Tag Archives: politics

Why It Matters

A recent newsletter from Charlie Sykes really resonated with me. Sykes began by exploring why he focused on political reporting–why he didn’t turn his face from the disastrous dismantling of the American Idea to more pleasant concerns. Why is he reporting on Trump and his merry band of morons and psychopaths, rather than listening to music, or learning a new language, or spending more time with his grandchildren?

As he wrote,

I’m at the age now when every twinge or ache makes me think: is this the thing that’s going to kill me? So why am I devoting so much of my time to writing about the stupid, the inane, and the futile? How many years do I have to squander on Donald F’ing Trump?

I really related to that question. Like Sykes, I’m at a “certain age.” And I am one of the very fortunate–I still really, really like my spouse of 45 years; my children (who have evidently overlooked my deficits as a parent while they were growing up) are attentive and caring; my grandchildren are perfect (okay, maybe I’m a bit over-fond…); our blended family is loving and compatible, and–at least until Trump destroys the robust economy he inherited from the Biden administration–we have enough money in our retirement funds to live comfortably. I should be happy all the time.

Instead–as regular readers undoubtedly recognize–I’m routinely livid. Like Sykes, I sometimes wonder why I allow the country’s fraught political situation to displace the good fortune for which I should be grateful, so I was interested in his conclusion, which rested on an essay by former political pundit Charles Krauthammer.

A man of Renaissance sensibilities, Krauthammer could have written about literally anything, but he chose to write about politics, because he knew that was the one thing we had to get right.

“In the end,” he wrote, “all the beautiful, elegant things in life, the things that I care about, the things that matter, depend on getting the politics right. Because in those societies where they get it wrong, everything else is destroyed, everything else is leveled.” Krauthammer was echoing John Adams who wrote: “I must study politics and war, so that our sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy.”

But Krauthammer had the added benefit of our own grim history.

“You can have the most advanced and efflorescent cultures,” he wrote. “Get your politics wrong, however, and everything stands to be swept away. This is not ancient history. This is Germany 1933.”

Sykes quotes Krauthammer for his observations about the extreme importance of governance and politics, pointing to examples like North Korea, “whose deranged Stalinist politics has created a land of stunning desolation and ugliness, both spiritual and material,” and to China’s Cultural Revolution, which he labeled a “sustained act of national self-immolation” that aimed “to destroy five millennia of Chinese culture.”

“The entire 20th Century with its mass political enthusiasms is a lesson in the supreme power of politics to produce ever-expanding circles of ruin. World War One not only killed more people than any previous war. The psychological shock of Europe’s senseless self inflicted devastation forever changed western sensibilities, practically overthrowing the classical arts, virtues, and modes of thought. The Russian Revolution and its imitators (Chinese, Cuban, Vietnamese, Cambodian) tried to atomize society so thoroughly — to war against the mediating structures that stand between the individual and the state — that the most basic bonds of family, faith, fellowship and conscience came to near dissolution.

“Of course, the greatest demonstration of the finality of politics is the Holocaust, which in less than a decade destroyed a millennium-old civilization, sweeping away not only 6 million souls but the institutions, the culture, the very tongue of the now vanished world of European Jewry.”

I think it was Santayana who said “Those who don’t learn history are doomed to repeat it.”

Those of us who did learn history–or at least a great deal of it–can choose to do one of two things. Those of us who have the option can burrow back into our comfortable lives and ignore the current fascist takeover, or we can join together with others who are determined to fight the malignant forces that threaten all of us, but especially those whose lives are more precarious.

When you think about it, unless you are a very self-engrossed person, it isn’t much of a choice.

I’ve been working with Central Indiana Indivisible. I hope those of you in the area will join me. If you can’t attend protests and participate in other resistance activities–and even if you can– you can support them financially here.

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Everything Is Political

One of the enduring frustrations of political life is the frequency with which those of us who regularly vote encounter Americans who dismiss the importance–indeed, the relevance–of politics. “Oh, I’m not political,” these folks tell us, as if an interest in who governs us and how is akin to a fondness for a certain television show, or engagement with a hobby.

Judging from the number of people who are eligible to vote but don’t bother to cast ballots, there are millions of people who  utterly fail to connect their lives and prospects to the policies and competence of the governing regimes under which they live–who fail to understand that, at base, pretty much everything is political.

A recent essay by Rick Perlstein in the American Prospect  made the case for that connection.

Perlstein began by noting that Scientific American had endorsed Kamala Harris. This is only the second time in that publication’s 179-year history that it has made a presidential endorsement, and the decision to do so prompted criticisms. Critics argued that engaging in the campaign was a bad idea–that it just risked giving aid and comfort to conservatives who “want nothing more than to be able to credibly claim the scientific community as just one more in a malign den of elite liberal villainy.”

