Confusion

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“You can fool all the people some of the time and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time.”—attributed to Abraham Lincoln

We are one Hell of a confused nation.

Take Covid-19, for instance. It’s a respiratory virus. It travels through the air. You can have it without knowing you’re infected. So you can pass it to others without even knowing, merely by breathing or talking. Wearing a mask cuts down transmission, both to you and from you. Masks are a simple, cheap, cause-and-effect medical safety measure.

Current data also tell us that, if you wear a mask and still catch the disease, you’ll have a milder case than if you don’t. The severity of illness depends on viral “load.” More mask, less load.

Pretty simple, isn’t it? A properly instructed child could understand.

So why do we have so many people who don’t wear masks? Why do we have a president and governors who have not only balked at requiring them, but have encouraged not wearing them? Why is Brian Kemp, governor of Georgia, suing the mayors of Atlanta and other Georgia cities to keep them from requiring residents to wear masks?

Then there’s the economy. We’ve shed tens of millions of jobs since the pandemic hit. Millions are sitting at home because they have no job and no money to spend beyond survival. Even if not sick, they’re waiting, helpless, barely able to feed themselves, in fear of getting evicted and becoming homeless.

The experts tell them that going out and socializing normally are the quickest ways to get sick. So they’re not going out—at least not to spend money they don’t have.

Businesses and institutions that depend on “packing them in” are cratering. That includes restaurants, movie theaters, sports stadia, rock concerts, cruise ships, airlines, and even churches and political rallies. Remember the empty seats at Trump’s rally in Tulsa?

This, too, is easy to understand. People aren’t spending because they fear going out, and the unemployed have money for survival only. Two causes, one effect. The causes are fear of getting Covid-19 and tens of millions facing destitution. The effect: our economy craters.

So why are Republicans—and an American Enterprise Institute shill for the oligarchs—saying unemployed people won’t go back to work unless we cut their Covid-19 “extra” $600 unemployment insurance. Can people go back to work when there are no jobs?

If you cut relief money, won’t the unemployed have less to spend on necessities, like groceries, clothing and rent? Won’t their destitution just propagate right up the chain, to their landlords, local businesses, supermarkets, and even Amazon.com?

This, too, is just common sense. And there’s no evidence to the contrary, as Nobel Prize winner Paul Krugman recently reminded us. Yet we’ve got “serious” think tankers and “serious” pols like Mitch McConnell saying, in effect, “cut their safety net and let them bleed,” so as to force the destitute back to work in non-existent jobs.

Forget about empathy. Forget about kindness or humanity. Wearing masks and giving people monetary relief from destitution are the simplest, most direct ways to fight the pandemic and keep the coming economic depression from getting much, much worse. They’re practical remedies for what ails us.

More generally, how can we believe our president? He brags about “acing” a test to rule out Alzheimer’s and senile dementia. He says he’s “a very stable genius.” So why has he gone to absurd lengths, including threats and payoffs, to keep secret his college grades and test scores, from when we was young and virile?

Yes, we’re really confused, as a nation. Or some 30-40% of us are. How did we get so gullible?

This didn’t happen overnight, and it didn’t start with Trump. For over forty years, we’ve developed the strongest institutions to sow confusion in human history. Unlike foreign propaganda organs, ours are private entities, and big money makers. They make the people who own and run them rich, filthy rich. They make propaganda profitable.

It all started with Rupert Murdoch and his Fox media empire. He got fabulously rich deluding our people and making his pundits’ delusions entertaining. And Congress rewarded this foreigner—an Aussie—with US citizenship for helping destroy our collective contact with reality. Now Fox, with its consistent alternative reality, is the most-watched cable news program ever. For those in its bubble, it’s an addiction.

But Fox was just the beginning. We’ve also got the bit players—Rush and Alex Jones—who’ve made millions peddling hate, self-obsession, conspiracies, lies and (in Jones’) case, patent medicines like twenty-first-century snake oil.

Our coup de grace was the Internet and its “many-to-many” communications modes. Facebook and Twitter let anyone into the act. Sheer amateurs, as well as professional deluders and political operatives, can now peddle lies, fake news, invented conspiracies, and hate by the bucketful. So can foreign spooks and trolls, including the Russians, Chinese and Iranians.

Our worst enemies inject us with doses of false reality. They watch the confusion grow. They laugh and gloat. And no one, it seems, can stop them.

Trump doubles the confusion by using Twitter to peddle his lies to the known universe. The “mainstream” media amplify and broadcast each bogus Tweet. They do so both because he’s president and because he has the base cunning to make his lies titillating.

So sensationalism displaces sense not just on the Internet—a medium just over one generation old. It also displaces sense on the venerable lions of print media, the NYT, the WSJ and even the WaPo. All unwittingly hawk Trump’s confusion because his lies are titillating “news.” He plays all the media, including the most respected, like cheap fiddles.

The political theory underlying our First Amendment is that the truth will emerge from a cacophony of competing voices. That theory is self-evidently not working in the Internet Age. There are too many competing voices, and too little time for anyone to hear them all. So our public has divided itself into separate information “bubbles,” each with its own competing version of reality.

Our massive profit-making organs of confusion have blown bubbles big enough to envelop some 30-40% of us, thereby enriching themselves and entrenching the very oligarchic ideology that frees them from restraint. They enjoy a positive feedback loop: delusion to profit to more money for deluding to political power to further license for more delusion. Their positive-feedback loop rivals the one for global warming, which might decimate our species.

As the examples above show, the Internet and modern electronic media are tailor-made for confusion. Yet those examples are only the tip of the iceberg. The chill of confusion extends to every field of human endeavor, from politics through foreign policy to science.

A small but telling consequence is devaluation of experience and expertise. It started long before Trump’s recent belittling of Dr. Anthony Fauci. Ronald Reagan began the trend. He had been grade-B radio announcer and movie actor, and his relevant pre-presidential experience was eight years as governor of California. If you include the years of active military leadership of our general-presidents—Jackson, Grant and Eisenhower—Reagan’s was then the least leadership experience of any president ever elected.

Next came Dubya, George W. Bush. He cut the minimum experience level down from eight to six years, as governor of Texas. With that second precedent, Trump’s zero years of military or political experience was just a step in the same direction, a predictable mathematical progression.

