Random Blogging – Page 118

Whataboutism

I’ve gotten used to “whataboutism”–most vividly illuminated by Republicans who respond to every criticism of Trump with “But what about Hillary’s emails!” There are lots of other examples: think of the people who respond to incidents of racist violence with “But what about black on black crime?”

What is so infuriating about this particular deflection technique is how intellectually dishonest it is. Whatever one’s position with respect to Hillary’s emails or black on black crime, they are irrelevant to the issue being raised.

Recently, Bret Stephens wrote a “whataboutism” column for the New York Times decrying liberal intolerance and excoriating left-wingers who “believe all the old patriarchal hierarchies must go (so that new “intersectional” hierarchies may arise), who are in a perpetual fervor to rewrite the past (all the better to control the future), and who demand cringing public apologies from those who have sinned against an ever-more radical ideological standard (while those apologies won’t save them from being fired).”

Stephens is a conservative, so coming across a conservative takedown of the column was particularly satisfying.

Tom Nichols is the author of The Death of Expertise (a book I recommend highly, by the way). Nichols is a conservative professor at the Naval War College, and like Stephens, a Never-Trumper. He took to Twitter to respond to Stephens’ column, and the thread was captured by AlterNet.I’m reproducing it in full, because it’s well worth reading in its entirety.

Yes, I read the Bret Stephens piece. Ho hum. Yes, the intolerant left is a threat. Stipulated. However, I have excoriated people on the left for most of my career. But only opposing Trump produced harassment, demands to fire me, and death threats. Cancel culture, indeed. /1

I mean, I have blistered everyone from Obama to Hillary Clinton, and across the seas to Putin and Assad. For years, I was an outspoken conservative. But I never encountered McCarthyist thuggery like the kind I’ve gotten from the Cult of Trump. So spare me the hand-wringing. /2

I am not blind to the totalitarian streak on the left. I wrote about it – and at The Federalist, back in the day, no less. Amazingly, no one on the left tried to get me fired for it or told me I’d be hung as a traitor or left endless f-bombs on my voicemail at work. Imagine. /3

Look, the Democrats always have short-pants Stalinists in their midst. The GOP has always had theocratic wanna-be ayatollahs in *their* midst. The difference is that the GOP is now in power and owned, completely, by its fringe – one that is frantic with fear and anger. /4

The people who want to pull down statues without reading the nameplates (or without reading a book) are idiots. Many are the children of privilege. Some are even stupid enough to think they’re leading a revolution. They’re not. Calm down. /5

Leftist revolution here is about as likely as the Civil War 2.0 porn that Trump’s kooks love so much (not least because those same young people would freak out if no-kidding socialism was ever implemented).
Meanwhile, right-wing attacks on the Constitution? Happening now. /6

“Oh noes, the college kids are gonna take over the country!” is one of those cyclical things that conservatives worry about – usually as an indication of how little faith conservatives have in their own ideas and how much they fear their own personal weaknesses./7

But what about the culture war, right? Here’s an open secret: most GOPers never really cared that much about the culture war. They say they do, and they wave the flag and decry the behavior of poor people and brown people and people in cities, but that’s mostly a show. /8

How can I say this? Because you don’t see much of that culture war reflected in the personal behavior of most self-identified conservatives, who are as decadent as anyone else. These are not Amish stoics. They just don’t like *other* people being decadent, too. /9

What are they, then? They’re white people, who liked the world (or imagine they did) the way it looked when they were kids, and use the culture war as a proxy for resentment and nostalgia. The behavior of political evangelicals since 2016, especially, finally outed all that. /10

You want me to worry about college Marxists? Yeah, I’ll get right on that as soon as we dislodge the febrile anti-constitutionalists of the GOP.
I have plenty of concerns about the left. But right now, I’d like to deal with the obvious and demonstrated threat from the right. /11

I’ve been hearing about leftists taking over the country since I was a kid. It was supposed to happen in the 60s, after the 80s, etc etc. And the culture war, such that is, was over decades ago. But I never thought I’d have to fight over the Constitution – with the *right*. /12

So take all your fears of rampaging drag queens and how Joe Biden is controlled by the College Spartacists, and put ’em in a sock, pally. I’ll be first in line to oppose extremist left-wing dumbassery – once we defeat far more dangerous people like Barr and McConnell. /12x

You go, Tom!

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Statues And Shades Of Gray

Americans are having yet another iteration of a longstanding argument about the various monuments erected to memorialize–or let’s be honest, valorize– Confederate heroes of the Civil War.

