Category Archives: Random Blogging

Remember The Golden Mean?

Remember the golden mean?

Aristotle believed that virtue occupies a middle ground between deficiency and excess. He called that middle ground “the golden mean,” and it was a key concept in his philosophy. Courage, for example, can be described as a mean between cowardice (a deficiency of courage) and recklessness (an excess).  Confidence lies between self-doubt and arrogance. Etc.

Inherent in the notion of a golden mean is the recognition that even good things can be taken too far.  The absence of a good quality is a problem we usually recognize, but (despite the adage) we less often understand that you can have too much of a good thing.

I recently came across an article from the Yale Daily News that reminded me of the importance of that golden mean. (I have no idea how I came to read the Yale Daily News….). The argument raised was hardly new; numerous scholars and historians–not to mention political pundits–have faulted America’s culture for an excess of individualism. Indeed, there is an entire philosophy, called communitarianism, built upon the premise that a good society is one in which citizens are “embedded” in the values and norms of their communities, and that the American emphasis on individual rights actually deprives us of the comforts and connections that make for a fulfilled life.

My own reading of communitarian philosophy is that it lies at the “deficiency” end of the spectrum–that the sort of society many of its proponents extol would smother creativity and penalize difference. Protecting individual rights against majority passions was, after all, one of the Founders’ most important and praiseworthy goals.

That said, the author of the linked article and many others who would not choose the degree of “embeddedness” that the communitarians appear to advocate argue that we have gone too far in the direction of excess.

As a matter of political philosophy, we, like many other countries, protect individual rights to protect the people from government overreach and maintain the mixed regime that our exceptionalism presupposes. But our politics and practices go further. They are built on the individual not just as a bearer of rights, but as the sole fundamental unit of society; in this vein, policy ideas are constantly evaluated on the basis of individuality. How does policy X affect an individual’s freedom to express their religion? How does policy Y burden an individual taxpayer?

This individualist mindset, built into the core structure of U.S. governance, is now inseparable from the American identity. I propose that our wholehearted devotion to the individualist perspective goes too far.

As the author points out, governments in much of the rest of the world have come to realize that serving the common good requires a combination of individualism and commitment to community welfare.

In America, we seem to lack the ability to prioritize the common good over individual rights, even when doing so would clearly benefit both individuals and the community. The author provides examples: the U.S. is the only Western democracy (assuming we still are a democracy) that declines to provide its citizens with universal health care. We refuse to prevent the leading cause of death for children and teens, thanks to our devotion to an individual right to bear arms. As he writes,

In America, community safety is understood — like everything else — through this same individualistic filter; the community is nothing more than a loose set of individuals. Therefore, community safety is as simple as putting weapons in the hands of each American so they can protect themselves. The American community as an end in itself is an empty concept.

This is probably not an optimum time to have this discussion–in the U.S. right now, the individual rights that do lie at the heart of the golden mean–free speech, separation of church and state, the right to due process and other protections of the rule of law– are under unremitting attack, an attack mounted primarily by a Christian Nationalist cult, and aided and abetted by a rogue Supreme Court. But it’s worth wondering whether people who were a bit more “embedded” in a system that looked out for their collective welfare–that guaranteed them access to health care, outlawed assault weapons, and provided a more robust social safety net–would be less likely to express their resentments by joining racist cults.

Devotion to the common good is entirely compatible with protection of individual rights. We just need to find the golden mean…

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The Monsters In The Closet

There’s a difference between real monsters and imaginary ones. A recent essay in Lincoln Square made that point–and the further, not-so-obvious point that expending our energies fighting fictitious ones may be less unproductive than we think.

The essay began with the author explaining that he’d gotten a little girl to sleep by pretending to overpower the monsters that–in her imagination–populated her closet. As he wrote, politics works similarly. The monsters may not be real, but they’ll control the process until someone confronts them.

Every election cycle has its own bedtime story. This last one, the 2024 showdown between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris, was no different. It was a close race, and Trump won it on the margins — those tight, swingy counties where a few thousand votes make democracy feel like a coin toss.

And once again, MAGA’s favorite bedtime story was about the monster in the closet. This time, it wasn’t immigrants or caravans or Critical Race Theory — it was transgender Americans.

Anti-transgender political ads flooded the airwaves, built on the same fear-based architecture Republicans have been refining since Nixon. Trump’s campaign made them a centerpiece, hammering the claim that trans athletes were destroying women’s sports and sneaking into bathrooms to terrorize little girls.