Joe Biden marks a stark contrast. Before running for president, he had two years in local office, 32 years in the US Senate, including 4 years as chair of its Foreign Relations Committee and 8 years as chair of its Judiciary Committee, and eight years as Vice-President. That’s a total of 42 years in elective office, including 20 years in leadership positions. Few postwar presidents even came close.

But our national confusion won’t end with Joe’s election as president, or even with a second term of his or his chosen VP’s. It took forty years to drive us into our ditch, and it’ll take an immense and sustained effort to pull us out.

Our organs of confusion are more powerful than any organs of propaganda in human history. They’re especially resistant to change because they’re private and dispersed, because they have varied and shifting motives, and because they make their owners filthy rich and so more powerful. Their persistence and dominance fit right into our comforting national myths of virtuous capitalism, the supernatural powers of “entrepreneurs,” and (since Reagan) the goodness and beneficence of greed. Our First Amendment protects them from government censorship, so we must curb them by subtler means, including social and business pressure, economic restraint, and boycotts. All that will take time.

Meanwhile, our organs of confusion have turned the words attributed to Abraham Lincoln on their heads. As it turns out, ideologues don’t need to fool all of the people all of the time. In a so-called “democracy” based on minority rule—our Senate with its filibusters and our Electoral College—all they need to do is fool a minority of some 30-40%. That’s precisely why we have Trump as our supreme leader, and why we are now in social, economic and political free fall.

Trump has willing or reluctant lackeys in the GOP, in Congress and the media. His dismal example of success in lying, concealing, distorting and distracting will survive his presidency and his life. If others adopt his example, our skilled workers who have lost their jobs, their factories, their industries and their dignity may soon “own the libs” but little else. The oligarchs who feed the confusion, and profit from it, will have conquered all.

Confusion is not an ideology. It’s a state of mind and a crude but effective means of political control. We must learn to control its deliberate sowing. If not, our democracy will be shorter lived than was ancient Rome’s after Julius Caesar invented demagoguery and his fellow Roman senators killed him for it. Just like Caesar’s reputation, which every school child learns today, Trump’s skill at lying, cheating and playing the media will survive long after he’s gone. It needs a durable antidote.

Endnote: Today’s routine bit of confusion is Trump’s threat to delay the election. He has no lawful power to do that: the date is fixed by our Constitution and federal statutes, not presidential edicts. But much of the nation doesn’t know that, and the media universe hangs on Trump’s every Tweet. Thus does he create yet another bogus “controversy” to distract attention from his miserable performance on the pandemic, the economy, his trade war and would-be Cold War with China, and his retreat from unlawful and unwanted military intervention in our cities.

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What’s Not China’s Fault

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“We have met the enemy and he is us.“ — Pogo, a now-defunct comic strip.

[For a new coda, click here.]

Sunday’s NYT has a front-page article about Trump’s last-ditch attempt to save his re-election chances by fomenting a new Cold War against China.

Trump’s skilled rabble rousers have a lot to work with. China has confined over a million Uighurs, for little more than their ethnicity and religion. It has, in essence, just breached its agreement with the Brits for the half-century-long handover of Hong Kong, with more than half the agreed term still to go. It’s building up islands and military forces in the South China Sea, in violation of international law. And it’s busy, as usual, stealing every piece of American research and technology that’s not bolted down.

But dismay, anger and even outrage are not plans. They’re only so for a man like Trump. For him careful strategy is for wussies; the drunken roundhouse punch is all. It’s what we’ve come to expect from a man who’s never served our military and can’t get along with the most distinguished men who have.

We lost abjectly in Vietnam—and we committed the worst collective atrocities since slavery—based on a simplistic “domino theory” cooked up by one Robert S. McNamara, a car maker. So before we go down that road again—let alone with history’s most rapidly rising and most populous superpower—we ought to spare a few moments for sober reflection.

Just as China is today’s most rapidly rising nation, we are the most rapidly declining, with the possible exception of Bolsonaro’s Brazil. Before we start a new Cold War, we ought at least to figure out what parts of our steep decline are our fault, and what may be China’s. Then, if we are smart and disciplined—words inapplicable to our to leadership for over three years—we can develop coherent strategies to address both sources of decline.

At the moment, the sources that are our own fault absolutely dominate the picture. China didn’t force the knee of a rogue cop onto the neck of George Floyd, snuffing out his life while he was chained like a slave. China didn’t shoot Ahmaud Arbery down while jogging innocently in a pastoral suburban community. A father-son “team” of what looks like the vilest white trailer trash did. China didn’t exploit the vast social upheaval that these atrocities caused to divide our people and distract us from our longstanding economic decline. Trump did.

China may have botched its own initial response to Covid-19, but it didn’t botch ours. Our president and his uber-incompetent lackeys did, focusing like lasers on the president’s fragile ego, the Dow, and his chances for re-election, which wane with every new thousand deaths and every million newly unemployed.

China didn’t move our factories abroad to China and Mexico, leaving millions of skilled workers with little or nothing worthy of their skill to do. Our own oligarchs did.

They arbitraged wage-rate differentials with poor foreign peasants to make a quick buck. They did so heedless of the effect on our own workers, our economy, and our ability to maintain an advanced industrial infrastructure–which had made us the greatest national innovator in human history.

All China did was steal some of our technology, while our oligarchs willingly sold and transferred the vast bulk of it for thirty pieces of silver. Only now, as our industrialists and leaders are beginning to understand how self-defeating our policies have been, has China started stealing more, and then only because the door to our treasures that the oligarchs left open is closing.

China is not responsible for the astonishing delusion and deception of our people. Facebook and Twitter are. Facebook has reportedly refused to take down false paid political ads, making money from consequential lies. And Twitter is the means by which our president promulgates most of his lies and misleading claims—reportedly 20,000 by now.

China and Russia, with their spooks and trolls, do take advantage of Facebook and Twitter. But these platforms, with their wild-West approach to “news” and truth, provide the means. For the platforms themselves, the profit motive rules and lies increase their profit. Without them as willing or unwitting accomplices, Trump’s presidency could not exist.

China is also not responsible for the inanity, and sometimes insanity, of our own globalization and trade policy. It’s not responsible for Trump’s useless blunderbuss tariffs, which hurt our own industry and consumers and bear no resemblance to more sophisticated “rifle-shot” tariffs that might really neutralize wage differentials. It’s not responsible for our caring more for the bankers in Hong Kong than for the million Uighurs thrown into gulags, as those bankers now flee the Mainland’s effective assimilation of Hong Kong.

