Random Blogging – Page 39

Rights And Obligations

A few months ago, Bret Stephens wrote an essay in New York Times that included the following paragraph about what he–accurately– called the “classically liberal core of intelligent conservatism,” defined as:

The idea that immigrants are an asset, not a liability; that the freedoms of speech and conscience must extend to those whose ideas we loathe; that American power ought to be harnessed to protect the world’s democracies from aggressive dictators; that we are richer at home by freely trading goods abroad; that nothing is more sacred than democracy and the rule of law; that patriotism is about preserving the capacity to criticize a country we love while loving the country we criticize.

Well, how extremely “woke” of the Times’ conservative columnist…

I continue to be amazed–gobsmacked, really–by the complete 180-degree turn of a Republican Party that used to be serious about such old-fashioned ideas, along with “duty” and “responsibility.”

In January, Richard Haass published The Bill of Obligations: The Ten Habits of Good Citizens. While it once might have been seen as an exercise in “preaching to the choir,” these days, a depressing number of Americans are no longer members of that choir.

As the linked review begins,

It’s an idea as old as Rousseau: With rights come responsibilities toward the social contract. To this, Haass adds the admonition that “American democracy will work and reform will prove possible only if obligations join rights at center stage.” Those rights are constitutionally enumerated even if “the struggle over rights…continues to this day.” The obligations are less well enshrined, though the 10 Haass offers are unobjectionable. The first, echoing the right of freedom of speech and thought, asks that citizens be informed about how the government works and be prepared to participate in civic duties. On that second point, the fundamental obligation is to vote (and to insist on it when that right is impeded). “Voting is the most basic act of citizenship,” writes the author. “It creates a bond between the individual and government and between the individual and country.” Given a largely uninformed citizenry, that bond would seem tenuous, and it’s also conditioned by a lack of civility, which asks of each citizen a reasoned willingness to set aside ideology in order to deal with matters of shared concern or interest “on their merits, not on motives you may ascribe to those making the arguments.” Civility bespeaks a willingness to accept another obligation, which is to reject and repudiate violence of the kind we saw on Jan. 6, 2021. Civility also feeds into the obligation to respect norms and the lessons of civics, such as the idea that the common good often overrules one’s selfish demands—e.g., being allowed to smoke in a crowded restaurant or walk around unvaccinated and unmasked in a pandemic. Sadly, of course, those who most need to read this agreeably thoughtful book likely won’t, but that’s the way of the world.

I am hardly the only observer of today’s rancid and decidedly uncivil politics to endorse the importance of re-emphasizing these obligations.

Rights–as Haass points out–imply duties. Your right to exercise freedom of speech, for example, imposes a duty on me (and especially on government) not to engage in behavior making that speech impossible. I don’t have to listen or agree; I am free to respond critically–but neither individual citizens nor government is free to censor you. (A/K/A “pulling a DeSantis.” ) When an individual citizen does so, it is unbecoming and, I’d argue, unAmerican; when government does so, it’s unconstitutional.

Haass does not limit the obligations of citizenship to the duties implied by our constitutional rights. He quite properly includes duties/obligations of democratic participation–especially informed voting.

The approaching national elections are very likely to be a turning point for this country. What is at stake is nothing less than our national commitment to America’s longtime–albeit still unrealized– aspirations to democratic self-rule, liberty and equality.

In 2024, the electorate will be faced with a deceptively simple question: will we continue to work toward realizing those aspirations? Or will we make a philosophical U-turn into White Christian Nationalism?

It really is as simple–and profound–as that.

I have absolute faith in the good will of most Americans. I remain convinced that–no matter how loud they are– the racists, anti-Semites and misogynists are a minority. What I worry about is the willingness of the majority of Americans to take their civic obligations seriously–to inform themselves, to ignore the incessant messaging that tells them their votes won’t count, and to turn out at the polls.

Good people need to vote like America depends on their ballots, because the version we and they want to inhabit really, truly does.

