrecking the lives of people already struggling to get by while the rich profited on the back end. Then social media’s explosion offered a vehicle to spread grievance and conspiracy theories, allowing populist leaders to radicalize their followers with the precision of an algorithm.  

The playbook for transforming a democracy into a soft autocracy was clear: Win power with a populist message against elites. Redraw parliamentary districts. Change voting laws. Harass civil society. Pack courts with judges willing to support power grabs. Enrich cronies through corruption. Buy up newspapers and television stations and turn them into right-wing propaganda. Use social media to energize supporters. Wrap it up in an Us versus Them message: Us, the “real” Russians or Hungarians or Americans, against a rotating cast of Them: the migrants, the Muslims, the liberals, the gays, George Soros and on and on.  

Yet now Mr. Trump has decisively won back the presidency. I would never claim to have all the answers about what went wrong, but I do worry that Democrats walked into the trap of defending the very institutions — the “establishment” — that most Americans distrust. As a party interested in competent technocracy, we lost touch with the anger people feel at government.  

Yes, this is unfair: Republican policies from Ronald Reagan to George W. Bush did far more than Democrats to create this mess. But Mr. Trump’s crusade against the past elites of his own party — from the Bush family to Mitch McConnell — credentialed him with a public hungry for accountability, while the Harris campaign’s embrace of Dick Cheney conveyed the opposite message.  

Donald Trump has won the presidency, but I don’t believe he will deliver on his promises. Like other self-interested autocrats, his remedies are designed to exploit problems instead of solving them, and he’s surrounded by oligarchs who want to loot the system instead of reforming it.  

Out of the wreckage of this election, Democrats must reject the impulse to simply be a resistance that condemns whatever outrageous thing Mr. Trump says. While confronting Mr. Trump when we must, we must also focus on ourselves — what we stand for, and how we tell our story. That means acknowledging — as my Hong Kong interlocutor said — that “the narrative of liberalism and democracy collapsed.” Instead of defending a system that has been rejected, we need to articulate an alternative vision for what kind of democracy comes next. 

The idea that the narrative of liberalism and democracy collapsed strikes me as having a lot of truth in it. The idea that a Chinese official in Hong Kong watching the collapse of democracy there makes sense. Maybe his US outsider position made it easier to see what probably most Americans cannot easily accept. Worse, the forces arguing for liberalism and democracy are themselves significantly undermined by special interest power and wealth, which in my opinion are inherently authoritarian and inherently pro-corruption.

The question Rhodes raises is this: What are the alternative visions for what kind of democracy comes next? I’d like to think it is a tolerant democracy that is at least modestly more uncoupled from left-right politics and more honestly focused on serving the public interest in a different mental framework (pragmatic rationalism maybe?). But we have to deal with the poisonous power of dark free speech and toxic social media, and the unshakable false realities they create. It’s not clear to me that a new vision can compete and win against that monstrosity. I think MAGA will probably have to implode on its own before a new vision of democracy has a chance to regain its footing.

NOW we know the real reason the Democrats lost so badly.................

 Though the following story is dated it gives us some insight on how EVIL the GOVERNMENT is............

Here’s why Trump’s allies are talking about a squirrel right now

Peanut the squirrel was famous on social media before New York authorities euthanized him. Now, many Trump allies want his death to be infamous.

The final few nauseating days before a deadlocked election are critical. They mark the moment when many undecided voters finally put the proverbial licked finger in the wind to assess the vibes—if not necessarily all the policy positions—and break one way or the other. Anyone doing so at the moment, however, may be surprised to discover that the atmosphere on one side has gotten a little, well, nutty. That’s right: Donald Trump’s campaign, and its biggest supporters, are going all in on . . . Peanut the squirrel.

For the many understandably uninitiated, Peanut the squirrel was a social media-famous pet who is unfortunately no longer with us. A man named Mark Longo took him in seven years ago, after the animal’s mother was hit by a car in New York City, and he’s kept Peanut ever since in an animal sanctuary in the hamlet of Pine City, near the Pennsylvania border. In the years since, Peanut has amassed followings in the many thousands on Instagram and TikTok, where he could often be found eating adorably, or wearing jaunty little squirrel ensembles.

On October 30, New York’s Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) took the squirrel, along with a raccoon named Fred, apparently acting on complaints that they were being kept illegally, possibly posing a health hazard. (According to state law, New Yorkers are required to be licensed in order to care for such critters.) During the ensuing chaos of the DEC coming to check on the animals, Peanut reportedly bit someone assisting in the investigation. Both he and Fred were subsequently euthanized, in order to test the pair for rabies.

While it certainly tracks that a grieving pet owner might channel his emotions into an external villain, it seems like quite a stretch for anyone in a position of power and influence to attempt the same thing on a mass scale, for the entire electorate.

Try telling that to the world’s richest man, however.

Elon Musk’s pinned tweet at the time of this writing warns his 203 million followers on X that, “If they will raid a house for a squirrel, they’re sure as shit going to come after you.” It’s a message that should concern roughly zero people who are not currently housing squirrels without a proper license, and yet it is one of at least 20 similar messages Musk has posted since Friday.

