Monthly Archives: July 2023

Why The Right Won’t Win The Culture War

The term “culture war” is shorthand for the increasingly frantic effort of America’s White Christian Nationalists to turn back the clock–to return “uppity” women and Blacks to their prior, subordinate positions, stuff LGBTQ citizens back in the closet, and make it clear that respect for “religion” extends only to Christians (and really just certain Protestants).

The ferocity with which they are waging that battle can make our lives chaotic and dangerous. Bizarre accusations leveled at school boards and teachers are accompanied by voucher programs intended to destroy the schools that create a democratic polity; rogue Courts ignore longstanding jurisdictional rules in order to accommodate anti-gay religious bigotry; a contingent of Congressional mental cases has now gone beyond their effort to defund the FBI by refusing to fund the military if the Pentagon doesn’t eliminate what they call its “woke” policies.

Rational people are understandably depressed and/or frightened.

I don’t know who first uttered the phrase “this too shalll pass,” but it definitely applies to the culture warriors’ current eruption of fear and hate. What we are seeing is a tantrum triggered by subconscious recognition that the America they are fighting so hard to prevent is inevitable.

Why do I say it’s inevitable? Because it is already here.

A few months ago, I was asked to speak to a local church’s Sunday school class about anti-Semitism. It was a good discussion (they were members of a denomination that I categorize as actually Christian), and as I was leaving, a lovely lady stopped me to say she’d appreciated the conversation, because her grandchildren are Jewish.

She has a lot of company. A 2020 survey by the Pew Research Center found that 42% of all currently married Jewish respondents had a non-Jewish spouse. (I’m obviously one of them–in case you were confused, Kennedy is not a Jewish name.) For that matter, the high rate of Jewish intermarriage is of great concern to the Rabbinate and to Jewish organizations; to the extent intermarriage reduces the number of people identifying as Jewish, we may disappear entirely. After all, there weren’t that many of us to start with.

Of course, it isn’t just inter-religious marriage. It’s also interracial and same-sex unions.

America is experiencing the demographic “mixing”that so terrified Southern slaveholders (at least, when they weren’t engaging in some of that “mixing” themselves, with slaves who couldn’t refuse…) The most recent data I could find from the U.S. Census Bureau was from 2019; at that time, about 11% of all marriages in the United States were interracial. Even more significantly, in 2021, according to Axios, approval of interracial marriage in the U.S. hit a new high of 94%, according to Gallup polling.

The article noted that the prevalence of intermarriage continues to increase. In 1967, when Loving v. Virginia was decided, just 3% of married couples were interracial. In 2021, Pew estimated it at 20%.

Numbers and percentages can change, depending upon the definitions used, but whatever the “accurate” percentages, the rate of demographic inter-mingling continues to rise, and to affect the social context within which increasing numbers of Americans live.

It isn’t just increased acceptance of opposite-sex intermarriage. A poll conducted by the Trevor Project found that two-thirds of American adults report personally knowing someone who identifies as gay or lesbian, and nearly two-thirds of them (62%) said they would be comfortable if their child came out to them as gay, lesbian, or bisexual.(Only 13% would not be comfortable–a huge change from past attitudes.) Approval of same-sex marriage is now at 71%.

Dobbs was also too late to re-stigmatize abortion. Researchers tell us that one in four American women have terminated a pregnancy at some point in their lives. Gallup tells us that 85% of American women support reproductive choice–and that 45% would impose no restrictions on the procedure.

We now live in a society in which a not-insignificant number of older White Christians have Jewish, Black, Latino or gay grandchildren. Some number of those people react by rejecting those grandchildren, but a larger number will fight for a world that treats them fairly.

It isn’t just our friends and families. Increasing numbers of Americans go to jobs every day where their colleagues and co-workers are “diverse.” We have doctors and lawyers and CPAs who come from backgrounds different from our own.–and increasing numbers of those doctors, lawyers and CPAs are female.

In short, the world has moved on, and most of us prefer its current contours to the bigotries and caste-like social structures of the past. The exceptions are very angry and very loud, and they can do a lot of short-term harm. But their time has passed–and the tantrums they are throwing are evidence that–deep down–they know it.

