Category Archives: Random Blogging

The Persistence of Tribalism

I think I need to go back and reread Benjamin Barber’s Jihad vs. McWorld.

The cover of that paperback illustrated the conflict Barber was addressing: a woman in a full burka drinking a diet Pepsi. That one picture showed the conflict between globalization and tribalism.

Barber was exploring the conflict between consumer capitalism in a constantly shrinking, interconnected modern world and deeply-rooted “tribes”–cultures resistant to and threatened by modernization.

In the wake of the recent terrorist attacks in Istanbul and Brussels, it’s easy enough to point our fingers at the jihadists who believe they are defending their tribal cultures against encroaching global norms. These extremists pose a real challenge to civilization, and the best way to meet and defeat that challenge is by no means clear–not just because of the danger and mayhem they pose, but because there are troubling signs that many of our more “civilized” citizens are responding in kind.

Whatever else accounts for the electoral successes of Donald Trump, a major element has been his blatant appeal to white American tribalism–his willingness to “go there,” to draw stark lines between (a culturally and racially-defined) “us” and “them.” Proposals from Trump and Cruz to “patrol” Muslim communities, to build a wall between the United States and Mexico, the scornful rejection of civility and inclusiveness as “political correctness” all serve to remind us that Middle East jihadis aren’t the only groups responding viscerally to what they see as assaults on their worldviews.

Communication and transportation technologies, scientific and medical discoveries, the growth, productivity and interrelationship of the global economy–all of these advances hold enormous promise, if we can enlarge our concept of our tribes to include the other humans with whom we share the planet.

But right now, the signs are anything but auspicious.

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An Intriguing “What If?”

A recent op-ed in the New York Times posed an intriguing possibility–Republican voters who are frantically looking for an alternative to The Donald might opt for Gary Johnson, a former Republican Governor of New Mexico. (At least he has more government experience than Trump.)

Johnson was the Libertarian Party’s candidate for President last time, and  is likely to be their candidate again in 2016.  Supporting him would solve the biggest problem facing those who are advocating a third-party or independent presidential campaign.

The biggest hurdle anti-Trump Republicans must overcome, aside from finding a candidate willing to go into the wilderness for them, is getting on the ballot. The presidential election system is a patchwork of state deadlines and ballot requirements. Ralph Nader, who critics say helped usher George W. Bush into the White House by running as a Green Party candidate in 2000, is extremely familiar with the ballot requirements, having been booted off the Pennsylvania ballot in 2004. While Mr. Nader is happy to rail against the “two-party tyranny” of the American electoral system, he thinks starting a third-party run at this point in the election season a near-impossible goal.

“It’s almost too late, unless you’re a multibillionaire,” Mr. Nader said. “Other than just a tailored two- or three-state approach, I don’t see it happening.”

There was a time, twenty or twenty-five years ago, when the Republican Party was beginning its change from a big-tent major party into the extremist, litmus-test amalgam of resentment and reaction that it has become, that the Libertarians had an opening–an opportunity to step in and gather up those members of the GOP who were increasingly uncomfortable with the party but not inclined to join the Democrats.

Here in Indiana, I knew several former Republicans who were trying to make the Libertarian Party the logical alternative–to appeal to Republicans whose “small government” rhetoric was genuine– not of the “keep government out of my boardroom but not out of my bedroom” variety–and whose anti-welfare beliefs encompassed crony capitalists as well as impoverished single mothers.

It didn’t work then, because the base of the Libertarian Party was in-your-face pro-gun and anti-drug-war. (Today, ironically, most Americans probably agree about the drug war.) Any softening of those positions would have led to a wholesale abandonment by the party’s base–but a failure to move even a bit toward more “mainstream” positions frightened off the disaffected GOP prospects.

This is probably not the Libertarian moment, either. We are seeing too many examples of what happens when government is neutered, or wholly-owned by private interests. (The water in Flint, the crumbling infrastructure in Indiana, etc. etc.) If the pendulum is swinging, it’s probably swinging in the other direction.

But the great virtue of libertarianism as a philosophy is that it forces us to ask an all-important question: what should government do? What is the role of the state?

Just as there are things that–I would argue–government must do, there are things that government should not do, decisions that government should not make. Think how refreshing it would be to have those discussions, those debates–free of the propaganda, self-dealing and hypocrisy that characterize (and attempt to mask) today’s efforts to gain power and advantage.

It’s an intriguing thought.

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“Strict Constructionists” and the Supreme Court Vacancy

I’ve posted previously about the absolutely stunning refusal of the Senate GOP leadership to do its job and hold hearings on President Obama’s nominee for the vacant Supreme Court seat.

I know I’m being repetitive, but I can’t stop thinking about the degree to which that intransigence symbolizes an ominous breakdown of governance in this country.

It isn’t that we haven’t gone through dangerous times before. We had a civil war, and the 60s certainly weren’t all Woodstock. The Gilded Age, the Depression–we can all come up with examples from history. (Or maybe not, since so few people seem to have studied history–but the examples are there.) What I don’t remember is a similar degree of hypocrisy and flat-out lying by people in public office who are so transparently following their own immediate self-interest to the detriment of their constitutional duty and the common good.