China is not responsible for our own stupidity, the breathtaking incompetence of our leaders, and our own Congress’ failure to hold them to account. China didn’t force all Republicans but Mitt Romney to acquit Trump of abuse of power and obstruction of justice amounting to treason. It has no dog in the three-way fight among us, Russia and Ukraine. China didn’t fire or move five inspectors general so that Trump and his cronies could continue violating the law and looting our Treasury to do it.

We, not China, are our own worst enemy. Our most destructive failures are almost entirely our own fault. That goes for everything from failing to contain Covid-19, through the rise of white supremacy and our willful abandonment of our industrial and technological base, to Congress’ and the courts’ failure to preserve our balance of power and checks and balances.

Nevertheless, in yet another routine act of deception, our master of distraction and displacement will try to make China a key factor in the coming presidential election. He will rant and rave like a warmonger. But he is, in his soul, a bully and a coward.

So Trump will brandish the saber but never pull it from its scabbard. That’s been his consistent practice during his presidency. Paradoxically, that may be the only consistently good thing to emerge from his abysmal excuse for leadership: despite considerable provocation from Iran, he hasn’t started a new war yet. (It remains to be seen whether he will yet do so out of sheer stupidity or miscalculation, or near-election desperation.)

Make no mistake about it. The word “decline” is far too weak. Our country is in social, economic, industrial and political free fall. Just walk through a Lowe’s, Home Depot, or Walmart and count the huge proportion of goods there made in China, or in other foreign nations. Or tally what’s made in China from the stuff you order from Amazon. You will quickly discover that we have sold and transferred almost our entire industrial base abroad, except for cars and planes.

This was not China’s fault. Our own oligarchs, plutocrats and shareholders did it all deliberately and willingly, for short-term profit. And our economists encouraged them for the sake of abstractions like “efficiency” and “free trade,” without an apparent thought to the terrible social, political and practical consequences that we are all experiencing now. Cause and effect are not Western economists’ forte.

That’s why, when it comes to Covid-19 test kits, masks, gowns and other simple PPE, we still haven’t gotten our act together and are relying on overwhelmed foreign suppliers. The pandemic has pushed us over the edge, but we’ve been approaching the cliff for decades. During the last three years, we’ve been running toward it.

We have no parachute. But if we return our government to the experts and to pols with some empathy and understanding, we might land in a soft spot.

There is only one way to do that now. We must dump Trump and his entire party, which stands for nothing but its own power and survival, plus further enrichment of our oligarchs in the most unequal society in over a century. If we keep our eye on that ball, and ignore distractions involving China, we might just save our democracy, and later our economy.

But none of this is up to China. It’s all up to us now. Picking a fight with China in the midst of our own economic and social free fall, and before we deploy a strategic parachute, will only make us weaker and our landing harder.

Coda: The Final Irony For over thirty years, oligarchs, greedy executives, bankers, lawyers and their GOP lackeys have sold our ability to make things down the river. Few of these desk jockeys would recognize a torque wrench, let alone know how or when to use one. So they don’t care who makes it.

But now they want to start a new Cold War with the rising power that they’ve encouraged to make almost every piece of hardware and equipment we use. Good luck with that! Apparently they think sheer gall can substitute for brains, as well as industry.

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A Dozen Big Reasons to Vote for Joe Biden

For brief descriptions of and links to recent posts, click here. For an inverse-chronological list with links to all posts after January 23, 2017, click here. For a subject-matter index to posts before that date, click here.

There are dozens of reasons to vote for Biden over Trump, big and small. Here are an even dozen big ones, some framed in a way I haven’t seen elsewhere:

1. Trump Lies. According to the Washington Post, Trump has made more than 20,000 false or misleading statements in less than three years, six months in office. You can’t trust anything he says, including that Covid-19 will just “go away,” or that anyone who needs a test can get one (let alone get the results in time to trace contacts).

Trump is doing his damnedest to create a society where the most convincing liar wins. Do we want our kids and grandkids to accept this as normal?

2. For a leader of a great nation, Trump says astonishingly stupid things. He believes that nations like China pay the tariffs that he’s imposed on their imports into this country. They don’t. Our own people and businesses pay for them, as they pay the increased prices for tariffed goods. Trump has recommended that we cure cases of Covid-19 by injecting ourselves with disinfectants like bleach, or somehow shining sunlight on the cells inside our lungs and bodies.

As Abraham Lincoln once said, “Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak and to remove all doubt.” In his daily disjointed ramblings, untutored by experts or even his own briefing papers, Trump routinely removes all doubt. In the process, he lets our enemies laugh at our expense, while our people and our allies quake in embarrassment and fear for their futures.

Is there any wonder why Trump has gone to astonishing lengths to conceal his college grades and test scores? Can a man with his intelligence ever hope to compete with bent but smart leaders like Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin, let alone Angela Merkel?

3. Trump and his GOP have done little or nothing to create good jobs for workers. There’s a really simple way to do that, which I noted on this blog four months after Trump took office. For about a decade, we’ve had to invest at least two trillion dollars in our national infrastructure to make it safe, let alone to bring it up to global standards. You can’t outsource building roads, bridges, sewers, pure-water systems and the like to China or Mexico; this work has to be done here at home. So a simple two-trillion-dollar infrastructure-building bill would put tens of millions of skilled and unskilled workers in good, reliable, useful jobs, right away. But instead of investing our tax money on infrastructure and good jobs in rebuilding it, Trump spent $1.5 trillion on tax cuts, more than half of which went to the top 20% of earners. Doesn’t that reveal his priorities? Watch what he does, not what he says!

4. Employer-based health insurance helps bosses dominate working people. Why do we have one of the worst systems for health-insurance among developed nations? And why do we pay almost twice the norm for it? Is all this just a sorry accident, an unfortunate but innocent mistake?

Not hardly. Our private, employer-based health insurance system makes people’s health depend on their jobs and their bosses. You may have a job with a bullying, unfair boss, and you may hate it. But you have to keep it because—if you have employer health insurance—your family’s ability to go to a doctor and stay healthy (or alive) depends on your job. Millions of workers feel this insecurity much more acutely now: they’ve lost their jobs and health insurance to the pandemic, so they lack health care even as contagion rages around them.