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Diagnosis And Prescription

In a recent opinion piece for the New York Times, David French shared his theory that the recent, astonishing number of sign-ups to Meta’s Threads occurred–at least in part– “because Elon Musk did to Twitter what Donald Trump did to America.”

Not that Twitter was so great before Musk acquired it–as French quite accurately notes,  understanding what Musk did to Twitter doesn’t require an exaggeration of Twitter’s virtues before Musk, “any more than we should exaggerate the health of our body politic before Trump.”

Even before Musk, Twitter had become a toxic force in American culture, so toxic that I wrote last year it might be beyond repair. The site lurched from outrage to outrage, and the constant drumbeat of anger and crisis was bad for the soul.
So, yes, when Musk purchased Twitter, it needed help. Instead, he made it worse. Much worse.

For all of Twitter’s many flaws, it was still by far the best social media app for following breaking news, especially if you knew which accounts to follow. It was also the best app for seeing the thoughts of journalists, politicians and scholars in real time, sometimes to our detriment. It wasn’t the American town square — there are still many places where we talk to one another — but it was one of our town squares. Twitter mattered.

French enumerates the numerous decisions that have made the platform much worse–decisions that rather clearly rested on Musk’s flawed understanding of its strengths and weaknesses.

French’s essay makes a point that is applicable not just to the marketing of a social media platform, but to policy–and for that matter, human decision-making–more generally. As he says,

The new right’s theory of culture and power is fundamentally flawed, and both Trump and Musk are now cautionary tales for any conservatives who are willing to learn.

According to French,

The new right’s theory of power is based on a model of domination and imposition, and it just doesn’t work. In the new right’s telling, the story of contemporary American culture is the story of progressive elite capture of the nation’s most important institutions — from the academy to big business to pop culture to the “deep state” — followed by its remorseless use of that institutional power to warp and distort American values.

And what’s the new right’s response to its theory of the left’s use of power? Fight fire with fire. Take over institutions. They tried to cancel us? Cancel them. They bullied us? Bully them.

The “cautionary tale” to which French alludes is actually pretty simple: in order to fix a problem, you need to diagnose it properly. Medical personnel understand that–duh!– if the disease being treated isn’t the disease from which you’re suffering, you won’t be cured. If a social dysfunction is rooted in X and policymakers insist upon addressing it by attacking Y, the likely result will just be additional dysfunction.

That axiom is simple, but of course, its application can be complicated. The actual roots of many social problems are complex. That said, a significant cause of America’s political divisions can be found in the wildly different diagnoses of the country’s problems offered by the GOP cult and by more thoughtful Americans.

The cult is convinced that America’s problems are rooted in a modernity that has discarded “tradition,” by which they mean the dominance of White Christian males. The cult’s frantic efforts to outlaw abortion and its attacks on efforts to increase diversity, inclusion and equity grow out of that diagnosis. The most recent example: House amendments to the bill funding the military– funding that passed only after the far Right attached provisions limiting abortion rights, gender transition procedures and diversity training in the armed forces.

When a diagnosis–an explanation of causation–is rooted in fantasy, the medicine prescribed is likely to make the condition worse. Gun violence won’t be ameliorated by making more guns available to “good guys;” the working poor won’t be helped by reducing taxes on presumed “job creators;” history won’t disappear if we pass laws against teaching it…

What happens when a sizable portion of the polity misdiagnoses reality–when the “medicine” imposed by people in power is exactly the wrong prescription? We’ve seen the result. As French put it, a government that needed reform “encountered a politician who broke far more than he built. A social media platform that needed repair was purchased by its most prominent troll. The results were predictable.”

We inhabit a complicated world. It isn’t always easy to locate the roots of our problems–but government by people whose diagnoses and prescriptions are  reliably simple and just as reliably wrong won’t cure what ails us.

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The Eternal Target

Robert Hubbell is the author of one of the newsletters that appear in my inbox each weekday; some months ago, my sister recommended that I add him to my daily read and I can echo her endorsement.