The Democrats didn’t waste much time and effort on pushing back, because the party’s polling suggested that relatively few Americans were swayed by these attacks. But as the author noted, Trump didn’t need very many. He didn’t even need 51%. He needed just enough voters to enable him to flip three counties.

As the author wrote, “That’s the Southern Strategy 2.0: Rebrand hate as “common sense,” then sell it as protection.”

In our digital age, lies can become immortal. As some wag has put it, a lie will go halfway around the world while truth is still putting on its pants. In the Wild West that is our current information environment, truth is increasingly irrelevant; repetition is what matters. In the 2024 election, those millions of dollars in targeted anti-trans messaging weren’t intended to move a majority — “just enough voters in just the right ZIP codes.”

The essay puts this strategy in historical context, finding its roots in Nixon’s Southern Strategy. That strategy has now evolved. As the author put it, the dog whistles have become baked into our reflexes. He quoted the strategy’s “prime mover,” Lee Atwater:

 “You start out in 1954 by saying n****, n*****, n*****,”* he said. “By 1968, you can’t say n**** — that hurts you. It backfires. So you start saying stuff like ‘forced busing,’ ‘states’ rights,’ and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract now that you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things, and the byproduct of them is that Blacks get hurt worse than whites.”*

That wasn’t a slip. It was a strategy. The racism didn’t disappear; it just learned better grammar.

If America’s current political polarization proves anything, it reminds us of the human tribal reflex to divide the world into us and them. Political strategists know that in today’s environment, the use of certain words will trigger predictable responses, and those responses aren’t reasoned — they’re conditioned. “Once fear bonds a group together, logic doesn’t even get a seat at the table.”

The essay argues that Democrats haven’t figured out how to respond to that reality, haven’t recognized that they need to confront political fears, no matter how ridiculous or imaginary those fears may seem, before they metastasize. The monster in the closet doesn’t disappear when you ignore him.

I find that argument persuasive.

What the essay doesn’t tell us, however, is just how the Democrats–and others who see the strategic use of “Othering” for what it is–are supposed to defeat it. In our current information environment, those most likely to be convinced that the monsters are real typically get their “news” from sources that confirm the existence of the monsters in the closet and the threat they pose. In order to evaluate the validity of a proposition, citizens need to hear contending perspectives–and we inhabit a world where millions of people have purposely insulated themselves against evidence that is contrary to their preferred beliefs.

There will always be some percentage of voters who feel the need for someone or something to blame for life’s disappointments, and those voters are perfect targets for the political strategists trying to convince them of the existential threat posed by the monsters in the closet.

I don’t know how we counter that, but we really need to figure it out.

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The Political Divide

Libertarian friends of mine used to insist that the political spectrum is not a straight line from Left to Right, as it is often described, but a circle–and at the top of that circle, where Left and Right meet, the argument isn’t about liberty, it’s about whose agenda a powerful government should impose on the rest of us.

I’ve always agreed with that description, which is supported by another friend’s observation: there are a lot of people who simply cannot tolerate ambiguity. These are people desperate for bright lines and moral certainty, for whom inhabiting or even recognizing the existence of “gray areas” is intolerable. (That need for certainty helps to explain the appeal of fundamentalist religions.)

A recent article from Lincoln Square (a publication I increasingly consult) focused in on those observations. It was titled “The Extremes Aren’t Opposites. They’re Twins,” and it provided additional insight into the world-views of the ideologues at the top of that libertarian circle.

As the author, Trygve Olson, pointed out, assertions that the far Left and far Right are different are simply false–and if we want to save democracy, we  need to understand their shared psychology. Olson cited a study from Eastern Europe — van Prooijen & Krouwel, 2019 — that identified the four core psychological traits fueling extremism, and confirmed that they are present in both extremes of the political spectrum.

People with these mindsets are “true believers”–and they are receptive to autocracies that promise to use government to impose their beliefs on others.

The four traits are: psychological distress (the craving for certainty); cognitive simplicity (a black and white worldview);  overconfidence (belief in the superiority of their understanding); and intolerance (rejection of pluralism). The combination leaves no room for nuance, no ability to occupy–or even see–gray areas. As the essay puts it, “Every issue becomes a purity test. Every disagreement becomes a betrayal. Every opponent becomes the enemy. That’s why conspiracy theories spread so easily. They offer simple stories for a complicated world. They reduce every problem to good guys and bad guys.”

