democracy and rights

I've always thought of "democracy," at least insofar as it relates to this country, as a matter of the vote.  We elect our leadership, for example, in elections that are mostly fair and open -- mostly.  We could list the abuses here -- gerrymandering that undermines our pretentions to fairness and various registration laws that undermine our pretentions to openness -- but those are recognized problems amenable to solution, if, that is, we want a more (not less) democratic nation.  In a democracy, a majority vote decides matters, and so too I have always thought that democracy could be described basically as majority rule.  While there is room for greater nuance, the vote and majority rule seem to sit at the crux of the matter.

There are problems with the core idea of democracy, and our founding fathers recognized many of them.  What if, for example, a majority of the people (think the unwashed rabble) voted to take property from the rich and redistribute it?  This was the first and perhaps most enduring question of "minority rights," for the rich, the very rich, will always be a significant minority. They are significant, of course, because wealth clearly buys influence, if not outright power, disproportionate to their numbers. One might argue that this difference lies at the core of our two party system with the Democrats mostly favoring the acquisition of property through progressive taxation and its redistribution through social programs, while the Republicans are diligent in protecting property rights against taxation and redistribution.  Each side of the debate can present rational explanations, some better than others, some more persuasive than others, for why their way is the best way. 

I won't delve into the economic discussion here.  There are secondary, but equally enduring questions of "minority rights," those associated with religious, ethnic, and racial minorities.  Not to be crude, but if a religious, ethnic or racial minority is perceived to be a problem for whatever reason, the majority, particularly an empowered majority, will eventually ask itself, "why not kill them all?"'  Black slaves were too valuable a commodity for genocide, at least until their emancipation, and even then were valuable as a source of cheap labor, at least as long as they "knew their place," and so various repressive measures were enacted to keep them in place.  As we all know, however, the "only good Indian is a dead Indian."  Since Native Americans were not particularly adaptable to forced labor, they were subject to the genocidal urge as their property became more and more valuable.  One might think of it as a particularly despotic form of majority rule, genocide and redistribution.

Beyond "minority rights," there are other "rights" that seem crucial.  Free speech and the right to a free press, for example, seem crucial because the electorate, if it is to vote wisely, needs to be informed.  As the mast head of the Washington Post puts it, "democracy dies in darkness." There are any number of reasons to denigrate and defend the so-called media in general.  And whether the Washington Post in particular is itself a beacon of light can be debated.  Nevertheless, an initial step in a any would-be tyrant's playbook is control of the media, and if anything in Trump's presidency should give us pause, it is his insatiable desire to dominate the news with his presence on the one hand, while denigrating fact-based news, particularly inconvenient fact-based news, as fake-news on the other.  Still and all, there's room for optimism.  As Lincoln put it, "you can fool all of the people some of the time, some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all of the time."  As I put it in my previous post, reality has a way of asserting itself, and despite everything we might want to believe, we nevertheless live in the real world.

Altogether, I am simply suggesting that democracy is, to use Churchill's familiar platitude, "the worst form of government, except for all those others that have been tried from time to time," and it stands to reason.  On the assumption that people do not want to suffer, there is a sort of utilitarian calculus imbedded within democracy as majority rule.  Given the opportunity to avoid suffering, most people will, and in the aggregate scheme of things, democracy will decrease suffering for a plurality and thereby give us a greater good.  Having said this, however, there is an assumption that the potential "tyranny of the majority" is restrained by "rights" that prevent a prevailing majority from inflicting pain on a minority. 

I am not suggesting, however, that there is anything like an equilibrium between majority rule and minority rights.   On the economic front, when unions first began to organize against their employers, one might suggest that federal troops were used to protect the minority rights of property owners against an emergent majority.  On the social front, when Rosa Parks resisted Jim Crow laws, one might suggest that local police were deployed to reassert a tyranny of the majority, while eventually federal troops were (had to be?) deployed to protect the rights of an emergent black minority.  Of course, there’s a good deal of “messiness” in both tales that cannot be captured in a sentence, nor am I attempting to elide the “messiness,” but there is a push and pull between “majority rule” and “minority rights,” and there is no reason to believe that we will ever reach any sort of perfect equilibrium.   

Before I go on, as a detour that I promise will lead back to the main road, let me introduce a notion that I borrow vaguely from James Carse, without particular reference to his actual argument -- the notion of finite and infinite games.  The prototype of a finite game, of course, is any athletic contest.  There is a point of initiation and conclusion, a first pitch and a final out in the bottom of the ninth when a winner is declared.   The prototype of an infinite game is science.  If we think of science as "human knowledge and comprehension," there was no particular point of origin (unless one adds a modifier like "modern science") nor will there be a moment of conclusion when everything is known and completely understood.  There might be milestones along the way, when the rules of the game change (e.g. the shift from hermeneutics and deference to authority to experimentation and deference to observation which define "modern science") or when there are major leaps in understanding (e.g. the so-called Copernican revolution) but there is no particular end in sight for human knowledge and comprehension, unless it's the end of humanity, at which point it will cease to matter, at least to humans.

Between the clearly finite and the clearly infinite, there is a sort of intermediate stance.  If we consider the broader game of baseball itself, there is a point of origin for the game, and it has evolved over time with shifts in rules and norms of play, but there is no particular prescribed end to the game.  Any particular contest within "baseball" is clearly finite with a designated winner.  Any particular season within "baseball" is clearly finite with a designated "world series champ."  Still, for the players and the fans there's always "next year," and the game goes on with no foreseeable end in sight.  Having said this, however, few I think would assume that baseball is "infinite," and there may come a day when it is deemed barbaric or as irrelevant as roller derby.   Steps can be taken to make it less barbaric, like improved helmets for batters, or more relevant, like youth programs to foster interest, but the day may come when the last game is played and baseball fades into history as a curiosity.

Now back to the main road.  Our particular American form of government is less like science, and more like baseball -- it is played as if it were an infinite game, with no designated end in sight, with two teams, the conservative red sox lined up against the liberal blue sox vying for intermittent supremacy.  The red socks won in 2016, but just wait until 2020.  I say it is played as if it were an infinite game, though clearly it is possible to imagine a time when our government may go the way of the Habsberg Monarchy and fade into history.  Indeed, it seems a minor publishing industry has sprung up surrounding apocalyptic "end of democracy" scenarios, some more plausible than others, but there is an emerging anxiety that our particular American form of government, that balances the will of the majority against the rights of the minority, is under threat.  Although I would like to be, I have to admit that I'm not altogether optimistic myself that our government can emerge unscathed from the current political climate of which Trump is the major symptom, though not the underlying disease.

In the terms I have set out above, on the one hand, there is a prevailing sense that government no longer reflects the will of the people, but rather the will of their major donors.  During the run up to the election, both Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump appealed to a popular sentiment that government is controlled by special interests and elites of one sort or another. Although one cannot know exactly what Sanders might have done, despite pledges to drain the swamp, Trump's administration has done more to ensconce elites and may well go down in history as one of the most corrupt in history, edging out Grant and Harding for the title.  On the other hand, there is a sense that "rights" are under attack.  Whether it is the 2nd Amendment right to own what many perceive as the means to mayhem, or the Roe v Wade right to commit what many perceive to be the murder of a child, the general feeling is the same, a sense that "rights" have been eroded.  In short, though our American form of government has always been adversarial, many feel, I feel, that we are no longer engaged in the actual sporting contest, as though the game itself has been abandoned, the teams have rushed the field, and a brawl has ensued.   

As Norm Ornstein put it for the Atlantic, the malaise is

stronger and deeper than most veteran political analysts realized or were willing to acknowledge.  They are neither immediate nor transitory phenomena.  The disdain for the status quo, for authority figures of both parties and other institutions, and the anger at inexorable changes in society are real, enduring, and especially deep on the Republican side.  Ideology forms a significant part of that anger, but it transcends much of the predictable divide between liberals and conservatives.