5. Trump and his GOP support a health-insurance system that enriches shareholders and mostly white-collar workers of private insurance companies. Now that millions have no health insurance in the middle of a pandemic, we’re all beginning to understand just how dysfunctional is a system based on employer-provided health insurance. Someone must benefit from this fiasco, or we would have dumped it long ago. But who?

The insurers’ shareholders and white-collar workers gain from our impossibly inefficient, multiply duplicative system of hundreds of private insurance companies. The shareholders reap the private profit. Management and white-collar workers have jobs managing the vast multiplication of forms, approvals, rules, plans, denials, computer systems, websites and complexity, as compared to any efficient single-payer system. These folks “win” by collecting dividends and pushing unnecessary paper for high salaries.

Trump’s GOP has relentlessly supported this unnecessarily complex and wildly unfair system—which also renders American businesses less competitive abroad. In trying to crush every alternative, including “Obamacare”, is the GOP supporting the shareholding class and white-collar paper-pushers over the vast majority of Americans? You decide.

6. Trump wants to get rid of “Obamacare,” leaving the 23 million people who depend on it for health care uninsured in the middle of a pandemic. His administration is pressing a lawsuit for that very purpose even now. Can you think of anything more cruel and counterproductive than trying to deprive 23 million of our people of the economic ability to see a doctor or go to a hospital right now? If that weren’t enough, a by-product of killing “Obamacare” would be to let insurance companies stop covering pre-existing conditions again.

7. Trump and his GOP are all about domination. That’s their way of life. In his lifelong “in your face” style, Trump is just a bit more up front about it than the rest of the GOP. He tries to dominate others by lies, fraud, bullying, lawsuits, stonewalling, insults, demeaning nicknames, and fomenting hate and division. He also wants an all-powerful executive, more like a king than a president. He wants a hamstrung Congress, that can’t even question him with subpoenas, and a compliant judiciary that will let him grab kingly power. He wants whites to dominate non-whites. He wants bosses to dominate workers. He wants native-born (except for so-called “anchor babies”) to dominate immigrants. He wants a class-based society formed along economic and racial lines. How can you tell? By his actions and his words. The next four points elaborate a few specifics.

8. Trump’s labor policies are all about bosses dominating workers. Union-busting didn’t begin with Trump and surely won’t end with him. But the lackeys he’s installed in the Department of Labor and on the National Labor Relations Board are among the most hostile to labor and labor unions in a generation. Their hostility doesn’t even matter so much anymore, because so-called “right to work” laws, starting in the South, have already destroyed much of the progress, power and economic gains that workers made through unionization during the middle of the twentieth century. The only way to begin to reverse this decades-long trend is to put Biden, with his deep working-class roots, in the White House.

9. The “gig economy” is busy creating a whole new class of serfs for Trump’s social class to dominate. Neither Trump nor his lackeys seem to understand gigs well, because they are mostly technologically unsophisticated. But they all know that their social “peers,” the new Internet oligarchs, are making out like bandits. They also sense instinctively how “nicely” (from the bosses’ perspective) the gig economy turns once-protected employees into yet another class of serfs.

Gig-workers’ serfdom begins with legal name-calling. They are not “employees,” but so-called “independent contractors.” By virtue of that simple name-calling and its legal consequences, they have none of the rights that employees have fought hard for, through unionization and political organizing, since before FDR’s New Deal.

They don’t have regular hours. They don’t get paid vacations, health insurance, family or sick leave, or other benefits. They get paid only for the hours they are actually working, after deduction of commissions and other expenses. And drivers for Uber and other gig-transport firms also have to take care of their own vehicle’s expenses: gasoline, maintenance, insurance, depreciation, etc. Many other gig workers also have no control over their hours whatsoever, but are told when to report for work the night before, or even after they wake up.

We call all this “technology,” part of the “miracle” of the Internet. And, yes, it does make hourly allocation of labor more “efficient” in the abstract. Uber and Lyft, for example, seem more available and affordable than did antiquated taxi and truck-transport systems.

But what’s the essence of the “gig” economy? Is it the speed, efficiency and precise logistics that the Internet provides? Or is it the process of making human workers cogs in an algorithm, working all alone, without any of the benefits or entitlements that labor achieved through a vast social struggle over most of the last century? You decide. If you think the essence and power of the “gig” economy is commodifying workers dominated by algorithms that profit the oligarchs, and so creating a whole new class of digital serfs, and if you fear that you might be the next worker so commodified and algorithmized, you know for whom to vote.

10. Trump and the GOP are maintaining a class of eleven million serfs. We have that many undocumented immigrants living and working in our country right now. Without them, our economy would grind to a halt. Now, during the pandemic, they are working in risky jobs, often with inadequate protection from Covid-19. As a result, they are getting sicker and dying at higher than the “normal” rate for workers, creating an infection risk for the rest of us.

Trump claims he wants to deport them all, but he hasn’t and he won’t. Obama in fact deported more undocumented immigrants.

Why is this so? For two generations, the GOP has had it both ways. It has used undocumented immigrants as a political punching bag, knowing that many Americans can be made to fear them as “strange” and “foreign” and possible competitors for jobs. Yet they do essential jobs for pay and under conditions that few American citizens can tolerate. The GOP also knows that workers who have no papers and fear deportation and breakup of their families will be meek and docile. They won’t organize unions. They won’t protest low pay or unsafe working conditions because they fear being rounded up by ICE and shipped out at any time.

So the GOP’s business wing maintains the eleven million as a permanent underclass of peasant workers. Their families sometimes live among us for generations, working and paying taxes. But they have no rights, no visas, and no citizenship. They are fearful and humble because they can be deported at any time, for any reason or no reason, simply because they don’t have papers. They fear being sent “back” to countries that they have forgotten and that have forgotten them.

The GOP and Trump like it this way because these fearful immigrants pick our fruits and vegetables, slaughter our animals, and pack our meat at low pay and without making trouble. They are modern, twenty-first-century serfs. But the rest of us have to ask: “Is this America? Is their serfdom compatible with democracy?”

11. Trump wants to dominate, not just govern, our own people, by force if necessary. He used force—accompanied by our new SecDef, Mark Esper, no less—to clear the streets around Lafayette Plaza of peaceful protesters for a propaganda stunt and photo op. He has referred to the largely peaceful protests after the murder of George Floyd as reasons to “dominate” the streets. He has called their participants “anarchists” and “agitators.”

