Thursday, March 7, 2024

Bumpy Night

The consensus of people in the know at the moment is that Trump is likely to win in November.

Too many people who would otherwise vote democratic will not because they don't want what they see as a doddering old man running the country.

Your vote doesn't matter, actually, unless you live in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Arizona, Wisconsin, Georgia and possibly Nevada: 

The reason is our political system is structured not on the basis of majority rule, but so that the winner will be determined by the Electoral College.

Nothing you can do about that now. Not if you are going to insist we are governed by the rule of law.

I fit comfortably into the demographic of leftist Americans who fear a Trump victory is equivalent to the rejection of democracy, a victory for right-to-life Christian nationalists, corporate enablers of the "I've got mine" wealthy class who have succeeded in convincing a critical mass of Americans to believe it's the Democrats who are now the party of the rich. They do represent the more sophisticated better educated Americans, in fact, but this element of the population has now been successfully tagged with the label "elitist" and vast numbers of Trumpists take pleasure in blaming them for anything and everything they see as wrong with their everyday lives - high prices at the supermarket, high gas prices, rejection of traditional sex and gender roles, insistence this is not a Christian country, billions given away to fight wars in Palestine and Ukraine, to name only a few.

I've been arguing that we need to keep our eye on the ball, that we need to fear a Trump victory and vote for Biden despite all reservations about his suitability - whatever he lacks is not as bad a problem for the country as a Trump victory would be. And, by the way, if you have the capacity to look at his record objectively, he's done an amazing lot of good in the past four years.

But what ails us at the national level at the moment is that we have been led to believe that truth is elusive, that government is inherently not to be trusted, and that Trump - or somebody like him interested in tearing it down and starting over - is the solution to the current malaise.

Our media is not reliable. If you tune into Fox News, you get what amounts to the Republican propaganda ministry. If you tune into MSNBC, you get a bunch of political geeks talking not about policy matters but the horserace, who is in the lead here and there around the land.

From my perspective, the American justice system is properly functional and the charges against Trump are legitimate. He should be put on trial on 91 counts and if found guilty prevented from being relected president. From the perspective of a critical mass of Americans, truth is as he claims it to be and this is all a witch hunt. And given our lack of faith that there is such a thing as objective truth, you are free to embrace or reject either perspective.

What ought to be a healthy debate on important issues - how we spend tax money internationally and domestically, what things should be determined by government and what things should be left to the private sector, to what degree should we be the world's policeman, how important is personal privacy, to what degree do we try to control the internet and artificial intelligence - these issues are not front and center. What is are our suspicions, fears and special interests without regard to the general welfare of the country. To a great degree this was ever so and is nothing new. But I have the impression that we are living in unusually chaotic times, that things have gotten wild and out of control.

I think of Bette Davis - "Fasten your seat belts; it's going to be a bumpy night!"  (People think she said "ride"; she said "night" - Margo Channing, All About Eve, 1950.)

I know I can't get people to come around to my perspective; it's not in the zeitgeist at the moment to take others' perspectives if they don't have prior tribal approval. But we can at least broaden the range of discourse we listen to. That's my Plan B. If you're not going to listen to me, at least listen to more stuff.

Here are two bits of non-Fox, non-MSNBC stuff: The first is from UnHerd. Look them up if you don't know them. They claim to be a neutral source of information. I see them as right-of-center - but you already know I tend to take a left-of-center perspective, so figure that in...

The second is an all-out anti-Trump piece that gives me no end of pleasure.







Friday, March 1, 2024

Creating a safe place for Jewish kids in Berkeley

The bad news keeps on coming.

There's a real possibility that Trump may get re-elected president in November, for starters. There's the loss of the comforting illusion that the U.S. Supreme Court is an independent branch of government. Russia's got the upper hand in Ukraine, and Macron and Scholz are squabbling publicly over how to form a common European response to Putin. American media now accept as normal and routine the brazen lies that the Republicans in Congress openly spout publicly, night time comedians are openly grateful to them for providing them with a clown to satirize,* and there is evidence that lying openly is now acceptable American behavior. Then there is the feebleness of the will to stop pollution and support rapid development of renewable energy, there's homelessness, there's the dumbing down of American youth, aided by the Covid Shutdown and leading to the open embrace of ignorance as a positive virtue. 