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Why I Don’t Think The Midterms Were An Anomaly

I have a bet with my youngest son. He’s a political pessimist, especially when it comes to the state of Indiana. (The bet involves very expensive dinners…) The bet was triggered by my excitement–and optimism–about Jennifer McCormick’s announcement that she is a candidate for Governor. I think she can win, even in deep Red Indiana; my son has written off the possibility of any Democrat winning statewide office, and has dismissed any predictive value of Obama’s 2008 Hoosier win.

My optimism about McCormick’s campaign is partially due to candidate quality (both hers and that of her likely opponent, the odious Mike Braun) but it is also based on what I see as a national trend: from top to bottom, the GOP is running truly horrible candidates.

At the very top of the Republican ticket, we are almost certain to get either Donald Trump or Ron DeSantis. American voters soundly rejected Trump in 2020, and he gets more certifiable as his legal woes mount. DeSantis appears to be basing his campaign on an “anti-woke” platform. Not only is DeSantis most definitely not a guy you’d like to have a beer with, his evident belief that a majority of Americans want to return to the 1950s, when “men were men” (and in charge), women were in the kitchen barefoot and pregnant, no one had ever heard the word transgender, and schools dutifully imparted White Christian propaganda, is simply delusional.

In a recent issue of his daily newsletter, Robert Hubbell noted that Democratic over-performance hasn’t abated since the midterms, when that predicted Red wave failed to materialize. He pointed to subsequent elections in Colorado Springs, Colorado, where voters selected the first non-Republican mayor since 1979 by a margin of 15 points;
a Pennsylvania special election to the state assembly where the Democrat won by 20 points and maintained Democratic control despite the fact that, going into the 2022 midterms, Republicans had held a 113-90 advantage; and a New Hampshire assembly race where the Democrat won by 43 percentage points, “eclipsing Biden’s 27-point margin in 2020.”

Hubbell quoted one analyst for the observation that

Democrats have overperformed the 2020 presidential results by an average of six points across 18 state legislative races this year. . . . They’ve also beaten their 2016 margins by an average of 10 points.

He quotes another analyst who focused in on the underlying reasons for that over-performance: abortion extremism, ongoing GOP-encouraged gun violence, extremist MAGA candidates, and a (finally!) fired-up Democratic grassroots.

In the run-up to the midterms, Republicans confidently pointed to Joe Biden’s disappointing approval ratings as a sign that they would sweep their gerrymandered House districts and retake control of the Senate. As we now know, despite the extreme gerrymandering and the vote suppression efforts, those victories eluded them.

As Morton Marcus and I argued in our recent book, the loss of Roe v. Wade was a major reason for that outcome. Women’s progress toward civic equality requires autonomy, control over one’s own reproduction, and most women who vote understand that. Republicans running for office in 2024 will have to “thread the needle” between primary voters who are rigidly anti-abortion and a general election electorate that is lopsidedly pro-choice.

Good luck with that…

Add to the abortion wars the daily gun carnage that feckless Republicans keep trying to blame on mental health–despite the fact that large majorities of voters, even majorities of NRA members, attribute the mayhem to the lack of responsible gun regulations.

Voters who aren’t part of the White Nationalist Cult that is today’s GOP look at Congress–at Republicans protecting George Santos, hiring Neo-Nazi staffers, threatening to ruin the economy if they aren’t allowed to deprive poor people of food and mistreat veterans...and a not-insignificant number of them are echoing the immortal words of Howard Beale in the classic movie Network:“I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this any more!”

It’s true that the GOP can count on its cult members coming to the polls. There are more of those sorry creatures than most nice people want to believe, and they absolutely pose a danger to all of us–but they are a distinct minority of Americans. We need to see them for what they are, and recognize the threat they pose to the America the rest of us inhabit, but they can’t win in the absence of majority apathy.

Democratic candidates, on the other hand, appeal to voters who (like Indiana’s McCormick) support public education and academic freedom, who believe in separation of church and state, in women’s equality, in civility and compassion and inclusion–in all those qualities that our parents taught us were admirable, but the GOP disdains as “woke.”