Without local authorization, Trump has sent federal agents from the Department of Homeland Security, who are supposed to be concerned with our borders, deep into our hinterlands to detain suspected protestors, without probable cause, in unmarked vehicles. Trump has sent them deliberately into cities with Democratic mayors, against the mayors’ wishes.

These actions seem wholly contrary to the spirit and structure of our Constitution, the roles of our National Guard and governors, and the customs and traditions of relations between the federal government and our states developed over the centuries. But it’s all so shockingly unprecedented as to require a trip to the Supreme Court for a definitive ruling. That Court is out of session until the first Monday in October, so it won’t have ruled by November 3.

Your vote on Trump’s quest for domination matters, lest it continue for another four years and become a habit. If you have trouble making up your mind, you might want to read Tom Friedman’s op-ed Wednesday, which likens what Trump is doing here to Syrian dictator Bashar Al-Assad’s playbook for turning a once-prosperous country into a Land of Graves and Rubble.

12. Trump acts like a king and appears to think like one. He has actually said, as president, that the Constitution gives him “the right to do whatever I want.” He has pushed the envelope of legitimate presidential power entirely out of shape, (1) by coercing and attempting to extort foreign leaders for his own personal political advantage; (2) by stone-walling subpoenas from legitimate state criminal authorities and from Congress; (3) by refusing to appear before Congress and ordering his minions not to; and (4) by taking acts of war, including the assassination by drone of Iran’s General Soleimani, with questionable authority kept secret even from Congress. (I agreed with taking out Soleimani, but doing so could have started a war. So it should have been done in accordance with law and sound military advice, not by the secret whim of one man.)

If you think this list reads a bit like the list of “whereases” in our Declaration of Independence, you’re on the right track. Those were reasons for rejecting the rule of King George III and founding an independent nation. This is only a partial list of Trump’s transgressions of law, custom and generally accepted governmental operating procedures. But they’re enough to give you an idea of how close we stand today to the dilemma of our nation’s birth: subjection to domination versus independence and equality.

* * *

You’ve probably noticed that I haven’t mentioned Joe Biden much so far. The reason is simple. Biden is normal and obeys the law. Trump is not normal and tries to make his own law. Biden is sane. Trump is a self-obsessed sociopath with a narcissist personality disorder. Biden has a humble and realistic self-image; he doesn’t see himself as a “very stable genius.” Trump appears to think that he’s the only one who knows anything. He slants most everything toward his own personal interest, takes advice (if at all) at random, and doesn’t regularly read his briefing papers.

Like most good leaders, Biden will assemble a team of very smart people, even smarter than he. And unlike Trump’s team, they’ll be competent people, with expertise and experience (not just money), from every racial and ethnic background.

If you feel that domination by someone as careless, stupid and selfish as Trump is the way out of our troubles, by all means vote for him. If you liked the image of George Floyd pinned down by his neck, with his hands cuffed behind him, about to be murdered by knee, go ahead. (Why would anyone vote for his or her own domination, or domination of fellow Americans? Beats me. Fox and Rush must be really good propagandists.)

If you want an America free from domination and a return to normalcy and decency, you’ve got to vote for Joe, and no one else.

Voting for anyone else is throwing away your vote and helping Trump. Some of us tried that before, with dismal results. Some voted for Ralph Nader instead of Al Gore, or for Gary Johnson instead of Hillary Clinton. So we got Dubya, who started the two longest unnecessary wars in our history, one of which strove vainly to do what Obama did with two helicopters and a team of Navy Seals. Then, in 2016, voters for Gary Johnson helped put Trump over the top.

So this time there’s only one choice for sane and normal people not reconciled to domination, whether by Trump, bosses or whites, as a principle of society: vote for Joe Biden and every Democrat on your ballot.

Normalcy may seem unexciting. That’s especially so after we’ve gone through three-plus years of “exciting” sick showmanship, incessant titilliating (but mostly false) Tweets, and national delirium.

But we must soon awake from our fever-dream, wracked as it’s been by the incessant, grating, discordant voice of one man focused entirely on himself. When that nightmare finally passes, when a normal person takes charge again and lets worthy others into the room, we will all feel euphoria—and the love of life and normalcy—just like survivors of Covid-19.

Footnote: Based on careful estimates of lifetime taxation, “The richest 1 percent received 9.3 percent of the total tax cuts, the top 5 percent got 26.5 percent, the top quintile received 52.2 percent and the bottom quintile got 3.3 percent.” Laurence Kotlikoff, Forbes Magazine (July 19, 2019).

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Rays of Hope

For brief descriptions of and links to recent posts, click here. For an inverse-chronological list with links to all posts after January 23, 2017, click here. For a subject-matter index to posts before that date, click here.

“Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—forever.” — George Orwell, 1984

This spring, the American people looked into the Abyss. They saw the video of a white cop’s knee pressing down on George Floyd’s Black neck for nearly nine minutes, murdering him. The stark spectacle of deliberate, senseless domination was lost on no one. Even those who’d never read Orwell’s dystopian novel knew it. They felt it in their guts.

They rose up in numbers, in every corner of America, white, black, brown, yellow and red. Commentators believe it was the single greatest mass protest in American history. It outranked even the women’s march in early 2017, then the biggest mass protest in our history.

Over three years have passed since that gender-focused beginning, but the tide is finally starting to turn. Trump’s “job approval” numbers are dropping below the survival threshold of forty percent. That’s where once-popular leaders became one-term presidents, like Jimmy Carter and George Herbert Walker Bush. (The same thing happened to Jerry Ford, who never got elected as president but who had granted an unwarranted pardon.) Even the nation’s pundits, once burned by their unanimous failure to predict Trump’s win in 2016, are starting to let the numbers speak for themselves.

An even bigger force, of course, is the pandemic. You can spin abstractions, lie about the size of your inaugural crowd, and paint a false picture of the extent of and the reasons for our rapidly fading economic recovery. You can delude the public by exploiting the big time lag between economic cause and economic effect—both good and bad—a subject on which I’ve got a blog post pending. But you can’t spin disease, suffering and death. You especially can’t when virtually every nation on the planet is doing a better job of managing the pandemic than we are.

