Tag Archives: founders

The Costs of Rejecting Reality

Thanks to the information environment we inhabit, we Americans increasingly inhabit alternate “realities.” I’ve put quotation marks around the term “realities,” because it has become very clear that the universe in which too many Americans have chosen to reside is at odds with–indeed, incompatible with–empirical reality. The amount of propaganda, conspiracy theories, and other varieties of mis- and dis-information readily available online greatly facilitates the very human desire to indulge in confirmation bias–and the failure of civic and scientific education has facilitated widespread acceptance of “realities” wildly at odds with fact and credible evidence.

It seems pertinent, therefore, to ask: what happens when people choose to deny empirical evidence and facts they find inconvenient or annoying? What, for example, might we expect from RFK, Jr’s refusal to understand the science of vaccines, or the demonstrable benefits of a fluoridated water supply?

History is instructive. I did some (very superficial) research, and found fascinating (and depressing) evidence of humanity’s past experience with the denial of science and empirical inquiry.

Before acceptance of germ theory, for example, many people believed diseases like cholera were caused by the presence of  “miasma” (bad air). As a result, governments took no effective measures to control cholera outbreaks–and doctors who warned about the dangers of contaminated water were ignored. The result was thousands of unnecessary deaths.

The tendency to ignore and reject scientific evidence hasn’t been confined to America. In Russia, in the early 20th Century, a Soviet agricultural scientist named Lysenko rejected the science of genetics in favor of pseudoscientific ideas like Lamarckian inheritance (the belief that physical changes made to an organism during its lifetime would be  passed on–inherited by the organism’s offspring.) Stalin’s government embraced Lysenko’s theories, suppressed the scientists who supported Mendelian genetics, and based its agricultural policies on Lysenkoism. The result was widespread crop failures and famines that caused millions of deaths.

I found plenty of other historical examples: delays in accepting the science of plate tectonics that hindered advancements in understanding earthquakes, volcanic activity, and geological hazards. Initial medical responses to the HIV/AIDS crisis that were hampered by widespread stigma and misinformation. Vaccine disinformation (especially the consistently debunked claim that vaccines cause autism) has led to reduced vaccination rates, and the resurgence of diseases like measles, polio, and whooping cough that medical science had virtually eradicated.

Numerous studies have confirmed that the MAGA movement’s resistance to masks and vaccines during the COVID pandemic cost the U.S. thousands of lives–a far greater percentage of American citizens died than the percentage of people living in countries where the population had more respect for medical science. Delays in lockdowns, resistance to public health measures, and vaccine rejection caused millions of preventable deaths and significant economic damage.

And I don’t even want to theorize about the likely consequences of climate change denial…

Ironically, MAGA’s stubborn resistance to empiricism and fact flies in the face of what actually made America great.

America’s founders were students of the Enlightenment, especially the philosophy of John Locke, often considered the father of empiricism. The Founders committed themselves to unleashing the power of reason to advance knowledge and to build an effective and responsive government. They believed that science and democracy worked together, and often expressed their intent to base government policy on the best available data and the most up-to-date, empirical understanding of the world.

As the Union of Concerned Scientists wrote in 2012, “science and democracy, working hand in hand, have proved a powerful combination that has helped our nation to prosper and thrive throughout our history.”

That partnership of science and government is what enabled America’s economic “greatness.” The country’s economic growth  has significantly depended on empiricism and technological innovation; advances in industries like aerospace, computing, and biotechnology have all been dependant upon rigorous science and empirical evidence. Respect for science and empiricism has also been crucial to the development of the military defense technologies that have made the U.S. a world power. (Think radar, GPS, and nuclear energy.)

Trump and the MAGA movement are the absolute antithesis of the respect for science, evidence and expertise that is actually at the base of America’s global preeminence. The collection of clowns, buffoons, and know-nothings that Trump has nominated for his cabinet make a mockery of MAGA’s promise to return America to greatness.

What is that famous Santayana quote? Those who don’t know history are doomed to repeat it.

Welcome to Lysenkoism.

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A Rerun

I particularly enjoy visiting the “your memories” function on Facebook (mostly for the pictures of grandchildren when they were younger and me when my hair was still black…). The other day, however, those memories included several comments referencing a post from 2017. I reread it, and concluded that it continues to be relevant–especially as we approach a pivotal election. So today, I’m taking the day off and reposting “Tribalism Versus Americanism.”

Think of it as a very late summer re-run.