Hubbell recently considered the anti-Semitism displayed by one of RFK, Jr.’s many conspiracy theories–this one, that the Chinese had “bio-engineered”  COVID  to disproportionately target Caucasians and Black people., while immunizing Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese people.

As Hubbell wrote

Over the weekend, we learned that Kennedy’s conspiratorial thinking regarding the origins of Covid and the (alleged) evils of vaccines led him to the place where many conspiracy theories seem to inevitably land—blaming “the Jews” for the world’s problems. Most conspiracy theories begin by blaming the ubiquitous and anonymous “they”, which inexorably morphs over time to “liberal elites,” then “Bill Gates and George Soros,” and then “the Jews.”

 I sure wish we Jews were as powerful as these conspiracy-addled  lunatics clearly think we are. (Really, if I had a space laser, don’t you think I’d have used it against some of these nutcases by now??)

In Hubbell’s subsequent discussion of Junior’s “bioweapon” theories, he meticulously examined the ignorance it required.

He claims that the Chinese and American governments are developing “ethnic bioweapons.” The notion that governments are building bioweapons that will selectively attack people based on their “ethnicity” is a delusion based on monumental ignorance about DNA, biology, race, ethnicity, science, politics, and reality. It is the stuff of 1950s comic books, adolescent imagination, and Nazi eugenics—which is how sheer stupidity morphs into absolute evil in the reality free cauldron of conspiracy theories.

Hubbell examined RFK,Jr.’s “copious documentation” (so that we don’t have to), and found that–to the extent any legitimate documentation exists regarding “ethnic bioweapons”– “it relates to the fear that some government might exploit the gene editing technology CRSPR/Cas9 to develop ethnic bioweapons in the future.”

Rather obviously, a concern about what might occur  sometime in the future is not “evidence” that U.S. and China are developing bioweapons targeted at various genetic groups.

What struck me about this particular eruption of anti-Semitism–and Hubbell’s ability to demonstrate the ignorance that prompted it–was an insight it prompted about the nature of conspiracy theories in general: people who don’t understand the world they inhabit, and who are unable to tolerate the ambiguities resulting from that lack of understanding, are desperate for answers and explanations they can comprehend.

Conspiracy theories provide those answers. (So do some religions.)

Are LGBTQ people more visible than they used to be? There must be more of them, and that means that some groups–librarians and Drag Queens among them– are “grooming” children and turning them gay.

Are the FBI and Department of Justice closing in on Donald Trump’s myriad crimes? That’s convincing evidence that those federal agencies have been “weaponized” against Republicans.

Did your 87-year-old grandfather die a month after getting a COVID vaccine? Was your sister-in-law’s next-door neighbor’s brother’s child diagnosed as autistic after getting her measles vaccine? Aha! Evidence that vaccines are dangerous.

Are you a man who’s unable to get a date? (Okay, unable to get laid?) It isn’t because you’re unattractive or unpleasant (or nuts). As your fellow Incels will tell you, it’s evidence that “women’s lib” groups have poisoned relations between the sexes.

Is your life not unfolding in ways you had hoped? Are your children behaving in ways that you disapprove? It’s evidence that some shadowy group–probably the Jews–is running the world in ways that disadvantage good White Christians like you…

I’m sure readers of this blog can add to the list….

There is a reason for the growing political and social gap between educated and uneducated Americans. And by “educated” I don’t mean people with degrees; I mean people who read books and newspapers, open themselves to the lessons of history, and respect science and technical expertise. Educated people are humans who recognize–and have learned to live with– the inevitable ambiguities of modern life. They are people who understand that the world is a complicated place, that we humans are still learning about causes and effects, and there are many questions we can’t answer.

They are people who can tell the difference between evidence and fantasy, and are comfortable saying “I don’t know.”

Other people–those who are frantic for simple answers and desperate for someone or some group  to blame for their distress– cope by adopting fantasies that justify their fear and hatred of the “other.”

Today’s America evidently has a lot of them. Until their fevers subside, they can and do make life for the rest of us very uncomfortable–and for some of us “others,” very unsafe.

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What About Whataboutism?

There are two kinds of “whataboutism.”