They say the endorsement degrades what is most valuable in science’s operative ideal: that its results are ideologically neutral, because scientists follow evidence objectively without reference to who benefits, and that once science becomes “politicized,” it will not truly be science anymore.

I understand and respect those arguments. But I disagree. If anything, I think the Scientific American endorsement doesn’t go nearly far enough.

In Perlstein’s view, negative reactions to the endorsement should be part of a much larger discussion about how institutions, organizations (and indeed, all of us)– should think about electoral politics. In this case, he focused that discussion on the question “when is it appropriate to break norms of behavior?” (It has been a norm, for example, that science is non-political, at least in the partisan sense.) His discussion is well worth reading in its entirety, but it triggered a somewhat different stream of thought for me.

Is it really possible for a human who lives in a society–a non-hermit–to be nonpolitical? With that question, I suppose I’m returning to a conviction I have often voiced: language is important. Using language to communicate requires that those participating in the conversation agree on the meanings of the words being used. When people declare that they are not “political,” I’m fairly certain that they mean they don’t engage in partisanship–that they are uninterested in contests between political parties and their spokespeople. (We can quibble with that declaration too, but that’s a subject for a different time.)

What they fail to understand is that politics encompasses far more than the battles between political parties. All activities associated with decision-making in groups, and virtually all other power relationships between and among individuals, are political. Politics governs the distribution of goods and services–or, for that matter, the distribution of status–in a given society.

When you think about the various ways that public decision-making affects us all, hundreds of examples come to mind.

Workers who have no redress for wage theft, battered wives in societies that accord husbands “dominion” over their spouses,  homeowners unprotected by zoning laws that prevent the guy next door from operating a tavern from his living room…The hundreds of laws and customs that allow communities to function and individuals to flourish– are all the result of politics, the result of decisions about the way people relate to each other, decisions about what constitutes fair play and justice, decisions about our obligations to our fellow humans.

Which brings me back to Perlstein’s central observation: saying that we shouldn’t “politicise” science–or any area of human conduct–is meaningless, because every area of our common lives is inescapably shaped by political decision-making. The decision by scientists to rely on evidence–and their definitions of what constitutes reliable evidence– is political. Educators’ choices of what subjects to teach (and how) is political. A journalist’s decision to report Item A and ignore item B is political.

Recognizing the power of government and choosing to be governed by people who respect the Constitution and the Rule of Law is unquestionably political–it affects every other aspect of the social and political reality we inhabit.

Americans who don’t understand that, who won’t bother to vote or educate themselves about the choices before us, are ultimately as dangerous as the MAGA folks who vote their fears and bigotries.

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The Politics Of Lying

When I was teaching, Free Speech discussions would frequently evoke a question from students appalled by the massive amounts of disinformation enabled by the Internet and social media: “Can’t we at least outlaw lying?” I would have to explain that courts would have great difficulty determining the difference between what is a lie and what is a mistake, etc. The practical problems of such an effort would be insurmountable.

More to the point, the First Amendment rests on reliance upon the “marketplace of ideas.” Bad ideas and lies are to be countered by better ideas and facts. It is a theory that depends upon the participation of We the People.

It isn’t working very well right now, and I see no simple solutions. Neither does Bill Adair, who founded Politifact. In a recent essay for the Atlantic, he explored the failure of that fact-checking site to combat the firehose of propaganda and lies that  distort our political lives.

For American politicians, this is a golden age of lying. Social media allows them to spread mendacity with speed and efficiency, while supporters amplify any falsehood that serves their cause. When I launched PolitiFact in 2007, I thought we were going to raise the cost of lying. I didn’t expect to change people’s votes just by calling out candidates, but I was hopeful that our journalism would at least nudge them to be more truthful.

I was wrong. More than 15 years of fact-checking has done little or nothing to stem the flow of lies. I underestimated the strength of the partisan media on both sides, particularly conservative outlets, which relentlessly smeared our work. (A typical insult: “The fact-checkers are basically just a P.R. arm of the Democrats at this point.”) PolitiFact and other media organizations published thousands of checks, but as time went on, Republican representatives and voters alike ignored our journalism more and more, or dismissed it. Democrats sometimes did too, of course, but they were more often mindful of our work and occasionally issued corrections when they were caught in a falsehood.

After exploring some theories about why politicians lie–the calculus that they apparently apply to determine the ratio of risk to reward– Adair notes that today’s extreme political polarization encourages them to do little else.