And if that were not sufficient to drive you to despair, there is the capture of the Christian faith community by a political subset of the Evangelical Community committed to an authoritarian populist who speaks of his opponents as "vermin" and claims the flood of people seeking asylum in the United States are "polluting the blood" of Americans, in ignorance or denial of the fact that these notions are derived from the language of Hitler and the Nazis. And, not least of all, there is the failure of people all around to distinguish between Hamas and ordinary Palestinians of good will and between Benjamin Netanyahu's "take it all for Israel" right-wing jingoist policy and Israelis of good will. It leaves you breathless and profoundly discouraged.

It's all too much to deal with in a single response. Let me take up the last one only for now, the battle over how to frame the current Israeli war on Hamas in response to their surprise attack on Israel last October 7 and the capture of some 130 Israeli hostages. Hamas states they will be released when the 5200 Palestinians now in captivity in Israel are released. (Allow me some space here - I make no claim to accurate numbers, since they can change at any time.)

To bring this home, I have just read a forty-one page letter written by the Brandeis Center for Human Rights to the Department of Education complaining about the way the Berkeley Unified School District has failed to protect Jewish and Israeli students from sometimes violent and commonly intimidating anti-Semitism in Berkeley schools. As a life-long educator, even though I have no children in school, I feel this calls for Berkeley citizens to inform themselves and speak out.

And that, in turn, leads to the stone wall that is the discourse on the Israel-Palestinian conflict. You can't even ask the question, "Where do we start?" because by now it's clear the narrative you will become part of by taking a stance is so long and convoluted that you will be considered an enemy by the other side the moment you pick a starting place. And every outrage and injustice you point out on one side will be met by a "What about...?" question from the other side, citing a similar outrage or injustice perpetrated by them.

I have tossed in my two cents a number of times. In brief I have argued that the only reasonable approach to take is one based on today's realities, not on history filtered through the lens of religion or other ideological starting points. Israel exists as a powerful modern country. That has to be a given. People who call themselves Palestinians also exist.  Efforts to make them Jordanians or Syrians or Egyptians or push them out of their homes or bomb them out of existence only hardens their resolve and makes them cry out even louder for justice. If there is to be a solution, it will not be found in the extremist positions both sides take. There are Israelis and Palestinians willing to work together toward a mutually satisfying outcome; these are the people we should be identifying and then working with.

I know there are many arguing that reason doesn't work in America anymore, that you have to appeal to people's emotions, not their intellect. Maybe so. But I maintain it's not one or the other, but one and the other. Whenever anybody asks me to take an either/or approach, I automatically always find a reason to take a both/and instead. Better to cover all the bases.

If I had Aladdin's lamp I'd ask the genie to get the Berkeley High School faculty to remember their first priority is to create a safe place for those in their charge to learn and create knowledge. And their second is to remember the distinction between education and indoctrination, and to value argument as a means of persuasion over assertion. I'd also ask the genie to remind them and anyone else dealing with the Israel/Palestine question that there is space enough between the Jordan and the Mediterranean for both peoples. Neither has to be expelled. 

Education is a never-ending task. No sooner does one generation learn the importance of distinguishing between fact and fiction and between a person's ideas and their personhood than it falls upon them, in turn, to teach it to the next generation.

We yearn for reliable authority, for a leader to take us out of this mess we're in, (remember the German word for leader is Führer).  But we're on our own.

That's bad news if we continue to fail to make the proper distinctions between truth and lies and follow the liars. Not such bad news if we seek out and join with others of good will.

There's so much we can still do.

Start by writing Joe Biden and telling him to disassociate himself from Netanyahu and his policy of killing Gazans and encouraging West Bank settlement by Jews. Tell him to do it now.

It may swing the election in November, so it's not just the right moral step to take but a practical step as well.

If you're frustrated at all the things going wrong, do that. It's a small thing, but it's an important one.




*I appreciate that some of them - I'm thinking of Stephen Colbert, Jimmy Kimmel, in particular, have taken the gloves off and their satire has gotten very sharp indeed - and I also appreciate the fact that Jon Stewart is back at it.





Monday, February 12, 2024

Focus on the Enablers

My friend Barbara, in Berlin, just sent me a clipping from N-TV, a German news channel similar to CNN (and, if I am not mistaken, CNN owns half of it.)  It is a report of the claim by the Russian governor of the oblast (province) of Kaliningrad that its most prominent historical figure, the philosopher Immanuel Kant, is responsible for the war in Ukraine.

