Majority Rule

Majority rule in our democratic republic is more complicated than we like to think.

For one thing, our particular form of government carves out matters that are specifically insulated from what the Founders called the “passions of the majority”–the individual liberties enumerated and “reserved to the people” by various provisions of the Bill of Rights. For another, in those areas where majority opinion is supposed to count, our mechanism for determining what a majority of citizens really wants  is the vote–and not every citizen entitled to cast a vote does so. (The differences between what popular majorities want and what gets enacted can often be seen by comparing polling and survey research with legislation passed by victorious candidates.)

And don’t get me started on the Electoral College.

Then there’s the distortion regularly provided by media–very much including Twitter and Facebook, etc. We too often assume that the loudest and most persistent voices reflect the opinion of majorities–and that is not a well-founded assumption.

Take, for example, the issue of vaccine mandates.

A recent report by the Brookings Institution’s William Galston suggests that requiring vaccination is a lot more popular than we might imagine if we only listened to the hysterical purveyors of misinformation and conspiracy theories. (Recently, those vaccine deniers were accurately–if intemperately–labeled “assholes” by the Mayor of West Lafayette, Indiana. I don’t know him, but I’m pretty sure I’d really like him.)

Galston did a deep dive into the data. Not surprisingly, he found that unvaccinated Americans were less concerned about COVID than those who’d had the sense to get vaccinated.

In the face of massive evidence to the contrary, more than half of unvaccinated adults regard getting vaccinated as a bigger risk to their health than is getting infected with the coronavirus. Only one in five of the unvaccinated say that the spread of the delta variant has made them more likely to get vaccinated. These data do not support hopes that the recent outbreak will suffice to increase vaccination rates enough to bring the pandemic under control.

The data also reflects surprisingly robust support for vaccine mandates.

Since the beginning in March 2020, government’s response to the pandemic has occasioned intense controversy, much of it along partisan lines. Although the level of conflict remains high, recent events have solidified public support for the most intrusive policy government can undertake—mandatory vaccinations. According to a survey conducted by the Covid States Project, 64% of Americans now support mandatory vaccinations for everyone, and 70% support them as a requirement for boarding airplanes. More than 6 in 10 say that vaccinations should be required for K-12 students returning for in-school instruction as well as for college students attending classes at their institutions. And the most recent Economist/YouGov survey found that more than 60% support mandatory vaccinations for frontline workers—prison guards, police officers, teachers, medical providers, and the military—and for members of Congress as well…

“Solid majorities of every racial and ethnic group support vaccine mandates, as do Americans at all levels of age, income, and education.

The data also supports the growing recognition by sane Americans that the GOP has  devolved into a cult of anti-science, anti-evidence, crazy folks: Only 45% of Republicans support vaccine mandates, compared to 84% of Democrats.

When I sent my children to school, I was required–mandated– to provide evidence that they’d been vaccinated, and thus did not threaten the health and safety of the other children with whom they would be taught. When I was young myself, Americans lined up with gratitude to receive the polio vaccine that would allow them to avoid the alternatives–death, or imprisonment in iron lungs.

When providing for “the General Welfare” requires rules–mandates– a majority of us understand that such mandates not only do not infringe our liberties, but actually give us more liberty–allowing us to go about our daily lives without the danger of infection (or the need to wear a mask).

Vaccine mandates are supported by medical science, by law, by morality, and by a majority of Americans. We periodically need to remind ourselves that “loudest” doesn’t equate to “most”–and that a fair number of the hysterical people shouting about “personal freedom” can’t define it and don’t want their neighbors to have it.

Comments

Money Makes The Lie Go ‘Round…

There are crazy people, and then there are scary crazy people with lots of money.

If you want the hair on the back of your neck to stand straight up,  read Jane Mayer’s recent article in the New Yorker,“The Big Money Behind the Big Lie.”

The first paragraph describes beliefs so insane it is is difficult to believe that any but a small fringe of people who should probably be institutionalized would hold them.

It was tempting to dismiss the show unfolding inside the Dream City Church in Phoenix, Arizona, as an unintended comedy. One night in June, a few hundred people gathered for the première of “The Deep Rig,” a film financed by the multimillionaire founder of Overstock.com, Patrick Byrne, who is a vocal supporter of former President Donald Trump. Styled as a documentary, the movie asserts that the 2020 Presidential election was stolen by supporters of Joe Biden, including by Antifa members who chatted about their sinister plot on a conference call. The evening’s program featured live appearances by Byrne and a local QAnon conspiracist, BabyQ, who claimed to be receiving messages from his future self. They were joined by the film’s director, who had previously made an exposé contending that the real perpetrators of 9/11 were space aliens.