How do we understand the current malaise?  The first key to a real understanding might be "don't panic."  Although I find Trump alarming, and his rhetoric boorish and dispiriting, I nevertheless share Pinker's appraisal that the state of the world is better today than at any time in the past.  To lend credence to his optimism, he suggests a Rawls-like thought experiment.  Imagine you are in line waiting to be born on earth.  You can choose any historical period you like, but you must choose under a veil of ignorance -- that is to say, you cannot choose what today we might call markers of identity, your race, your gender, your ethnicity, your parents education and income level, et cetera.  Anyone who chooses any time other than the present is setting themselves up for a huge disappointment.  It may have been great if you're born white, male, Anglo-Saxon, of a well-educated and rich lineage, but what if you're born black, female, African, of an illiterate and slave lineage?  Not so great. 

Ezra Klein, who shares Pinker's optimism, quotes Ian Haney Lopez, who calls the 20th century United States "'a herrenvolk liberal democracy' -- a democracy for the majority ethnic group but something very different for the rest of society."   Having said that, it was a “herrenvolk” democracy, a majority ethnic group subject to the push and pull of minority rights.   If "being more democratic" represents progress – that is to say, if the inclusion of racial and ethnic minorities into the political system has extended beyond the “herrenvolk” represents progress -- then are more democratic today than we have ever been in the past.   Not only do women have the franchise, but blacks and Hispanics are better (though not perfectly) able to exercise their right to vote.  As I've noted above, there are still impediments that need to be addressed, but they are not the impediments of 1840, nor are they the impediments of 1940, nor even the impediments of 1960.   

Trump's promise to "make America great again" is in part a call to reinstate our “herrenvolk liberal democracy,” and he might succeed in a limited fashion, for a limited time.  I doubt, however, that he will succeed for long.  I am not suggesting that the resistance should quit resisting – Hitler, after all, succeeded in a limited fashion, for a limited time in creating his Nietzchian paradise -- but Trump’s over-sized ego and his hyperbolic bravado poorly disguises something desperate and pathetic.  As many have noted, for example, the tide of demographics is clearly against him.   We are edging into a minority-majority future, and so long as the conservative red sox identify themselves more and more as the provincial party of the white Christian nationalists, the liberal blue sox will continue to build a cosmopolitan multi-racial, multi-ethnic plurality.   One suspects the future will be more blackish than black and white, more tacos and tempura than chicken-fried steaks and gravy.   And there are reasons to celebrate Meghan Markle's wedding that go beyond the fairy tale of a British royal wedding.   Perhaps I am seeing something that isn’t there, but it strikes me that corporate advertising is not only featuring more and more diversity, but they also featuring inter-racial couples with racially ambiguous children, and they’re doing so without much hoopla.

Having said all that, a couple of things to note here.  First, although Trump and Trumpism have usurped the GOP, the heart of the GOP is anything but the party of Duck Dynasty and Rosanne.   Trump’s most loyal supporters might be the white Christian nationalists, those who feel the loss of status within the “herrenvolk” most acutely, but as Ornstein intimated above, he tapped into a deeper and more pervasive anger at “elites.”   As a sort of preliminary analysis, there really are two sorts of “elites” at the present moment in history, and for the sake of brevity, let me call them the “technocrats” and the “plutocrats.”  

By way of confession, my sympathies lie with the “technocrats,” and for a complete and optimistic description of the “technocrat,” one should read Steven Pinker’s Enlightenment Now.  These are the people who ask, “what exactly is the problem we’re trying to solve?” and then go about finding tangible, real-world solutions to the problem.  In some respects, the technocrat has displaced the role of educated elite played by the clergy, a displacement that took place gradually, in part because technocratic ministrations were about equally efficacious with clerical ministrations – in medicine, for example, bleeding and prayer were on a par in the curing of disease – until modern medical science took off on its geometric climb in the early 20^th century and suddenly there really was no contest if one actually wanted to get “better.”   Having said that, of course, modern medical science is not perfect, nor does it make any claims to perfection, and so there will always be room for prayer in the gap between “better” and perfection, but each medical advance narrows the gap. 

There are difficulties with science, as such, but its “amorality” is perhaps most fundamental, particularly as the technocrat competes with the clergy for status.  Pinker wants to make the case that the technocratic enterprise itself has pretentions to morality, but he’s unconvincing.  At the end of the day, the problem at hand might be “how do we mitigate the effects of lung cancer?” or it might be “how do we make cigarettes more addictive?” and both problems are amenable to “technical” solutions.   One can come up with numerous examples where technocrats, so to speak, have been working diligently on both sides of the fence, and for some that is sufficient reason to distrust the whole technocratic enterprise.   We might instinctively feel that those working on behalf of the American Cancer Society have a greater pretense to morality than those working on behalf of R. J. Reynolds, particularly since their work has gone to enrich a select few plutocrats at the expense of the people at large, the question of their relative morality requires an answer outside the technocratic enterprise itself.

One way to examine this might be to examine the moral pretentions of a largely technocratic enterprise.  John Benjamin, for example, writing for the New Republic points at the technocrat's moral dimension.  He notes that "an MBA class will consider a business issue ... in isolation.  Its challenges are delineated; its society-level implications are waved away."  The over-riding reason for this comes back to the singular business goal, or as he put it, "the principals over-riding goal, profit maximization, is assumed," and the issue, whatever it might be, is considered with "mechanical efficiency" relative to this singular business goal of profit maximization.  Echoing Pinker's advice, if in doubt, quantify, Benjamin contends that "individual choices are abstracted into numbers or modeled in graphs."  At one level, of course, there's nothing particularly immoral about "maximizing profits," and as Benjamin puts it, "when the [issue] is benign, these exercises aren't problematic, just technically challenging."  Yet, as he notes,

there are times when the topic of a study widens, and an inquiry into a business issue raises questions about business in general, and what our economic system should be calibrated to incentivize and allow.  These instances lay bare the limits of the MBA world view, [and I would extend this generally to the technocrat's world view] as student's shy away from the economy's moral outcomes ...

So again, we might instinctively feel that those who do take into account the broader social context have a greater pretense to morality than those blinkered by in the search for an elegant solution to the singular goal of profit maximization, but the question of morality seems to require an answer outside the technocratic enterprise itself.        

Here, of course, the clergy want to insert themselves with the claim that religion has the answer to questions of morality.  I find the claim dubious, in part because the follow-on question, “which religion?” cannot be answered in any way that feels definitive, or objective, apart from accidental biases accrued from the culture of one’s birth.  That a Christian man in a Christian nation finds the obvious answer in Christianity, the Muslim man in a Muslim nation finds the equally obvious answer in Islam.  Even within a religion, objective decisions seem problematic.  Is the Catholic or Protestant or Mormon version the correct version of Christianity?  Is the Shite or Sunni version the correct version of Islam?   What objective evidence would one muster to support the conjecture that this (and not that) religion has a “better” claim on morality, much less the only claim on morality? 

It may be the case that science is amoral, but it doesn’t necessarily follow that we need religion for morality.    One can simply ask, “does this decrease human suffering?” or conversely, along with Pinker, ask “does this increase human flourishing?”  While there are, one supposes, definitional issues involved – e.g. “what counts as human suffering?” or conversely “what counts as human flourishing?” – but here one can trust the democratic impulse.  People are adept at knowing when they suffer.  They are not always adept at knowing why they suffer, or how to alleviate their suffering, but they are adept at “feeling their pain,” great and small.  Because they are not always adept at knowing why and how, all of the people fall prey to charlatans some of the time, some of the people fall prey to charlatans all of the time, but eventually reality asserts itself.  Once the smoke has cleared and we know that cigarette smoking causes lung cancer, among other noxious diseases, it seems rather clear that they increase human suffering.   Consequently, the technocrats at R. J. Reynolds are engaged in an enterprise less moral than those at the American Cancer Society. 

Although science is not a religion, to many it must seem like a religion and one in a pitched battle with their own religion. There are any number of explanations, not least the invidious comparison between ignorance and knowledge.  The vast majority of Americans are scientifically and technically ignorant. While almost everyone has an opinion on the matter, I doubt that one in ten Americans could begin to explain, for example, the difference between “green-house gasses” and other “gasses,” how the “green-house gasses” are raising the average (the average, not the immediate) temperature of the earth, or why that might not be such a good thing.  Though I could take a stab at it, I’m pretty sure my attempts would be laughable to the real experts, and like the vast majority of Americans I must simply put my faith in the expertise of the experts.  Although I would assert that there are real differences, to many this “faith” feels no different than the “faith” demanded by the clergy, and it comes with fewer social and psychological benefits, that sense of belonging to something larger than oneself and the reassurances of being special, in the know, among the elect, superior to the heathen.