Kaliningrad was once the capital of East Prussia when it was part of Germany and was known as Königsberg. In 1945, it was ceded to Russia, its German citizens driven out, and russified. Kant's grave remains a major tourist site, in recognition of his contribution to the history of philosophy. One of the first thing students of modern philosophy learn, (in contrast, I mean, with those who focus on the works of the ancients like Plato and Aristotle) is that one can be either a Kantian or a Utilitarian. A Utilitarian argues that the right thing to do, morally, is whatever leads to the greatest good for the greatest number or people. In contrast, a follower of Kant shares his view that the majority can often be mistaken, and believes that the greatest good is what is established to be good in principle, which is something we can come to understand by the use of reason. He argues that you should want to have happen to others only that which you would want to have happen to yourself, and that you should always see other human beings as ends, and never as a means to an end. Majority rule derives from utilitarian ethics; rule of law limited to agreed upon basic rights - constitutional rights, for example, regardless of the will of the majority - has a Kantian ethical orientation.

So much for the Philosophy 101 lesson. Here's what the N-TV article is about:

Anton Alichanow, the governor of Kaliningrad Oblast (province), made the pronouncement three days ago (last Friday, as the Moscow Times confirms,) that Kant was a moral relativist whose works have enabled the West to take a relativist ethical stance which allows it to violate all the agreements it has made with Russia, a culture which Alichanow insists is "based in values (sic!)."  Russia is therefore provided with a justification to step in and correct the situation (Go get'em, Putin. Go get those corrupt Nazis).

Like any wild theory, you can find a grain of truth in what he is saying. The Americans, after the war, stopped (more accurately: slowed down) the active pursuit of Nazis and turned its focus onto making friends with the Germans, allowing Nazis to get away scot free in many cases, in order to form a strong anti-communist front, while Russia could claim the mantle of being ongoing fighters of fascism.  That anti-fascist claim was then extended to the Soviet-run East Germany, which claimed that all the ex-Nazis had fled to the West, a grossly oversimplified view of things, and quite inaccurate. Today this view of the former Soviet world of good guys fighting the nazi bad guys of the west has come alive in Putin's justification for his "military incursion" - and call it a war and you go to jail.

Alichanow is enabling the Putin justification for invading his neighbor in precisely the same way Trump's enablers support his claim that January 6th was not a coup attempt but a simple case of angry citizens expressing their displeasure about the 2020 election. I repeat. In Russia you can go to jail for calling an invasion an invasion.  Give that a moment of thought next time somebody asks about the power of words.

You don't need to take an advanced course in philosophy to recognize that Alichanow's claim is not only false; it is the exact opposite of the truth. Alichanow is a vivid example of the Big Brother mentality in George Orwell's 1984, whose main character, Winston Smith, works for the Ministry of Truth. The dystopian world has been taken over by authoritarians intent on complete mind-control. They have persuaded the world that "war is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength."

After hearing Trump call for Russia to attack any NATO country that is behind in paying its NATO dues, and after watching Tucker Carlson sit and be instructed by a half-hour lecture on a butchered version of history by Vladimir Putin, I wrote Barbara that I was ready to leave the planet as soon as I could locate my keys. She wrote back that she wanted to come along.

I remember so vividly the first lessons I got in political theory as a teenager. I was working part-time after school in a shoe store owned by a man who had ideas that challenged the ones I was coming up with. My ideas reflected the Republican views of my father; Mr. Campbell's were the views of a dyed-in-the-wool Democrat. According to my father, Republicans were people who worked hard and lived an honest life, while Democrats were corrupt inner-city politicos who made crooked deals that enabled them to hold onto power. According to Mr. Campbell, Republicans believed the only people you could trust were those who put their self interest first. Do-gooders inevitably got corrupted. The best form of government was minimal government and we should take our lead from the marketplace. Democrats were concerned with things like social equity and community welfare and preventing the poor from falling through the cracks. Those conversations in the back of the store when there were no customers and all the shoe boxes had been reshelved gave me a democratic political orientation I hold to this day, some seven decades later, give or take.  Sorry, Dad. I'm going my own way.

I respected my father and it hurt a little to find myself pulling away from him.  The alienation only increased over time for reasons other than political ones and many years passed before we could find our way back to relating to each other. We did, fortunately. He lived to 84, and there was time for us to mend fences. The advantage of a long life is that one can do that with a bit of effort. I have done the same with others I have had serious differences with, especially over religion and politics. I still have a positive orientation to life, still believe one can find common ground when working with others of good will.