Now that many politicians speak primarily to their supporters, lying has become both less dangerous and more rewarding. “They gain political favor or, ultimately, they gain election,” said Mike McCurry, who served as White House press secretary under President Bill Clinton. As former Democratic Senator Bob Kerrey told me, “It’s human nature to want to get a standing ovation.” Lies also provide easy ammunition for attacking opponents—no opposition research required. They “take points off the board for other candidates,” said Damon Circosta, a Democrat who recently served as the chair of North Carolina’s Board of Elections.

Adair notes that partisan media, especially on the right, fosters lying by degrading our shared sense of what’s real. These outlets expect politicians to repeat favored falsehoods as the price of admission. If you’re not willing to participate in the twisting of facts, you simply won’t get to speak to the echo chamber.

Tim Miller, a former Republican operative who left the party in 2020, pointed out that gerrymandering, particularly in red states, has made it so “most of the voters in your district are getting their information from Fox, conservative talk radio … and so you just have this whole bubble of protection around your lies in a way that wouldn’t have been true before, 15 years ago.”

Adair uses Mike Pence as an example of the way today’s political incentives change people. They had been neighbors when Pence was in Congress, and Adair saw him then as “a typical politician who would occasionally shade the truth.” When he was Indiana governor, Adair watched his lies grow. “By the time he became Donald Trump’s vice president, he was almost unrecognizable to me.”

The question, of course, is “what can we do?” Here are Adair’s closing paragraphs:

If politicians lie because they believe they’ll score more points than they’ll lose, we have to change the calculus. Tech and media companies need to create incentives for truth-telling and deterrents for lying. Platforms of all kinds could charge higher ad rates to candidates who have the worst records among fact-checkers. Television networks could take away candidates’ talking time during debates if they’re caught lying.

But these reforms will demand more than just benign corporate intervention. They’ll need broad, sustained public support. Voters may not be willing to place truthfulness over partisan preference in every case. But more will have to start caring about lies, even when their candidate is the culprit.

Amen.

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Politics: The New Time Religion

Fareed Zakaria is one of our most perceptive pundits. I have purchased his most recent book, Age of Revolutions, and am about halfway through it. Thus far, I’ve found it illuminating.

Zakaria’s recent essay in The Washington Post was similarly illuminating, connecting America’s increased secularization to the growing religious zealotry of the GOP and Trump’s supporters. Here’s his lede:

Reporters have been noticing something new about Donald Trump’s campaign events this time around. They often resemble religious revival meetings. The New York Times notes that where his rallies were once “improvised and volatile,” their finales now feel more planned, solemn and infused with religion. The closing 15 minutes “evokes an evangelical altar call” filled with references to God.

Trump is a shrewd reader of his supporters and has clearly seen what the data show. White evangelicals, who make up about 14 percent of the population, made up about one-quarter of voters in the 2020 election. And about three-quarters of them voted for Donald Trump. Even more striking, of those White voters who attend religious services once a month or more, 71 percent voted for Trump in the 2020 election. (Even similarly religious Black Americans, by contrast, voted for Joe Biden by a 9 to 1 ratio.) The key to understanding Trump’s coalition is the intensity of his support among White people who are and who claim to be devout Christians.
The decline in the nation’s religiosity is one of the many cultural changes that have upset so many Americans. For a number of years, America was an outlier among modern Western nations, most of which had secularized far earlier. (Ironically, scholars mostly attribute this country’s greater religiosity to the Separation of Church and State so despised by Christian Nationalists.) In the 1990s, that began to change, and it has plunged since 2007.
As the scholar Ronald Inglehart has shown, since that year, religious decline in America has been the greatest of any country of the 49 surveyed. By one measure, the United States today is the 12th-least-religious country on Earth. In 1990, according to the General Social Survey, less than 10 percent of Americans had no religious affiliation. Today it’s around 30 percent.
Zakaria considers some of the reasons for the decline, and then turns his attention to what has taken the place of fundamentalist religious dogma: politics. He quotes Walter Lippmann for the observation that modern life has deprived men of the “sense of certainty as to why they were born, why they must work, whom they must love, what they must honor, where they may turn in sorrow and defeat” and notes that Americans who are trying to cope with the loss of that “sense of certainty” have increasingly replaced religious dogma with political extremism.
Over the past few years, this process has been extended even further with those who consider themselves devout Christians defining their faith almost entirely in political terms — by opposing abortion, same-sex marriage and transgender rights. This in turn has led to a great Democratic dechurching: According to Gallup, Democratic church membership was 46 percent in 2020, down from 71 percent two decades prior. The scholar David Campbell of the University of Notre Dame told the Associated Press, “Increasingly, Americans associate religion with the Republican Party — and if they are not Republicans themselves, they turn away from religion.” This phenomenon — of the right using, even weaponizing religion — is not unique to America or Christianity. You can see it in Brazil, El Salvador, Italy, Israel, Turkey and India, among other places….
This is the great political challenge of our time. Liberal democracy gives people greater liberty than ever before, breaking down repression and control everywhere — in politics, religion and society. But as the philosopher Søren Kierkegaard wrote, “anxiety is the dizziness of freedom.” Modern society gives us all wealth, technology and autonomy. But for many, these things cannot fill the hole in the heart that God and faith once occupied. To fill it with politics is dangerous. But that seems to be the shape of things to come.
Those of us who embrace life in secular America, who find the wide diversity of opinions, philosophical commitments and religious beliefs stimulating and thought-provoking, confront a political movement powered by people who find the loss of certainty terrifying, and who have compensated for the loss of religious fundamentalism by turning politics into a (similarly fundamentalist) religion.
The problem is, the essence of productive political engagement and governance is negotiation and compromise. Political engagement doesn’t work when one party sees policy disagreements, but the other sees those same disagreements as a battle between good and evil.
MAGA is a religion, and in religion, battles between good and evil are non-negotiable.
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Now For Something Different

