Random Blogging – Page 78

The Suicidal Human Race

I used to think I understood at least some aspects of human behavior. In college, I learned about Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, and that made a lot of sense; as I aged (and boy, have I aged!), I came to understand the complexities created by our individual, still poorly-understood combinations of nature and nurture.

But reactions to the combination of a global pandemic and the existential threat of climate change have left me gobsmacked. What explains the evident preference of so many people for obviously suicidal behaviors? How do people manage to construct a “reality” contrary to science and logic, let alone personal safety?

The politicization of responses to Covid has been widely described, although that phenomenon is still not well explained. Denial of the severity of the threat, fear of lifesaving vaccines and ingestion of dangerous “cures” (for a disease that doesn’t exist??) are largely Republican behaviors–and suicidal at both the individual and group levels. Research confirms that rural folks and members of the GOP are dying in far greater numbers than Democrats and city dwellers.

Equally suicidal is the maddening, continuing, blithe refusal to address climate change seriously, despite years of warnings. Denying the threat, and/or continuing to postpone any serious effort to combat it, should no longer be possible–at least, by sane humans–because the effects of a warming planet are already manifesting. And yet, headlines like this one from the Guardian, remind us that governments–ours and others around the globe–continue to prefer the bottom line of fossil fuel companies over the ability of the only planet we currently inhabit to sustain human life and civilization.

The fossil fuel industry benefits from subsidies of $11m every minute, according to analysis by the International Monetary Fund.

The IMF found the production and burning of coal, oil and gas was subsidised by $5.9tn in 2020, with not a single country pricing all its fuels sufficiently to reflect their full supply and environmental costs. Experts said the subsidies were “adding fuel to the fire” of the climate crisis, at a time when rapid reductions in carbon emissions were urgently needed.

If fossil fuel prices reflected their true cost, the IMF calculates we would cut global CO2 emissions by over a third.

The G20 agreed in 2009 to phase out “inefficient” fossil fuel subsidies and in 2016, the G7 set a deadline of 2025, but little progress has been made. In July, a report showed that the G20 countries had subsidised fossil fuels by trillions of dollars since 2015, the year the Paris climate deal was reached.

There’s a fair amount of data available on individual suicides: my very superficial research suggests that people who try to kill themselves may suffer from depression, substance abuse or other mental disorders. (More understandably, suicides are more prevalent in people who suffer from chronic pain.) None of these reasons–with the possible exception of mental disorder–explains either the rejection of science and logic leading to refusal to be vaccinated, or the social phenomenon of lawmakers preferring the bottom line of fossil fuel companies to the survival of civilization as we know it.

I’m at a loss.

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A Sanity Backlash?

In a recent column for the Washington Post, Jennifer Rubin suggests that Texas Republicans may be doing something Democrats have been unable to do: they may be turning the Lone Star State blue.

Rubin says the GOP has alienated so many voters outside its hardcore base, it has put the state in play in 2022, when the state will elect a governor in addition to the usual congressional and local contests.

A new Quinnipiac poll suggests Republicans’ radicalism has put them at odds with a majority of Texas voters. In the wake of the Texas law offering bounties to “turn in” those seeking an abortion after six weeks of pregnancy, with no exceptions for rape or incest, the poll reports that 77 percent of state residents say abortion should be legal in cases of rape or incest, including 66 percent of Republicans. Some 72 percent of Texans do not want the law enforced, and 60 percent want to keep Roe v. Wade in place.

Even on a quintessentially Texan issue such as guns, voters are not in sync with MAGA politicians. The pollsters found: “Roughly two-thirds (67 percent) of voters, including 58 percent of gun owners, say allowing anyone 21 years of age or older to carry handguns without a license or training makes Texas less safe, while 26 percent say it makes Texas safer. Half of voters (50 percent) say it’s too easy to carry a handgun in Texas, while 44 percent say it’s about right, and 4 percent say it’s too difficult.”

When it comes to the GOP’s incomprehensible posturing on the pandemic, the results are equally negative for Abbott and his hard-core supporters in the state legislature: polling shows that Texas voters are much closer to the positions taken by President Biden than to Abbott. Texans opine 47 – 38 percent that Abbott is hurting rather than helping efforts to slow the spread of COVID–and majorities support vaccine mandates.

Those numbers evidently persuaded Matthew Dowd, who was a former senior adviser to President George W. Bush, to run for lieutenant governor–as a Democrat.

