Politics |
|
16 December 2022
Diminished Capacity
The odd thing about Donald J. Trump is the cunning he has, given that he exhibits very few of the characteristics of a well-educated and curious person. He is not a moron as I and millions of others first thought. , especially many in the media, who misreported on him continuously. Cunning is also the engine of his grift. He believes to his marrow that the meaning of life is to acquire as much as one can, so to lead of life of comfort and control, and that the means to that end are for himself to decide, not society, kin, or anyone else, all of them naive fools. For him control is essential and, given that his up-bringing nurtured the full-throated narcissism he has in lieu of a world view—which is to say that given the narcissism no other world-view could exist—his exercise of control is to dominate others to the point they accept the obvious premise of his being, but simultaneously discount its actual strength. On Thursday, December 15th, ten days before Xmas, Donald announced what appears to be his new money-making scheme: Trump Trading Cards, each a portrait of Donald as some iconic figure: astronaut, cowboy, footballer, you name it. Each card is valued by Trump at $99! So, he obviously thinks that he is entitled to the value that his notoriety will presumably inflate each card. Obviously some cards will be valued more and some less, but $99 is the price. This opportunity was greeted by the house with derision, even among those in the inner-most concentric circles around him. The media can hardly believe their eyes and have, so far, fallen back on the old tropes about Trump's narcissism and griftiness. They are correct that this trading card idea fits with his narcissism and that trying to sell them for about 99.99% more than they cost to make is surely a grift. Why he might have done this is thought to be that he needed to put something out there to let Governor DeSantis know what he is up against ... and to make money. Incidentally, there is no pretext that the money will go to Donald's 2024 Presidental Campaign. It goes to Donald himself. He will sell cards and given the loyalty still present in the body politic, he will make a pile. But, does he not see that it makes him look foolish at the same time? Trump is a grifter whose cunning commands him to have as many wins per behavior as possible. He advertises his strategies well in advance, publicly and nakedly, and so disarms some of his skeptics and some of the media, who must find a "balance" between norms and The Donald. So, you have to look at Trump behavior with a wide angle lens and with an open imagination. The reason he did this is for GOP political reasons—minor—for money—unlikely to top $10million—but, to prove that his narcissism is intact and strong (if not healthy)—because he will be going to trial soon, and his supporters need a mantra that everyone else will understand as lunacy and diminished capacity. The love for Trump is one of the reasons Justice has not yet been meted out. The unspoken, but alluded to reason, is that once the Rubicon of charging a former president with crimes has been crossed, everyone "knows" it will be misused in the future, even if the many charges to be made against Trump are definitively criminal and exceedingly serious. Diminishing the public view of Trump's "capacity" is a genius stroke of jury tampering. JB Index: Politics
13 November 2022
Victory Laps
This has been a hair-raising election season, even for those of us bald. Listening to the MSNBC stable of experts and cable journalists, until Saturday I had the impression that Democrats had won the election. Then Ali Velshi, Ayman Mohyeldin, and Alicia Menequirendez tapped into the wisdom of frequent MSNBC political analyst Matthew Doud, who was nominally a Republican campaign advisor and analyst. NBC had just called the Senatorial race in Nevada for Catherine Cortez-Masto when a batch of Clark County votes came in. The Culinary Workers Union of Nevada had cranked up the late Harry Reid's political operation there, and it worked. Matthew Doud was impressed that Nevada manages touch slim margins, yet favor Democrats. But that was not his message. The hosts had been dodging the question of why, if the Democrats and democracy had "won", why had so many people voted Republican and for election deniers, anti-democracy candidates, and a political party led by a twice impeached and disgraced ex-president? Matt Doud hopped on that and quietly said that the victory over the well-known and expected backlash against the party in power—in the White House—is not a victory over the contemporary anti-democracy movement in America, any more than the Battle of Bull Run, which the Confederate Army won handily and scared the pants off the "holiday onlookers" from Washington, did not win them the war. It merely indicated that the Union was unprepared for the Rebellion and would have to do way better to succeed. Doud's advice in a one pill a day prescription was be calm and do what you do best as perfectly as possible. What people in the very middle of politics and the the perennial independents did was reject Chaos, now the tool of the anti-democratic politicians who we call fascists for short. Calm! Display competence rather than bumptious fervor and fury. It is going to take a very long time for half of the Trumpists to understand their error. The MAGA crowd, the acolytes of Trump, who stirred the pitcher of violence and brash anti-governmentism, will not find themselves for many years, if ever. At first the go-along to get-along folk will hush for a while; they know how to hide in silence, and it will be therapeutic for them and us. The less rabid Trumpists will reconsider when AG Garland charges Trump for espionage, and later the most militant will feel the scorpion in their boot. The young, as Doud (and others said) will have fewer peccadillos to cover up, so they will be the way forward. And that brings into focus the nature of the timeline for finding a less chaotic American politics. It is a generational problem. Grievance is real. Every day some get the short end of whatever it is. Some dwell on their bad fortune and some move on to the next confrontation with Fate. Strauss and Howe, who produced Generations: The History of America's Future, 1584 to 2069 in 1992 and followed with The Fourth Turning at the end of 1997, the former of which I have encapsulated in a much viewed website The Silent Generation (1996), which contains their estimates of the character of my generation and two of those which followed, the Boomers and the X-Generation, the unhappy young heirs to the Vietnam Aftermath, Newt Gingrich, and amazing revolutions in technology, which deposited in everyone's purse or pocket a connection to a world-wide-web of amazing information and even more troubling discontent and immaturity. If Strauss and Howe were right, the Boomers were an inward-looking, self-conscious cohort but infatuated with the immense power of their numbers. They call the X-Gen folk "reactive" and go as far as to say they are less anchored in our American traditions than others. The two together were a dose of salts for a body politic prepared and ready to be led by whomever would cater to their grievances. These are glittering generalizations and very arguably fiction, but they are intriguing possibilities, but I still hesitate to predicated everything that happened on this analysis. What really turned the corner was technological and the pace of it and the outflow from it. Only a few people noticed that a revolution was underway that portended a change in politics. Many of the politicians of the day laughed it off and committed themselves to a status quo that was already disrupted and soon would overtake the entire world, civilized and otherwise. So. Victory laps are for brief sporting events. For history we are very lucky if we can see clearly what just happened. We must consider the human condition at every moment, our propensity to misunderstand and over-react. Values will change as some among us will challenge a piece of the status quo and create the emergentes re, the emerging reality. Still, though, I am very happy about the pothole we just missed! JB Category: Politics
4 November 2022
The State of Our Experiment
As we anxiously do our weekend things before the General Election next Tuesday (and already weeks in progress through early and mail-in voting), it could be instructive, chastening, and exciting to revisit the beginnings of what we, with assumed scientific discipline, call the Great American Experiment— in representative democracy. It was unheard of in the main. Britain had her Parliament, but it was anything but democratic. France had not yet bitten from the forbidden fruit. The rest were still in the thrall of medievalism, a state where the individual was not quite yet a person, except for the nobility and certain wealthy members of the bourg"oisie. Then as the 18th century wore on and the distance between London and Boston increased, while the travel time improved, along comes another Puritan, this one exceedingly bright and political and whose lungs were full of the fresh air of frontier liberty: Samuel Adams, cousin of John Adams. Smithsonian Magazine's October issue has the story, by Stacy Schiff, of "The Noble Fury of Samuel Adams",l which finally brings the story of the rise of revolutionary politics into clearer and more personal focus. I hope you read it. I learned that Samuel Adams is not just a beer, but was perhaps the most important person in the colonies, certainly the most well-known, eclipsing George Washington, and among the brightest thinkers and political activists in North America. Many, many years later, we are dealing with the hope to preserve the tattered fabric of the democracy they brought into being in 1776. Since 1964 we have had, in theory the possibility of having a true representative democracy, one representing everyone, all adult human beings. So, of our 246 years under one Constitution, we've had 58 years of representative democracy, but the forces within who reject the ideals, customs, mores, and politics of The Other, are seemingly "done" with that. Their clamor for primacy of their own ideas over those of The Other, will be tested this election season. The New York Times Editorial Board has weighed in on this with its statement "America Can Have Democracy or Political Violence. Not Both." We know we have had America all the while, but have deceived ourselves that we had achieved our goal. "Our Goal" is the clinker in that paragraph. We have a government that tries to abide by the Rule of Law, and succeeds in the main. The Law is what words we can muster together—together—to operationalize ourselves as a nation. So, it is a hodge-podge of different ideas springing from many sources, some antagonistic, some neutral, some symbiotic, most acquiescent, that is, a compromise of all goals and ideals, but a step forward, at least not backward, we piously hope. Goals and ideals are what we want or need and aspire to, knowing that we are always performing a triage, a sorting of what is possible, given our differences and given our resources. There is a song that expresses multiple points of view that landed in my ear this week, and I have been aching to give it to you, knowing that "What About Us?" is not only about taking care of the planet, but also about one another, those lost in the shuffle, those infirm, our children, those of us with our prides and prejudices. JB Category: Politics
25 October 2022
These Angry, Frightened People