My problem these days, however, is that this condition seems to be getting more elusive by the day, harder and harder to find. How are Israelis and Palestinians who are willing to share their corner of the Middle East to deal with Jews who believe God intended for them to have the whole thing and with Palestinians who believe killing every Jew in sight is God's will? How are we to "negotiate" with Putin who insists he is not an aggressor in Ukraine but a savior of ancient Russian territory from Nazis led by a Jewish man named Zelenskyy? 

Finding common ground will always remain the most noble of political goals, I think. Anybody interested in making the world a better place must necessarily work to find compromise, if not complete agreement. But there are times, such as when perpetrators of violence try to run you down, when you have to fight. Even Gandhi recognized that Hitler was not a man to be reasoned with.

I can of course be wrong about this, but I am persuaded that we are making a terrible mistake in loading Donald Trump down with all the wrongs of American political life at the moment. I think of him, despite his crimes and lies and conspiracy theories, as more of a clown than an American fascist.  The latest one, in which the Trump enablers are attributing Taylor Swift's influence to a conspiracy by the NFL rather than her simple desire to show her support for Democrats, is only the latest of many times when you don't know whether to laugh or cry. Another is the evidence that when the Democrats finally put together a plan for dealing with the immigration problem even better than the one Republicans might come up with, Trump puts the breaks on, because a success this big would be seen as a Biden success and Trump would rather sabotage it than let Biden get that credit in an election year. Is it possible to get clearer evidence that Trump is willing to keep the agony of the immigration problem alive if it leads to his personal advantage? Is it possible to get clearer evidence that his motives are self-serving than when his lawyers claim that he has the right to kill his political enemies and get away with it unless he is first impeached - especially when we know that the cards for impeachment are stacked in his favor? The evidence piles up - and still the Enablers enable. Still the right-wing politicians stand idly by. Still the supporters ignore the evidence.

It's easy at times to draw parallels with Hitler and Mussolini, and Orban and Duterte and Erdogan and Kim Jong Un and Putin and Xi Jinping and all his other authoritarian models of strength and power - he draws them for you, in fact!. But I think the focus should be on the people who make the wheels go round, the "Enablers." The apologists, the Republican Congresspeople who value their jobs more than their party and their party more than American democracy. Just as the child abuse scandal in the Catholic Church showed, it wasn't that handful of sexually frustrated priests who were the problem, but the Bishops who shuffled their troubled souls around, enabling them to go on abusing kids in a new location rather than exposing their crimes because it could damage the image of the church to do so. It was the Enablers. Capital E. Wrong-headed thinkers.

The outrages perpetrated by Donald Trump have increased, seemingly at a geometric rate, from the merely unkind - the way he mocked a New York Times reporter with a disability - to cuddling up to Putin in his call for him to attack NATO allies in arrears, a potentially catastrophic international move, if he gets to carry it out. But still, despite it all, we are faced with polls which suggest that Americans could actually put this guy back in charge of the executive branch of government. Few things blow the mind as effectively.

Debates over the proper size and heft of government is one thing. Talking with people who are likely to vote for Trump and use the excuse that Biden is too old, is another. Not the same level of discourse. Not the politics I first encountered as a teenager.

And there is an additional wrinkle in the fabric. Yesterday's New York Times carried two opinion pieces, one by Maureen Dowd, the other by Ross Douthat, that pushed the view that Biden really is too old to hold the office.  Which prompts me to ask, are they too Enablers? Or are they doing their job in a principled way, asking tough questions which are deeply unwelcome at the moment? I honestly don't know and would like some more honest debate by people making arguments on the basis of evidence, and not on gotcha ideology.

How did we get here? How did we get this close to discarding this wonderful two-and-a-half-centuries long attempt to establish a "more perfect democracy"?  We could well do that in November, toss out a system of checks and balances and replace it with a one-man show run by a craven narcissist. Reject constitutional (Kantian) principles - not for the will of a misguided majority, but for a minority of self-serving politicians - and their Enablers.

What happened to that excellent world of civil debate and passionate argumentation where we could hope to find common ground? Where people of good will could agree to disagree and trust that we could live with our differences?  How did we enable liars and conspiracy theorists to take control of our lives and reduce us to these least worthy versions of ourselves?

God, we've got to fix this.