People defending these statues argue that they teach us about our history. Proponents of removal respond that placing them in museums is adequate to the teaching of history, and remind us that Germany still remembers the Nazis despite the fact that there are no statues of Hitler or Eichmann “gracing” the public way.

In my view, deciding that Confederate statues should come down is an easy call.

Here’s the test: why was this particular statue erected? To ask that question a bit differently, why is this person being honored? Public statues are uniformly considered “honors”–so the first question to ask is, logically, “why do we honor Senator or General or XYZ?” If the person portrayed has been selected for his participation in the Confederate secession, the monument should go. If the person is historically significant, move the statue to a museum or other teaching venue; if he is just a reminder of Confederate treason, smash him.

As numerous historians have reminded us, these statues weren’t erected in the aftermath of the Civil War; almost all of them were placed in prominent places during the civil rights movement as a testament of white resistance to African-American equality. They aren’t even legitimately “historic.”

The question of public monuments gets more complicated when it comes to people who were less one-dimensional. What do we do, for example, about people like Woodrow Wilson?

As Ross Douthat wrote in the New York Times awhile back,

When it comes to hating Woodrow Wilson, I was an early adopter. Raised with the bland liberal history that hailed the 28th president as a visionary for championing the League of Nations, I picked up in college what was then a contrarian, mostly right-wing perspective — that many of Wilson’s legacies were disastrous, including an imperial understanding of the presidency that’s deformed our constitutional structure ever since, the messianic style in American foreign policy that gave us Vietnam and Iraq, and a solidification of Jim Crow under a scientific-racist guise.

Now his racism has finally prompted Princeton University, which once had Wilson as its president, to remove his name from its prominent school of public and international affairs. This move was made under pressure from left-wing activists, but it also answered conservatives who had invoked Wilson’s name to suggest that progressive racists might be unjustly spared from cancellation.

For this Wilson-despiser, his fall was a clarifying moment. I expected to be at least a little pleased and justified when the name was gone. Instead, the decision just seemed fundamentally dishonest, a case study in what goes wrong when iconoclasm moves beyond Confederates to encompass the wider American inheritance.

Douthat says that monuments and honorifics are intended to honor deeds, “to express gratitude for some specific act, to acknowledge some specific debt, to trace a line back to some worthwhile inheritance.” I agree.

So–what do we do with monuments to inevitably flawed real humans–to Founders who glorified human liberty while “owning” other human beings, for example?

Thus when you enter their Washington, D.C., memorials, you’ll see Thomas Jefferson honored as the man who expressed the founding’s highest ideals and Abraham Lincoln as the president who made good on their promise. That the first was a hypocrite slave owner and the second a pragmatist who had to be pushed into liberating the slaves is certainly relevant to our assessment of their characters. But they remain the author of the Declaration of Independence and the savior of the union, and you can’t embrace either legacy, the union or “we hold these truths …” without acknowledging that these gifts came down through them.

I find myself in agreement with Douthat. The relevant question remains the one I previously outlined: what, exactly, are we memorializing?

To repudiate an honor or dismantle a memorial, then, makes moral sense only if you intend to repudiate the specific deeds that it memorializes. In the case of Confederate monuments, that’s exactly what we should want to do. Their objective purpose was to valorize a cause that we are grateful met defeat, there is no debt we owe J.E.B. Stuart or Nathan Bedford Forrest that needs to be remembered, and if they are put away we will become more morally consistent, not less, in how we think about that chapter in our past.

On the other hand, complicated and often profoundly flawed individuals often do very good things. If the statue we have erected was intended to honor those good things, it should stay. If it is only there to remind us that something happened–especially when that “something” was regrettable– it shouldn’t.

If we shouldn’t celebrate what a monument celebrates, it should go.

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Respect

Tom Friedman isn’t one of my favorite New York Times columnists; I usually find him either tendentious or self-congratulatory. But he’s growing on me.

I especially liked his column last Wednesday, in which he suggested a slogan/bumper sticker for the Biden campaign:“Respect science, respect nature, respect each other.”

If only!!

As Friedman writes, not only are these values held by most Americans, they are in dramatic contrast to Trump. (I’m pretty sure Trump doesn’t have anything we would call “values”–and I have never seen him display anything remotely resembling respect for anyone or anything..Even self-respect would be an improvement.)

Disdain for science is seen in Trump’s antagonism to fact, evidence and reality. It’s bad enough when his contempt for facts involves lying about crowd sizes or windmills causing cancer, infuriating when it involves denial of climate change– but with the advent of Covid-19, it poses an even more immediate threat.