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We Americans are a cantankerous and argumentative lot. We hold vastly different political philosophies and policy preferences, and we increasingly inhabit alternate realities. Partisans routinely attack elected officials—especially Presidents—who don’t share their preferences or otherwise meet their expectations.

Politics as usual. Unpleasant and often unfair, but—hysteria and hyperbole notwithstanding– usually not a threat to the future of the republic. Usually.

We are beginning to understand that Donald Trump does pose such a threat.

In the wake of Trump’s moral equivocations following Charlottesville, critics on both the left and right characterized his refusal to distinguish between the “fine people” among the Nazis and KKK and the “fine people” among the protestors as an assault on core American values. His subsequent, stunning decision to pardon rogue sheriff Joe Arpaio has been described, accurately, as an assault on the rule of law.

It’s worth considering what, exactly, is at stake.

Whatever our beliefs about “American exceptionalism,” the founding of this country was genuinely exceptional—defined as dramatically different from what had gone before—in one incredibly important respect: for the first time, citizenship was made dependent upon behavior rather than identity. In the Old World, countries had been created by conquest, or as expressions of ethnic or religious solidarity. As a result, the rights of individuals were dependent upon their identities, the status of their particular “tribes” in the relevant order. (Jews, for example, rarely enjoyed the same rights as Christians, even in countries that refrained from oppressing them.)

Your rights vis a vis your government depended upon who you were—your religion, your social class, your status as conqueror or conquered.

The new United States took a different approach to citizenship. Whatever the social realities, whatever the disabilities imposed by the laws of the various states, anyone (okay, any white male) born or naturalized here was equally a citizen. We look back now at the exclusion of blacks and women and our treatment of Native Americans as shameful departures from that approach, and they were, but we sometimes fail to appreciate how novel the approach itself was at that time in history.

All of our core American values—individual rights, civic equality, due process of law—flow from the principle that government must not facilitate tribalism, must not treat people differently based upon their ethnicity or religion or other marker of identity. Eventually (and for many people, reluctantly) we extended that principle to gender, skin color and sexual orientation.

Racism is a rejection of that civic equality. Signaling that government officials will not be punished for flagrantly violating that foundational principle so long as the disobedience advances the interests of the President, fatally undermines it.

Admittedly, America’s history is filled with disgraceful episodes in which we have failed to live up to the principles we profess. In many parts of the country, communities still grapple with bitter divisions based upon tribal affiliations—race, religion and increasingly, partisanship.

When our leaders have understood the foundations of American citizenship, when they have reminded us that what makes us Americans is allegiance to core American values—not the color of our skin, not the prayers we say, not who we love—we emerge stronger from these periods of unrest. When they speak to the “better angels of our nature,” most of those “better angels” respond.

When our leaders are morally bankrupt, all bets are off. We’re not all Americans any more, we’re just a collection of warring tribes, some favored by those in power, some not.

As the old saying goes: elections have consequences.

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The Court’s Selective Originalism

Our current Supreme Court is dominated by regressive Justices who insist–as did the late Antonin Scalia–that they reach their conclusions by being “originalists.” Their definition of originalism differs rather substantially from mine–I’m firmly of the conviction that an authentic originalism requires fidelity to the values embraced by the Founders, while they insist that an originalist is bound by the constitutional text as it was understood at the time.

Permit me an example of why this is horse-pucky.

I used to ask my students what James Madison thought about porn on the internet. Obviously, Madison could not have conceived of the Internet–but he had very explicit beliefs about the value of free speech and the need to prevent government censorship. The current majority’s crabbed and dishonest “originalism”–if consistently pursued– would reserve free expression to communication methods in place during Madison’s time. A workable originalism protects speech from government censorship irrespective of the method of its transmission.

Of course, the majority doesn’t apply its version consistently, because it would be unworkable. Instead–as legal scholars have pointed out–they are selective in their application. (At least so far, they haven’t allowed government to censor radio, television, movies, and the internet–none of which the Founders could have envisioned.)

I thought about that very telling selectivity when I read an essay by Thom Hartmann about theocracy and the Dark Ages. I encourage you to read it in its entirety, but the part that struck me–and reminded me of the selectivity of Justices like Scalia, Thomas and especially Alito– were the sections detailing the Founders’ approach to Separation of Church and State.

Hartmann began by quoting extensively from John Adams. Adams was a practicing Christian, but was wary–to say the least– of government efforts to compel religiosity. Among the Adams quotes shared by Hartman was the following:

“Since the promulgation of Christianity, the two greatest systems of tyranny that have sprung from this original, are the canon and the feudal law. The desire of dominion, that great principle by which we have attempted to account for so much good and so much evil, is, when properly restrained, a very useful and noble movement in the human mind.