Where did all these people come from—whose personal ideas on how things should be and, ultimately, on how to define their own liberty—now trump their ideas about our democracy? And, is this a fair way to begin the description of 21st century America? They are individuals whose sense of themselves has overtaken the sense of participating in the stewardship of the democracy that undergirds literally everything they achieve. The short answer is that they are overwhelmingly white people whose parents, grand-parents, all the way back for hundreds (300+) of years, came from Europe. They came from countries where democracy was born, but mixed with monarchies and outright dictatorships, defined by class and wealth. The slow demise of monarchies is intimately tied up with ancient ideas of patriarchy, born out of necessity, often, and out of traditions carried forward by religion and folkways. Patriarchy is a fundamental idea in many cultures, and it often behaves poorly under even gentle assault. Meanwhile, all politics is local. This is the insight and motto of political activists, political campaign strategists and managers, and even most pundits. What this means in practice is that the importance of local realities, including local traditions and folkways, loom large in the decision making processes of voters and those for whom they vote. In this sense two or at most a half dozen ideas and traditions can form the basis for a local politics. In this way ancient patriarchal forms of family organization, of religious doctrine, of home country history — medieval monarchies, early modern empires led by emperors, bloody revolutions, restorations, then less bloody defenestrations, and introduction of liberal democracies, sometimes overrun by marauding nations causing one's own nation to revert to emergency-rule for defense — all set a stage for individuals or, even if they do not think of themselves as staunchly reverent or orthodox, but rather as just members of families, clans, and regional cultures, to rely on and carry forward the facts and mores of these cultures, their patriarchal nature, the sense of impermanence about some aspects, the very kind (and color of) people with whom they and their forebears agreed to agree. But history is not just about what people did, but also why. Freud enthusiasts in the last century had many interesting ideas about why people cling to patriarchy in a storm and then forget to let go. My mentor and I approached the problem in terms of how people communicate, ultimately how they think. How people think is observable in how they write and speak and what they read. Hayden V. White's book Metahistory is an example of this kind of history, and I was his student. It is a combination of epistemology and rhetoric, and more than slightly complex, and so I am not going to bother you with stuff like the relationships of synecdoche and metonymy and irony to worldview structures. What I am going to bother you about is the fact that people, angry and anxious, frightened people, who have put democracy aside because they no longer trust it to maintain the world as they have seen it or imagined it and depend upon it for peace of mind and privilege are de facto not democratic republicans, or Democrats or Republicans, but fascists. That other effing word "fascist" is the historical label of people who have lost or never really had a strong reliance on the concept that (all, the sum of) the people know best what's good for the organization called their nation. And so, we (and the media) are hanging breathlessly for twelve (12) more days to see if there so many of these people that our national democracy (such as it is now after 244 years of tinkering) will not survive. History moves slowly, usually, so what happens in the November election will not be the dromedary straw, but it will be Macbeth played in orange. JB Category: Politics N.B. I have changed the name of the category fron National Politics to Politics, to comport with the fact that politics is local, but also national, and intertwined.
1 October 2022
The Court
As some of you know, I am not a fan of the Supreme Court. More, I am sure that the Constitution does not provide (a) lifetime terms of office for Article III judges and justices, and (b) the Constitution DELIBERATELY doesn not provide for "judicial review," as conceived by Chief Justice John Marshall in the notorious case of Marbury v. Madison. The Constitutions says that justices and judges are appointed on "good behavior." I can see how that could be construed as an endless term—if the person behaves well and does not experience dementia or other mental deficits or do not recuse themselves when they are clearly in a conflict of interest personal, political, or intellectual. As I have s and repeated here, "judicial review"—the act of declaring a law unconstitutional or not commenting on its constitutionality was discussed at length in Philadelpia at the Convention and it was decided that the Constitution should not give Article III such powers over Article II and Article I branches of government. It is more than a check, and certainly completely imbalanced. The Court is fallible, but it it has the power to nullify law, fability is unacceptable. So there it is: either hire infallible justices or restrict them to ruling on cases. If the Court comes up with the same verdict again and again—which they might—then Congress should take note and fix the law the Court finds so onerous, but must must leave intact. Today in the NYTimes there is a Guest Essay about the Court and about President Biden's reluctance to fix it. His reluctance will be his undoing. For whatever it matters, that reluctance is the single thing that makes me hope he does not run again, even considering the good work he has done. Being an "institutionalist" is not a decision to stand pat on broken and abused and misused parts of government, or it should not be. I urge Joe Biden to get down off that long-legged horse and augment the Court with responsible jurists—six more would be the minimum necessary to avoid catastrophic damage to our society. JB Archv: Government
30 September 2022
Grenouille bouillie
Things that happen slowly are often barely noticed—if at all. Things that are barely noticed make only a small impression on us, and although they may be made of terrifying stuff, their terrific qualities fade, especially from the dulling effect of repetition. Worse yet, faded things stay faded, even when idly pondered. Their full impact is lost in the repetition, even when pondered, partly because we understand repetitive things to be unalarming. Then, to make things worse, we tend to defend our own perceptions of things as correct, and in some cases we find a way to ignore the least likely parts, but instead to have faith in the insight that what we have sort-of experienced is of only minor importance, if any at all. Then if a friend or spouse or passerby tells us a similar story—not exactly the same—the common factors are saved and the rest tends to sluff away into our bin of forgotten bits. All of this is much, much more than what we are conscious of as boiling frogs. Also what our brains tell us is that false things are not to be believed. This sounds stupid, but what it means is that, if something is blatantly false, we tend to dismiss it—all of it—along with the source where we first (and subsequently) heard or saw it. False things have a reality that we dismiss, while true things are not dismissed wholesale, but we do have ways of forgetting them, as well. Frogs never learn that frying pans are not good places to take a nap. First, they are slow learners to begin with and, second, they rarely nap in frying pans, but when they do, they have the uncanny luck—or karma—to find them in cupboards rather than on the tops of stoves. All of that, which is to say, that we all have our routines and ambits and habits and pay little attention to the variations in the details of things we are strongly apt to dismiss once we are trained or habituated, such as the rise of violent talk among people we believe are dopes. There were times in London at the turn to the last century when the air was so thick from soot from furnaces and factories that Englishmen sort of confused these events with their famous fogs. And, of course, the soot and the fog found one another and the result was terrifying at last, but only as it relentlessly wore on. The arrival of dense soot in London fit several of the conditions mentioned above. It happened slowly, the sootiness was sort of cyclic, a spell of it, and then not. The most recent soot assault was the worst, but not much worse, so "becoming worse" became part of the reality, but in very small increments. The explanations tended to be spot on, but the suggestions to stop it ran aground on the notion they were basically natural like fogs. The persistence within the brain of Ginni Thomas that the election of 2020 was stolen by the criminal Biden family and that, eventually of course, they would pay by being housed on barges off-shore in Guantanamo Bay until they are tried and then executed, is not the sort of mental event (delusion) described above, BUT the lackadaisical nonchallance of the Bidens and most Americans IS. Ginni is certain to be slightly out of her mind, in the sense that she cannot change her mind because of all the emotional baggage she's imported into the story. For her and, apparently millions, the 2020 election should have been the antidote to their real anxiety about the impending seven million vote defeat of the one person she and they believe had/s the stones to suppress all her bogeys and probable enemies. It wasn't and so it must have been false and violently forgetable. The real problem-people are those of you who are frogs, sitting there, in the pan, hoping that huge amounts of Republicans' "Citizens United" dark-money will not sway the vote out in the states in the mid-term elections. Are you understanding it yet? Elections are infrequent (unless you are a donor, of course) and so knowledgability about elections is vague and nearly evaporated from most voters. Ginni and the MAGAs are not aberations, but part of a long line of folk who really do not want majority rule, if it includes the distilled will, hopes, and ideas of Blacks, Browns, Yellows, Reds, Commies, Socialists, Progressives, or Liberals and Independents. They have been acting out this way since the Constitutional Convention. They wrote some of the most anti-democratic parts of the Constitution, eventually declared war on the US, beat back Reconstruction, imposed Jim Crow laws on Blacks, and fought like wild animals in the Capitol Building on January 6th to make their point. And so, now, we know their leader is completely non-averse to violence, to say the least. But you have not added it all up. The Republicans do not and never have wanted a true democracy, only a curtailed one—basically White Christians and their friends. Yes, they mean it. Always have, and they very much mean it now that they have—while you were staring at your navel, trying to avoid the bordom of watching them doing their anti-democratic thing again and again—a guy whose lies are legion, repetitive, astonishingly false, and matched with a very strong will to power, a personal need to rule America (and eventually the world, probably). It is not too late, but damn close! You have to pay for your indolence, your failure to understand slow-moving history, your lazy skepticism of your own perceptions and observations. You need to join and defend the MAJORITY of voting Americans. You must send real money to your candidates and the candidates in other states you can (plainly) see are crucial to a majority in the House and the Senate. You must put your arm around your Republican father and mother and friends and tell them that this time, and perhaps in 2024, they must vote only for Democrats or else! or else they may never get to vote again and have it count! JB Archv: National Politics
19 September 22
"The Short Answer is 'No'"