But his disdain for science has become fatal, as we’re seeing in this widening pandemic. Trump has gone from offering quack remedies, like disinfectant, ultraviolet light and hydroxychloroquine, to mocking people, including Biden, for adopting the easiest and most scientifically proven method for limiting the spread of the coronavirus: wearing a face mask.

Trump doesn’t simply reject science. He’s lost whatever grip he ever had on elementary logic. Friedman echoes the astonishment so many of us expressed when our Commander-in-Chief–the purported leader of the free world–opined that we have more cases of Coronavirus because we test for it.

Think about that: Stop testing. Then we’ll have no knowledge. Then we’ll have no numbers. Then we’ll have no virus. Why didn’t I think of that?

Stop testing people for drunken driving, and then we’ll have no more drunken drivers. Stop arresting people for shootings, and then the crime rate will go down.

And if we didn’t have pregnancy tests, voila! Population control…

Then there’s the little matter of respecting Mother Nature.

Trump’s lack of respect for nature may be a political asset for him with his base, but it’s been a disaster for the country. …

Respect for nature also means understanding that we live on a hard rock called planet Earth with a thin cover of oceans and topsoil, enveloped by a thin layer of atmosphere. Abuse that soil, junk up those oceans with plastics, distort that atmospheric blanket and we will likely (further) destroy the perfect Garden of Eden that has been the basis of all human civilization.

According to National Geographic, the Russian Arctic has been having an extended heat wave that drove temperatures north of the Arctic Circle to 100.4 degrees F on June 20–the official first day of summer. (I can’t imagine what that will do to all the structures that have been built on the Arctic’s permafrost…)

The Trump administration has rolled back close to 100 environmental regulations–and has failed or refused to enforce a number of others. The administration reserves its “respect” for the bottom lines of fossil fuel and chemical companies that are operating with impunity as the planet heats and widely-used chemicals are found to be lethal.

Respect for other people? Can we even remember the civility, decorum and good manners of the Obama-Biden administration?

Respect each other? That’s not so easy in the midst of our other pandemic — a pandemic of incivility. You cannot exaggerate the impact on the whole civic culture of having a president who has elevated name-calling, denigration and lying to a central feature of his presidency, amplified by the White House.

Friedman acknowledges that there are multiple sources of disrespectful behavior–especially the algorithms of social media platforms–but he notes that restoring interpersonal respect will require two things: a president who every day models respect rather than denigration, and citizens who actually listen to each other. Right now, we have neither.

Respect for science. Respect for nature. Respect for each other.

I like that.

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Psychology and Autocracy

A recent op-ed in the New York Times warned that would-be autocrats–yes, Donald, we’re looking at you–get very dangerous when cornered. As Trump finds it more and more difficult to live in the fantasy-land he has constructed, there’s no telling what he might do.

This caution is similar to worries I’ve heard expressed about the time period between the election and January 21st, when (hopefully!) a new President assumes office. Both concerns are valid–and we all need to recognize that the feckless Republicans in Congress are responsible for whatever happens.

A reference in that same op-ed made me think about the blind obedience of those Republican elected officials.

After noting the departure of ethical Executive Branch officials and their replacement with “an army of pliant flunkies and toadies at the agencies, combined with the always-enabling Mitch McConnell and an increasingly emboldened attorney general, William Barr,” the author wrote

Three years ago, a friend of mine shrewdly pointed out that Trump’s election would be like one long national Milgram experiment, the famous psychological study from the 1960s that revealed just how susceptible people are to authority, how depressingly willing they are to obey even the most horrifying commands.

Readers of this blog undoubtedly remember learning about the Milgram experiment, (initially undertaken to investigate why so many Germans had insisted that they had participated in genocide because they were “just following orders.”)

Volunteers were told that they were participating in an experiment in which they would be “teachers” administering electric shocks when “learners” gave incorrect answers. In reality, Yale University psychologist Stanley Milgram was studying the willingness of people from a variety of backgrounds and a diverse set of occupations to obey an authority figure who ordered them to perform acts that were in conflict with their personal morality.

The fake electric shocks gradually increased to levels that would have been fatal had they been real. The experiment demonstrated that despite the discomfort and reluctance of most volunteers (and despite hearing the “learners” screaming in pain), a very high proportion of the volunteers continued to obey the authority figure’s instructions and administer the shocks..

