common sense – Sheila Kennedy

Losing My Faith

I used to have faith in the good will and common sense of my fellow citizens. Over the past several years, I’ve lost that faith.

Good will?? The MAGA zealots who have taken over a previously normal political party routinely engage in outlandish accusations and escalating calls for violence. As David Frum recently wrote,

When a madman hammered nearly to death the husband of then–House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Donald Trump jeered and mocked. One of Trump’s sons and other close Trump supporters avidly promoted false claims that Paul Pelosi had somehow brought the onslaught upon himself through a sexual misadventure.

After authorities apprehended a right-wing-extremist plot to abduct Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, Trump belittled the threat at a rally. He disparaged Whitmer as a political enemy. His supporters chanted “Lock her up.” Trump laughed and replied, “Lock them all up.”

Fascism feasts on violence. In the years since his own supporters attacked the Capitol to overturn the 2020 election—many of them threatening harm to Speaker Pelosi and Vice President Mike Pence—Trump has championed the invaders, would-be kidnappers, and would-be murderers as martyrs and hostages. He has vowed to pardon them if returned to office. His own staffers have testified to the glee with which Trump watched the mayhem on television…

Common sense??? Chris Lamb is a journalist professor at IU-Indianapolis who has documented (at length) the ridiculous “facts” that Republicans have to believe in order to cling to their insistence that the 2020 election was stolen.

Lamb began by referencing the Washington Post’s compendium of Trump’s lies–over 30 thousand of them– during his four-year presidency, and linked to the newspaper’s accessible data base of those lies. And as he reminds us, that figure was restricted to public statements.

There is no point fact-checking Trump because he uses no facts.

There is as much evidence that Donald Trump led American troops on D-Day as there is evidence that he won the 2020 Presidential Election.

And yet, as he points out, two-thirds of Republicans say Biden’s win of that election was illegitimate. In a post replete with links to sources of his evidence, Lamb deconstructs that claim, and enumerates the multiple ridiculous assertions that must be accepted as true in order to believe it.

The post points out what should be obvious: for one thing, that the massive award against Fox News for defamation could not have been won had there been any probative evidence of election fraud. (As he writes, “It’s worth noting that the truth is an absolute defense in libel suits. If news sites – and I use that word loosely – told the truth they would have been immune from defamation lawsuits”). He also points out that a significant number of the sixty-plus cases dismissed for lack of any evidence were heard–and dismissed–by judges Trump appointed.

Lamb’s post provides a meticulous and documented list of the claims MAGA folks have embraced, and copious evidence of their falsity. I won’t recite that whole list–which I encourage you to click through and read–but to say it is discouraging is an understatement.

The unanswered question, of course, is: what percentage of the American population actually believes these things? How many of my fellow Americans have listened to both Biden and Trump, to Democratic and Republican political figures, and actually concluded that Democratic rhetoric has stoked violence? What percentage of American voters truly thinks the 2020 election was stolen, despite a total and complete absence of any corroborating evidence?

And what is wrong with that cohort? Why do they cling to beliefs that are so clearly unsupported by reality?

So yes, until relatively recently, I was confident that most people in this country were people of good will and common sense. Yes, we have always had fringe elements–the bigots of the far Right and far Left, the discontented, fearful and well-armed “Second Amendment” contingent, the scary theocrats like Beckwith and Banks– but I used to believe those people constituted a relatively small part of our body politic.

In the age of MAGA, It’s harder and harder to believe that.

I tell myself that these deluded souls really are a minority; that it is only because they are so loud and “in our faces” that they seem so numerous, but it gets harder and harder to convince myself that the sort of people with whom I regularly interact (on this site and in “real life”)–people who are, by and large, normal, measured and evidence-based –are the real majority.

If they aren’t–if the hordes of angry MAGA Christian Nationalists return Trump to power–the rest of us will lose more than faith in our fellow Americans. We will lose America.

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A Lesson From Ukraine?

I’m a longtime reader of the Hedgehog Review, and was reading a review in the current issue of a book I’ve recently purchased but haven’t yet read: The Dawn of Everything. The review was very positive–the reviewer was a longtime fan of one of the co-authors, who recently died–but the final paragraph of that review brought me up short.