Extremists believe they are the righteous, and that people who disagree with them are morally broken. “They confuse clarity with correctness. They reject disagreement not because it’s wrong, but because it’s threatening.” That reaction–as the author correctly notes–is a characteristic of a cult, not of democratic polities. Its a characteristic that leads extremists to reject the very notion of a marketplace of ideas. What they want is an echo chamber. (While the article didn’t reference it, an echo chamber is what the Right has constructed via the extensive network of right-wing media outlets all of which obediently echo MAGA’s approved “talking points.”)

We are seeing the consequences of that extremist worldview all around us.

Once politics becomes personal identity, disagreement becomes existential. And when that happens, dissent isn’t just unwelcome — it’s dangerous.

That’s how you get threats to school board members. That’s how you justify political violence. That’s how democracies die — not with a bang, but with a crowd cheering its collapse.

It’s important that the rest of us recognize where the threat comes from. As the author says, that recognition isn’t just an academic exercise.

If we’re serious about fighting authoritarianism — not just Trumpism, but the broader global wave of illiberalism — we need to stop pretending the threat only comes from one side. It comes from anyone who plays the zero-sum game.

Democracy is win-win. Autocracy is zero-sum. And the people who reject democratic norms — whether they call themselves left or right — are playing the same game.

That means our job, as defenders of democracy, is to build a coalition of the reasonable. That includes liberals, conservatives, independents — anyone who believes in truth, pluralism, and peaceful transitions of power.

Because in the end, it’s not about left vs. right.

It’s about democracy vs. extremism.

When people fear ambiguity, they fear “the Other”–and anyone who disagrees with their particular world-view is “Other.” Think about that as we protest autocracy and demand a return to American constitutional liberties on this second “No Kings Day.”

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Will We See A Dummymander?

I have a theory. Bear with me…

Trump is clearly concerned that Republicans will lose the House–and even, possibly, the Senate–in the 2026 midterm election. Because he’s Trump–aka stupid– and because he always opts to cheat rather than compete, he is pressuring Red state Republicans to engage in mid-cycle gerrymanders that he believes will add “safe” districts in those states and protect Congress from a Blue midterm victory.

My theory is that–rather than a traditional gerrymander–we may see what has been dubbed a “dummymander.”

Let’s look first at Texas, where state officials who bow to every Trumpian command have already completed their obedient mid-cycle redistricting. Several observers have pointed out that those revisions incorporate assumptions based upon data from the 2024 election–an election in which a larger number of  Latino voters than expected supported Trump. Current polling suggests that those voters have changed their minds–and that far from building on that incursion, Trump is now deeply underwater with Latinos in Texas. Republicans in that state are now worried that the new districts that mapmakers drew to be “safe”–based in large part upon data reflecting that unusual (and fleeting) Latino vote– are actually likely to make several existing districts competitive. 

Here in Indiana, the reluctance of several Republican lawmakers to engage in a mid-cycle gerrymander has been attributed to integrity (stop laughing!)– to the acknowledgement of those lawmakers that doing Trump’s bidding would constitute a wrongful and arguably unlawful “rigging” of the electoral system. Perhaps some of the members of Indiana’s pathetic super-majority do actually have consciences, but I think their reluctance is more likely based upon a recognition that Indiana’s extreme gerrymandering has already reached its demographic limit.

What do I mean by that?

After the last legitimate redistricting, I had coffee with a political science colleague who had examined the data the Republicans had used to draw their district lines. He noted that they hadn’t added any new safe districts, and attributed that decision to the fact that the populations of rural Indiana–the source of GOP dominance–have been thinning out. As a result, there simply weren’t enough reliable Republican voters to support creation of an extra “safe” district–doing so would endanger incumbents in the current districts.

The emptying out of rural Indiana has continued.

Furthermore, there’s another defect in the data our Republican overlords use to draw those district lines. As I’ve frequently noted in these posts, gerrymandering is first and foremost a voter suppression tool. The current, presumably “safe” districts are home to a number of Democrats, Independents and unhappy Republicans who simply haven’t been voting–they’ve been convinced that their votes wouldn’t make a difference, a conclusion supported by the lack of a Democratic candidate in many of those districts. (Disengagement from the democratic process isn’t unique to Indiana–the number of Americans who failed to vote in the last Presidential election was larger than the numbers who voted for either candidate–a shameful statistic.) A new gerrymander would begin with the use of data incorporating the absence of those disaffected voters from the polls.

But as investment advisers like to remind us, past performance is no guarantee of future returns.