Messages from the future. Space aliens…um..okay.

Far more frightening is Mayer’s report on the ” well-funded national movement” that has used Trump’s bogus claims of fraud to promote “alterations to the way that ballots are cast and counted in forty-nine states, eighteen of which have passed new voting laws in the past six months.”

Mayer quotes Ralph Neas– a Republican who served as executive director of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights.

Neas has overseen a study of the Arizona audit for the nonpartisan Century Foundation, and he told me that, though the audit is a “farce,” it may nonetheless have “extraordinary consequences.” He said, “The Maricopa County audit exposes exactly what the Big Lie is all about. If they come up with an analysis that discredits the 2020 election results in Arizona, it will be replicated in other states, furthering more chaos. That will enable new legislation. Millions of Americans could be disenfranchised, helping Donald Trump to be elected again in 2024. That’s the bottom line. Maricopa County is the prism through which to view everything. It’s not so much about 2020—it’s about 2022 and 2024. This is a coördinated national effort to distort not just what happened in 2020 but to regain the House of Representatives and the Presidency.”

The truly frightening part of Mayer’s report isn’t in the fantasies of the QAnon followers and assorted “true believers” who serve as foot soldiers in Trump’s White Nationalist cult–instead, it is the fact that these efforts are being funded by “sophisticated, well-funded national organizations whose boards of directors include some of the country’s wealthiest and highest-profile conservatives.”

Dark-money organizations, sustained by undisclosed donors, have relentlessly promoted the myth that American elections are rife with fraud, and, according to leaked records of their internal deliberations, they have drafted, supported, and in some cases taken credit for state laws that make it harder to vote.

Who are these groups?

Mayer identifies several: the Heritage Foundation, and the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) are (unsurprisingly) prominent. Leonard Leo of the Federalist Society has renamed his Judicial Education Project the “Honest Elections Project”–it opposes mail-in ballots and basically any reforms making it easier for people to vote. Then there’s the “Election Integrity Project California,” and a group called FreedomWorks.

They have all received funding from the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, a private, tax-exempt organization Mayer says has become “an extraordinary force in persuading mainstream Republicans to support radical challenges to election rules—a tactic once relegated to the far right.”

With an endowment of some eight hundred and fifty million dollars, the foundation funds a network of groups that have been stoking fear about election fraud, in some cases for years.

Lest you be tempted to dismiss these efforts as fringe assaults with little chance of success, several polls have found that a third of American voters believe Trump’s Big Lie that the 2020 election was stolen. Perhaps the most chilling part of a chilling article was the explanation offered for receptivity to that belief:

What blue-state people don’t understand about why the Big Lie works,” he said, is that it doesn’t actually require proof of fraud. “What animates it is the belief that Biden won because votes were cast by some people in this country who others think are not ‘real’ Americans.” This anti-democratic belief has been bolstered by a constellation of established institutions on the right: “white evangelical churches, legislators, media companies, nonprofits, and even now paramilitary groups.” Podhorzer noted, “Trump won white America by eight points. He won non-urban areas by over twenty points. He is the democratically elected President of white America.”

The article provides much more detail about the ways in which wealthy reactionaries are funding the assault on democratic institutions–most dangerously, the right to vote and (as Paul Ogden frequently reminds us) the right to have those votes accurately counted.

You really need to click through and read the article in its entirety.

I did, and then I poured myself a very stiff drink.

Comments

Positive/Negative

Retirement has given me way too much time to think about questions that have no answers. I find myself waking up at odd hours to mull over issues I am clearly incompetent to resolve–something I rarely did when work-related tasks occupied my thoughts.

Earlier this week, I woke up in the middle of the night and returned to one such question–a question that has frequently bedeviled me: what do we humans owe each other? That is, what are our basic, unavoidable obligations to our fellow humans?

I suspect that the people refusing to be vaccinated against COVID  triggered this particular visit to that question, but the question itself is considerably broader. It seems to implicate the Golden Rules. Note plural.

The rule as I learned it was in the negative: if it pisses you off, don’t do it to someone else. (Okay, okay–the text  actually reads “What you yourself hate, do to no man.” Or, presumably, to no woman.) The rule as it is commonly recited in the U.S., however, is framed as a positive: “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” 

So–what’s our basic obligation to other people? To refrain from behaviors that are hurtful or damaging to them? (Doesn’t that require some awareness of their specific fears and/or challenges?) Or are we obliged to do affirmative things to help others, based upon what we would want those others to do for us? (And if that is indeed our obligation, what if the things I would like to have done to or for me are things that would royally piss you off?)