There’s a lot to be concerned about, but like Hubbell, I’m hopeful.

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History Repeats Itself

One of the most disconcerting realizations triggered by the election of Donald Trump and the various rages of MAGA Republicans has been my realization that there are many more haters in the American public than I had ever imagined. If survey results and academic research are to be believed, these fearful and angry people comprise some 25-30% of our “body politic”–and they are coming for the rest of us: Blacks, Jews, Muslims, LGBTQ+ folks…anyone who isn’t a White Christian.

Not a majority, thankfully, but a substantial and incredibly dangerous minority–made infinitely more dangerous by anti-democratic political mechanisms (gerrymandering, the Electoral College, the filibuster) that allow them to exercise far more power than they would be entitled to on the basis of raw numbers.

The New York Times recently ran an essay by Michelle Goldberg tracing differences between the Christian Nationalism favored by Trump and his supporters, and the version being developed by Ron DeSantis.

As she noted,

The issue isn’t whether the next Republican presidential candidate is going to be a Christian nationalist, meaning someone who rejects the separation of church and state and treats Christianity as the foundation of American identity and law. That’s a foregone conclusion in a party whose state lawmakers are falling over themselves to pass book bans, abortion prohibitions, anti-trans laws, and, in Texas, bills authorizing school prayer and the posting of the Ten Commandments in classrooms.

Goldberg reported on the recent ReAwaken America Tour, “a Christian nationalist roadshow co-founded by the former Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn.” Two of the speakers on that tour were jettisoned when the tour arrived in Miami because of negative publicity over their praise of Hitler, although they remain on the group’s website.

Unsurprisingly, Trump called in to offer his unrestrained support.

Goldberg notes that DeSantis is “fluent in the language of the religious right, and strives to check all its policy boxes”.

Put on the full armor of God. Stand firm against the left’s schemes,” he said at the Christian Hillsdale College last year, substituting the “left’s schemes” for the “devil’s schemes” of Ephesians 6:11. In addition to the abortion ban and his war on “woke” education, he will almost certainly sign a recently passed bill intended to keep trans people from using their preferred bathrooms in government buildings, including schools.

As Goldberg notes, the question is whether rank-and-file religious conservatives care more about consistency or charisma. “DeSantis treats Christianity as a moral code he’d like to impose on the rest of us, Trump treats it as an elevated status that should come with special perks.”

Both are terrifying–and both are eerily reminiscent of the significant pro-Nazi movement in the United States during the interval between the first and second World Wars. Most of us today are unaware of just how robust that movement was–it became considerably less fashionable once we entered the Second World War (although some American corporations that traded with Germany continued to do so even after declarations of war).

I was certainly unaware of the extent of American pro-Nazi sympathy.

In 1933, Rudolf Hess, then deputy führer of Germany, authorized formation an official American branch of the Nazi Party, to be known as the Friends of New Germany in the U.S. Although based in New York, it had a strong presence in Chicago, and it was openly pro-Nazi. According to historians, members stormed the German-language newspaper New Yorker Staats-Zeitung and demanded that the paper publish articles sympathetic to Nazis.

The German American Bund formed in 1935 and lasted until America formally entered World War II. Its goal was a united America under Nazi ideology. It was anti-communist and anti-Semitic. Taking inspiration from Hitler Youth, the Bund had a youth division– members “took German lessons, received instructions on how to salute the swastika, and learned to sing the ‘Horst Wessel Lied’ and other Nazi songs.”

The Bund continued to justify and glorify Hitler and his movements in Europe during the outbreak of World War II. After Germany invaded Poland in 1939, Bund leaders released a statement demanding that America stay neutral in the ensuing conflict, and expressed sympathy for Germany’s war effort. The Bund reasoned that this support for the German war effort was not disloyal to the United States, as German-Americans would “continue to fight for a Gentile America free of all atheistic Jewish Marxist elements.”

The Bund didn’t disband until the day after the bombing of Pearl Harbor.