At one level, there is nothing democratic about the expertise of the expert, and to the extent that it demands deference, it is authoritarian.  If I can be permitted a bit of anthropomorphizing, science and the technocratic enterprise, as such, don’t really care what a majority of people might think or feel or prefer.  Reality is reality, and while any positive statement about reality is conjecture, some conjectures are better than others.  How so better?  It is not merely, or not only, a matter of individual opinion, in part because, at another level, science is deeply democratic.  Science and the technocratic enterprise are really concerned with a majority-minority opinion – that is to say,  the majority among the minority of their peers.   In another domain, the coterie of economists might not much care what an “ignorant” public might think, but they do care what other economists, examining their conjecture, and its supporting data, might think.  It is perhaps more indicative of human nature than bad science that, on occasion, individual technocrats fudge data, ignore inconvenient realities, follow the cash, succumb to areas of blindness, or the like.  Reality has a way of asserting itself, and while one economist might fool all his peers some of the time, some of his peers all the time, it’s unlikely that he’ll fool all his peers all the time.  Science and the technocratic enterprise are concerned with being “right,” or at least “not wrong,” and the conjecture of any individual technocrat, if it is to have “authority,” must meet the test of confirmation or refutation among peers. For a sense of how this plays out, compare Matthew Stewart's article for the Atlantic, "The 9.9 Percent is the New American Aristocracy," with Jordan Weissman's article for Slate, "Actually, the 1 Percent are Still the Problem."  

Consequently, science and the technocratic enterprise are concerned with two sets of rights – free inquiry and free expression.  Not necessarily the same thing.  One of the most discouraging things about the gun debate, speaking as a technocrat, is not the influence of the NRA’s money or the congressional inability to address gun violence with positive measures, but the current restrictions on research.  If one cannot examine the facts, then everything becomes simply a matter of opinion and taste.  It’s as though there were anamorphous “right to fly,” and the political structure banned research on airline accidents or measures to improve the safety of airlines.  Having said that, it's not as if there is no research on the topic, and one can hear the technocrat's frustration in an article like that of German Lopez of Vox.  The headline of his piece reads, "I've covered gun violence for years.  The solutions aren't a big mystery."  He speaks, that is, with the authority of an expert, having "covered gun violence for years," and the solutions he proposes are "evidence-based," which he provides throughout the article, with caveats as appropriate.  The fundament problem, which cuts to the core of the technocrat's world view, is that it "hasn't come to grips with the problem."  We haven't, that is, defined gun violence as the problem to be solved.  We haven't formulated policy conjectures that can be enacted (as they have elsewhere with some success) and the results measured.    

To be continued

Lies and the Crises of Representation

I have spent a good deal of my adult life studying and teaching "literature."  I considered it a nobel enough pursuit -- partly because it was conspicuously unremunerative -- and one of the justifications for studying obviously made up stories was this:  the story told a deeper truth.  I won't diverge into a defense of poetry, but consider, for example, the Bible.  There are those who claim to believe in the "literal" truth of the Bible, and for those I don't need to waste much time, mostly because it is buttressed by ignorance, whether willful or not.  Beyond that, one can approach the Bible as a "fiction," which in no way disparages it, but simply suggests that it need not necessarily be literally true in order to point at deeper truths.  Those truths can be "truths of God," or in a more secular sense, "truths of mankind," or both, since the one need not necessarily exclude the other.  I point this out for a couple of reasons, but mostly to illustrate just how slippery the concept of "truth" can be in the larger scheme of things -- that we can "tell the truth," and at the same time "tell it slant."  So, hold this idea in mind when we talk about lies. 

One can create a taxonomy of lies, and the first or most obvious sort is the lie designed to conceal the truth.  There is behind this a literalist version of the "truth," where language refers to things and actions out there in the world in rather conventional ways.  Philosophically, this literalist version of the "truth" is enormously difficult to pin down, but we can recognize it when we see it and its important that we do.  A prosecuting attorney, for example, might ask, "did you shoot your wife?"   If the accused confesses and answers "yes," the prosecutor doesn't need to go on and ask, "was it your gun?  was the gun loaded with bullets?  was the gun pointed at your wife?  were you the one holding it?  were you the one who pulled the trigger? did you have motive for killing her? "  The list of potential questions might go on, but they only become necessary in a system of jurisprudence if the accused lies and answers simply "no."  The prosecutor can show the accused is lying through ancillary evidence -- e.g. records showing that the gun belonged to the accused, that he kept it loaded in the hall closet, that there was gun powder residue on his hand, et cetera.  All of this accords with our conventional understanding of the world and how it works.

Behind the conventional idea of a lie is an understanding of intent -- i.e. the accused told the lie intentionally in order to escape prosecution or some other deleterious result.  Consequently, while normally insisting on the "truth," we can easily forgive and over-look the so-called "white lies" because the intent is not (or not wholly) self-serving.   The lie conceals a truth that might be socially inappropriate or hurtful.  There are times when the infamous question, "does this skirt make my butt look fat?" can only be answered, "yes,I'd change into something else."  Although the answer is completely a matter of taste and opinion, one can imagine scenarios where such a "truth" might be the best response, but generally speaking one can also imagine scenarios where the "truthful response" would cross normally accepted social norms and as such could be seen as an intentional attempt to be hurtful.

There are several things to notice here.  First, there is the nature of the question itself, which is embedded within a complex interpersonal dynamic, which in turn is embedded within equally complex social norms surrounding taste and beauty.  Consider Sir Mix a Lot's take on the matter of butts, one freighted with racial implications.  Or perhaps Megan Trainer's take on the matter, one equally freighted with gender implications.  Second, there is this matter of taste and beauty itself, or what might normally be called the subjective nature of the response, which quickly devolves into a prismatic my truth, your truth, his truth, her truth.  There is, of course, a difference between a question like "did you shoot your wife?" and "does this skirt make my butt look too large?"  The one can be answered "factually" and the truth adjudicated against observable, verifiable evidence.  The other, not so much, which is not to say there is no evidence whatsoever.  There is the butt after all, and one might discuss what it means for a butt to be fat within certain racial and gender contexts, and such discussions might have relevance to the answer, though such discussions don't really answer the question at all.  So third, there is not only this matter of context and occasion.  In asking, she is not seeking a discussion on aesthetic responses to butts, rather a disconfirmation of doubts about her appearance.  Best to answer, "Hard to say, you always look great to me."      

Another word on observable or verifiable evidence. Consider, for example, Bill Clinton's infamous statement, "I did not have sex with that woman."   Forensic evidence proved the "lie."  We could engage in semantic exercises.  If "sex" refers only to vaginal penetration, then technically speaking he did not have sex with that woman.  This so beggars our conventional understanding of what it means to "have sex," however, that this explanation for the "truth" of his statement was unconvincing and hypocritical.  Given that he "lied," one could imagine various motivations for the "lie," all of which might be "true."  Perhaps, he did so in order to spare his wife the embarrassment and hurt that would come with the admission that he did indeed have sex with that woman.  One could also imagine he did so too in order to spare himself the embarrassment and the political fallout from a more truthful statement.   Altogether, it's easy enough to imagine the motive for the act itself and the motives for lying.  Whether he lied primarily to spare his wife, or primarily to spare himself, even Bill Clinton might not know, and nothing prevents us from imagining both might exist simultaneously.   Having said this, context and occasion continue to matter, however, and Bill Clinton lied within a context that carried penalties, within a grand jury investigation.  Clearly, in this context, he should not have lied, but that he did lie is perfectly understandable.   The weight one puts on this might depend upon how one views the act itself, or how one viewed Bill Clinton in the first place, or in our increasingly partisan environment, or how one affiliates with the political environment.   