There was a startling image of Q-Anon and fascist people at Donald Trump's rally for Ohio Senatorial candidate J.D. Vance which is very likely all over the western world by now. It is amazing how very like the crowds in 1930's Germany responding to Herr Hitler this appears. An image like this was shown on the "Deadline White House" show (MSNBC) by Nicolle Wallace this afternoon in the run-up to a discussion of QAnon cult and religous and political characteristics, and how QAnon is becoming more and more violent in its rhetoric, and how Trump is playing more and more to them, and using their rhetoric, making it his own. In the course of the discussion Nicolle asked former FBI Counter Intelligence expert Frank Figliuzzi "if the FBI has its arms around all this?" Frank's frank answer was: "The short answer is NO!" Apparently QAnon has a theory—an article of faith, actually—that the where the Bible speaks of a Son of Man (as opposed to the Son of God) the reference is, finally, to Donald J. Trump, "The One" (check the single fingers on those hands saluting him). Surely Trump enjoys this very much since for all of his life he has been the Only One of any importance in the world. For the rest of us, though, the eerie similarity to Nazi rallies and all that portends is a grave concern, AND Frank Figliuzzi's candid statement should bring your easychair-shaped self upright! There is usually a confident sentiment among us that FBI and DHS agencies "have got this." Frank says they are stretched way too thin at this point. I have no reason to believe that DHS is any better organized than it was in and around January 6th 2021. If you have better information, please let us know. What we are looking at as the November Congressional Election arrives is the opportunity for all these Trumpists to refuse to accept the results of elections. I put it that way because I am convinced that Independents and so-called "old line" Republicans will vote for Democrats at least once, hoping that we can bury Trumpism at the polls. But, that might not be sufficient. Violence is now openly spoken of by the MAGA crowd, even though many of their well-armed and trained leading militants are now in jails across the nation. We/DoJ certainly do not have them all, and they have been preparing for decades. Meanwhile, the Queen is dead, and the Ukraine War goes on with Putin doubling-down on war crimes, while pundits and experts wonder if this will soon involve nukes, too. It is becoming quite obvious that Putin's goal is to destroy what he cannot have. MSNBC's Richard Engle's hour-long video "Ukraine: The Search for Justice" (which now requires membership of some sort to watch), but which was aired Friday, 9/16/22, was a trip through the hell Putin has visited on civilians in eastern Ukraine (and everywhere else), now recently recovered by the Ukraine armed forces. Putin and his government and a good swath of Russians themselves are very much enemies of everything we stand for as civilized people. This raises the question and the "ante" again. President Biden has assured the media that we are "in it" to the end FOR the Ukrainians. NATO has not been polled, but it would be nice if someone did it before it starts to get cold in Europe. When it does get cold, Putin will act, and our resolve and intelligence will be tested. NATO and the US are in a war with Russia, you already know this, but by proxy. Putin's position is far more precarious than it has ever been, so military and civilian psychologists seem all to think that he will try to force all his enemies onto their heels, their back feet, in other words to gain some momentum that his really never had after the fifth day of the invasion. The Covid Pandemic and the Ukraine War and the sanctions against Russia are largely responsible for setting off the global inflation we are all experiencing. Add to that this autumn a wild-hair political response from the MAGAs in November, and you have a very messy situation. I am mentioning this because you need to prepare yourself and your family for it, physically and psychologically and politically. It is going to happen! It has already begun! JB archv: National Politics
25 August 22
What's Left
Occasionally, the New York Review of Books selects a review author from surprising places and circumstances. The review article "Socialists on the Knife-Edge" written by Hari Kunzru is such a one. The book being reviewed is American Democratic Socialism: History, Politics, Religion, and Theory by Gary Dorrien, Yale University Press, $50.00. NYRB is very unlikely to be slighting Professor Dorrien by this choice, so one must assume that Dorrien's book needed a clean "outsider's" point of view. So, we have a Kashmiri Indian Brit very successful novelist (and much, much else), untangling what is admittedly stated by the book's author a very tangled political history. Tangled is what I would say, too. My generation, what Wm. Manchester dubbed, "The Silent Generation" had several distinguishable cohorts, those born 1924 to 1929, those from 1930 to 1937, and my cohort from 1938-1943. Boomers began with the first military leaves in late 1942, giving rise to an amazing increase in the birthrate in 1943 and onward. So, by the time the first two cohorts of Silents got into their twenties student activists were still about panty-raids. A few 3rd cohort folk were there in the mid-sixties when the New Left emerged "bristling with the idealism of privileged youth," (Dorrien). to confront traditional 19th century utopian socialism and Eugene Debbs orthodoxy with its "embrace of personal liberation," (Kunzru). Socialism in America has been typically and with malpolitics-aforethought described in the press for the unwary and unsophisticated mass vote as a dichotomous battle between "individualism and socialism." Remember that in Emerson's era the young US was dealing with the influx of immigrants by the millions, the political colors of which Emerson and others knew must be on a spectrum skewed toward collectivism. Emersonianism exhorted that "rugged individualism" is the core principle of Americanism, thus dividing and subsuming. So, even the utopians of New Harmony, Indiana, and the Oneida Community near Syracuse, New York, were disparaged. The point being that in a democracy labor would vastly outnumber capital, so the "balance" of these two primal productive forces must be maintained. In 2010 the Supreme Court put its ponderous weight on the balance scales in Citizens United v. FEC ignoring the implicit mathematics that capital can buy more words than labor can. Making heads or tails of American socialist or collectivist or communitarian movements was virtually impossible from 1965 onward. We knew during the last third of the 20th century that a battle was being fought, but finding a way through the thickets of propaganda from either side—actually many different sides—was impossible to reconcile with national and international events. The Soviet Union stood for seventy years as the iconic bad example of collectivist national socialist thinking, the Vietnam War stood as the typical irresponsibility of the capitalist military-industrial-(congressional) complex. Meanwhile, Johnson's Civil Rights Act overturned the traditionally left-leaning Democratic Party, shearing off the Dixiecrats, electing Reagan to drive a stake through the heart of socialism in America. One had to survive, and so the history of these tangled years needed a good historian and a positive review. This is it! Again I must apologize for the policy of the NYRB to keep archival gold like this in Fort Knox. Most of my readers are interested, but not very motivated to spend much time or money in pursuit. The only thing I can say is that, if you grew up in the 20th century, believed that your politics was reasonable and in harmony with your personal values, you should read this book review and, probably, the book itself. So, I will conclude with an educational sample of the review. Contemporary American socialism exists on a continuum between social democrats, who want to achieve a fairer settlement within market capitalism, and democratic socialists, who want to bring various activities, from housing to health care, under some form of state, community, cooperative, or employee control. Democratic socialists have transformative ambitions, but unlike Communists, their goal is not the abolition of private property. They accept, to varying degrees, the utility of markets, but disagree with classical free marketeers who see the economy as a self-regulating system that works most efficiently when insulated from the “distortion” of nonmarket forces; they insist instead on what the Austro-Hungarian economist Karl Polanyi called “embeddedness,” the emergence of the economy from—and dependence on—social, political, and cultural relations. This kind of thinking has never been popular with American elites, who have historically used the press, public information campaigns, think tanks, and corporate lobbyists to turn public opinion against it. But while the demonization of socialism has a long history in the US, so does American socialism itself. The movement whose tangled history Gary Dorrien tells in American Democratic Socialism has deep roots in the very “American” values it is accused of undermining. JB see: National Politics
14 August 22
Fascism in America
Trump has been accused by many of being a fascist, or at the very least, fascistic. He ticks many of the boxes on the fascist checklist. Brazen xenophobia, allegiance to corporations, contempt for democracy — all we need is a Nixon-esque tape of anti-semitism, and Trump is a fascist dead to rights. It is interesting to see (above) how the Indiana Daily Student addresses the question I have for today. We need to know what are the agreed-upon core elements and policies of the political posture called "fascism." It is not going to be easy, partly because the US has such a jumbled history of what was actually called fascism during the 20th century and, from all appearances, on into the 21st. Naturally, one wants to know what has been assembled at Wikipedia on the subject, too. Take a look. Most of my academic work on politics was on Marxist and other forms of socialism, the precursor political movements in 19th and 20th century Russia, Bolshevism and the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU). So, I am not a scholar of fascism, but like a few abroad in the media these days, I have studied it seriously. Benito Mussolini more or less invented the name, which he said should properly be called "Corporatism." The fascia object is sticks bound to and around an axe and are emblematic of the binding of corporations — the main dynamic components of the economy — to the axe of state (coercive) power. The two huge fascias on the wall behind the dais in the US House of Representatives are meant to be the states bound together around the central power of the federal government. One wonders why, given the history of this icon, these two objects are still there! Is Trumpism a form of fascism though? As a political movement it is not exactly unique, so maybe it is an expression of fascism. It is idiosyncratic, as one might expect from even a cursory knowledge of Trump himself. Trumpism is fluid and like Italian Fascism and German National Socialism very dependent on the leader himself. But movements like these are not holograms out of the minds of the leaders. They are real movements of large numbers of at least partly like-minded people such as you would find in American neighborhoods or rural settings today. In the 1930's persons of Italian, but particularly of German ancestry, recently immigrated or not, were often associated with organizations that qualified as fascist, like the German-American Bund. We really need to know more about their descendants than we now know. What we do know about the Trumpist version of fascism is this. Trumpists are anti-immigrant and racist, and the reasons for this are many. Immigrants, they say, take jobs away from Americans. They live differently in what is thought to be squalor, harboring diseases and political ideas that are out of place here. They are even said to take up room, shelf space in grocery stores, and facilities in public places. They are assumed to probably have different religious views, maybe not even Christian! Some immigrants are from Africa or the Caribbean and are thought by fascist racists to be inferior because God made them black. Blacks, they say, in America are the descendants of slaves and, for racists, should never be equal to the white people who once owned them. Jews are probably a race, they think, and not to be trusted in a Christian nation. Even so, Jews might be useful if their ideas about the Last Days come to pass, for then Christians will be vindicated, they imagine. Racism and religious bigotry are key fascist values. Trumpists are for corporations in the sense that corporations provide jobs, consumer goods and services, and stability (sic) in the economy. Yet, forty-eight percent of all US employees work for small businesses, down from 52% in the first decade of the 