We’re all familiar with the first, which became fashionable thanks to TFG and is now a repeated response by those defending him. Did he try to overturn the election? Endanger American security by stealing classified and highly sensitive documents? Brag about grabbing women by the you-know-what?

Well, what about Hilary’s emails?

That particular expression of what has come to be called “whataboutism” is considerably less effective as the evidence of Trump’s activities has mounted; rational folks (granted, a smaller part of the population than I used to think) understand the difference between traitorous behavior and inadequate attention to the rules governing electronic devices.

Another form of whataboutism seems to be growing, however, and it is far more destructive of the civic landscape. It is manifested by otherwise reasonable people–many of whom hold progressive political values, but for one reason or another, have given in to cynicism and embraced a “plague on all their houses” viewpoint.

Has Republican A expressed a particularly racist or misogynist worldview? Critics of Republican A are met with “well, what about Democrat C, who once made a Polish joke?”

Is a Republican officeholder accused of criminal behavior? Well, there are undoubtedly Democrats who are just as crooked. Or just as greedy. Often, expression of those sentiments is followed by a pledge to abstain from voting, or an equally counterproductive plan to vote for a doomed third-party candidate.

Here’s the thing: the cynics aren’t wrong when they point out that no party has a monopoly on virtue. Are there dishonest, greedy Democrats? Sure. Does the Democratic Party include officeholders who shade the truth, act in less than honorable ways, harbor prejudices, and (horrors!)fail to prioritize your pet issue? Undoubtedly.

Excuse me, but– except in very rare, very outrageous cases–it shouldn’t affect your vote or your other  political support.

Talk about a double standard: non-insane Republicans who recognize the lunacy of the contemporary MAGA base repeatedly excuse the pandering and lying of the party’s candidates by telling themselves that candidates “have to” feed the prejudices and support the conspiracy theories of the GOP base in order to win elections. They assure themselves that those candidates really do know better, and they obediently march to the polls and cast ballots for anyone sporting an “R” next to the name.

On the other hand, Democrats all too often consider themselves too pure to do likewise.

Those who embrace a “pox on all your houses” view ostentatiously wash their hands of the political process, nursing their offended virtue. The offending candidate doesn’t even need to be dishonest or bigoted–in many cases, the mere fact that he or she once took a position with which the critic disagreed is enough to justify a self-righteous withdrawal of support.

This display of ideological purity isn’t simply immature. Given the agendas of today’s political parties, it’s suicidal.

Today’s Republican Party embraces an agenda that represents a U-turn from the principles that once characterized it. It is now the party of Donald Trump, Ron DeSantis,  Marjorie Taylor Green, Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz. (When even a thoroughly corrupt Mitch McConnell begins to look statesmanlike by comparison, the GOP rot is all too evident.)

The current Democratic Party is all that stands in the way of control by a cult that wants nothing more than a return to the “good old times”– separate drinking fountains for Whites and Blacks,  LGBTQ citizens consigned to the closet, and women dying  from back-alley abortions.

Some wise person coined the a phrase that’s appropriate to the choice Americans face in upcoming elections: Never let the perfect become the enemy of the good.

We got Donald Trump because a lot of Americans didn’t like Hillary Clinton. They didn’t agree with positions Bill had taken, or they found her personality unpalatable, or they just couldn’t bring themselves to vote for a woman…So they stayed away or voted for Jill Stein in states where those decisions made a difference.

And America got Donald Trump and an alternate reality that continues to appeal to a  number of  Americans whose lives aren’t going the way they wanted and who desperately need someone or something to blame for their problems.

Joe Biden has been an impressive and consequential President. It is a travesty that more Americans don’t recognize the significant achievements of his administration. It hasn’t been perfect, but it has been considerably better than good.

I’m confident that more Americans will vote for Biden than for whatever mean-spirited candidate emerges from the chaos of today’s GOP, but–given the Electoral College–Biden could be defeated by the “whatabouters” who consider themselves too pure to cast a ballot for an old guy who’s less than perfect.

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And The Hits Keep Coming…

What happens when government–the primary mechanism through which humans engage in collective action– is no longer perceived as legitimate? 