In a recent Slate article, Yascha Mounk in turn cites a recent article by Hahl, Kim and Sivan.  In it, they attempt an experimental solution, as Mounk put it, to "one of the central puzzles of the 2016 election: why did so many people support Donald Trump even though he told so many blatant lies?"   The academics go to answer this question by differentiating between two types of lies, both of which are implicit in the discussion above.  One they call a "special-access lie," the other a "common-knowledge lie."  The first they define as "a deliberately false statement based on facts about which the speaker is thought to have special access," and it is the sort of lie that one might expect the accused to tell within a court of law when they plead "not guilty" to a crime they have in fact committed.  They give Bill Clinton's lie as an example of the same.  He (and Monica Lewinsky) had special access to facts about their relationship that no one else had, and he effectively pled "not guilty" until his accusers met their burden of proof.   They go on to suggest that the "reason why politicians tell such lies is that they are gambling that their falsehood will never be uncovered ... Such a politician is indirectly reinforcing the norm that speakers should make true statements and avoid false ones; the implicit claim is that the truth is important and her statement is true."

The other, the "common-knowledge lie," the academics define as follows: "a false assertion about facts to which the speaker has no special access."  They give as an example Donald Trump's claim that his inaugural crowd was larger than Obama's, though the "truth" of the statement could be disproved through readily available photographs of the two events.  They go on to say, "the ideal-typical case of this type of lie is one in which the speaker not only knows the statement is false, but she knows her listeners also know that she knows the statement is false; it is thus common knowledge that the statement is false."  Perhaps because it would simply not occur to most to engage in "common-knowledge lies," that Trump tells so many such "whoppers" is a distinctive and puzzling and, yes, at times, infuriating feature of his candidacy and his presidency.  The academics feel "the distinction is useful because it clarifies what is at stake. In particular, whereas the speaker of a special-access lie is implicitly upholding the norm of truth-telling, the common-knowledge liar is implicitly attacking this norm."

I would encourage people to read the academic study to form a judgement about the study itself, and the conclusions they draw.  For the moment Mounk provides a good summary of what is at stake.  He writes,

the reason why populists and political newcomers are so willing to challenge basic democratic norms is in part tactical: whenever populists break such norms, they attract the univocal condemnation of the political establishment.  And this of course proves that, as advertised, the populists really do represent a clean break from the status quo.  There is thus something performative about populists' tendency to break democratic norms: while their most provocative statements are often considered gaffes by political observers, their very willingness to commit such gaffes is a big part of the appeal.

There are a few things to unpack here, not least the notion that "truth-telling" is a "democratic norm."  We all know, of course, that politicians lie.  They do so for any number of reasons, but mostly to avoid embarrassment and to conceal what motivates them.  Bill Clinton's assertions about Monica Lewinsky and now Trump's assertions about Stormy Daniels are more alike than not.  These are the most blatant of special-access lies.  Both competing politicians and the press make it their business to "expose" special-access lies.  We have, in other words, an adversarial political system -- one in which adversaries insist on the truth each from the other, though not necessarily from themselves.   Just as conservatives were adversarial to Obama, liberals are adversarial to Trump, and even a casual reading of history would suggest we're experiencing an "adversarial politics as usual," amplified perhaps by social media and negative partisanship.  Like sports teams and their fans trash talking one another, the contending parties have never been the best  source of accurate information.  Consequently, within liberal democracies, the so called mainstream media has served a traditional and mediating role in the adversarial system, pun intended.  While any particular outlet has always had "bias," and might spend more time "digging dirt" on one party over another, it has been generally assumed that the dirt they dig meets a standard of verifiable truth.  While the New York Times might be more keen to expose conservatives and the Wall Street Journal might be equally keen to expose liberals, both are constrained by standards of verifiable evidence.*

Implicit in this is an assumption that governance is ultimately "fact-based."  Here's what I mean by that.  No conservative politician will say "I want to cut donor class taxes because they contribute to my campaign and I want to provide a quid pro quo."  That misrepresentation might be the "truth" behind their motives, and I think there is a growing consensus between both liberals and conservatives that the "system is rigged" and corrupt for precisely this reason, but that misrepresentation is the most special of special-access lies.  We can make inferences from patterns of contribution and votes, particularly those legislative votes that favor the donor class as they run counter to public opinion, even so there is a chicken and egg question.  Do the donors support the politician's values and principles, or do the values and principles follow the money?  Only the politician can know his motives with absolute certainty, and at the end of the day, having said that, I'm not sure it matters.  Most conservative politicians will, however, say "I want to cut donor class taxes so they can invest in new business and job creation."  Although there is little reason to assume the motivation for saying this is genuine, the proof here is nevertheless in the pudding.  Do tax cuts in fact spur investment in new business and job creation?  Moreover, do tax cuts in fact create new tax paying businesses and workers that make up the difference and protect popular social programs like education?  The evidence is mostly in, and the answer to both questions is "no, not really."  If the people feel that new business and job creation are desirable ends -- and why else would a politician justify policy with new business and job creation if they were not desirable ends -- then we need to explore other instrumental means to that end.  In this rather complicated pragmatic sense, truth-telling is a "democratic norm."

There is, however, another sense that he is caught up within fact-based norms.  Even if we assume the worst motives behind the Mueller investigation -- that is to say, even if we assume it is motivated purely by partisan malice -- it shouldn't matter.  Although certainly people have their opinions, Trump continues as president under a presumption of innocence. Why?  It's not largess or partisan bias.  There is a logical, evidentiary reason for the presumption of innocence.  One simply cannot prove the negative or the "absence" of a crime.  One may have read a billion Hillary email messages and find nothing incriminating, but there is always the possibility that the next email may reveal something incriminating.  The possibility may be remote, and one may weary of the effort and expense of finding it, but it nevertheless remains a possibility.  Consequently, each new trove of recovered emails sparked hope in her adversaries mind during the last presidential election cycle.  Until that incriminating email shows up, however, we must presume innocence.  Despite the chants of "lock her up," or the "Hillary for Prison" bumper stickers, she remains free to hike the woods.    Likewise, the Mueller investigation.  I think the smoke surrounding Trump is darker and denser, and I really believe that the history will reveal his administration to be even more corrupt than Hardings, but the investigators must prove the positive or the "presence" of a crime by providing evidence of that crime.  For the sake of our criminal justice system, we would hope the evidence is substantive and verifiable.

So, again, what are we to make of a president with little regard for fact-based norms?  I think Mounk is correct when he suggests there is something performative about Trump's lying.  As John Barron might confirm, Trump is his own supreme fiction, which brings me round to the academics' notion of the "common-knowledge lie" or "fiction."  In fiction, the speaker knows his statements are not "fact-based," the listener knows his statements are not "fact-based," but the statements can be "true" in a deeper, non-literal sense.  Consider, for example, Trump's easily debunked assertion that his inaugural crowd was larger than Obama's.  It is parallel to the also easily debunked statement that he would have won the popular vote had it not been for all the "illegal" votes.  Within fact-based norms neither statement makes particular sense, but when one is willing to suspend disbelief -- that is to say, when one is willing to view the statement within the context of Trump's fictive vision of a "real" America populated with "real" Americans -- it begins to make sense.  The black Americans who swelled Obama's inaugural crowd simply "don't count."  The black and Hispanic and others who swelled Clinton's popular vote simply "don't count."  In this deeper, non-literal sense, his statements are "true" within his vision of the "real" America, and this deeper truth no doubt resonated with his voters.  I am not suggesting that the Trump supporters consciously made this connection.  Other interpretations are, of course, possible, and there will be those benighted few who believe, who really believe, the statements are literally true.  I am simply suggesting that, within Trump's world, the statements don't need to regard "fact-based norms" to be "true" in a deeper, more important and consequently more authentic sense.

Mounk and the academics see Trump as a "lying demagogue," and his ascendency comes within a "crises of legitimacy."  As Mounk put it,

when the political system is widely seen as doing its job, somebody like Trump, who violates its basic norms, is seen as illegitimate.  A politician who blatantly lies doesn't stand a chance.  But this changes when more and more people come to believe the system is rigged and that most politicians don't have their best interest in mind.  Amid such a "crises of legitimacy," voters don't particularly care whether a politician plays by the rules of the game. Instead they long for somebody who bluntly states how rotten the system really is.