It’s a puzzlement….

And what about government? America’s founders knew what they didn’t want their new government to do–in the Bill of Rights, they crafted a system of negative liberty. Government was supposed to butt out of our moral and intellectual decision-making and respect our personal autonomy–our right to self-govern. (Well, it was a right of White Male property owners, anyway….) When the Great Depression came along, however, Americans decided that government has some positive obligations as well.

Americans have been arguing about all of that–about what government should and shouldn’t do– pretty much forever. It’s a central preoccupation of this blog.

Legally, at least, we start with “live and let live.” So long as your behavior isn’t harming me, you are entitled to do your own thing. Sounds simple and straightforward– but then we realize that the definition of “harm” is very hotly contested.

I don’t think your decision to read that dirty book affects me, but the guy down the street is convinced that by both your willingness to read it and your support for the publisher by purchasing it, you are, in fact,  committing social harm–that you are polluting the culture and that affects us all.

I believe that having to inhale your passive smoke in my favorite bar is a tangible, demonstrable harm, but you believe the decision to smoke and endanger your own health is entirely yours to make, and you further believe the bar owner has the right to decide who does what in his establishment. 

And don’t get me started on vaccinations….

My middle-of-the-night (why can’t I just go back to sleep?) conversation with myself recognized that modern realities have altered the obligations we owe to each other–we are more densely packed into our cities and towns, more connected to each other by virtue of communication and transportation technologies, and immensely more interdependent in a multitude of ways thanks to the operation of all contemporary economic systems. (Jeffersonian agrarianism was something of a fantasy even in his time, and it’s even more untenable now.)

Even if we leave government out of the equation, and just concentrate on personal responsibility, both of those Golden Rule formulations require a certain degree of judgmentalism.  How do I identify the less obvious harmful behaviors I need to avoid?(Other than the more obvious stuff–don’t lie, cheat or steal, don’t injure or kill–the whole question gets very slippery)…On the positive side, what if am I doing unto you something I think is positive, but it’s something you don’t want done unto you? (I can’t help thinking of the moral scolds who want to control and direct my most intimate behaviors and beliefs “for my own good…”) 

My apologies for sharing my stream-of-consciousness internal debate. Mark it down to retirement-related dementia. I’ll return to more concrete and timely concerns tomorrow.

Other people who wake up in the night read a book, or have fantasies about sex or money. Obviously, there’s something very wrong with me….

Comments

Diagnosis And Treatment

Pointing out that a doctor cannot treat an illness successfully if that illness isn’t correctly identified/diagnosed is to state the glaringly obvious. I would suggest that the same caution should be applied when we attempt to address the ills of society.

Charles Blow–in my estimation–has offered precisely that insight in a recent opinion piece the New York Times.

Blow begins with what is now a depressingly familiar litany of the sins of the party that calls itself Republican–a cult that bears less and less resemblance to what used to be the mainstream of that party. As he asks, what do you call members of a party who are invested in an obvious lie–not to mention a liar “determined to undermine, corrupt and even destroy our democracy?” What about that party’s leaders, who feel entitled to use that lie “as a pretext to suppress the votes and voices of Americans with whom they disagree?”

What do you call a party where many of its members have worked against a lifesaving, society-freeing vaccine in the middle of a pandemic, exposing many of their own followers to the deadly virus, all for the sake of being contrarian, anti-establishment and anti-science?

Those accusations–that litany–is, or should be, stupefyingly familiar by now. The contribution Blow makes in this column is his insistence that this is anything but “politics as usual,” and that we need to recognize that fact if we are to summon the will and wit to overcome the threat these people pose to democracy and the rule of law.

I have heard all the things that the moderates and neutralists have to say: Overheated language helps nothing and alienates people who could otherwise be converted. Don’t cast as evil someone with whom you simply have a disagreement. Build bridges, don’t burn them.

I could understand and appreciate all of that in another time. I can recall being impressed by how well a conservative argument was asserted, even if I disagreed with it. I can remember when conservatism was just as intellectual as liberalism, and compromises could be made to feel like the combining of the best of both…

But we should also not underplay or sugarcoat the darkness of the current season.

I don’t see how we continue to pretend that this is politics as usual, that it’s normal squabbling between ideological opposites. No, something is deeply, dangerously wrong here. This is not the same as it has always been.