[The authors’] one undeniable achievement, it seems to me, is to show what a dangerous tool common sense can be. As more than a few people have pointed out lately, no government in the history of the world—not even Stalinist Russia or Nazi Germany—has ever had anywhere near the force needed to repress all of its people at once. States have always depended on their people to repress themselves. When most people—most anthropologists, even—deny that we can have iPhones and equal freedom at the same time, the chances of revolutionary change dwindle to zero, and glib cynicism becomes the new wisdom. “The moral basis of a society,” John Lanchester has written, “its sense of its own ethical identity, can’t just be: ‘This is the way the world is, deal with it.’” The Dawn of Everything says, in essence, “This isn’t the way the world has to be. There are literally thousands of other ways.” It’s high time we give some a try.

The “common sense” to which the reviewer alludes is the frequent, confident assertion that hierarchies are inevitable in a technologically-advanced society. (Evidently, the book includes a number of historical exceptions to that “common-sense” rule). More striking, however–and definitely more thought-provoking–is recognition of the undeniable reality that no government can repress all of its people all at once.

We do, as the reviewer asserts, repress ourselves–and although the author didn’t elaborate on how or why we do that, it seems to me that there are a some rather obvious causes of that self-repression: propaganda that encourages beliefs grounded in falsehoods, tribalism that encourages conformity with “our” positions, and civic ignorance. They combine to reinforce the conviction that individual citizens are powerless. Even people who recognize that Fox News and its clones are promoting lies tend to believe there is little or nothing that can be done about it–or about the gerrymandering that they think makes an effort to cast a ballot worthless.

It’s just “common sense,” that the forces that have distorted our democracy and impeded the passage of policies desired by large majorities of Americans–big money, big Pharma, the NRA, et al– are too powerful for mere citizens to vanquish.

Ukrainians are challenging that conviction.

After all, it was also “common sense” that the Russians would easily overpower Ukraine. Russian propaganda–quite probably even believed by Putin–assured its audiences that Ukraine was filled with Russian sympathizers who would greet invaders with flowers (a belief with some uncomfortable resonance with the U.S. invasion of Iraq.) Even if there were no flowers, however, most of the West shared the “common sense” that Ukraine would quickly fall to Russia’s greater military power.

The people who didn’t buy either form of that “common sense” propaganda were the Ukrainians. Thanks in part to their recent history, they knew better.

I previously posted about a documentary chronicling the Ukrainian’s 2014 uprising against the Russian puppet President who had refused to sign an agreement tying Ukraine to the EU. Despite an unbelievably brutal response by the Russian-dominated government to initially-peaceful protests, they prevailed.

As I noted in that post, what was amazing to me was the Immense size of the Ukrainian protests, the enormous numbers of ordinary citizens–teenagers and grandparents, labor and management, men and women– who joined in the demand for change, took to the streets, and actively participated in the ensuing deadly combat with government forces.

The Ukrainians who are having surprising successes battling Putin’s army learned a great deal from that 2014 experience: that politics matters, that citizens have agency, and that “common sense” opinion is often very wrong.

Those are lessons Americans (and especially Hoosiers) need to learn.

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Sometimes, All You Can Do is Laugh

Yesterday, I got an email from the Obama campaign. The campaign has obviously decided to have some fun with the “birthers”–in return for a contribution, I can get a mug or a tee-shirt with “Made in the USA” on one side, and Obama’s long-form birth certificate on the other.

Today, my sister sent me a link to a video message from George Takei to the Tennessee legislature, which is considering legislation called the “Don’t say gay” bill. It would ban the use of the word “gay” in Tennessee schools.George has offered “Takei” as an alternative, and explains how that will work.

And of course, in my post yesterday, I noted some of the more creative reactions to tomorrow’s anticipated Rapture. (My favorite remains the “After-Rapture Looting Party.”)

I think all of these responses are perfect. Clearly, the crazies among us don’t respond well to facts, evidence, science, logic or common sense.

I’m having a good laugh and then I’m going out to saddle up my dinosaur.