Two headlines from last Wednesday’s Guardian suggest that we may soon be able to answer that question.

First, the Supreme Court.  It’s Clarence Thomas–again.

Several lawyers who have had business before the supreme court, including one who successfully argued to end race-conscious admissions at universities, paid money to a top aide to Justice Clarence Thomas, according to the aide’s Venmo transactions. The payments appear to have been made in connection to Thomas’s 2019 Christmas party.

The payments to Rajan Vasisht, who served as Thomas’s aide from July 2019 to July 2021, seem to underscore the close ties between Thomas, who is embroiled in ethics scandals following a series of revelations about his relationship with a wealthy billionaire donor, and certain senior Washington lawyers who argue cases and have other business in front of the justice.

Despite the fact that the payments all referenced Thomas’ Christmas party, the article says it remains unclear what the funds were actually for. Most of the former clerks who made the payments are currently lawyers working for large and prominent law firms–firms with substantial business before the Court. None of them responded to the Guardian’s requests for clarification.

Richard Painter, who served as the chief White House ethics lawyer in the George W Bush administration and has been a vocal critic of the role of dark money in politics, said is was “not appropriate” for former Thomas law clerks who were established in private practice to – in effect – send money to the supreme court via Venmo.

“There is no excuse for it. Thomas could invite them to his Christmas party and he could attend Christmas parties, as long as they are not discussing any cases. His Christmas party should not be paid for by lawyers,” Painter said. “A federal government employee collecting money from lawyers for any reason.”

Gee, it must be nice to be a Supreme Court Justice. As a steady stream of reports has confirmed, if you are a Justice like Clarence Thomas,  you don’t have to pay for anything–your mother’s home, fancy trips, memberships in exclusive clubs, your nephew’s tuition, your wedding reception…evidently, not even your Christmas Parties.

The steady drip, drip, drip of disclosures–especially those about Thomas and Alito– have deeply damaged the legitimacy of the highest Court in the land. But it isn’t only the Court.

Across the way, Congressional Republicans are doing their best to de-legitimize that branch of government.

The headline and sub-head tell the tale: “Former House Republicans and DoJ veterans lambast efforts to curb FBI and justice department”.”Current GOP members ‘disconnected from reality’ while working toward weakening democracy and the justice system.”

As House Republicans with close ties to Donald Trump widen investigations into alleged bias at the Department of Justice and the FBI – while also mulling impeachments of top Biden administration officials – justice department veterans and ex-GOP members are voicing concern that these efforts weaken the justice system and democracy.

 Led by the judiciary committee chairman, Jim Jordan, the far-right House Freedom Caucus members have helped spearhead inquiries into the alleged “weaponization of the federal government” with significant backing from the House speaker, Kevin McCarthy, and other GOP leaders.

Freedom Caucus members have issued wild and irresponsible threats to impeach pretty much everyone connected with the justice system, starting with Merrick Garland;  they’ve threatened budget cuts and/or the freezing of some officials’ salaries to penalize perceived biases against Trump, even though such moves would seem to undercut traditional GOP “law and order” rhetoric and policies.

That was “traditional” rhetoric at a time the GOP was a political party rather than a lunatic cult. Several former Republican Representatives clearly understand the devolution.

“Jordan is not only accepting Trump’s falsehoods but actively promoting them. It’s an alternative reality. Members are doing it for re-election purposes, fundraising and power,” said the former Michigan Republican representative Dave Trott.

Trott added that he thought “what the Trump crazies have promoted is undermining our democracy and confidence in our judicial system and justice department. Now they want to defund justice and the FBI because they know it will further energize the far-right base.”…

Looking ahead, House GOP alumni warn that the Republican investigations may appeal to Trump and his base, but alienate moderate voters.

“I’m sure Trump is thrilled by it all,” the former Republican Pennsylvania representative Charlie Dent said. “I bet he’s talking to his allies regularly. Trump is looking at this from his sense of personal grievance.”

Corruption on the Court. Keystone Kops running the House of Representatives. A  political party turned into a grievance cult by a dangerously mentally-ill ex-President.

We’re in a world of hurt.

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