It’s impossible to read today’s news without seeing the parallels–and concluding that the pro-Nazi sentiments that led to the Friends of New Germany and the German-American Bund have simply remained underground until encouraged to emerge by the MAGA movement and its would-be fuhrers.

We can only hope that it won’t take another World War to defeat them.

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It Isn’t Just In MAGA-World

Let’s be honest: believing the people who tell you what you want to hear is a trait shared by all humans–Left, Right and Center. There’s a reason researchers study confirmation bias–the current terminology for what we used to call “cherry-picking the facts.”

Just one recent example: MAGA folks who are frantic to believe that Joe Biden is just as corrupt as Donald Trump (okay, maybe not quite that corrupt…) have latched onto a report issued by James Comer, a Republican House member determined to find something to support that accusation. Unfortunately, as TNR (among many other media outlets) has reported, there just isn’t anything that we might call “evidence” to support that desired belief.

The House GOP accused Joe Biden and his family on Wednesday of engaging in business with foreign entities—but were unable to provide any actual evidence linking the president to any wrongdoing.

House Oversight Committee Chair James Comer released a 65-page memo detailing a sprawling investigation into Biden and some of his relatives, particularly his son Hunter Biden. Nowhere in the massive document was there a specific allegation of a crime committed by Biden or any of his relatives.

During a press conference explaining the investigation, Comer was asked if he had evidence directly linking Biden to corruption. The Kentucky Republican hemmed and hawed but ultimately admitted he didn’t.

It’s easy enough to see confirmation bias at work when a commenter to this blog “cites” to Comer, a lawmaker who has publicly admitted that he “intuited” misbehavior by the Biden family, despite the fact that even Fox “News” personalities have admitted that there’s no there there. But it isn’t only folks on the Right who engage in confirmation bias–and the strength of that human impulse to cherry-pick is about to get a test on steroids.

Researchers have recently warned about the likely misuse of AI--artificial intelligence–in producing misleading and dishonest political campaigns

Computer engineers and tech-inclined political scientists have warned for years that cheap, powerful artificial intelligence tools would soon allow anyone to create fake images, video and audio that was realistic enough to fool voters and perhaps sway an election.

The synthetic images that emerged were often crude, unconvincing and costly to produce, especially when other kinds of misinformation were so inexpensive and easy to spread on social media. The threat posed by AI and so-called deepfakes always seemed a year or two away.

No more.

Sophisticated generative AI tools can now create cloned human voices and hyper-realistic images, videos and audio in seconds, at minimal cost. When strapped to powerful social media algorithms, this fake and digitally created content can spread far and fast and target highly specific audiences, potentially taking campaign dirty tricks to a new low.

The implications for the 2024 campaigns and elections are as large as they are troubling: Generative AI can not only rapidly produce targeted campaign emails, texts or videos, it also could be used to mislead voters, impersonate candidates and undermine elections on a scale and at a speed not yet seen.

“We’re not prepared for this,” warned A.J. Nash, vice president of intelligence at the cybersecurity firm ZeroFox. “To me, the big leap forward is the audio and video capabilities that have emerged. When you can do that on a large scale, and distribute it on social platforms, well, it’s going to have a major impact.”

Some of the ways in which AI can mislead voters include the production of automated robocall messages that use a (simulated) candidate’s voice and instruct voters to cast their ballots on the wrong date, or phony audio recordings that sound as if a candidate was expressing racist views– AI can easily produce video footage showing someone giving a speech or interview that they never gave. It would be especially simple for AI to fake images designed to look like local news reports making a variety of false claims….The possibilities are endless. And what happens if an international entity — a cybercriminal or a nation state — impersonates someone?

AI-generated political disinformation already has gone viral online ahead of the 2024 election, from a doctored video of Biden appearing to give a speech attacking transgender people to AI-generated images of children supposedly learning satanism in libraries.

If we have trouble now knowing who or what to believe, today’s confusion over what constitutes “fact” and what doesn’t is about to be eclipsed by the coming creation of a world largely invented by digital liars employing tools we’ve never before encountered.