Dowd is betting that Texans want something other than pandering to the MAGA base. “The Texas Republican politicians are completely out of step with Texas values like integrity and community and no longer govern with common sense, common decency or for the common good,” he told me on Saturday. “They put their ‘me’ over our ‘we.’ ”

If Rubin is right–if Democrats can win Texas despite the frantic gerrymandering and the various efforts to make it harder for urban and suburban voters to cast a ballot, we may finally be seeing the results of a political strategy that has always seemed short-sighted to me: relying almost entirely on turning out the GOP base.

In order to “motivate” that increasingly rabid base, the GOP has increased its appeals to racism, conspiracy theories and general fear-mongering. Meanwhile, the percentage of Americans who claim the Republican label continues to shrink. Earlier this year, Gallup reported that–even when they included independents who “lean toward the GOP,” they could come up with only 40%, compared with 49% of Democrats and independents leaning Democratic.

It’s worth noting, too, that not all of those Republicans and Republican “leaners” are part of the base. I personally know a number of people who still claim the label, but report being repelled by the current iteration of a party that is anything but the adult, conservative political party they originally joined.

The problem with relying on a shrinking base is similar to the problem faced by drug addicts: you need bigger “hits” to produce the same high. But the crazier and meaner the party gets, the greater the number of voters it turns off.

I’m trying not to get my hopes up, but there does seem to be evidence that we’ve rounded a corner–that the GOP’s manifest preference for acting out over governing has finally gone too far for the majority of citizens who will find their way to the polls in upcoming elections.

Whatever their policy differences, Democrats, Independents and the few remaining sane Republicans can all come together under that well-worn slogan: It’s time for a change.

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I Want To Believe…

Stephen Pinker is one of those academics who has learned to communicate with a much broader public than is served by obscure academic journals. A recent, long article in The Guardian profiled him and the string of books he has authored over the past 25 years.

Pinker has written popular books on language, the mind and human behavior–books that reflected his scholarship– but he is best known for what the Guardian called his “counterintuitive take on the state of the world.” In other words, he is focused on the good news rather than the bad–a posture I find incredibly appealing. (Okay, I’m desperate for good news…)

In The Better Angels of Our Nature, published in 2011, Pinker examined mountains of data that showed a steady decline of violence across human history. He attributed that decline to the emergence of markets and states. (It reminded me of Benjamin Barber’s observation that wars between countries that both had McDonalds were very rare…)

Then, in 2018, at the height of Donald Trump’s presidency and amid the accelerating climate crisis, Pinker published a follow-up, Enlightenment Now, which expanded his argument. It wasn’t just that life had become less violent; thanks to the application of science and reason since the 18th century, the human condition had dramatically improved in health, wealth and liberty, too.

According to the Guardian article, the turning point in Pinker’s career arrived in 2007, when he was prompted to answer a simple question: “What are you optimistic about?”

The prompt was part of an annual symposium for the website Edge, run by Pinker’s literary agent, Brockman. Pinker’s 678-word answer was that violence had declined across human history, an argument he expanded over the next four years into the 696-page book Better Angels. “A large swathe of our intellectual culture is loth to admit that there could be anything good about civilization, modernity, and western society,” Pinker wrote in the book.

The article describes Pinker as standing “athwart the stupidification of public discourse–as a defender of reason and objectivity.” That self-image led to the writing and publication of Enlightenment Now, which I read a couple of years ago, and which Pinker himself has described as his “theory of everything, or almost everything, or at least a lot”. I strongly agree with the values that book endorsed–values that emerged from the Enlightenment and that are currently under attack by people on both the Right and fringe Left.

In the book, he argues that, along with liberalism, the Enlightenment gave rise to three main values – reason, science and humanism – that led to the massive improvements he charts in the human condition. These improvements were not only material but moral, as people began to expand their circle of moral concern to those beyond their own family, tribe, nation or species. It was his wife, he said, who convinced him that these values were “worth singling out and defending”.

Pinker offers a robust defense of liberal democracy, and the “mixture of civic norms, guaranteed rights, market freedom, social spending and judicious regulation, held together by a state strong enough to keep people from each other’s throats.”

I don’t agree with all of Pinker’s positions (nor, admittedly, am I familiar with all of them). The critics who point out that progress rarely comes from those who are cheerleaders for the path we are on have a point. His friendship with the detestable Alan Dershowitz also suggests some blind spots.