21st century. Not only that, but rural areas seem to be voting for Trump and with the other fist fighting off Cargill Ag, ADM, Conagra, General Mills, and the other huge agro-corporations. Clearly this is a very mixed bag, and for now an undependable sign of fascistic leanings. If the corporations or economy are involved, it must be that significant numbers of job-seekers and job-holders are not living as well as their parents did, not to mention those in my generation whose parents suffered in the Great Depression and emerged during the Eisenhower eight years and the following eight to fairly solid and modest prosperity. Trumpists certainly do seem to be contemptuous of democracy, given the rhetoric out of Arizona, Pennsylviania, Texas, Michigan, Wisconsin, Nevada, and North Carolina. Republicans are running in these places to take-over the elections processes and, of course, to see to it that vote totals are adjusted so that Republicans win. They believe that as voters they can still encourage leaders toward policies that will make their lives better. This is the illusion of "political simplicity," suggesting that leaders are more knowledgeable and can pivot swiftly to fix things. A study of such leaders, usually of singular dictators or very small juntas, reveals that the incipient paranoia within a fascistic state curtails the supposed freedom of action of these leaders and resolves usually toward a violent police state. The question of democracy is a question of impatience and ignorance. When Congress is locked in rhetorical combat, as it is now, with the Senate or House acting as an obstruction, years can go by without substantial improvements to the overall national standards of living. The Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson years were the dynamo years, not without issues, but during which the American way of life was seemingly guaranteed. Then one by one we got—a remarkably corrupt, an overwhelmed, a criminally ignorant, an arrogant, a sleasy, a farsical, a widely loathed Black man,—set of presidents before Trump, leaving him a society with heads spinning from the huge changes in healthcare, life expectancy, cold war ending, arrival of the internet, and non-state terrorism, complete with a US generated world-wide economic collapse, which was euphemized as the Great Recession. Average Americans lost their homes, jobs, sense of worth, but not their sense of entitlement to those things. Then the pandemic hit! And the first really sweaty and violent signs of Global Warming! Demogogues love this kind of social turmoil, and now demogogues have cable news and social media with which to spread their doctines and lies. In Trump's base belief in Trump's Truth is actually very fragile, except—notably—among the hard-line paramilitary groups and ordinary, run-of-the-mill ruffians, the KKK types, the hereditary anti-Semites, and the hereditary anti-Blacks and anti-Browns. My guess is the quiet part of Trump's "base" will vote fascist, nevertheless, believing they can undo it later on, if they wish. And, that is the big problem. When you decide against democracy it becomes unavailable. Fundamentally, there are real fascists in the US and real Nazis, just as there were in the 1930's. They would like the rest of us to believe that they are correct about race, religion, the law, and that they comprise a larger percentage of the voting public than they really do. The merely disaffected, annoyed, naturally rebellious, and not doing too well economically might vote with them. Their votes are blowing in the political winds, and that's why Trump (and other demagogues) have rallies and iconic red caps. They know that the larger part of the base is as unstable and untrustworthy as the other, smaller part, is dangerous. I am going to continue to use the terms "fascist" and "fascistic" in my essays, because it has an alien scent and glow. I hope to apply it only to the leaders and the hard core violent, because they are fascists. JB archived: National Politics
22 July 22
21 July 22 Select Committee Hearing
These are not really "hearings," of course. They are all interim reports. I like the single-minded focus on the former president, and in this session they established that doing nothing is something. The "nothing" was what Donald Trump was doing privately out of the sight of almost everyone in the White House during the three hours and seven minutes from the ... a total of 187 minutes of failure to honor his oath of office AND the commission of several felonies including incitement to disorder, obstructing a government proceeding, and had he done anything as Commander-in-Chief, dereliction of duty, which apparently is only relevant to military matters. Almost all of the skeleton of events was already known, if previously unverified. What the Select Committee achieved was an oft repeated statement of the inexorable logic that not-calling-off-the-riot he had assembled and provoked, knowing that many of the rioters were well-armed and fighting mad WAS A CHOICE Trump made. He was not oblivious to the goings on at the capitol building. He was watching Fox News, Sean Hannity, of which called him to tell him to stop the riot and tell them to go home. I learned that some people believe that on the face of the fact that Trump did not honor his oath of office (which is by no means surprising) he removed the "presumption of innocence" that otherwise he would have regarding the crimes he committed while ignoring his oath. I believe Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill) was the speaker who asserted this concept. Having taken that oath of office as a NROTC midshipman and as an Ensign, Lieutenant Junior Grade, and as Lieutenant, I was impressed with the idea that this oath of office has that sort of nuance ... maybe way more than nuance. The other thing I learned was that it took 45 minutes to convince Trump that the Secret Service could not and would not allow him (or take him) to the Capitol to participate in the disruption of the certification of the Electoral College votes. Certainly, we learned, that Trump had already seeded the Secret Service with his own people, including the Director, James M. Murray, whose goose is now being defeathered in preparation for a thorough cooking because they, against the will of Congress and the DHS Inspector General destroyed evidence of their texts, some of which, ironicallly, would have tended to exonerated them in the issue of whether they were going up to the capitol or not ... which, thankfully, they did not. Trump could have been hurt, you know! JB see also: National Politics
17 July 22
Civil War: An Oxymoron
This morning in the Washington Post, a newspaper I delivered to 230 subscribers at 4:30 every morning for two years, has an opinion piece that seems germane. It might be born out of the despair abroad in the land with characters like Ted Cruz and Mitch McConnell and the paramilitary groups like the Three-percenters, Proud Boys, and Oath Keepers still roaming around burying ammunition in the woods and deserts. These paramilitary groups are actually military; nothing "para" about them, except that they are sort of vigilante types dedicated to someday taking things into their own hands. The Post article by KK Ottesen says "They are preparing for war:" My own view is that, indeed, they are preparing for war! Having said that, we have to ask if they are in a position to win a war against the United States? My answer is that, on reflection, they are not preparing for war, but for an all-out insurgency in which they get to choose the rules, times, and places. I believe Frank Figliuzzi, former Assistant Director of FBI's Counter-Intelligence unit, agrees with me. Asymetrical warfare is the most likely strategy. Yes, they can do that, but the result will not be a sudden take-over by them, but a steady or not-so-steady erosion of state and federal authority in various places around the country, like Idaho, Alabama, and semi-rural areas almost anywhere. Every minute they are not expressing the sentiments implicit in the chips on their shoulders or the quirks in their personalities, they are being infiltrated by federal and state inelligence agents. They know that, so they are weakened organizationally, knowing there's very little they can do about it. On the other hand, we have evidence that some agents have become "reluctant" to report in periodically, perhaps because their families are hostage or perhaps because they have developed a taste for the cool-aid. As I have reported before, one of the 3%-ers confronted me out loud online, and was rousted by the authorities. So, the skirmishes go on and on, keeping the groups busy burying ammo under their porches and in the hollows of trees. Ninety percent of it, I think, is a game grown boys play during unsettling times of great social and economic change. So the oxymoron, the incompatible, the irony of Civil War is that it is totally uncivil. It is barbaric, destructive, chaotic, and very deadly. I think people in the middle and on the left are fairly well prepared for it, but not as well-organized. I am not worried about that too much. The psychology of organizing and cooperation is on our side! JB Archived at: National Politics
15 June 22
Gerontocracy
Jamelle Bouie, columnist for the New York Times has a new piece out this morning suggesting strongly that the Democratic Party leadership is a gerontocracy, by which he, like Telemachus, son of Ulysses, pays meet respect to political piety, but the message he sends is from the "brink," that rocky crag where Ulysses sat, matched with an aged wife to mete and dole unequal laws unto a savage race. Jamelle is, like me, a University of Virginia graduate, but he is Black and I am merely half Lithuanian; he is young and I am not, he is correct and I agree with him. I think he makes his case very well. The seniority "systems" in Congress are irrational as algorithms for producing the best leadership available from the available resources. Seniority is surely an index of experience, but the trick in that is the common assumption of, guess what, stare decisis,, precedent, aka, "This is how we have always seen it, thought about it, and done it." Term limits in the new Constitution I and others are preparing will end this nonsense. Bouie's focus on the blithering of the aged is apt. It truly exists and is dangerous, not homey or some golden auld lang syne. It is dangerous because we truly are at the brink. Yesterday I wrote about the passing of the wand in the Times to a relatively young man, mid-fifties, who spoke aloud that the brink we're at is just another story. The mind is a creative engine that wants its precedent processes to prevail over the facts as they stream in. The fact, though, is that the Republican Party no longer respresents the world view and aspirations of a majority of Americans, and as such it is mathematically unelectable on the basis of party platform policy or point of view. The Republicans know this, found themselves led by bombastic power-hungry misanthropes like Newt Gingrich to believe the Republican outlook was eternal and correct, and so they did not evolve with the people of the nation and now are forced to forego democracy itself to stay in power. That is the brink: the Republican Party no longer respects or, indeed, survives in a democracy! It is not just another story to be massaged with bi-partisan banalities. My e-friend Tony in NYC, older by some than I, said Biden is not re-electable. I agreed with him, much as I like Joe's gentle outlook on life. Not all old-timers are addled by age! So I have decided to amplify Bouie and Tony and my own misgivings about the self-satisfied lassitude of the Democratic Party leaders. I fear it will take a shellacking in November to make this point, but at the same time I am buoyed up by the spirit and wisdom of the young. It has not been easy for the young in this country to put aside the hypocrisies and platitudes to see through the fog of politics what is really there ... here. We are at the brink and, if we fall off, it will probably take two very courageous generations to crawl back into a democratic system of goverment for which we can be proud and safe from the illusions of comfortable fascism.