These are the people who constantly tell us how devoted they are to the Constitution–at the same time they are refusing to follow its prescriptions. These are the people who piously invoke tradition, then lie about the history of Supreme Court appointments during election years. (Not to mention plucking and parroting a single sentence from a speech by then-Senator Biden–a speech that in its totality said something very different than their chosen sound-bite would suggest.)

These are the people who accuse the President of being “divisive” when he discharges his clear duty under the Constitution–at the same time that they are politicizing the Court by refusing to discharge theirs.

Do they think no one notices? Worse, is it possible that they’re right, and most people don’t?

In a scathing column in the Huffington Post, constitutional scholar Geoffrey Stone was blunt:

It is time for the Senate Republicans to back off and to act like responsible grownups who recognize that they have a solemn obligation to act according to the rule of law. If they don’t like that, then perhaps they should just resign their positions and let the nation get on with its business. If they move forward with their cynical and hypocritical plan, they will be guilty of a coup d’état of epic proportions.

How did we get to this point? How did these people get elected? What toxic mix of civic ignorance and apathy, political money, gerrymandering and raw racism has brought us to a place where a fascist buffoon is likely to be the Presidential candidate of a major party, and the legislative leadership of that party insists on elevating its partisan interests above the both the law and the national good?

How did a once-great party become so small, and how did the rest of us allow it to happen? And what does this unprecedented obstruction mean for the future of the American experiment?

I don’t know about the rest of you, but those are the questions that are keeping me up at night.

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What Do You Know?

A friend sent me this link to a quiz developed by Pew research. Twelve questions, virtually all of which should be easily answered by anyone who regularly follows national news.

The results, which are pretty appalling, may give us a clue to the ascendance of Donald Trump, not to mention the pathetic state of American politics today. After all, if you have no context within which to judge whether candidates’ positions are reasonable, or based upon an understanding of the issues involved, your vote is likely to fall into that category titled “uninformed.”

Here is the invitation to take the quiz. I particularly agree with the last line:

NEWS IQ TEST
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This is a terrific test. And it shows results in a number of ways. It surely indicates that the majority of Americans don’t know what’s going on.

It’s astonishing that so many people got less than half right. The results say that 80% of the (voting) public doesn’t have a clue, and that’s pretty scary.

There are no tricks here — just a simple test to see if you are current on your information.
This is quite a good quiz and the results are somewhat shocking.

Test your knowledge with the challenge of 13 questions, then be ready to shudder when you see how others did:

If you get less than half correct, please cancel your voter registration.

My sense is that visitors to this blog are considerably more aware of what’s going on than the average American. Take the quiz and let me know if my intuition is correct.

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Troubling Parallels

When Tuesday’s primary results led to speculation about a brokered GOP convention, Donald Trump predicted (threatened?) that an effort to deny him the nomination would be met with riots.

It is harder and harder to avoid the parallels between the improbable emergence of Donald Trump and the social and political conditions that enabled Hitler’s rise.

I’ve always appreciated Godwin’s Law. Facile or offhand comparisons of contemporary bad behavior to the holocaust–a period in human history that remains inexplicable to civilized beings–is profoundly insulting; the effect is to trivialize atrocities.

But as Godwin himself recently noted, admonitions to be careful with analogies to Hitler and the Nazis should not be taken to mean that those comparisons are never apt.

I have always wondered how Hitler gained power. Where were the good people? How did a civilized, cultured population breed a movement of vicious, violent racial “overlords”?

Like many other Jews, my antennae are especially sensitive to intolerance and bigotry–but I’m also aware that I am at risk of overreacting to thoughtless comments or to the existence of hate groups composed only of a few damaged individuals who don’t represent a broader threat.

Back in December, CNN ran a very thoughtful article asking the question: is Trump a fascist? The author, Peter Bergen, goes through the precursors to and characteristics of fascism: a sense that the nation faces a crisis beyond the reach of traditional political solutions; the asserted superiority of the leader’s gut instincts over abstract and universal reason; the belief of one group (here, working-class white men) that they are victims, and that their victimization justifies extreme actions; the need for authority to be exercised by “natural leaders” (always male), culminating in a national ruler who alone is capable of incarnating the group’s destiny.

Bergen finds the Trump phenomenon squarely meeting those criteria. But he points to one characteristic that Trump does not share– “the beauty of violence and the efficacy of will when they are devoted to the group’s success.”

There is no hint that Trump wishes to engage in or to foment violence against the enemies, such as immigrants, he has identified as undermining the American way of life.

That may have been true when it was written, but it is clearly not true now.No one who has watched Trump deliberately fomenting violence at his rallies can have any doubt.

When he urges supporters to punch protestors in the face, when he promises to pay the legal bills of those who rough up hecklers, when the violence becomes so threatening that at least one rally has to be called off, when he speaks longingly of the days when “political correctness” didn’t prevent silencing dissent by beating up the dissenters or worse–the parallels are too close, too obvious to ignore.

And those calls for violence have been escalating.

A few years ago, one of Trump’s ex-wives reportedly said that he kept a volume of Hitler’s speeches on his nightstand. At the time, I dismissed the accusation as the product of divorce bitterness, but I believe it now.

I keep reminding myself that the United States is not Germany, and the year 2016 is not 1933. The differences matter. But the question we all face is: what can people of good will do to prevent a contemporary replay of one of history’s most horrendous periods?

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