He goes on to point out that a "crises of legitimacy" can take two forms.  He paraphrases the academics by suggesting that

in a"representation crisis," large segments of the population feel that the political establishment doesn't govern on their behalf.  Meanwhile, in a "power devaluation crisis," a once dominant group resents the fact that politicians increasingly seem to pay attention to new, formerly less powerful groups.  The United States is currently suffering from both crises.  Many minority groups understandably fear that the current government doesn't have their best interests at heart.  At the same time, many member of the shrinking ethnic majority have good reason to believe that their power will keep on dwindling.  In other words, the legitimacy of the American political system is increasingly in doubt on both sides of the partisan divide.

A "representation crises" can be addressed within fact-based democratic norms, the "power devaluation crises" not so much.  On the former, one doesn't need to dig deeply to find constituents who feel the political establishment fails to represent them -- that is to say, fails to serve their interests. At the heart of a crises of representation is another crises of representation.  At the risk of sounding naïve, I do believe that there is a reality, out there, that transcends me.  We can "represent" any given reality in a number of ways, but that doesn't suggest that there is a parity between facts and alternative facts or that a locution like "alternative facts" is even meaningful.**   Nevertheless, some fictions are compelling because we want them to be true.  And indeed, yes! wouldn't it be great if low taxes did bring a libertarian paradise into existence, one replete with well paying jobs and full-coverage medical, one stocked with well-funded schools and other public amenities, but unfortunately reality has a way of asserting itself and low taxes don't bring a libertarian paradise into existence.  Reality has a way of asserting itself. They haven't in the past, and despite all our wishful thinking, they won't in the future.  Although one might imagine a time when a politician might have made this claim in good faith, any politician who makes the claim today, ignoring or in ignorance of all the evidence to the contrary, is "misrepresenting" reality.  The lack-luster response to the recent tax cut is evidence perhaps that people are waking up to that reality, which means too that politicians who "misrepresent" reality also "misrepresent" their interests when they claim that tax cuts to the rich will improve the lives of the other 99%. 

I simply do not see a democratic response to the "power devaluation crises" or, perhaps more accurately to catch the full spectrum of social and economic classes, the "status devaluation crises."  In all truth, I could see very little in Obama's presidency that was identifiably "black," though one doesn't need to dig deeply to understand that his mere presence in the White House symbolized the perils of an on-going and irreversible demographic shift in this country.  We are rapidly becoming minority majority. If we think of democracy in its purest sense, as majority rule, democracy itself becomes the enemy, and for those who feel the loss of status, it isn't surprising that they turn to an anti-democratic demagogue who exchanged the dog whistle for a microphone.  He is president, in part, because of another "crises of representation," one hard-wired into our constitution.  As has been pointed out, the state of Wyoming with a half million people has two Senators, and the state of California with 35 million people has two Senators.  Spread across the country, here again, if we think of democracy in its purest sense, the people of Wyoming are significantly over-represented relative to the people of California.  The House ostensibly balances this out, but gerrymandering tilts the balance again.  Regardless, realistically speaking, the Senate carries greater weight and is, consequently, harder to move.  I am not sure how we overcome the demons of our baser instincts, the racial animus of tribal politics, but they are the demons we must exorcise.      
         




*There is a longer discussion here, particularly about broadcast media, and even more particularly about media outlets like MSNBC and Fox News.  Although no one would question their partisan positions, and I do think that both Maddow and Hannity are guilty, as Samantha Bee put it, of throwing "together a bunch of scary buzzwords and out-of-context clips to support an outrageous conclusion."  That said, however, I might be revealing my own confirmation bias in suggesting that there are differences between them as well, not least that Maddow adheres closely to verifiable evidence.   As the recent disclosures suggest, however, Sean Hannity himself is not adverse to the special-access lie, concealing his relationship with Trump's attorney as he excoriates those investigating him on air.

** To illustrate the point, I would hold up a fist-sized rock and ask a simple question, "what is this?"  The quick and obvious answer was, of course, "a rock," but a slight context shift revealed it was a "murder weapon," since that particular rock had been used to bludgeon someone to death.  Another slight context shift revealed it was a "sacred stone," since embedded within the visible patterns of its mineral composition was the yin-yang symbol for the reconciliation of opposites.  Another slight context shift revealed it was primarily SiO2, commonly known as "quartz."  I could go on, but the point was typically made.  There seems to be no limit to the ways in which "reality" can be represented, but that doesn't mean anything goes or that it doesn't matter how we represent that reality.  It was plausibly a murder weapon because the object was hard and jagged, and while a piece of marble could have sufficed as a murder weapon, the particular "rock" I held up was not CaCO3, but SiO2, a very different mineral.   A correct representation matters because a fragment of SiO2 was found embedded in the murder victim's skull, not CaCO3.    

Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Today, and Human Flourishing

I have grown soul sick of listening to the Trump escapades on the news feeds, so I have been listening to Esta Tonne (I particularly like the video “Flight of the Butterfly”) and some other odd ball stuff which prompts more odd ball stuff to pop up as YouTube tries to guess my preferences.  I chanced upon a rather lengthy discussion between Steven Pinker and Sam Harris, and then another between Steven Pinker and Stephen Fry.   In both discussions the topic or pretext was Pinker’s new book Enlightenment Today.  I had read Pinker’s earlier book, The Language Instinct, in which he defends Chomsky’s hypothesis that language is innate to humans and thought it good.  I have ordered the new book, and it awaits me on my Kindle, so I’m sure you’ll be hearing about it more, but I wanted to capture my thoughts, for emendation, before reading the book.

At any rate, Pinker was talking about “human flourishing” and the triode of health, happiness, love (or something very close to it) rolled off his tongue naturally.  I rather like the notion of “human flourishing,” and I have articulated similar ideas in my other, more political blog – that is to say, the governing intentionality of the state should be the alleviation of suffering.  There is a Buddhist slant to that statement, though it’s not inherently or exclusively Buddhist, and I think of it mostly in “secular” terms.  Though we need a bit of empathy to understand the suffering of others, we don’t need any particular religion, or for that matter any religion at all, to understand human suffering.  We all suffer.   From there, of course, it’s all nuance, distinctions within distinctions, with plenty of room for discussion.  If I might be permitted one such distinction, for example, the suffering that results from our biology (e.g. thirst, hunger, “horniness,” et cetera) and the suffering that results from our social circumstances (e.g. invidious comparisons of possession or wealth).  I could go on from there, but you can see there’s plenty of room for discussion.   As the notion of “invidious comparison” reminds us, many of the distinctions are relative distinctions, or what I have called elsewhere “spectrum issues.”  It’s one thing to be hungry in the sense of starvation, another in the sense that I haven’t eaten since noon and I’m developing a craving for sushi.   More on that below.   

Setting some of the nuance aside for the moment, if we can accept that the governing intentionality of the state (the moral imperative of the state) should be the alleviation of suffering, then the means to that end are simply “technical” and we can come at them through rational means.   By "technical" and "rational means," there are essentially two questions, one epistemological and the other ontological – how do we measure and then how do we affect that measure?   It’s important to determine first “how we measure,” though there need be nothing mysterious about it.  Suffering is much to vague a concept to be operative, even a second level exemplar like hunger is too vague to be operative, so we need what might be called a “pragmatic” definition of hunger that measurement provides.   We want to alleviate hunger, for example, and one way of determining if we’re moving in the right direction might be the number of deaths per capita from starvation.  Or perhaps more relevant to our immediate circumstance, the prevalence of “diet” related diseases, to include obesity, which, it might be argued, is a form of starvation resulting from the relative cost and availability of empty calories.  From there, of course, we can devise “actions” that can go a long way toward reducing the number of deaths, or the prevalence of diet related disease.   There are, of course, "treatment" options for those individuals who have the disease.   Diabetes, one of the knock off effects of obesity,  for example, has a number of treatment options available.  There are also social actions that can be taken.   We could, for example, decide to tax “empty calories,” addressing the relative cost and helping defray the costs of treating the resultant diseases, or we could ban “empty calories” altogether.  In either case, you can see there’s still plenty of room for discussion about how best to proceed, but it’s possible to proceed on both the individual and social front, and make “progress,” even if we can’t achieve perfection.