JB archived at: National Politics
8 June 22
Suicide Pact
The Second Amendment to the US Constitution is this A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed. Article IV, Section 4. of the US Constitution is this The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government, and shall protect each of them against Invasion; and on Application of the Legislature, or of the Executive (when the Legislature cannot be convened) against domestic Violence. Recently a guest on one of the MSNBC news analysis programs caught my attention by reviewing the reason why James Madison, the putative author of the 2nd Amendment, inserted that pecularly worded amendment into the Bill of Rights. You will recall that ratification of the Constitution was dependent on the statements in the Bill of Rights, and so it was decided to append the enumerated rights to the document as "amendments," for purposes of simultaneous ratification. The Guest at MSNBC said that certain sectors of the population thought that Article IV, Section 4 was a potential threat to their liberty, so Madison persuaded them with the 2nd Amendment that they could defend themselves. His language is "too cute" by far and logically inept. Instead of saying "the right of militia members to keep and bear arms," it refers this right to the people, i.e., generally. I was taught that the 2nd Amendment was included because of the precarious position some states felt themselves to be in because of hostile native tribes and immigrant ruffians and of restive slaves, AND that they did not feel secure that the federal government could respond fast enough or effectively. The contextual truth is that the colonies and states under the Articles of Confederation were averse to strong central power like that of King George III and his PM, Lord North. Some few then and millions now believe that the 2nd Amendment is the "get out of jail free card" for states that want to secede from the USA or at least take over the country on principles of their own. The Constitution is not the national suicide pact the enthusiastic readers of the 2nd Amendment believe it to be. The framers did not offer the 2nd Amendment to arm a rebellion against the nation or its constitution. But, in 2022 even after scores of bloody, hidious mass shootings of grocery shoppers and elementary school chilren, concert goers, church and synagogue goers, defenders of the "open reading" of the 2nd Amendment are unwilling to risk losing not just their hunting rifles and plinking handguns, but also their military assault weapons and "right to rise up in armed rebellion." Someone high up needs to tell them how wrong they are! Nothing will be accomplished or lasting until these people are disabused of that suicidal interpretation of the 2nd Amendment. You see, they see the 2nd Amendment as an anti-suicide statement, while the majority, including the older and younger victims of gun violence see the "open reading" of the 2nd Amendment as suicidal for the nation. It is as close to a Gestalt phenomenon as exists in our culture. What makes us see a rabbit when others see a duck is uncertain. What is certain is that when the Supreme Court of 2008 ruled in District of Columbia v. Heller ("Heller") that Americans have a Constitutional right to possess firearms independent of service in a state militia and to use firearms for traditionally lawful purposes, including self-defense within the home, that argument biases some people to read the 2nd Amendment as an invitation to prepare for armed rebellion, just in case.... The Heller ruling defies the normal logic of English grammar and rhetoric of 1787 and 2022. It is assumed that, as with the 2010 ruling in Citizen United that vacated important campaign finance regulations and restrictions on the basis that contributions are "speech," that the Court has no competent imagination about unintended consequences, which are now, indeed, destroying our democracy. JB Archived at: National Politics
24 May 22
The Coming American Politics
If you follow center right and left of center politics at least somewhat avidly, as I do, you will have heard the dire and honestly well-meant predictions that in the November elections this year, many states will elect people who have campaigned on the promise to overturn the 2020 Presidential Election, which they know they cannot do short of armed, violent insurrection. These 2022 campaigns are sweeping up the vigorous disappointment energy among the population whose grievances are that their lives have been disrupted, overturned, or completely wrecked by one feckless government after another they helped to elect that did not represent them or their needs. The main culprits (aside from our government designed in the 18th century and no longer able to function with reasonable effectiveness) are disruptive technology, disruptive and/or predatory finance, rust-belt politics, personal failure to adapt, group and media lack of imagination, the pandemic, and especially vigorous and truthless populist party propaganda, which is now available in every purse and pocket personal telephone device or home computer, vastly changing the normal "rules" of politics in America (and elsewhere). It is an intolerable mess viewed from either side of "the aisle." After a chaos of pretend governance begun in 2016 with Donald J. Trump at the helm, the Republicans lost in 2020, giving Democrats the Presidency/Vice Presidency, the House of Representatives, and a tie in the Senate, but substantial gains for Republicans in so-called swing-state legislatures and governorships. Remember: "All Politics is Local." The current 2022 Republican campaigns do not actually intend to spend much time or money on overturning 2020, but they do intend, they say, to see to it that Republicans are elected where Secretaries of State and local precinct people can overturn elections won by Democrats by rejecting by one means or another the "excessive" Democratic votes. At that point those states where Democratic votes are removed from the honest tally are no longer democratic. They will have become party-autocracies, each led by some person who could become a dictator of that state, whether elected to office or not. Becoming a dictator is dicey business because there are usually more than one aspirant high up in the local party structure who "would not mind" being a dictator and, of course, not having to run for election ever again—at least not a fair, free, and honest election. Would-be dictators need to consolidate their positions, usually by quietly out-maneuvering the other "would-be" people, meaning giving them titles but little power, or the old heave-ho on trumped up pretexts, or, if necessary, detainments of certain kinds or outright murder. Jimmy Hoffa is moldering proof that even people in the spotlights can be disappeared. So, the evidence of there being a dictatorship will not be readily apparent to the average citizen quickly, but in a couple years it will be apparent and way too late to do anything about it. Pennsylvania has just completed a primary election where the Republican candidate for Governor has promised in various statements and quips that he will overturn "the system." Governor Huey P. Long of Louisiana (1928-32), nominally a Democrat (of the soon to be called (segregationist) Dixiecrat variety, became the political boss of his state, was elected to be one of its US Senators in 1930, but did not take that seat until 1932 when his governorship expired, and began a run for US President. However he was assassinated in 1935. The Long family, brothers, widow, and children dominated Louisiana politics into the 1960s. His son Russel B. Long was US Senator from 1948 to 1987. The Longs were perhaps the most notorious case of one man and his family running an entire state, but not the only one. The party boss idea had already taken root in other states with different politics, the most prominent were city bosses like Boss Tweed's Tamany Hall in New York and Chicago's Mayor Richard J. Daley. Britannica lists also Boston, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, and Kansas City where dictatorships under party bosses took root. You should notice that for the vast majority of citizens who kept their thoughts to themselves, the dictators did not bother them too much. Dictators got control of the musculature of the state or region and controlled it for their own purposes of self-preservation and enrichment. Occasionally even today, we see Chiefs of Police or big city Sheriffs feel the urge, too. The coercive powers of any political entity are just that, potentially coercive and necessary for dictators to control. Avoiding dictatorships in several states and nationally in 2024 depends, of course, on Democrats stepping up in 2022 with not-to-be-forgotten numbers to send Republican fascistic candidates back under the rocks where they came from. Massive Democratic voting will obviously raise questions among those who lose, but at that stage it is manageable, we think —if the US DoJ shakes off its traditional "poise." It will require a lot of center-right Independents and Republicans to vote with the Democrats to make the message unmistakable. To get non-Democrats to vote with them Democrats must be very smart about what they say, especially that the 2022 election is demonstrably the critical fulcrum point of the American attempt at continuous democracy. Republican candidates who say they would overturn legitimate votes must be called out and on election day removed from politics. The alternatives are not pretty, and most Americans have no idea what do about it. It is mind-boggling, indeed, complex and hard to get a controlling grasp of it, and so the fascistic alternative is a real possibility with odds now bordering on better than 50-50. Living in a blue state of significant consequence to the entire nation I cannot see us collaborating in any way with states that have given up on the founding principle of our nation—representative democracy. We will know all these states by January 2023, and our first option is to act nationally to reform them in the courts. This is the most likely response of a shocked nation, and it is probably going to be the least effective. If we fail in the courts during 2023 and 2024, we are also most assuredly going to fail in the 2024 Presidential elections as more states cave to unscrupulous state party and party boss dictatorships. At the point where we in my state are sure that the President and Vice President and the new members of Congress were elected by fascist fraud conducted by state officials, we will have few choices left. Franklin was correct: it's a republic only if we can keep it. In other words, even then one of the smartest men in the colonies, a student of human nature, was skeptical. And, we now know with 200+ years of world-wide experience that democracies crash and burn easily. It is not that democracy is, as the media say, "fragile." People are a great treasure of the Earth, but "constitutionally feckless." That is Human Nature. California is the 5th largest economy in the world with a 3.12 trillion GDP. California can little afford to be associated with, much less governed by the whims or the "predatory racism" of fascist states which have abandoned democracy. Without California's contribution the US GDP would drop to 17.28 trillion, sufficiently ahead of China's GDP of 13.4 trillion, way ahead of Japan's GDP of 4.97 trillion, Germany's GDP of 4.00 trillion, United Kingdom's GDP of 2.83 trillion, and France's GDP of 2.78 trillion. The California Republic should and probably will secede from the no longer viable, no longer democratic, and no longer united States. I am saying this now in public so you can get used to the idea over the next two years. It may sound fanciful or preposterous or absurd, but it may be the very best way forward as the USA spirals into fascism. The first thing we will do (or have already begun or even gotten a first draft written) is create a new constitution for the Republic, taking into account that and much more to assure all citizens of equal human rights throughout the Republic. Factions and political parties, ignored by the Framers in 1787, must be organically controlled. The fiction of sovereign "states" (little nations joining together) will be abolished, and so the Republic will vote by and be administered region by region (as defined after each decennial census) with all due respect to historical assets and liabilities. Accordingly the Republic's Legislature will be a House of Representatives equally representing regional populations, in which defined and detailed and explicit processes—Rules of Order— not party affiliation will be used to control processes, behaviors, and eligibility/dismissal. The other House of the Legislature, the Senate, will consist of highly expert representatives of science, technology, medicine & human development, justice, education, infrastructure, financial, commerce, defense, and environment, and will monitor and "cooperatively guide" the processes of the entire government. The new constitution will be a living document with suggested amendments available online (or as future technology can better provide) so that the constitution becomes as self-correcting as humanly and technologically possible. We must begin this now! The heat of future moments will direct attention from the very important need to write a comprehensive and internally consistent political constitution for what at the tipping point moment in January 2025 has an odds-on chance of becoming our new reality. We should begin to create something to be proud of and satisfied that it represents progress rather than chaos.