If regulators can’t figure out how to address the dangers inherent in this new technology–and quickly!– artificial intelligence plus confirmation bias may just put the end to whatever remains of America’s rational self-government.

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Fear Speech

I don’t know whether kids these days still employ that time-honored riposte to verbal insults: sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me!

If that sing-song phrase is no longer heard, it may be because it is abundantly clear that words can hurt. Words can hurt the individuals at whom they are aimed, and they can hurt the culture that tolerates them.

That realization is no reason to abandon the protections of the First Amendment’s Free Speech clause–an abandonment that would give government the right to dictate citizens’ communications–but it does require citizens to be aware of the multitude of ways politicians and special interests use language to motivate behaviors.

Which brings me to a thoughtful column I read a while back in the New York Times.The author began by quoting an unmoderated tweet posted to Twitter, calling for transgender Americans to be “eradicated.” It hadn’t been taken down because it didn’t violate the platform’s rule against hate speech. (The current disaster that is Twitter under Elon Musk isn’t relevant to this particular issue.) Instead, the post was an example of what the essay called “Fear Speech. After quoting other, similar posts, the author wrote:

None of this was censored by the tech platforms because neither Mr. Knowles nor CPAC violated the platforms’ hate speech rules that prohibit direct attacks against people based on who they are. But by allowing such speech to be disseminated on their platforms, the social media companies were doing something that should perhaps concern us even more: They were stoking fear of a marginalized group.

It’s hard to argue against the author’s assertion that fear is currently being weaponized even more than hate by partisans who are looking for votes, and ideologues seeking to spark violence. Commenters to this blog have often made a similar point, noting the political utility of stoking fears–and noting as well that it’s a tactic especially effective with uneducated/uninformed Americans.

Most tech platforms do not shut down false fear-inciting claims such as “Antifa is coming to invade your town” and “Your political enemies are pedophiles coming for your children.” But by allowing lies like these to spread, the platforms are allowing the most perilous types of speech to permeate our society.

Susan Benesch, the executive director of the Dangerous Speech Project, said that genocidal leaders often use fear of a looming threat to prod groups into pre-emptive violence. Those who commit the violence do not need to hate the people they are attacking. They just need to be afraid of the consequences of not attacking.

The author provides examples: the Rwandan genocide in 1994 was preceded by Hutu politicians warning the Hutus that they were about to be exterminated by Tutsis; Nazi propagandists triggered the Holocaust by warning that Jews were planning to annihilate the German people; Serbs engaged in genocide after being warned that fundamentalist Muslims were planning a genocide against them.

Benesch was quoted as saying she was” stunned at how similar this rhetoric is from case to case.”

“It’s as if there’s some horrible school that they all attend.” The key feature of dangerous speech, she argued, is that it persuades “people to perceive other members of a group as a terrible threat. That makes violence seem acceptable, necessary or even virtuous.”

A recent study found that “fear speech” promoted more engagement with a social media platform than hate speech–and that it was much more difficult for algorithms to identify.

There is no easy answer. Calling on social media platforms to police Fear speech runs into some thorny problems. As with so many of the difficult issues we face, our best defense is a thoughtful and civically-knowledgable polity.

In the end, algorithms aren’t going to save us. They can demote fear speech but not erase it. We, the users of the platforms, also have a role to play in challenging fearmongering through‌ counterspeech, in which leaders and bystanders negatively respond to fear-based incitement. The goal of counterspeech is not necessarily to change the views of true believers but rather to provide a counter‌narrative for people watching on the sidelines.

The essay’s bottom line echoes what I used to call my “refrigerator theory of free speech.” If you leave a leftover morsel on a back shelf in your refrigerator, it will eventually start to smell. If you place that same leftover under strong sunlight, it will lose its power to pollute.

A dedicated minority of educated and engaged citizens can–and must– provide that sunlight.

What was that famous Margaret Mead quote? “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.”

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