Finally, there’s our professional military. It’s been over a month since then-green SecDef Mark Esper marched with Trump on his protester-bashing photo-op, in which Trump held a Bible in front of a Church whose own pastor later condemned the stunt. If evangelicals needed further evidence that Trump is actually the Antichrist, it was that brutal, un-Christian and wholly unconstitutional show of force. Our would-be tyrant made a show of brusquely dominating his people, in a manner that might have pleased King George III.

Esper had gotten an earful from current and retired military brass. So Friday he announced, in indirect language, that the Confederate flag henceforth will not fly on or over any US military installation.

It was indirect bureaucratic speak, but the message was clear as day. The South will not rise again. The century-plus outrage of glorifying the lost causes of slavery, bossism and human subjugation is over.

Orwell’s dark vision of perpetual oppression will not prevail here, at least not right away. If Trump loses the general election, there will be no coup in America. If he tries to stay despite his loss, armed men loyal to our Constitution will escort him from the White House in handcuffs, if not a straitjacket.

Trump’s rambling rants, attempts to turn the White House into his own campaign center, and the deer-in-the-headlights reaction of his trailer-trash spokeswoman to her boss’ uncensored insanity show just how low Trump has sunk this nation. The public is getting weary of him and his vulgar, untutored, crass, cruel and ignorant minions. So there is hope at last.

Yet this is hardly a time for complacency. It’s a time for redoubling our efforts. It’s a time for doubling down.

We have so many traitors among us. We have Bill Barr—a purported lawyer, no less—who has supported every attempt to undermine our separation of powers and checks and balances and make his boss a king. He torpedoed Mueller’s months and months of diligent, professional legal work with a couple of pages of well-publicized but inaccurate spin.

Barr so richly deserves his own special impeachment, but there just isn’t time. Fortunately, his ship will sink with Trump’s. Good riddance.

We have Lindsey Graham—another so-called lawyer—who came by his military hard line sitting behind a desk. Trump has insulted and marginalized him, so he must secretly hate Trump’s guts. As Trump’s presidency begins to crash and burn, taking Graham’s political career with it, Graham must hate himself, too, if only for failing to summon the cojones to resist the vilest bully in American political history. [Erratum: An earlier version of this post mentioned Ted Cruz in this paragraph. Unfortunately, he’s not up for election this year, having beaten Beto O’Rourke by 2.6 points in 2018. But electoral decimation of Cruz’ Trump-lackey colleagues might make him more circumspect in his voting and his far-right ideology.]

Then there’s Sue Collins, with her empathy-inducing lisp and her school-marmish persona. She’s tried to have it both ways for far too long. Whenever the chips were down, she voted with the would-be tyrant. She, too, has to go. A soft female voice and motherly persona can’t hide feckless failure to protect constituents from Covid-19, or prone acquiescence in crude attempts to grab more power than any president of a democracy ought to have.

Worst of all, there’s Mitch McConnell, the “Grim Reaper” known for reflexive opposition to every good idea for reducing American workers’ pain and suffering. He dupes his own Kentucky well, but it, too, is changing. Maybe the wave of suburban revulsion against Trump can wash him away, too. At least we owe our Founders and our long-suffering workers a forceful, spirited try.

Make no mistake about it. The victory becoming more and more likely will not be complete unless all these base traitors to American principles are gone next January. Every one.

That’s a tall but not impossible order. Those of us who are not facing destitution due to relief granted too little and too late, as withheld by Mitch, have little to do during the pandemic, and not much to spend our money on. Now we must spend our free time and money helping to make the coming election a landslide to dwarf LBJ’s win over Goldwater in 1964. If we fail, we’ll have no reason to complain if a halfway win leaves us still in gridlock, or if the worst happens. We Americans have never needed a clean sweep as much as today.

So for those of us not sick with Covid or facing destitution, let’s get to work. Let’s not let up for a single moment until the results of November 3’s election are in. We’ve got a country to save and a democracy to restore. And now we have hope.

One more thing. Let none of us forget the debt we owe our Black leaders.

As it turns out, Joe Biden is the best candidate to beat Trump. He’s best because he has by far the most political experience of any candidate who ran. He’s best because his working-class roots are long, deep and incontrovertible—so much so that David Brooks believes they’re his secret campaign weapons, which could re-create FDR’s New-Deal coalition.

Biden is best also because he’s a thoughtful, flexible, empathetic, non-ideological, decent man. He knows he doesn’t have all the answers. So he will assemble a “rainbow” team of experts and empaths to guide him. In other words, Biden is the perfect antidote to Donald Trump.

And whom do we have to thank for Biden’s assured nomination? Rep. Jim Clyburn of South Carolina, the House Majority Whip, who almost singlehandedly brought Biden’s campaign for the Democratic nomination back from the dead.

This was no accident. Black people and their ancestors have been living in a Trumpian dystopia for most of this nation’s history, since centuries before Trump was born. Like Covid-19 survivors, they’ve developed antibodies to lies, spin, deception, derogation, and oppression. They’ve lost so often and so badly, even with God and what’s right on their side, that the best of Black leaders have developed a conditioned reflex against overreaching, whatever the temptation.

As we try to dig ourselves out of the deep hole that Trump and his GOP have put us in, we all need some of Blacks’ wisdom borne of hard experience and suffering. Among other things, we need to stop poisoning the best progressive prospects since JFK with off-putting slogans like “defund the police.”

Yet now, more than ever since January 20, 2016, there is hope. Our collective consciousness of the imperative to work with those who have the most at stake, reflected in the George Floyd protests, may yet become the spark that helps light up our collective future.

John Lewis, R.I.P.

Rep. John Lewis of Georgia, the venerable civil-rights hero, died Friday, at age 80, of pancreatic cancer. He first gained fame in 1965, in the non-violent civil-rights protest march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama. There a police riot beat him senseless and nearly killed him. It was far from the last time that Lewis risked his health and life for the cause of justice for all people in America. For 55 years afterward he fought tirelessly—but never violently—in the streets, in homes of constituents, and in Congress. I can’t do justice to this great man in a small box on this page. He was a giant. Better to read the New York Times’ in-depth obit. It made me hopeful to know that Lewis, before he died, also saw the portent of the massive George Floyd protests, and thus the light at the far end of the tunnel. [Search for “good trouble.”] We owe it to his memory, and to many more like him still living, to drive as hard and as smart as we can toward that light, with more than mere deliberate speed.