I spend a lot of time on this blog bemoaning the negatives–and there are certainly plenty of negatives to bemoan and warnings that really must be issued and heeded. But it is also the case that–along with the seeming avalanche of threats and reminders of our collective deficits, many good things are occurring.

I get a weekly newsletter titled “Good News for Humankind,” which helps me balance out all the Bad News for Humankind. (I think the actual title is Spark of Genius, and I don’t have a link–but I assume a Google search will lead to a subscription opportunity.)

The most recent newsletter reported the following items:

Nepal has now become the first country in South Asia to recognize a same-sex marriage,  after issuing a formal recognition of a marriage from 1997.

The U.S., Czech Republic, Cyprus, Dominican Republic, Iceland, Kosovo and Norway all formally joined the Powering Past Coal Alliance. The Alliance was launched in 2017 by the U.K. and Canada. The new members have committed to not developing new unabated coal power plants and to phasing out existing unabated coal plants. I hadn’t previously encountered the term “unabated” in this context; according to Dr. Google, it means “the use of coal, oil and gas without substantial efforts to reduce the emissions produced throughout their life cycle.”

In other good news for the environment, a court of appeals in Brussels ordered Belgium to cut its planet-heating pollution by at least 55% from 1990 levels by 2030. Evidently, as of 2021, Belgium had cut its emissions by a bare 24%. The court rejected government arguments that minimized the importance of the country’s efforts, arguing that Belgium’s impact on the climate crisis was limited by its small size.

More good news for the environment–and for drivers–comes from a very promising experiment in Detroit. Detroit became first city in the United States to install a wireless-charging roadway. The experiment will begin with the use of a Ford E-Transit fitted with a receiver to gather data; that is part of a five-year pilot project intended to perfect the technology “in real-world settings” and to study its potential for public transport applications. The report said that there are also plans to open the electric road system to the public within the next few years.

Other “good news” items:

Massachusetts became the fifth state  to make prison calls free.

“Ensuring that individuals in state and county prisons can keep in contact with their loved ones is key to enhancing rehabilitation, reducing recidivism, and improving community safety,” Governor Healey said in a written statement.

There are also positive stories from the Good News Network. A small sample of items having an environmental impact:

In the Bay Area of California, home of San Francisco, San Jose, Santa Clara County, and Silicon Valley a famous Pacific resident is heading home for the holidays—up newly-cleaned creeks to spawn.

Who could have thought that the cradle of 21st-century civilization, with its problems and advancements, would have space for wild river ecosystems capable of supporting salmon runs?

But here they are, reports KTVU, as large as 30 pounds, as long as 35 inches, running up the Guadalupe River Watershed by the hundreds.

Google may be defending against anti-trust accusations, but the company with a former “do no evil” motto is also doing good.

An advanced geothermal project funded and developed by Google has begun pumping carbon-free electricity onto the Nevada grid to power the company’s data centers there.

Geothermal energy was once confined in theory to areas of geothermal activity, but if one drills deep enough, there’s extreme heat from the planet’s core essentially everywhere to be harnessed to make steam and drive turbines to create carbon-free electricity 24 hours a day when the wind isn’t blowing and the sun isn’t shining.

For this reason, Google made an early bet on this enhanced geothermal technology, and partnered with the Utah-based Fervo Energy, which uses drilling techniques from the oil and gas industry to create a first-of-its-kind power plant in Nevada.

GNN reported that initial tests in July showed that the technology was working, in which the hypothesized 3.5 megawatts were indeed being delivered.

When I am particularly depressed by political turmoil and climate change, I try to remember that there are thousands of people around the globe who are working to understand and hopefully solve our most pressing problems. We owe them not only our gratitude, but our own efforts to improve our political and natural environment–beginning with our votes for sane lawmakers next November.

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