I had just put this essay down for lunch, intending to come back and publish it after one more sweep for misspelled words. I came back two hours later, after watching the MSNBC coverage of the mass shooting of 14 2-4th graders and a teacher in Uvalde, Texas, now all dead. There were memorable comments from a Parkland parent who lost his daughter and from Senator Murphy of Connecticut about the US Senate having "no solutions". You know, this country is broken. The system does not work as a democracy. Eighty-five percent of Americans want gun-control legislation, and we cannot get it! That is the tip of the iceberg. Our national legislature does not work for us. The red states have succumbed to Trump-organized anti-democracy fascism. The good guys say to not lose hope, but seriously, my friends, hope is no substitute for trust, and we no longer have a system of trust in the US. Why should we insist on trying to make this ramshackle government work for us when it can be bought lock, stock, and barrel by any of thousands of monied maniacs. Rupert Murdock's experiment in destroying America is working, and no one will stop his onslaught of hate and racism at Fox. Voting for good guys and having them fail again and again, is insanity. The nation is fatally broken! JB — "Velis Id Quod Possis" (see Politics or The Project)
14 May 22
The Nature of Politics
The Ambassador to France who later founded the university where I first studied history and politics as a burgeoning adult was busy in Paris when the Constitution of 1787 was written. He believed that the Constitutional Convention should have provided for political parties in the government. On reflection in 1824, well after his public and patriotic activities were done, Jefferson wrote (back) to Henry Lee IV, son of former governor Henry "Light-Horse Harry" Lee, about an essay Lee had provided him concerning political parties in government ... I am no believer in the amalgamation of parties, nor do I consider it as either desirable or useful for the public; but only that, like religious differences, a difference in politics should never be permitted to enter into social intercourse, or to disturb its friendships, its charities or justice. In that form, they are censors of the conduct of each other, and useful watchmen for the public. Men by their constitutions are naturally divided into two parties. 1. those who fear and distrust the people, and wish to draw all powers from them into the hands of the higher classes. 2dly those who identify themselves with the people, have confidence in them cherish and consider them as the most honest & safe, altho’ not the most wise depository of the public interests. In every country these two parties exist, and in every one where they are free to think, speak, and write, they will declare themselves. Call them therefore liberals and serviles, Jacobins and Ultras, whigs and tories, republicans and federalists, aristocrats and democrats or by whatever name you please; they are the same parties still and pursue the same object. The last appellation of artistocrats and democrats is the true one expressing the essence of all. ... (US National Archives Founders Online, "Jefferson Papers") For me this distills, for that epoch, the intrinsic, perhaps "precious" naivete and equally the attempt to narrow the scope Mr. Jefferson gave to the term "politics" in a century where psychology was mostly in literature and theology. For me politics is pervasive and is the dance we all do to assure ourselves and our closest companions or allies of peaceful relations and exchanges and benefits, or the opposite for those with other ideas or hostile to us, not only between those positioned to represent certain interests, but to people in every situation, including marriages, families, classrooms, and every kind of work place. We curtail or censor completely our fresh or longstanding opinions in favor of hoped-for lenience, compromise or benefit. We build alliances for a day or for a lifetime, and simultaneously differentiate those who do not share our concerns or values and identify them as Them, Others, or enemies. Politics is serious, even in families, see All in the Family or Grace and Frankie.Politics is dialectic: politicians call forth their antitheses. Any synthesis is a compromise. Politics is truthfulness or not, but one or the other or both, and without labels. Being "politically astute" means you can more often than not discern the proportions of truth and falsehoods in another's political stance and infer the reasons why. In national politics, as in the times of Jefferson and Julius Caesar, the glue holding allies together is a common emphasis on ideological positions: some as simple as we still say: conservative versus progressive, some not at all simple, called "big tent" political parties, with a few major points of agreement, but also additional issues perhaps not shared or even not respected by one's main allies. Conservatism incorporates at its center the idea that stabile and beneficial circumstances are hard enough to come by and to keep as a stable reference for carrying out ones life without doing what may turn out to be foolish and likely detrimental choices and projects for the future. Reactionary conservatism is literally the reflexive rejection of new ideas or people (players) as threats to the "happy (self-satisfying)" status quo. In party politics leaders consider the views and experiences of the mass of people less relevant to the good order and discipline needed to run the enterprise or country. Progressivism, often called liberalism, at its center incorporates the idea that reality is inherently never actually stabile, but continuously "fluid" in the incessant activities of large numbers of people constantly testing out new ideas and projects, the vast majority of which will prove their worth or unworthiness quickly enough that the "imperfect" status quo will not be made more imperfect. "Liberal" is a tricky word usually meaning "open to" new experience, inclusion, favoring empericism, and in party politics favoring civil rights and liberties for the members of a democracy, usually also free enterprise. In practice a person (and even parties) can be conservative on one issue and progressive on another. It usually depends on the contemporary beliefs about what issues will generate the most unintended or bad consequences or which involve leaders, structures, and principles thought to be weaker than others. Conservatives frequently refer back to past beliefs and how conservative policies maintained them, while progressives are more likely to project into the future benefits to be realized or problems that will be encountered if their preferred action is not taken. In the best of times party politics is a dance wherein participating politicians concentrate on "display," such as oratory, and also "disguise," such as indecision, whereas in the worst of times they fight, tooth and bloody nail. In matters like human slavery in this country the blood spilled was 110,000 killed, 2,200 survived their wounds, but 224,500 died of disease. In other words, politics is a very inexact type of interpersonal behavior. In the mass it is literally unpredictable to the extent of the impossibility of calculating hundreds of personal values variables of millions of participants. Yet there seems to be an inordinant willingness to rally and associate for a cause. Some politicians take a stance that, when people swear an oath to tell the truth and to reveal their true inner thoughts and intentions, they should be taken a face value—believed! But we know that people tell half truths, lie, omit relevant facts, and cross their fingers when being sworn in. Oaths to tell the truth and whole truth in court have perjury penalties. Oaths to defend the Constitution are almost meaningless, yet we constantly cast scorn on those who violate that oath of office. Scorn adds up in some precincts and not in others. Bargaining is the central process of politics. People join political parties on the promise that their own points of view will be heard in exchange for listening to the points of view of ostensibly like-minded people. It goes way beyond listening, obviously. It requires a politician to pledge and then to vote for the measures of other people, those in the party's majority, in exchange for support of the politician's measures at a later date ... and for financial and "moral" support for candidacies for election or re-election. In "big tent" parties these exchanges of promises and actual votes can be require representatives to forego representing the interests of their constituents, which means that politicians must not only represent, but educate and persuade their constituencies, and if they cannot do this truthfully, then they disguise the truth or outright lie, so that they will not be voted out of office. A politician must be very adept at gauging the temperament of hundreds of fellow politicians and of thousands of voters each with their own inclinations, emotions, prejudices, and desired outcomes. Polling is one way politicians and their observers (usually themselves) try to get an estimate of the thinking and potential voting patterns of large numbers of people. Polling is not voting, and those polled know that, so there is something like the "placebo effect" in polls that pretends a reality that just is not there. It should be obvious that "playing politics" is a behavior in which all politicians indulge and are forced into because others are into it as well. It is not avoidable! People are, as I asserted at the beginning, political as children, teenagers, adults, married, and professionally. What this means, however, is the critical point that at any given moment someone is lying, deliberately hiding a truth, misrepresenting the truth, or denying the truth. Honesty and ultimately Truth itself are the casualities, if the polity does not have the way to "clean house" often, to sweep away the deceits and damned lies and collect $200 on the way back to Go, that is, to get daily reenforcement for being candid and truthful at least as often as for being dishonest. We have not figured that out yet! Needless to say perhaps, politics and parties cannot be ignored, and that ignoring them in the 1787 Constitution actually compounded the significant issues of the day, especially human slavery. The next constitution of this country must incorporate measures to control and to attenuate the power of political parties, specifically to not allow or give parties tacit or explicit permission to arrange the structure or processes of government. If parties are the outcome of having representative government, then these parties can behave like representatives, visiting (for no more than three 4-year terms), but not owning, leasing, subleasing, or renting, our government. JB (The Project, National Politics)
29 April 22
What Would An American Dictatorship Look Like?