At this point, a couple of obvious things.   First, it’s important to decide first, not after, what the “measure” -- that is to say, we must be able to answer the questions “how do we know we’re making progress?” – otherwise it all devolves into tautology.  This is a rather technical point, but it points to a human desire to “act first, think later.”  Simply put, if you place the action before a clear understanding of what one wants as a result of that action, the action itself is often considered and held up as the mark of success and progress, even if the results are counter-productive.  One might leap from a cliff expecting to fly, and one does, briefly, but the sudden stop might suggest it was a bad idea.  If one is nevertheless committed to leaping from cliffs, it’s almost always possible to find “post hoc reasons” after the fact to “justify” it.   The leap did, after all, produce flight for 3.7 seconds, and we might improve on that by flailing our arms ever harder.   I’m not being as facetious as it might seem.  Many of our “committed” economic ideas are not unlike “leaping from a cliff.”  We might want to take the leap and “reduce corporate taxes” to improve business investment of the sort that leads to jobs (and it does, perhaps, free up capital here and there for those businesses that are feeling the pressure of unmet demand) but the cost of starving the public coffers can be devastating.  The state of Kansas provides a good example.  The decrease in taxes was not met with an increase in “taxing paying jobs” sufficient to replenish the public coffers, and everything from education to law enforcement suffered as a result.  This is not a trivial observation insofar as “human flourishing” or the alleviation of human suffering are directly or indirectly facilitated by those institutions dedicated to the public weal.   Still, look!  Lower taxes.   We are now going down the same path nationally, and Paul Ryan at least has held the action itself is held up as a mark of success and progress.          

Second, there are ethical concerns behind the question, “how best to proceed?”  Taxing and banning “empty calories” begs questions of “individual freedom and accountability.”  Here again, however, it is not an either/or issue, but rather a spectrum issue.   The outright ban of “empty calories” represents one end of the spectrum.  The state does everything.  The individual is not free to consume “empty calories,” and so cannot be held accountable for what he cannot do.  At the other end of the spectrum, the state could do nothing, and the individual bears the whole “accountability.”  Food processors continue to manufacture and market “empty calories,” and people continue to consume them and develop the diabetes and the heart diseases that result from “supersize me.”   Although the food processors may try to persuade people to consume the “empty calories,” they are not forcing people to consume them, and so individuals who do so should bear the full and sometimes devastating costs of treating the diseases that result.   On the spectrum, the “tax and defray” option might be considered “centrist,” but the ethical concern remains as a matter of degree – to what extent do we accommodate individual freedom and to what extent do we then hold individual’s accountable?

Implicit in the example above is another problem that Pinker mentions during the pod casts.   We might think of “human flourishing” and/or the “alleviation of human suffering” as one among many human values.  Another might be “individual freedom.”   It is one thing to say, the governing intentionality of the state should be "human flourishing," another to say that the governing intentionality of the state should be the preservation of "human freedom."  These values are not necessarily commensurate.  In the example above, the core problem of obesity is one of human flourishing, but if it is a problem that must be solved within the context of “individual freedom and accountability,” many social options available to address it are, so to speak, off the table.   It is, of course, possible to reverse the order of precedence and see the core problem as the preservation of “individual freedom and accountability,” a value which must be maintained against various pressures to limit freedom, even those clearly aimed at improving “human flourishing.”  

The first order of precedence is normally associated with “liberalism” (in a squishy sort of way) while the second is normally associated with “conservatism” (in an equally squish sort of way).   Consider, for example, the problem of “guns.”  There is a rather substantial, evidence-based argument that guns add to the store of human suffering.  As a consequence, to mitigate that suffering, “liberals” are quite willing to consider limitations on individual freedom that have been successful elsewhere in the world.  On the other hand, although “conservatives” might feel distraught in those instances where guns contribute to human suffering and wish to hold the individuals perpetrating the havoc responsible, the preservation of an individual freedom conveniently expressed within the Second Amendment takes precedence over any other “technical” attempt to mitigate the damage by limiting access to guns.

The parenthetical “squishy” comes to the fore when we consider other potential values.  As Pinker points out, something like “the glorification of and obedience to God” might be seen as the primary purpose of the state.  There remain various theocracies around the world, mostly in the middle east, for whom this value, this moral imperative, takes precedence over both individual freedom and human flourishing.  Within the United States, as a direct result of the First Amendment, we can talk about “religious preference” in much the same way that we talk about “ice-cream preference,” as a matter exercised within the realm of individual freedom and conscience.  Generally speaking, “liberals” are all in for individual choice when it comes to religion.   There is, however, a movement, mostly associated with “conservatives,” that would, not unlike the middle eastern theocracies, make “the glorification of and obedience to God” the governing intentionality of the state.  In contrast to “guns,” a more purely secular issue where “individual freedom” takes precedence, homosexuality cannot be consigned to the realm of “individual freedom” because homosexuality has been expressly forbidden by God and a state that sanctions or protects homosexuality fails in the glorification of and obedience to God.

Religion is a particularly fraught subject, which brings me back to Pinker and Harris.  If we’re on the path to theocracy, it will be a “Christian theocracy,” though I’m not sure just what that means.   There are sophisticated theological arguments about the nature of God and Christ, and I’ve touched a few, but at the end of the day, other than my acculturation within “Christendom,” I have no objective way of deciding between the “truth” of Christianity and the “truth” of Islam.   Even if I capitulate to my acculturation, I have no objective way of deciding between Catholicism and Protestantism, much less between Lutheranism and Methodism, and then there are outliers like the LDS church, not to mention the so-called "prosperity gospel" churches.  So long as this is a matter of individual freedom and conscience, and the state is expressly forbidden to declare for a particular religion, it probably doesn’t much matter.  I can believe what I want to believe, but when the “glorification of and obedience to God” becomes the governing intentionality of the state, we will be asking "what kind of Christian theocracy?' and what might be perceived as minor differences will matter.    Consider the recent history of Ireland, and the on-going struggles within the Middle East between Sunni and Shia Muslims.   

Back to the thread of the argument.  Pinker, in his lectures, makes a general case for the Enlightenment, where "humanism" provided the governing intentionalities, and "science" providing the technical means of satisfying those governing intentionalities.    Humanism, or secular humanism, does not so much disparage or discourage religion, but it does put it in brackets as irrelevant to the matter at hand,  a more inclusive "human flourishing."    Science provides the technical means of enhancing “human flourishing.”  In his lectures, he doesn’t fully address the post-modernist critiques of “science,” but from what I can gather, he has a very broad view of science and sees it as Popper sees it – “conjecture and refutation.”  If “science” is a religion, it is based on a single article of faith – that the “world” is “progressively comprehensible,” our theoretical conjectures are more and more accurate because our inaccurate conjectures are refuted and replaced with more accurate conjectures.   A Rawls like thought experiment provides justification.  Suppose you were sitting in heaven and about to be reborn.  What you DON’T know is your gender, race, sexual preference, parental social class, parental or social religion, or the other markers of “identity” politics, but you ARE given a choice of the historical era in which you can be born.  What would you choose?    The obvious answer is now.  Unless you are reborn as a straight, white male to upper class parents, chances are you will be much better off today than at almost any time in the past.  Even if you are reborn in the most favorable position, you will be susceptible to a wide range of disease that has more or less vanished from the earth.  Could things be better now?  Of course.  Could things get worse?  Of course.  The former stands as a cause for optimism, the latter as a cause for caution.  Progress is not inevitable, but the result of human endeavor.