The full-tilt sensationalizing isn’t restricted to Musk, of course. Far from it. According to the New York Post, JD Vance says Donald Trump is “fired up” over Peanut, while Fox News has both fanned the flames and later posted about the squirrel setting off a “social media firestorm.” Meanwhile, the official X account of the House’ of the ‘s Judiciary Committee, on the Republican side, posted “Justice for Peanut” on Saturday evening—as though this were both an appropriate message to broadcast, and one that everyone reading would intuitively understand.

https://www.fastcompany.com/91222451/heres-why-trump-allies-are-talking-about-peanut-the-squirrel-right-now

Germaine's Quest update: Bluesky, pragmatic rationalism and the communication problem

I have a real problem. Today I saw an article that said that lots of Trump opponents are leaving X for Bluesky. I immediately researched and found that Bluesky, which is still puny compared to X and Facebook, allows anonymity. I see that as an opportunity. I signed up under the moniker Germaine2 because Germaine was taken. 

That's me on Bluesky, no posts yet

Not sure what to do next, but I'll figure it out

What I wanted to do was start a channel, or whatever it is called there, focused on rational politics based on pragmatic pragmatism. That led me to Perplexity and a long series of questions about how to do that, what to emphasize and whether pragmatic rationalism even makes a lick of sense. What I got back was a huge mess of complexity, but mostly encouraging.

To help me, the input data I fed to Perplexity was my incredibly long, August 2015 post on self-criticisms of pragmatic rationality and my responses thereto: Objective politics: Criticisms and responses - https://dispol.blogspot.com/2015/08/objective-politics-criticisms-and.html

The answer I got back from Perplexity was that in essence what I wanted to do to describe pragmatic rationalism is a fool's errand because (unless I misunderstand, which I might) Bluesky posts have a 300 word limit: https://www.perplexity.ai/search/how-can-a-new-person-on-bluesk-V8b9vMAsQYihRUMm5zBTDw

The Q&A following my initial Q to Perplexity is massive. Probably longer than my 2015 self-criticism and answer blog post. But, being a persistent cuss, I don't care that what I want to do will necessarily be imperfect. I want to do it in defense of secular democracy, civility, civil liberties, the rule of law and transparent, honest, competent government.

I'll re-engage with this problem tomorrow. Maybe I'm barking up the wrong side of the tree, but maybe not. 

Regardless, I am looking for new ways to defend America from impending tyranny and kleptocracy, Maybe this is one.

And there is your update for the day.

New legal reasoning: The duality of it -- guns are safety devices too

Federal Trump trial court judge Stephen McGlynn (SD Illinois) offers a new and improved rationale for getting rid of an Illinois gun safety law regarding the semi-automatic AR-15 assault rifle, the weapon of choice for mass murderers at schools, public gatherings and whatnot. Judge McGlynn writes in his superbly-reasoned 168 page cannon blast:

Why are there small lifeboats on gigantic steel ocean liners? Why do we spend thousands equipping our vehicles with airbags? Why do we wear seatbelts and place our infants in safety seats? Why do we build storm shelters under our homes? Why do we install ground-fault interrupter outlets by sinks and bathtubs? Why do we get painful inoculations? Why do we voluntarily undergo sickening chemotherapy?

And why do we protect ourselves with firearms?

Too often, the perils we face are forced upon us by other people. By people who are negligent, reckless, insane, impaired, or evil. Sometimes it is the proverbial lone wolf; sometimes, it is the whole wolf pack. Truly, life comes at you quickly.

And who comes to our aid in times of peril? Sometimes, it is the police or first responders; other times it is healthcare professionals; and sometimes it is family, friends, or neighbors. Sometimes, it is no one.

Above The Law comments on this splotch of brilliant, tour de force legal gobbledygook:

This is how he began a 168-page opinion. He sat down and thought, “I’m going to come up with some brilliant analogies!” and then decided to OPEN the opinion with this. Which, in some ways, you’ve got to appreciate because 168 pages is a lot and it’s nice that he broadcast that this wouldn’t amount to a work of serious legal thought right off the top.

Why are there small lifeboats in gigantic steel ocean liners? Because sometimes they sink. But — and I can’t stress this part enough — when the cruise ship isn’t sinking, no one uses lifeboats to assassinate kindergartners.

Hm, it is true that no one uses lifeboats to assassinate kindergartners. They have a point there. But the judge is also right, the AR-15 is a fine safety device for use in imminent lethal threat emergencies when there is no help around, as we have all personally experienced many times. He sees the duality here, guns can be used as safety devices as well as mass murder devices.

That is blistering, over-the-horizon vision!

Hm, I must live a sheltered life. I've never been seriously threatened with a lethal weapon. Just what does being in an imminent lethal threat emergency feel like? Probably very scary.

You know what else is very scary? Judge McGlynn being nominated to the USSC after Sonia Sotomayor has to be replaced because her frail health conks out, just like Ruth Bader Ginsberg did.