Milgram himself summarized the experiment in 1974, in an article titled, “The Perils of Obedience”:

The legal and philosophic aspects of obedience are of enormous importance, but they say very little about how most people behave in concrete situations. I set up a simple experiment at Yale University to test how much pain an ordinary citizen would inflict on another person simply because he was ordered to by an experimental scientist. Stark authority was pitted against the subjects’ [participants’] strongest moral imperatives against hurting others, and, with the subjects’ [participants’] ears ringing with the screams of the victims, authority won more often than not.

The extreme willingness of adults to go to almost any lengths on the command of an authority constitutes the chief finding of the study and the fact most urgently demanding explanation. Ordinary people, simply doing their jobs, and without any particular hostility on their part, can become agents in a terrible destructive process. Moreover, even when the destructive effects of their work become patently clear, and they are asked to carry out actions incompatible with fundamental standards of morality, relatively few people have the resources needed to resist authority.

I’m still mulling over the applicability of the Milgram experiment to those we might consider Trump’s Republican “troops”–and what the results of the experiment might mean for America over the next few months.

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The More Things Change…?

It feels as if I’ve been on “lockdown” forever, and I know others are equally “over” a pandemic that is anything but over. There just aren’t that many rooms to be deep cleaned, that many books to be read, or–in my case–that many blogs to be written.

The rest of the time, then, becomes available for worrying.

I’ve been particularly concerned about what will happen to the center of my city in the wake of Covid-19. My husband and I moved to downtown Indianapolis in 1980, when things were still pretty sketchy, and we’ve celebrated the subsequent rebirth of a flourishing urban core. We’ve been excited to see new homes and apartments being built, we’ve marveled at our inability to patronize all of the new restaurants and bars (although we really tried!). We’ve worried as online retailing has reduced the number and variety of shops. And we were heartbroken when we drove past all the boarded-up windows in the wake of the one protest that included such destruction.

Predictions about “what will come next” are everywhere. Most aren’t worth the paper they’re printed on (or the bytes they represent), but I tend to respect the scholars at the Brookings Institution, who’ve weighed in with their analysis.

The Brookings report suggests that COVID-19 will accelerate or intensify many trends that are already underway, which makes a lot of sense to me.

The report noted that retailers, along with their landlords and suppliers, were already “responding to multiple industry-wide trends” (aka “in a world of hurt”) before the coronavirus. Trump’s tariffs hurt an industry that was already reeling from shifts in consumer demand from products to experiences, e-commerce, and the sharing economy. The pandemic is accelerating an already pressing need to embrace new models.

The report is light on specifics, but does predict that profit-sharing leases will be an “increasingly important tool to help new businesses get started, survive slowdowns, and provide a return to landlords who invest in their tenants’ success.”

The report’s predictions about food really comforted me. (Comfort food? Sorry…)

Convergence and hybridization will accelerate in food retail, which will return to be a “revitalizing force in urban life.” IKEA was already a furniture showroom, warehouse, and restaurant. High-end grocers were encouraging shoppers to have a beer. Restaurants were increasingly not just dine-in, but fast-casual or mobile food trucks. Whether through app-based delivery or prepared foods from wholesalers such as Costco, Americans will return to eating much of their food prepared outside the home. In 2017, jobs in leisure and hospitality (which includes all bars and restaurants) grew to outnumber jobs in retail trade. The pandemic is a setback, but not a reset.

On the negative side, the researchers expect that the 50- million- plus low wage workers will continue to face unsupportable housing costs– and that households that previously strained to pay rent will find it impossible. They also see worse labor market outcomes for older workers who lose their jobs.

So what does all of that portend for cities?

Some urban dwellers who have decamped to less dense areas will undoubtedly stay there permanently, “irrespective of the many amenities and agglomeration economies urban centers have to offer.” But the researchers note that the period following the Great Recession saw major metros gain more population than their suburbs

Why was this happening in a tepidly recovering economy? A good deal was attributable to young adult millennials. Unable to find jobs and housing in large stretches of the country, they found urban centers attractive. Eventually, the economy rebounded, jobs dispersed and many young adults dispersed with them. But large metro areas still prospered even with slower growth, as Brookings’s Metro Monitor 2020 revealed.

What does this mean for the post-COVID-19 period? Much will depend on Gen Z, an educated and racially diverse generation with strong urban roots.

In other words, if Gen Z wants and needs what urban life has to offer, they’ll opt to remain.

We will face huge challenges once the pandemic is over and Trump is (fingers crossed) a horrific memory. We will need to restore a functioning and ethical federal government, address our enormous inequalities with social investment and a comprehensive, adequate social safety net–and continue the work of making our cities vital, livable places to live and work.

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