A couple of ancillary points.  “Conjecture and refutation” cannot occur within a “closed society," to use Popper's term.  To refute a flawed conjecture, and all conjectures are to one degree or another flawed, one must not only have free speech, but the "freedom" to at least try out different means.    If there is a notion of “heresy,” things that simply cannot be said, then it is a closed society.  Theocracies are inherently “closed societies.”  Within a religion one might dispute the finer points of theology, and one might even justify the ways of God to man, but one cannot be among the faithful if one rejects the existence of god.   Other, secular forms of “heresy” (aka “political correctness”) are equally damaging.   Consequently, at a political scale, “conjecture and refutation” seems to demand one or another form of “democracy,” at least open elections where party platforms serve as the conjecture  about what best serves the public well being and human flourishing, with the vote as affirmation or refutation of that conjecture.  There are enormous complications associated with this.  It assumes that people will vote their "well-being," or their "self-interest" -- that is to say, that people will vote "rationally" -- but such is manifestly not always the case.  Moreover, party platforms (e.g. contemporary “conservatism,” which leans toward a nationalist theocracy) are not necessarily predicated on “enlightenment” values or an open society.  In other words, people living in an open society dedicated to human flourishing can “vote” to close it down in favor of a society dedicated to God's or the Nation's greatness.  While there is still considerable opposition to full closure, “Trumpism,” if left unchecked, could well result in a nationalist theocracy with Trump himself as the messianic leader – a charismatic David Koresh type, libido and all, as the supreme Leader.   Progress is not inevitable, but the result of human endeavor.

Thank God it's not Fascism

I watched a video the other day of a pundit explaining the difference between the left and the right, it being the "size" of government with the left ostensibly desiring a big government that regulates all aspects of life while the right supports a small government that promotes individual freedom. It was an advertisement that popped up before a YouTube video I wanted to watch, so there's no real stable link to the video, so my apologies if my immediate comments seem too pat. The advertisement itself was an attempt to stake out an ideological difference between the left and the right, or as Damon Linkin has put it elsewhere, "a uniform galvanizing ideology."  I will say right up front that the big government/small government dispute is a false dilemma.  If we think in terms of a particular issue -- "guns" -- it's relatively clear that the left desires greater government intervention and regulation.  If we think in terms of another particular issue -- "abortion" -- it's relatively clear that the right desires greater government intervention and regulation.  Suffice it to say, in these two issues at least, it's not so much a question of the government's size, or whether the government regulates an aspect of life, more a question of which particular aspect the government regulates.

As an aside, I might add it's also a question of who the government regulates, and the answer almost always comes back to the relative poor.  Money, of course, is a great facilitator, and anyone with sufficient money, should they feel the need for a gun or an abortion, could obtain one safely even if they were illegal.  Tim Murphy makes the case eloquently for political and moral hypocrisy when it comes to abortion, so I don't need to dwell on the issue.  The rich are indeed different, and "people of quality," as my grandmother used to refer to the local burgher's, have always felt themselves to be an exception to the rules that govern others.  Just saying this, however, puts me on the left side of the horseshoe, as one of the relative poor, in part because those on the right seem eager to accuse the left of fomenting "class warfare."  Perhaps so, but at the moment it seems mostly just a war of words, or more precisely a war of attitudes between what might be called the cultural left and the cultural right.  It's all those other "differences" that help form the attitudes -- the highly educated vs the modestly educated, the urban vs the rural, the ecumenical vs the religious fundamentalists, and the list could go on.  I'm really sick unto death of the culture wars, but if I had to stake out territory, I'd like to see myself as a Woody Guthrie populist, a left leaner empathetic to the plight of those who live in the fly over states and the drive by towns, but my empathy is wearing thin.  I have a vague suspicion that, if Woody were alive today, he'd be singing about getting drunk on a plane to Cancun.
             
I want to say that the culture wars, the attitudinal posturing on the left and right, is mostly a side show irrelevant to the real show, but I'm not sure I can make that claim unequivocally.  Attitudes toward the hot-button issues do matter to the quality of life.  There are significant reasons why, for example, a black urban female might hold different attitudes toward guns than a white rural male.  A few moments of reflection would reveal the circumstantial differences, and a few pundits have taken the time to notice the racial implications of the current "pro-life" youth movement calling for more stringent regulation of guns.  Almost all of the hot button issues have "racial implications," and we have yet to deal effectively with those "racial implications" in part because "race," in the most trivial way possible, transcends attitude.  You can be as right wing as Ben Carson, but if you're black, at the end of the day you're still black, and for altogether too many people that's the one thing that matters All else sorts from there.

Still, I want to say that the culture wars are mostly a side show irrelevant to the real show, but of late, particularly with the "right" politically ascendant in the on-going battles, it has become the principal show.  Consider, for example, one hot-button issue in the emergent culture wars -- Trump himself.  It's reasonably clear that Trump ran on a platform, if one can use that word, of hot-button culture war issues, most significantly those that touch most significantly on racial anxieties.  As the recent spate of sexual misconduct claims have once again revealed, he has lived a life diametrically opposed to the values espoused by evangelicals, but they continue to support him because he continues to support their side on the hot button issues.  One could go on, but the price of being a cultural icon on the right is the fear and loathing of those on the left.  As the NY Times put it, "Polls and every recent election show that Mr. Trump has galvanized liberal and moderate voters — especially women and those with college degrees — to oppose his party. Yet at the same time, personal loyalty to the president is increasingly the most crucial litmus test for Republicans."  They go on quote Mr. Costello, the representative not running for re-election in Pennsylvania, who noted that "Mr. Trump’s persona did not just fuel liberal activism — it also made it nearly impossible to talk about Republican policy goals.  'He blocks everything out,' Mr. Costello said of the president. 'What fuels the energy isn’t the issues. It’s the personality.'"   The left unwittingly or haplessly plays along because the "cultural" issues seem to determine who wins or loses elections.    

Having said all that, there is a general sort of consensus that the left is winning the culture wars while the right is winning the political wars.  Perhaps so, but both sides remain alarmed at the others "ascendency" while the country wallows in a moral sewer.  The Stormy Daniels affair is a case in point.  Writing for The Week, Damon Linkin asks "Have we learned anything from [the Stormy Daniels affair] that we didn't already know?"  He answers, not really.  Most of Trump's sexual escapades were well known before the election.  There is the possible exception that the "Daniels lawsuit has revealed to the public that Trump's entourage of sycophantic knuckleheads act like what they so manifestly are -- members of a criminal syndicate issuing threats of physical violence and other forms of intimidation in order to safeguard the Boss."  Perhaps so, but even that was known, and "anyway, isn't this a large part of what the President's most loyal supporters (white evangelical Christians) liked about him in the first place?"  Not the sexual escapades, which are an embarrassment and must be prayed away, but that "he promised to serve as their strongman protector willing to play rough and dirty in order to keep them safe from the coercive hand of the liberal state?"  If Trump's thuggish behavior energizes the left, equally it energizes the right, and he sits at a 10 month high in the polls after the Daniels story broke.

In the end, I could give a crap about Stormy Daniels.  In almost all respects, she is proving immune to Trump's shaming not because she is righteous in any way shape or form, not because she is speaking truth to power or any of the other moralizing shibboleths, but because she is the moral equivalent of Trump.  It's perhaps not surprising that a porn star would be as blithely shameless as Trump in pushing her fifteen minutes of fame into what?  a reality TV show and later a run for the Senate?  Who knows?  I would add, "who cares?" but it's almost impossible NOT to watch the lizards slither into and out of the moral sewer that our government has become.  The salacious stupidity of it all is not important in and of itself, but the results are important.  It is, after all is said and done, NOT a reality TV show, but our government, a "real" reality that will affect our lives in any number of ways.  At the risk of being exceptionally crude, if Ms. Daniels were to post a video of her spanking Trump's bare ass or engaging in oral sex with his tiny prick (the non-sex act that almost brought Clinton down) it might add to my loathing of the man, but then not much.  I already loath the man, and it's questionable how much MORE I could loath him, and even then it wouldn't change one iota how I am able and how I choose to live my own life.  The boring stuff happening off to the side will, however, affect me profoundly.  