Blow doesn’t offer a strategy for dealing with the situation that he has accurately described, and I certainly don’t have a solution, or even a proposed intervention. But I do know that you cannot solve a problem you are unwilling to recognize. A doctor cannot cure someone’s cancer if she continues to insist that what ails the patient is just a common cold.

Let’s be honest: A significant minority of the American public is dangerously mentally ill. (Mental illness, as Mitch recently reminded us in a comment to a previous post, is ” a state of mind which prevents normal perception, behavior, or social interaction”) A troubling number of those who have been drinking this generation’s Kool Aid are acting out their fantasies–shooting up pizza parlors, staging an insurrection, denying the reality of a pandemic…Failure to recognize the extent to which the moment we occupy differs from the ideological or political disagreements most of us formerly experienced will make it impossible to fashion an effective response.

I wish I knew what that “effective response” might look like. Other than a massive GOTV effort, I don’t. But I do know–and yesterday’s blog highlighted– that we aren’t dealing with the common cold.

Comments

Hot Water

Sometimes, I think America’s constitutional democracy is the frog in that over-used parable–the one that gets boiled because the pot of water it’s in is being heated just slowly enough that the frog doesn’t notice until it’s too late.

Every single day brings new evidence of our dysfunction–the capture of one of our political parties by people who range from evil to detached from reality to objectively crazy; the episodes of increasingly militant and unashamed racism and anti-Semitism; the growth of belief in QAnon and other bizarre conspiracy theories; and the public embrace of what most of us previously considered a European form of rightwing nationalism.

The water has become hotter this week, with news that Fox News’ most bankable  and pompous right-wing cheerleader, Tucker Carlson–he of the smarmy sneers and bow ties–had met with Hungarian autocrat and strongman Viktor Orban. As Talking Points Memo reported,

Fox News host Tucker Carlson is billed as a speaker at a far-right conference in Hungary on Saturday, according to a flier for the event. The appearance will come days after the Fox host met with the country’s Prime Minister Viktor Orbán.

Carlson will purportedly offer his insights at MCC Feszt, an event hosted by the Mathias Corvinus Collegium, which the New York Times described in June as a government-funded plan to “train a conservative future elite.

A program for MCC Feszt touts Carlson as speaking on Saturday, delivering a talk called “The World According to Tucker Carlson.”

It’s part of a larger, four-day long program that also advertises a talk from a representative of one of America’s esteemed conservative institutions of higher education: Dennis Prager of PragerU, which makes up for what it lacks in physical space, accreditation, and discernible curriculum in Facebook virality. Prager will deliver a talk on “media and free speech.

MCC, the sponsor of the “Feszt,” reportedly benefits from both $1.7 billion in grants from the Hungarian government and the open support of Orbán, who has characterized his approach to governance as “illiberal democracy.” Orbán’s government has used anti-Semitic imagery to demonize George Soros, a native of the country and a favorite target of the Right, and has pressured universities associated with Soros and his Open Society to close. Talking Points Memo also notes that Orban has “gone out of his way” to clamp down on LGBTQ rights during his tenure.

Josh Marshall–the editor of TPM–commented on the meeting and what it reflects about the direction of the GOP:

One thing that a number of us have been saying for some time is that increasingly over the last decade-plus, the GOP has continued to present itself as a center-right party of government while increasingly operating as a rightist revanchist party on the European model. This intentionally conspicuous hobnobbing with Orbán is part of that story. Obviously, Carlson isn’t formally representing the GOP. But in practice he does. He’s far more influential in conservative politics than any elected official currently in office.

This lurch from genuine conservatism to what Marshall quite accurately labels “rightest revanchism” is one more reflection of the party’s current identity, which is as a White Nationalist cult. When you cut through all the BS, by far the most dominant conviction held by members of today’s Republican Party is a deep-seated, racist belief that the only “real” Americans are White Male fundamentalist Christians.

That belief is the reason Republicans in Congress have stopped legislating in favor of performative insanity. The party is no longer about policy or actual politics of any kind–liberal, conservative or even (as it sometimes seems) fascist. The GOP is interested only in maintaining power, but not in order to govern– it needs that power in order to protect White Male Christian privilege, and to ensure the continued dominance of “real” Americans over all of us “others.”

The members of today’s GOP now realize that White Christian Male cultural domination will inevitably erode in the absence of a governing autocracy committed to its preservation, and they are willing to trade both the American Idea and the rule of law for a despotism that will protect that domination. With his visit to Viktor Orban, Tucker Carlson has made that willingness impossible to ignore.

The water in the pot is getting very, very hot.

Comments