But Pinker isn’t blindly optimistic. He concedes that we are living in a precarious moment–a time when advances in human wellbeing are under threat. He assigns primary importance to the political battle being waged against “the Trumpist, authoritarian, conspiratorial right.” But he also worries that too many factions on the left see the world as a zero-sum battle for supremacy among different racial, ethnic and gender groups.

The (very lengthy) article ended with a quote from Pinker that was emblematic of our areas of agreement: “Who’s going to actually step in and defend the idea that incremental improvements fed by knowledge, fed by expanding equality, fed by liberal democracy, are a good thing? Where are the demonstrations, where are the people pumping their fists for liberal democracy? Who’s going to actually say something good about it?”

Who is going to march for moderation, civility and common sense?

Who is going to the ramparts to defend science and reason and liberal democracy? Who is going to remind us that, over time, those products of Enlightenment philosophy have vastly improved the human condition? Who is going to protect us against the barbarians who are so close to the gate?

I so want to believe that sane Americans are going to rise up and shut that gate…

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Killing Themselves To “Own the Libs”

Each morning, I get one of those “news of the day” emails sent out by the The New York Times. The version I get always begins with an introductory discussion of one of the main stories, and last Monday, that introduction was mind-blowing–at least to me.

The data shows that the racial gaps in vaccination that were worrisome have narrowed, although they haven’t entirely disappeared. But it also shows that the partisan gap remains enormous.

A Pew Research Center poll last month found that 86 percent of Democratic voters had received at least one shot, compared with 60 percent of Republican voters…The political divide over vaccinations is so large that almost every reliably blue state now has a higher vaccination rate than almost every reliably red state.

One consequence of differences in vaccination rates, rather obviously, is a difference in death rates.

Since Delta began circulating widely in the U.S., Covid has exacted a horrific death toll on red America: In counties where Donald Trump received at least 70 percent of the vote, the virus has killed about 47 out of every 100,000 people since the end of June, according to Charles Gaba, a health care analyst. In counties where Trump won less than 32 percent of the vote, the number is about 10 out of 100,000.

The story was accompanied by multiple charts demonstrating the salience of political identity to death rates and resistance to vaccination, and the obvious question is: why? Why has a decision that should be made on the basis of medical science and individual prudence become so politicized that Republicans prefer to risk illness and death rather than take elementary precautions to protect themselves and their families–let alone their neighbors?

As the article noted, other countries aren’t experiencing a political vaccination divide.

What distinguishes the U.S. is a conservative party — the Republican Party — that has grown hostile to science and empirical evidence in recent decades. A conservative media complex, including Fox News, Sinclair Broadcast Group and various online outlets, echoes and amplifies this hostility. Trump took the conspiratorial thinking to a new level, but he did not create it.

“With very little resistance from party leaders,” my colleague Lisa Lerer wrote this summer, many Republicans “have elevated falsehoods and doubts about vaccinations from the fringes of American life to the center of our political conversation.”

Evidently–as one pundit noted– a number of Trump supporters believe they are “owning the left” by refusing to take a lifesaving vaccine. (Presumably, dying is the ultimate evidence of that “ownership.”) Even some Republican strategists are beginning to worry; as one was quoted, “In a country where elections are decided on razor-thin margins, does it not benefit one side if their opponents simply drop dead?”

I frequently accuse today’s GOP of fostering–and exemplifying–insanity. Readers may consider my use of that term overblown, and I have occasionally wondered whether it might be hyperbolic. But nothing else seems to fit. What would you call someone who was not suicidal–but who jumped out of an airplane without a parachute, confident that he could land safely?

Rejecting empirical evidence, risking death, and endangering loved ones and acquaintances in order to “get” political opponents is to be mentally disordered. There’s no way around that conclusion.

Among the dictionary definitions of insanity is “extreme folly or unreasonableness.” Synonyms include “derangement,” “lunacy” and “madness.” One example given was “someone who acts or speaks strangely because their brain isn’t working correctly. An example of insane is a person who goes shopping without any pants on.”

How about people who refuse to believe that a deadly disease–a pandemic–threatens not only their own lives but the health of the community in which they live, and who proceed to act in ways that endanger not just themselves, but others? And who base that refusal on the “fact” that science is a liberal plot?