In my previous post, I wondered about the inherent flaws in our constitutional form of government, and thought perhaps it might simply be that it is "timing out."  There is an "end of days" feel to Trumps presidency, but that might just be my own fear and loathing.  As I have thought about it, however, another aspect of our constitution has occupied my thinking -- the "de-centering," as I put it, of economic and political power.  Each clearly has influence on the other, and I don't really need to detail the ways in which economic power influences political power, or the ways in which political power influences economic power, but under our current constitution they are interdependent, but they are not the same. Trump, who, despite all his wealth, occupies a position of political, not economic power.  Had Trump simply evaporated over-night from the economic scene, one would hardly have noticed, and one might even have a suspicion that he felt the need to run for political office BECAUSE he lacked the reality of economic power.  With that in mind, the current flap between Trump and Jeff Bezos, the CEO of Amazon, more or less demonstrates the de-centering.  Jeff Bezos DOES have economic power, in part because he has near monopoly control over on-line retail, and on-line retail now represents a significant segment of the American economy.  It's too big  to fail, so to speak, without affecting the lives of millions.  That said, Business Insider reports that "among all the leaders in tech, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos probably had the most contentious relationship with President-elect Donald Trump during the campaign. The two publicly criticized each other on many occasions, with Trump once warning that Amazon would have 'problems' if he became president."  Although the relationship is contentious, it appears that Bezos is willing to make nice, in part because, as Business Insider again put it, "Amazon has grown so much in recent years that its business interests are tightly linked to government policies, across areas like sales tax, net neutrality, immigration, and shipping, just to name a few. It's one reason Amazon has significantly increased its lobbying expenditures lately."  Trump, of course, is the consummate narcissist who must be at the eye of his own tornado, but it remains questionable how far he can push his personal feud with Bezos without stepping on the toes of other tech and retail leaders whose interests are also "tightly linked to government policies."  For the moment, constitutionally, we are still under the "rule of law."  While his elected office holds considerable power, it is exercised through regulation and the execution of the law, and the universalizing effect of both regulation and the law prevents the sort of individual targeting of the opposition that Trump craves. 

Ostensibly, under our constitution, political power belongs to the "the people," a vague enough concept, and one not necessarily inclusive of all homo sapiens.  Nevertheless political power flows from the will (or the consent) of the people.  The "vote," for example, expresses the will of the people, and yes, there are constitutional distortions built into the "vote" that skew how the vote results in representation.  The Senate itself is a distortion.  As Bill Mayer has clucked, California with its 35 million people gets the same "vote" in the Senate as Wyoming with a little more than a half million people.  In the representative body that perhaps counts most, the people of Wyoming get a huge markup in the power of their vote.  Admitting as much, however, Connor Lamb's victory at the ballot box seems to signal pushback against the current regime, partly because he held firm on core issues like social security and Medicare while co-opting the opposition's stance on the distracting cultural issues like abortion and guns.  I'm not holding my breath, but we'll see what happens during the midterm elections.  Then too, so long as they are protected, of course, first amendment rights also allow for the expression of the will of the people, particularly the right to assemble and petition the government for redress of grievances.  We saw it in response to civil rights, we saw it in response to the Vietnam war, and we're seeing it again in the response to the Parkland shooting.  Indeed, if the NRA represents one economic center of power, the Parkland protests represent the will of the people pushing back against that particular center of power and they seem willing to push back at other economic centers of power.  Whether or not the Parkland protests will have any real effect remains a matter of some dispute, but their exercise of collective political power did at least garner the attention of a few major retailers.        

Having said all that, with the centers of political and economic power "de-centered" it is less a question of large government, small government, more a question of what might be called  the vectors of power.  The left at its purest demands government hegemony over the economic centers of power, while the right at its purest demands economic hegemony over the governmental centers of power.  For those on the economic right (to be distinguished from the cultural right) those who own the country should run the country, if not directly, then "by proxy" through political power that is nothing if not subservient to their needs.   In some respects this does mean "limited" government -- that is to say, the role of government is limited to the defense of "property" rights, to include the "inalienable right" to secure greater happiness through more and more "wealth." There is some room for dispute in just what exactly that means, partly because the notion of "property," like happiness, seems rather vague in the pursuit. The recent flap with Facebook cuts to the core of this issue.  What exactly does Facebook own?  Intellectual property rights to a web service, yes, but a web service that collects "personal data."  Who exactly owns that "personal data?"  If that data was surrendered "voluntarily" to Facebook, and Facebook aggregated that data through their "proprietary" algorithms, should Facebook feel free to sell that data to whomever they please, including Russian political hacks?  Should the FTC or the FCC (which?) step in and "regulate" Facebook?  Or perhaps a simpler solution is at hand.  If the people don't like it, shouldn't they, so to speak, "vote" with their unsubscribe clicks and leave Facebook behind?  It's confusing for both the left and right, no?

Having said all that, Damon Linker is correct.  A vector of power is not the same thing as a "galvanizing ideology," at least not in the 20th century sense of the word, an ideology that "could plausibly animate a centralized totalitarian state to co-opt civil society, driving out dissent by employing a combination of surveillance, repression and propaganda." Linker wants to differentiate between "the threat facing liberal politics today" and those that threatened liberal politics in the past -- particularly fascism.   The real sickness of our time, he contends, "is quite different and in some ways the opposite: a rising tide of polarization and chaos in civil society driven by numerous forces, some structural (social media) but others political (right-wing disinformation, Russian meddling), that threatens to empower a form of postmodern, kleptocratic authoritarianism. That’s certainly bad, and potentially antidemocratic. But it’s not fascism." 

I do think he's correct, the real sickness of our time is the rising tide of polarization and chaos in civil society, a chaos fueled by the increasingly strident, increasingly distracting, winner-take-all culture wars.  Social media has played its part, and it has done so by giving free rein to those unscrupulous enough to invent "alternative facts" that prey on people's anxiety and animosities, which, more than anything else, prompts the "like" and the "share."  Indeed, there is a "post-modern" feel to politics today, a world in which all realities are "socially constructed," and no reality, including the reality of science, has any more claim on the "truth" than any other reality.  Perhaps it's instructive than many of the originating avatars of "post-modernism," to include Martin Heideggar and Paul de Man were smitten with fascism, which resolves the resultant chaos in the "great man," in the absolutism of a particular charismatic personality.  Ultimately, one can't help but feel that Trump will prove to be too clownish even for his most ardent supporters.  It's difficult imagining Trump's bare bottom being spanked with his own image by a porn star and thinking "great man."  Trump may have made himself the celebrity of celebrities, but in the end he personally commands only the lurid attention of any other celebrity, with one exception.  Because he is the head of state, his very presence in the office denigrates and degrades the office, and he has gone a long way toward turning government itself into the unreality of reality TV -- a vehicle for the manufacture of celebrity (on which, by the way, the likes of Stormy Daniels is capitalizing).   Because it is so ineffectual, such parade of celebrities behaving badly, the base of power has shifted increasingly to the right, an economic hegemony over the political.  The one act the government has effectuated has been a tax cut that is unambiguously in the interests of those who occupy the economic centers of power.              

So again, I think Linker is correct, but I'm not sure how to respond. Should I say, "oh, thank God, it's not fascism?"  Really?   I would perhaps respond that the on-going culture wars, along with the moral and ethical degradation that seems to follow in the wake of all wars when "winning" co-opts the casus belli, has gone a long way toward empowering the right, the economic hegemony synonymous with a "postmodern, kleptocratic authoritarianism."  Should the economic hegemony be complete, it is not just "potentially antidemocratic," it is inherently antidemocratic, or more to the point inherently anti-constitutional, and a "kleptocratic authoritarianism," no less than a "fascist" or "communist" authoritarianism, will employ a combination of "surveillance, repression and propaganda" to maintain its hegemony.  Of course, it will take place right under our noses and likely with our "consent."  We will breeze through the terms of service and click "accept."  The Facebook flap reveals that Trump and his facilitators are more than willing to use "post modern" means of surveillance to achieve political power?  Hasn't he already signaled his willingness to repress dissent, using violence?  From day one he suggested he would "punch protestors in the face," which render the repressive threats against Stormy Daniels almost comic as gangster movie dialogue, but also plausible.  Hasn't he (credit where credit is due) perfected a form of propaganda where all "news" is "fake news," even his own dictates, but it changes nothing because remains an entertainment,  a shameless oligarch among the oligarchs.  If all news is fake news, then really only one thing matters -- his news, not because it carries moral suasion, not because it represents anything resembling a "truth," not because it will benefit the people, but BECAUSE he is in power.  Really.  Thank God it's not fascism.  Otherwise we'd be in real trouble.