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A Nation of Willful Children

For brief descriptions of and links to recent posts, click here. For an inverse-chronological list with links to all posts after January 23, 2017, click here. For a subject-matter index to posts before that date, click here.

“[B]ecause the virus can be spread by people who don’t have symptoms and don’t know they are infected, it’s critically important for everyone to wear a face covering in public and social distance.” — Walmart’s press release on mandating mask wearing in all its stores, as reported in the Washington Post, July 15, 2020.

With less than five percent of the world’s population, we Americans once were universally acknowledged leaders. Now we’re a global laughing stock and international pariahs. We have by far the worst per-capita statistics on the spread of Covid-19. Much of the rest of the civilized world now bans us from entry, not for political reasons (as we do many others), but just for public health.

Why are we in such a deep hole, when the pandemic began in China, halfway around the world? We had plenty of warning about pandemics in general, and even for this particular bug. Chinese scientists dropped the entire viral genome in our laps. We have, or used to have, the world’s best medical science.

So what went wrong? We didn’t take the pandemic seriously until it was too late.

From our president on down to Joe and Mary in our streets, too many of us are still not taking it seriously. We want our lives and our economy back without making a serious effort to get the virus under control. But that’s just not how pandemics work, especially not this wildly contagious, nasty virus. People are not going to spend, work, shop, travel, or entertain themselves in groups until they feel safe.

So we want what we can’t have, and we act accordingly. Isn’t that what kids under seven do?

We also entered World War II late in the game. But then we quickly became the “arsenal of democracy.” We sent innocent city and farm boys off to foreign continents to fight and die in the bloodiest combat in human history. We ended up supplying most of our Allies, including Russia, with food, guns, tanks, planes and ammunition.

To make our good fight possible, we rationed gasoline, food, rubber for tires, and basic metals here at home. We got our civilians to plant individual “victory gardens” at home, so our people would have a balanced diet while we sent most of our farm products off to the war.

Our women in their millions left their kids at home. For the first time ever, they went to work in defense plants as “Rosie the Riveter.” They learned to weld, machine, cut, polish, drill, assemble parts, and to design and build whole machines. They did all this under immense pressure, while worried sick about their men fighting abroad, and while enduring rationing of things that might have made life more bearable at home.

Our people did all this because it was necessary. And now they won’t even wear masks. Many insist on partying, dining, spectating and worshipping as if the pandemic didn’t exist.

Compared to the risks, not to mention the deprivation and suffering, that our people voluntarily undertook to help win World War II, wearing a mask is a trivial, even laughable, inconvenience. So is declining to meet indoors in large groups. Yet still enough of us balk to make the whole effort fail.

Yes, the underlying science can be complicated. Yes, we are learning about the virus as we go. Yes, our leadership has been fractured, inconsistent and mostly abysmal. But you can’t blame it all on Trump, Pence and Republican governors who seem to think that science is for nerds.

Our individual lives and livelihoods are at stake. And our economy is not coming back until the vast majority of us feel safe to work, shop, go out and congregate. Meanwhile, far too many of us are acting like willful children, who just won’t do the right thing to keep their own streets, stores, towns and cities—and their neighbors—safe.

Three things we know for certain about this virus. First, it’s a respiratory virus. It travels through the air. That’s by far its most common and most dangerous means of infecting us.

Second, it’s an unprecedentedly nasty virus. It can infect and degrade almost any organ or part of the body, including the lungs, heart, brain, liver, kidneys, blood vessels, capillaries, and even one’s toes. The damage it does to these body parts can be irreversible. So the virus can literally ruin your life, even if you survive it.

Finally, the virus can kill you and your friends, co-workers and family. It can do so easily if you or they are old, infirm, have medical issues, live in crowded circumstances, and/or are “people of color.”

Next to these awful threats to life and happiness, what’s wearing a mask?

Long before the pandemic, people wore masks and bandanas to ward off smoke from fires, bad smells, fog, and cold. They wore them at parties and balls just for fun. But now they won’t wear them out of what often seems no more than willful spite, or at best willful ignorance.

That’s what kids under seven do. They test rules and boundaries in every way. They complain. They claim they did what they didn’t do, or vice versa. They cut corners. They fake it. Some smarter ones rationalize their recalcitrance with sophistry worthy of ancient philosophers. For one specious reason after another, they just won’t do what they’re told and what common sense says is right.

So have we become a nation of willful children?

I’ll leave aside, for now, all our other failures. After six whole months, what was once the arsenal of democracy can’t produce enough live-virus tests or antibody tests to see where the virus is going and where it has been. We can’t produce enough PPE to supply our besieged hospitals and first responders, let alone all the essential non-medical workers who need it, and who are already getting sick and dying in large numbers. We can’t seem to organize testing, contact tracing, quarantining and follow up, although tens of millions of us are out of jobs and could be trained to do that work.

In short, we just can’t seem to get ourselves together. It’s every governor, mayor, public health expert, man, woman and child for himself.

This is what we’ve degenerated to—as a nation, a society, and a culture. People march—even carry and flaunt automatic weapons—for the “right” to be careless and heedless of the lives and health of others and the survival of our society. People who remind them how to act properly suffer shouting, taunting, spittle, assault and even murder. If you think of adults acting like children, consistently and in significant numbers, that’s us.

One striking recent discovery of psychological science is the importance of delayed gratification. By now, everyone has heard of the experiments. You leave a child of two or three years in a room with a piece of candy. Before leaving, you tell the child that a second piece of candy is coming if the first hasn’t been eaten when you get back. Then you record whether the child eats the single piece or waits for the second.

In follow-up studies over decades, a child’s ability to delay gratification determines his or her success in every aspect of life, from education, through employment and lifetime earnings, to marriage, children and family. That simple test of personal discipline predicts a child’s future.

As a nation, we Americans are failing that test every day. We won’t wear masks. We won’t maintain proper distance. We won’t stop going in crowds to bars, restaurants, parties, weddings, funerals, and collective worship. And we expect the virus to go away—or the economy to come back—by some miracle, without us providing the necessary conditions, including testing, contact tracing, quarantining and a consequent sense of personal safety and security.

We all ought to know the second piece of candy is coming. The virus won’t just go away, as our president and our other leaders seem to think. But we have the best microbiological science in human history. We understand DNA and RNA, and we’ve known the virus’ genome and its mutations for about half a year. We have diligent doctors and scientists working around the world and around the clock to develop a vaccine or cure. Some of them already have candidate vaccines in medium-scale clinical trials.