There’s a point at which “stop the world, I want to get off” becomes more than an expression of annoyance or anger. it’s a statement of intent.

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The Sane Folks Are Fleeing

Last Friday, Politico had an article that focused upon the decision of Republican Representative Anthony Gonzales not to run for re-election.Gonzales is young (37), attractive and well-funded, and he represents a safe district in Ohio. So why has he chosen to exit the political arena?

According to Charlie Sykes, the author of the article, “Gonzalez didn’t quit because he feared he couldn’t win, but because it just wasn’t worth it anymore. Winning, it turns out, is not winning if the prize feels a lot more like a loss.

This was the key to his decision to self-purge: He could spend a year fighting off merde-slinging deplorables, only to win another two years sitting in a caucus next to Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), Madison Cawthorn (R-N.C.), Paul Gosar (R- Ariz.) and the other avatars of Trumpism.

Defeat, even before a single vote is cast, might have been disappointing. It might even look to some like a conspicuous lack of competitive mettle. But that assumes the outcome is in doubt — which it isn’t. The Republican Party is already lost. And victory meant two more years trapped in a hellscape of crazified school board meetings, Trump rallies, My Pillow Guy insanity, Newsmax and Fox News hits, and a caucus run by Kevin McCarthy, a man without any principle beyond the acquisition of power.

That’s a pretty accurate description of where Republicans are right now.

As Sykes points out–and as everyone who reads this blog knows–the transformation of the GOP is pretty much complete. Today’s GOP embraces the members who “dabble in white nationalism, peddle conspiracy theories and foment acts of political violence. Neither bigotry nor nihilism is disqualifying.”

But telling the truth about the 2020 election is an “unforgivable sin.”

The devolution of what used to be a major political party into a racist conspiratorial cult has prompted what Sykes calls “the self-deportation of the sane, the decent and the principled.”

Their political emigration is profoundly changing the face of the GOP, and it is happening at every level of politics, from local school boards to the United States Senate. Whatever the result of next year’s elections, the GOP that remains will be meaner, dumber, crazier and more beholden than ever to the defeated, twice-impeached former president.

It is worth emphasizing that the people leaving the GOP are not more “centrist” or (perish the thought!) liberal–according to FiveThirtyEight.com, Gonzales voted with Trump nearly 89 percent of the time in the 116th Congress. His conservative bona fides were impeccable. He even ran well ahead of Trump in an area where both won in 2020. But he happens to be sane and principled; he was one of only 10 GOP representatives who voted to impeach Trump after the Jan. 6 insurrection.

Gonzales isn’t the only elected official who has decided to depart the No-Longer-Grand Old Party.

In 2018, according to Ballotpedia, 23 House Republicans retired from political life altogether, followed by another 20 who stepped away from political office in 2020. Others also retired, but ran for other offices. Reps. Liz Cheney (Wyo.) and Adam Kinzinger (Ill.) continue to hang on, but they are increasingly isolated and outnumbered. The House retirees have been joined by centrist GOP senators like Jeff Flake, Lamar Alexander and Bob Corker, who opted not to seek reelection. Pennsylvania’s Pat Toomey and North Carolina’s Richard Burr (who also voted to convict Trump) will also step down after next year’s election. They will be joined by Ohio’s Rob Portman, who voted to acquit Trump but was critical of his behavior….

Of course, there were many different motives for the Republican departures, but all of them understood that survival in Trump’s GOP required multiple acts of self-humiliation that would, in the end, only win them more years of self-abasement.

Gonzales and several others who’ve departed have indicated an intent to work for a post-Trumpian GOP. Those of us who departed years ago–in my case, when I wrongly assumed that George W. Bush represented the low point–applaud the sentiment, even if we doubt its feasibility.

There are only crazy and unprincipled people left in the party that locally once boasted people like Dick Lugar, Bill Ruckelshaus and Bill Hudnut. The GOP is now the party of Marjorie Taylor Greene, Matt Gaetz, Lauren Boebert and Louie Gohmert. It’s a tragedy–not just for the party, but for the country, and especially for the possibility of governing in an age where rational, informed government is increasingly critical.

We desperately need two adult political parties, composed of rational, serious people who bring different ideological perspectives to the critical issues we face. Instead, we have one “big tent” party composed of everyone who cringes when they look at today’s wacko GOP, and one cult of crazies and racists that is today’s GOP.

We are in big trouble.

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