Maybe it would be more appropriate to ask why a question like that posed above in the title is even relevant? The relevance is that the Republicans are no longer the simple political party with an elephant mascot, the party of Lincoln, but are now and since 2015, if you will, demonstrably involved in an on-going criminal conspiracy to acquire governmental power with which they overtly intend to limit the franchise to people like themselves who cannot abide sharing democracy with people they deem cultural aliens, untrustworthy and fundamentally inferior: in general Blacks, Browns, Asians, Muslims, Liberals, Atheists, Jews, LGTBQ people, direct household welfare recipients of any color, Socialists, and Communists. Admittedly, that is a long laundry list of people to fear or hate and to whom they have already vocally expressed their undying enmity. To be fair, though, not every Republican fears and hates all of these types of people, but they bring people with those fears and hatreds under their political tent, all of them, because all of them no longer respect the democratic principles they once did—or once quietly pretended to. They see themselves out-numbered and threatened with extinction. Boiled down to its fundamental essence Republicans no long espouse (and quite the contrary, despise) equality of all Americans under the rule of law, or put another way, the have declared the "great American experiment in multi-cultural democracy to be an abject and intolerable failure. And, moreover, a situation which no longer fits with their baseline idea that the United States was intended (by God) to be a nation where White Christian People are in charge." The first epoch of the American Dictatorship will look very much like the American Republic looked in 1949 or so: segregated, Protestant Christians in power nearly everywhere, Roman Catholics biding their time and occasionally to occupy serious policy and power wielding offices. Jews were restricted to local areas or low-visibility positions. There were no prominent or annoying Muslims in America in 1949. Atheists kept to themselves with certain notable exceptions, some of whom monetized it. Trade unions were corrupted at almost all levels. Corporations had acquired many key members of either house of Congress. The Eisenhower eight years ending in 1960 were sedate, censored, with rumbling fears of corporatist fascism surfacing not nearly often enough. This epoch will last only six or so years, linked to the presidential election cycle. Elections will frequently be corrupted and decided by Republican state legislatures. Leadership and the grievance-base it depends on will plot carefully the removal of key opponents, usually for tax evasion. Putin likes that sort of finesse. For a good majority of the electorate the consolidation of power will seem quite far off, and it will be poorly reported in the news. In 1949 through the mid-1960's the South was run by Dixiecrats whose agenda was continued suppression of the Black culture, unless it could be monetized by and for Whites, the middle classes of which enjoyed a world of consumer delights, many of which were to assist women who had been returned to the home household from their wartime emancipation. Notre Dame was a favorite college football team, but various state universities vied for the top laurels. Professional baseball was barely integrated, but still basking in the illusion of being the national pasttime. College students drank copiously, but did not demonstrate in public about the social inequities or the rapacious corporate culture. They wanted careers more than opporunities to fix all the cracks in the Bell, but to be steadfastly anti-Communist and girded for a long cold war. Cities were growing and spreading out into delightful but poorly funded and staffed suburban townships. Basic industries were not yet fully impacted by less costly goods produced "overseas" —a quaint term underlining the illusory independence of the US from Europe and Asia. For some, mostly White, it was an idyllic time for which many Republicans wish to return or reinvent with our new technologies. Washington and state capitals were reported in less detail by news media, and that will be replicated first. Television journalists already foresee this and are hewing to the "fair and balanced" neutrality they were taught, despite the glaring fact that balance is now a comparison of apples to toadstools, and fairness is essentially complicity against democracy. The second phase of the American Dictatorship will follow its logical pathways to situations like Tamany Hall in New York, Huey Long in Louisiana. It will prosper in situations like the theocratic government in Utah, and Protestant-pandering statehouses in semi-rural places like Oklahoma and Missouri and Indiana, all of the South, and even the upper midwest, especially states like Minnesota heavily "burdened" by Islamic immigrants. There will be more corrupt "buy-off/trade-offs" like price supports and land banks for agriculture, so that they would stay quiet in those states like Pennsylvania, Indiana, Iowa, Illinois, Wisconsin, Minnesota, the Dakotas, Montana, et al. Economic sub-sector welfare will be balanced by Military sub-sector welfare. Basically, rolling the sow over onto her side and giving suck to whomever could raise enough political noise to get it. The news cycle was managed by those running the big three news companies and in cahoots with the few major newspapers not already headed for oblivion. These things will happen in Washington more and locally worse. But in Phase 2, as now, the principle of "Leninist democratic centralism" will guide Republican politics, that is, the value or valence of everything will be declared at the center of the "Party," as it is now by Trump and his avatars in wards, precincts, and all the way to Washington. The power apparatchiki will continue to use "dog whistle" language. Journalism is protected by the First Amendment, yet the nightly news is not protected from the corporations that own their means of production. Prominent journalists will be scorned and shuttered as the dictatorship takes hold through endless lies and mendacity. The rest will bow out of contention, and journalism departments across the nation will fold for lack of customers and under pressure from fearful alums. The word "truth," which was assailed endlessly before the last free election, will not be used as much anymore. Universities and colleges will retreat into Aesopean curricula as alumni and state legislatures are transformed into censorship boards wielding power through budgets. Again those most affected will be that long list of the feared and hated, including now the Progressive moles that pop up to criticize and are slapped down into obscurity. So far most of this will be tolerable if you are White or Rich or both. The discrepancies between ideal and real will increase, but these will fall most problematically on all those kinds of people Republicans fear and hate and cannot tolerate participating in our government. The White middle class so aggrieved by our national failure to adapt our economy smoothly and equitably to the online, computer-managed, world economy with all its natural disortions from asymmetric economic evolution, will demand redress, but the center will not tolerate that much dissent. It could take a generation before these aggrieved, the fascistic base, learn their lesson. It could take another generation to throw off the tyranny. Progressives and Recovering Republicans will watch in horror—and fear—as this happens. So will the world, which by the way is fairly used to "American self-deceptionism." There will be movements for secession in New England, New York, New Jersey and the west coast. There could be civil war over this, but it could also trigger the wary everywhere to reconsider the cost to their freedom and our democracy. The seeds of absolutist, anti-democratic, fascist politics are planted deep in our soil. Fighting our way free of dictatorship will be very difficult, for many fatal. JB (Society, National Politics)
8 FEB 22
On the Other Hand
Well, jumping to conclusions is okay, if you and they turn out most of the time to be correct. I am paranoid about the Trumpists and their hand puppet formerly known as the Republican Party. It is no longer a party in the sense that it has an agenda, policies to pursue, or respect for democracy, the Constitution of the United States or the intelligence of the vast majority of voting people in this country. It is a creature of Donald J. Trump's fulminating imagination, dedicated entirely to putting him back in office and to doing what they might to restore the America of 1927 to reality. It is violently anti-Semitic, anti-Black, anti-Brown, anti-socialist, anti-abortion, anti-immigration and pro-White Supremacy. I am sure in my conviction that, if there is something Trump believes he could do to ingratiate himself with Putin, he will do or already is doing it. With the RNC fully converted to Hostage-Trumpism, my speculation that Trump is already doing it seems valid still. In sum, the right to far right in America looks and sounds quite a bit weaker today than it did last week. Meanwhile, NATO is falling into line with some interesting confusion about whether or not to shut down the new under-the-Baltic gas pipeline from Russia, but otherwise a solid front confronting Putin, who my former student and friend of many years (who lived in Moscow for about twenty years) believes does not want to invade Ukraine, but does want to establish (re-establish) Russia as a major country, even if no longer a super-power. Putin's expulsion from the G-8 is one of the key elements of his nagging and lagging self-esteem. Yes, he probably will decide that the time is right for Ukraine to cede the Donbas region to Russia. He could get it, we both think, without an invasion. My student also points out that the eastern regions of Ukraine are nominally Orthodox, while the western regions are Roman Catholic. I do not know what this means for Ukrainian domestic politics, but almost any analogy from the west would tell you