In this case, thanks to the Trump administration’s ongoing war against democracy and the Constitution, millions of Americans have become newly engaged. Indeed, evidence of that sizable public blowback is what has prompted Trump’s gerrymander push.  The millions of protesters insisting that America has “No Kings”–see you there tomorrow!– and the millions of Americans who participate in the growing number of weekly spontaneous protests aren’t likely to stay home next November. Assuming Democrats and Indiana’s newly active Independents give them a choice, a lot of those so-called “safe” districts won’t be safe.

My theory is that even the dimmer members of Indiana’s GOP super-majority have figured this out, and that their reluctance to do a mid-cycle redistricting isn’t just based upon the likely negative public reaction to such in-your-face cheating, although that does worry some of them.

It’s based upon a recognition that–as they say in those rural precincts–pigs get fed, but hogs get slaughtered.

 My theory (and yes, my hope) is that a mid-cycle redistricting, if it occurs, will turn out to be a dummymander.

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An Absolutely On-Target Essay

I frequently disagree with the conservative New York Times opinion writer Bret Stephens, but a while back, he honed in on an under-appreciated aspect of America’s current dysfunctions--our lack of authentic argumentation.

Before you decide that both Stephens and I are looney–after all, sometimes it seems as if all we Americans do is fight one another–let me emphasize that this is another of my frequent diatribes about the importance of using terminology accurately. Because whatever we want to label the interminable angry and hostile encounters between MAGA ideologues and the multiple factions of citizens appalled by and opposed to them, I don’t think you can properly call them arguments.

Stephens attributes his own appreciation of proper argumentation to his time at the University of Chicago, an institution that requires its undergraduates to read the books that formed the Western tradition, to familiarize themselves with a philosophy and literature that was notable for argumentation meant to persuade, not put down.

Where did the anti-Federalists differ from the Federalists, or Locke from Hobbes, or Rousseau from them both? The curriculum made us appreciate that the best way to contend with an argument was to engage with it rather than denounce it, and that the prerequisite to engagement was close and sympathetic reading. Reading Marx didn’t turn me into a Marxist. But it did give me an appreciation of the power of his prose.

I don’t think Stephens is wrong or exaggerating when he focuses on the importance of genuine argumentation to democracy.

What is the soul of the Western tradition? Argument. Socrates goes around Athens investigating the claims of the supposedly wise and finds that the people who claim to know things don’t. The Lord threatens to destroy Sodom for its alleged wickedness, but Abraham reproaches and bargains with Him — that for the sake of 10 righteous people He must not destroy the city.

The virtue of Chicago’s curriculum is that it introduces students to a “coherent philosophical tradition based in reasoned argument and critical engagement that explained not only how we had arrived at our governing principles but also gave us the tools to debate, preserve or change them.” (In other words, students who were required to immerse themselves in these works received an actual education, rather than a job training credential; a distinction entirely lost on Indiana’s pathetic legislature. But I digress…)

It’s hard to argue with Stephens’ observation that the Internet and the digital transformation of the way we receive information has facilitated our ability to inhabit carefully curated bubbles of ideology and “facts” confirming our biases. But he argues that the deleterious effects might have been mitigated “if we hadn’t first given up on the idea of a culture of argument rooted in a common set of ideas.”

Which brings me to Charlie Kirk.

Kirk, to my way of thinking, was not a real conservative, at least in the American sense. The point of our conservatism is to conserve a liberal political order — open, tolerant, limited and law-abiding. It’s not about creating a God-drenched regime centered on a cult of personality leader waging zero-sum political battles against other Americans viewed as immoral enemies…

It’s too bad that Kirk, raised in a Chicago suburb, didn’t attend the University of Chicago. It wouldn’t have hurt getting thrashed in a political debate by smarter peers. Or learning to appreciate the power and moral weight of views he didn’t share. Or recognizing that the true Western tradition lies more in its skepticism than in its certitude.

But the larger tragedy by far is that it’s America itself that’s losing sight of all that. In the vacuum that follows, the gunshots ring out.

That last sentence sums up the central point of the essay–at least as I read it. A citizenry that has lost the ability to engage in genuine arguments–and the operative word there is “engage”–expresses its disputes and disagreements with insults and violence.

The utter inability to engage in actual debate may be the most prominent characteristic of the incompetent clowns who dominate the Trump administration, and it may explain why the administration eschews civility and relies on invective and militarized violence rather than efforts at persuasion.

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