“But when such restraints are taken off, it becomes an encroaching, grasping, restless, and ungovernable power. Numberless have been the systems of iniquity contrived by the great for the gratification of this passion in themselves; but in none of them were they ever more successful than in the invention and establishment of the canon and the feudal law.”

Hartmann also quoted Jefferson, who wrote in his Notes on the State of Virginia:

“Reason and free enquiry are the only effectual agents against error. … Had not free enquiry been indulged, at the æra of the reformation, the corruptions of Christianity could not have been purged away.”

And he shared an often-cited Jefferson line: 

“The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others. But it does me no injury for my neighbour to say there are twenty gods, or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.”

Adams and Jefferson weren’t the only Founders who believed in separating church from state. As Hartmann notes,

George Washington refused to declare himself a Christian; Thomas Paine wrote an entire book embracing atheism; Ben Franklin famously fled Massachusetts as a teenager to escape the censorship and threats of imprisonment by religious leaders.

The essay points out that today’s White Christian Nationalist movement is both ahistoric and anti-American–a conclusion with which credible scholars entirely agree.

So here’s my question, aimed especially at Justice Alito (Thomas is simply corrupt, but Alito seems to be a true theocrat.) If you are really an originalist, bound by that doctrine to decide constitutional debates as the Founders would have understood them, why are you ignoring both the Constitutional text and the substantial contemporaneous evidence of their belief in the importance of Separation of Church and State?  

Hartmann’s essay focused on the Dark Ages, a thousand-year period introduced and maintained by virtue of the close alliance of church and government. He ends with a question:

Will we go down a nationalist religious road similar to that now being followed by Modi in India and Netanyahu in Israel? Could we end up as bad as Iran, Afghanistan, or 17th century New England? Will Republicans trigger a new Dark Age?

Or will we re-embrace the Renaissance and Enlightenment values and ideals of the Founders of this nation and hold to a secular democratic republic?

If the pseudo-originalists on today’s Court prevail, we won’t like the answer to that question.

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Back To Basics

There is one basic question that every society must answer: what is government for? What is its purpose and what are its proper limits?

Whether you want to call America’s current, vicious civic battles a “culture war,” or an assault by theocrats on the rest of us, one thing is clear: those waging that battle–the “warriors” who are intent upon using the power of the state to impose their beliefs on everyone else–have utterly rejected the libertarian premise upon which American government rests.

Libertarian, in this usage, refers to the nature of liberty, not today’s political ideology.

There is great wisdom in what has been dubbed the “libertarian principle.” Those who crafted America’s constituent documents were significantly influenced by the philosophy of the Enlightenment, and its then-new approach to the proper role of the state. That approach rejected notions of monarchy and the “divine right” of kings (the overwhelming authority of the state) in favor of the principle that Individuals should be free to pursue their own ends–their own life goals–so long as they did not thereby harm the person or property of another, and so long as they were willing to accord an equal liberty to their fellow citizens.

Government was tasked with protecting that liberty.

The libertarian principle undergirds the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights, and its operation has been persuasive world-wide. (If we really wanted to make America great again, we would revisit and revive our allegiance to it.)

Those who crafted America’s Bill of Rights believed that individuals are entitled to basic human rights simply by virtue of being human–and they understood human rights to require respect for individual moral autonomy. The term “limited government” is recognition of that principle–“limited” isn’t a description of size, it is a limit on authority, a limit on the power of the state to invade and disregard the individual’s right to self-determination.

Handing government the power to prescribe citizens’ moral “dos and don’ts” is the antithesis of genuine liberty.  If those in positions of power and authority can prescribe your life choices, and punish any deviation from officially sanctioned personal conduct, you are a subject, not a citizen–and you definitely are not exercising moral choice.

So what role should government play? What is implied by that libertarian construct?

Allow me to restate it: Individuals should be free to pursue their own ends–free to “do their own thing”–so long as they do not harm the person or property of another, and so long as they are willing to accord an equal liberty to others.

Those caveats are important, and they require both action and restraint by government.

One of the most obvious purposes of government is to prevent some people from harming the person or property of others. What constitutes “harm,” of course, can be a contentious matter: does my use of profanity constitute a harm to society? What about pornography? Books with “anti-social” content? “Wrong” religious beliefs? (Contemporary Republicans insist that teaching accurate history constitutes a harm.)