that is definitely more likely to be divisive than unifying. No one, not even many Ukrainians want to fight Russia for the country. Ukraine, the Kievan state "founded" (taken over and invigorated) by the Varangians (eastern Scandanavian Vikings) from the loose confederation of duke and princedoms that took root as the 2nd millennium began was wiped out by the Mongol Golden Horde, then overtaken by the Lithuanian Grand Duchy, the Lithuanian-Polish Commonwealth, and then a resurgence of the Khanate of the Crimea, which survived the general withdrawal of the Golden Horde. The Don Cossacks were usually thought to be in charge in the Don River Basin area and some years west over the great Eurasian steppe to the Dnieper River, which is the basic dividing line of contemporary eastern and western Ukraine, which in 1686 after the Russo-Polish War ceded to Russia the eastern half of Ukraine, so roughly the time of Peter the Great, who you will remember went in disguise to The Netherlands to learn ship building so he could assemble a fleet on the Black Sea. Russia's claim to Ukraine is historical, but not deep, and (except for the draconian 70 years of the USSR) was a distinct and separate culture. Ironically, Russia itself was founded by Kievans spreading out under the pressure of primogeniture inheritance to the north and east! So, I will add "international prestige" to the list of wins, Putin hopes to accomplish by this mass build-up of military assets on the border with Ukraine. There is also a possibility that flexing his muscles like this was also meant to test the mettle of his generals and the military beaurocracy. There's nothing like vague commands to reveal the weaknesses in those given those commands—and, the strengths, too, of course! JB (National Politics)
6/FEB/22
Timing is Everything!
Does anything about this last week seem uniquely strange to you? Not just plain strange, but off-pattern, unique. We have been going through a lot of political turmoil mixed with a brutal pandemic with over 900,000 lives lost in the US to the virus and perhaps a very large number more misdiagnosed as something else, plus brutal weather around the world proving the point that if you pump energy into a system it will talk back. There are explanations for both (and many who refuse the explanations), but there are sciences of pandemics and of global climate. So, brutal here, brutal there, yet what is going on with Trump's complete take-over of the Republican Party seems to me to be out of step with the political calendar and the political behavior one would expect to see at various stages of that calendar—even his kind of political behavior. Why would he admit he was directing the Vice President to literally "overturn" a free and fair election which, incidentally, he knew he had lost badly. The admission is public and real and constitutes several different serious crimes, which if we were at war right now would constitute High Treason. Then, even more recently last week, the Republican National Committee said, as they censured Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger, the two Republicans investigating the brutal insurrection at the US Capitol on January Sixth, were “participating in a Democrat-led persecution of ordinary citizens engaged in legitimate political discourse.” Clearly this is not typical RNC behavior or rhetoric and must have come directly from Trump himself. This is the beginning of what could become a pitched battle for the whole ball game. [My emphasis above.] "This was the week when Trump revealed all" Washington Post, February 5, 2022 Yes, we were scheduled to hold an election for local, state, and Congressional seats this November, but it is just barely February and to me it looks like Donald Trump has jumped the gun. Does this mean Trump now/already thinks that the Congressional elections cannot be won in a fair election, given the stunning success of the Biden Administration in just one year? If so, Trump believes he must prepare his base to be unconcerned with traditional thinking and behavior, so that the armed, domestic terrorist part of his base is able to carry out a) fraudulent elections, or b) outright take-overs at every level of government in the country? But why now—this past week, is my question? The self-incrimination is the most difficult to understand, but may provide an important clue. It means he believes that he sees he has only one way out of prosecution and conviction. He may also believe his minions will feel more secure in his grasp if they know he is "all in," so to speak. Trump loves behaviors that have multiple wins. Still, why now? I think he has moved up the time-table of his plans so as to provide a different and disconcerting backdrop for a direct and armed coup d'etat. There are two main ways to view this: either he is in direct communication with Putin, or this is another of those "Russia, if you are listening" events. Trump means to capitalize on and indirectly assist Putin's brutal invasion and take-over of Ukraine. The confusion and chaos of a Ukraine war will fully occupy Washington. What better time for Trump to attempt at every level of government a violent take-over! I'll tell you who loves this—Vladimir Putin. Washington supporting a fractious NATO, with obvious opportunities to participate in direct armed conflict with Belorus and Russia itself, will have a hell of a time countering an armed insurgency from within. Putin has just secured his weakest flank in an ominous meeting in Beijing (under the cover of attending the Olympics) with President Xi by getting him to promise not to take advantage of Russia ... or to join in, if America gets into the actual fighting, all done just as the Olympics begin. The irony is so awful, it has to be real. Nota Bene: There is an article about jumping to conclusions in the February issue of Scientific American. One test of the issue is the question of how much a baseball bat costs if it and the baseball together cost $1.10 and the bat costs a dollar more than the ball. Another test is about fishing in two lakes. One lake has mostly red fish; the other lake has mostly grey fish. If a fisherman catches three fish, two of them red, from Lake A and three fish, two of them grey, from Lake B. Is it jumping to conclusions to decide that Lake A has more red fish than grey? One of these tests is self-contained, the other is not. Deciding what constitutes evidence is part of what homo sapiens learned out on the African savannas and through natural selection evolved our brains. The other part is pattern recognition, which as you can see depends crucially on patterns of what? Evidence. Patterns of Evidence. (A buck five, and yes, given only this information.) JB (National Politics)
1/15/22
Other's Complaints
It turns out that Donald is not the only public figure who throws tantrums. A tantrum is a vivid, noisy, post-infantile railing against the fickleness of a fate you have convinced yourself is your right and privilege to enjoy. I do not quote this person very often, and frankly, you may therefore assume that I do not read her column very often either. Her most redeeming feature is that she tries very hard to be a thinking person of the Democratic persuasion. Her success ratio is just a bit better than 50-50. I will leave it to you to decide where she lands this opinion piece. It seems to me it is about the same place as usual, the glass half empty. The thing about having 48 Democrats and 2 independents caucusing with them to achieve a 50-50 tie, if voting in the US Senate is by caucus, rather than principle, oath, or other non-suicidal considerations, it is that every last Senator in the chamber has more power to mess things up all by themselves, but with the fillibuster even more swagger. This is a bi-partisan effect, too. Members who think they are still Republicans who vote as they please and not as their leader requires can upset the obstruction ordered by Trump. So on the Democratic caucus side, there is very little anyone can do when a member defects. Push Manchin or Sinima too hard and they switch parties, which means the Biden Administration party is over. The author of today's piece of opinion seems to have forgotten how to count. It is true, however, that President Biden lapses into "reveries" of how it was in bygone days and how he now thinks it should be. The annoyingly "funny" thing about those reveries, they were just as contentious by the standards of their day as today's. Maybe more, because we have made significant progress in civil rights and gender rights. The reverie excuse is wearing very thin, especially as he believes he has a Presidential right to his revered memory and understanding of US politics. As I have said before, that lady who is supposedly with him in the room and the last to leave has not been forceful enough with him. She is dead politically if things procede as is. So, she has to act and do some woman-'splaining to this POTUS. In all fairness to the author of today's opinion, she may think that someone in the White House does read her comments and that these comments will flex a knee and point a boot to land where it needs to land, as explained above. I think we can all hold our breath another month, but not into March! What then, you may ask? Well, we will have a coup de grace, pretty much like the one Dick Nixon received. He resigns or she does. The new VP will be someone with the temperament of a Ted Lieu. Ron Klane stays for at least six months. The new or chasened POTUS, convenes the cabinet and tells each one to provide a detailed list of things they can and will do administratively to block, run around, and defeat the myriad new anti-democratic voting and election laws in a third of our states. DoT will provide T to the polls. It will be every secretary. If the Attorney General or any other balks, fire them. There are plenty of well-prepared men and women available to deal with this situation. Reverie is not acceptable. We are not going to commit national suicide because Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin have effectively defected from the Party! JB (National Politics)
|