Then, of course, there is that little matter of government’s responsibility for ensuring civic and legal equality….

As difficult as our arguments about the nature of the “harms” that justify government action continue to be, Americans have really balked at that second “so long as”–the one requiring those of us who insist on our own right to self-government to “accord an equal liberty to others.” Far too many of us prefer something along the lines of “liberty for me but not for thee.”

The problem with a system in which only some people have rights is that a government with the power to deny me my rights today can use that authority to deny you your rights tomorrow. Actually, a government with the power to grant and/or withdraw rights isn’t dealing with”rights” at all–it’s doling out privileges, and privileges can be withdrawn when the political environment changes.

As a wise man once told me, we’re equally free, or no one really is. Poison gas is a great weapon until the wind shifts.

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Doug Masson Quotes The Federalist

Doug Masson is a lawyer in Lafayette, Indiana, and one of the most thoughtful and erudite Indiana bloggers. He has a post on the Democratic primary that is well worth reading in its entirety–and with which I entirely agree–but I was particularly struck by this quotation from Federalist 68

Nothing was more to be desired than that every practicable obstacle should be opposed to cabal, intrigue, and corruption. These most deadly adversaries of republican government might naturally have been expected to make their approaches from more than one quarter, but chiefly from the desire in foreign powers to gain an improper ascendant in our councils. How could they better gratify this, than by raising a creature of their own to the chief magistracy of the Union?”

The “desire in foreign powers to gain an improper ascendant…by raising a creature of their own to the chief magistracy of the Union.”

Whatever propaganda Republicans employ to dismiss the findings of the Mueller Report or denigrate America’s Intelligence operations, the evidence is overwhelming that Russia raised a creature of its own during the 2016 election. That evidence was recently confirmed by a bipartisan report from the Senate Intelligence committee, about which I will report more fully in due course.

As Doug says, Trump is “emotionally fragile, intellectually bankrupt, and utterly corrupt”.

He believes that the office of the Presidency is there to serve him rather than the other way around. His trading on public resources to induce foreign powers to meddle in our elections was exactly the kind of thing the Founders were concerned about when they wrote the Constitution.

Most readers of this blog have already joined me in my determination to “Vote Blue No Matter Who,” (I would personally cast my ballot for a potted plant if it was the alternative to Trump) but that doesn’t mean that most of us don’t have favorites in–and opinions about– the Democratic Primary. At this point in the process, I find myself agreeing with Doug’s analysis.

For my part, I don’t mind Biden, but I like Mayor Pete and Elizabeth Warren. I don’t have strong feelings about Bernie himself, but his online supporters have been fairly off-putting in a way that doesn’t seem nearly so common for supporters of other candidates. In a perfect world, I should be comparing policies, but Presidential campaigns are won or lost on the basis of personalities. The electorate says they care about policy, but when it comes time to vote, they mostly don’t understand the policies and have shaped their understanding of the policies to conform with their personality preferences. I may have better than average understanding of some of these issues, but ultimately, I don’t know enough about the ins and outs of federal laws, rules, and regulations to truly assess the candidates’ plans beyond a pretty superficial level. Nevermind the fact that whatever they propose will have to navigate the legislative process. I’m going to have to trust that the person will do the best they can and will generally make sound decisions.

I have previously called Bernie and Biden analog candidates for a digital age. Either would be immensely preferable to Trump, but I would prefer to see both of them as honored elder statesmen. I love Elizabeth Warren, but I worry that she would make a fairly easy target. Plus I’d hate to see her leave the Senate, where she has been such an effective voice for fairness.

And I really love Mayor Pete.

I’m ready to turn this country over to a new generation–to the people who will have to live with the results of the economic and environmental decisions they make, who grew up with and understand the immense impact of technology on everyday life, and who have the intellect and energy that the Presidency requires and that the current President so clearly lacks.

The men who wrote The Federalist and crafted our Constitution were young. I Googled it, and it turns out that many of the Founding Fathers were not yet 40 years old in 1776. The average age of the signers of the Declaration of Independence was 44 (Ben Franklin undoubtedly raised the average!), but more than a dozen of them were 35 or younger.

The impressive Jacinda Ardern of New Zealand was born in 1980 and elected at age 37, and Emmanuel Macron of France just turned 41.

On the other end of the spectrum, I’m Bernie’s age, and most days, I need a nap.

All that said–whoever emerges will have my activism and my vote. Whoever it is won’t have Russia’s.

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