But just like the child under test, we don’t know exactly when the second piece of candy is coming. In the best case, it could be next year. It might take until 2022 or even longer. But there’ll likely be a vaccine or cure at some future time. Even if not, the pandemic, as distinguished from the non-living virus, could die out through simple control of contagion, as a result of diligent mask wearing, distancing, contract tracing, isolation and quarantine. That’s precisely how other countries have beaten it or are doing so now.

We can beat this virus as a species, and we will. Asians are doing so, in their teeming cities, with sidewalks filled with pedestrians all wearing masks. We Americans are failing because our personal whims—our much vaunted “individualism” and “freedom”—keep too many of us from doing what common sense and the experts tell us must be done.

Is this a fatal flaw in our society, our culture? It sure looks like one.

At this moment in history, our greatest enemy is not the Chinese, the Russians or Islamic jihadists. It’s ourselves. We cannot beat a relentless, ruthless, contagious, genomic algorithm without a plan and disciplined, society-wide cooperation. But as applied to the USA, the very word “discipline” now seems a contradiction in terms.

As for leadership, we now must rely on unelected, profit-seeking firms like Walmart just to get us to wear masks, even while shopping for necessities. What about doing something just because it’s the right, smart, and prudent thing to do, and because it costs so little and takes so little extra time?

Footnote 1: “Some [store] workers say they have been told they cannot refuse service to maskless customers, even if local laws require the wearing of masks. In recent weeks, retail workers have been physically assaulted, even suffering broken limbs and, in the case of a security guard at a Family Dollar store in Michigan, killed while trying to enforce the mask requirement.” (Washington Post, July 15, 2020).

Endnote: Brian Kemp, a Threefer of Stupidity and/or Evil. Remember Brian Kemp, Georgia’s current governor? He’s a threefer, but unlike Stacey Abrams, not in a good way. First, he beat Abrams narrowly in the 2018 race for governor, apparently with the aid of massive and deliberate voter suppression. Second, for about a month he’s been one of Trump’s “liberation lackeys,” seeking to open up Georgia for business before it had come close to containing Covid-19, and therefore helping cause the state’s current spike in cases and deaths. But the third and final rap against Kemp is even more extreme: he recently issued an executive order as Georgia’s governor, purporting to prohibit any mayor or lesser state official from requiring masks to be worn in public spaces. Now he’s suing various city mayors in Georgia to enforce it.

Hard as it may be to believe, you read that right. In the midst of a spike in cases and deaths that his own premature and unwise opening of Georgia’s businesses helped cause, Kemp is trying to forbid mayors and others from requiring the use of masks in Georgia—the simplest, cheapest and most practical expedient against Covid-19 contagion, and the best way to control the virus as economies start opening. It would be hard to imagine a more counterproductive move, unless Kemp believes that Georgia has more than its fair share of willful children.

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Understanding China

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Among modern nations, China is unique. It’s not just the twenty-first century’s single most populous nation. It’s also the oldest, biggest and most venerable conglomeration of people capable of being considered a nation. (India is less populous even today. More important, it never even qualified as a nation until the Brits knit it into a single whole through colonization and Mahatma Gandhi forced its wholesale liberation in the middle of the last century.)

Over a millennium ago, China led human civilization in almost every aspect. At that time, Russia was a loose conglomeration of peasants arrayed around the occasional duke’s or knight’s castle or warring monastery. Europe was similar. North America was sparsely inhabited by native tribes without written languages.

Besides its age and uniqueness, what’s most striking about today’s China is its near-total reversion to type. Take away the trappings of modern terminology—including the incongruity of calling top-down state capitalism a “Communist” system—and what do you have? You have the age-old Chinese Empire dressed up in modern garb.

Last year Xi Jinping unilaterally removed term limits on his rule, declaring himself “Chairman,” a term previously used only for Mao, an absolute tyrant. In so doing, Xi made himself China’s latest Emperor in all but name.

Xi didn’t even have to re-create the old Mandarin administrative system. It already existed, nationwide, in the form of the Chinese “Communist” Party (CCP), some eighty million strong.

How does the CCP differ from the Mandarins in China’s Imperial Age? Mostly in ways that augur stronger, and perhaps better, central control. Today’s so-called “Communists” are more numerous, better educated, vastly more acquainted with science and technology, and better connected by modern technology than were the Mandarins of old.

The Old Empire once had a practical proverb: “Heaven is very high, and the Emperor is far away.” This practical reality permitted a good deal of local independence and control, at times akin to “our federalism.”

But modern technology makes the New Empire radically different. Emperor Xi can talk personally with (and chew out) anyone in China by real-time video. And he can show himself personally anywhere and everywhere in China, replete with pandemic mask, in less than a day.

So China’s New Empire is not just the Old Empire in modern garb. It has four things the Old Empire never could have imagined: modern communications, modern transportation, modern Science, and (as part of Science) modern economics.

China’s so-called “Communist” economy did not rise in a mere two generations from near-universal poverty to today’s global near-dominance by following the dictates of Marx and Engels. After Mao died in 1976, China took off like a rocket, fueled with Deng Xiaoping’s pragmatism and an insatiable thirst for Western ideas and education. “I don’t care whether the cat is black or white,” Deng famously said, “as long as it catches mice.”

But make no mistake about it. China did not and will not copy Western notions of democracy in any significant way. Whether the West’s expectations to the contrary were forlorn but rational hope or mere wishful thinking is hard to tell, even today. But “democracy”—in the sense of majority rule, the rule of law, and citizens’ rights to govern themselves by their own lights—is simply not part of China’s DNA.

Maybe there are too many Chinese to manage a democracy. (Maybe there are too many of us Americans, too, which is why we’re now suffering the least sane, most consistently corrupt, and most incompetent simulacrum of democracy in any developed nation.)

Anyway, China has never had anything like Western democracy, except for the brief anomaly of Sun Yat-Sen and the Nationalists around the turn of the previous century. Nor has China ever had anything like the three seminal events of the Western Enlightenment.

China had nothing like Magna Carta—the world-historical written agreement that settled a near-battle-royal between King John and the Barons. Instead, China had a longstanding and ever-adaptive accommodation between the Emperor and the Mandarins, in which all shared power as practically necessary, but the Emperor’s predominance was mostly presumed.

Except for brief invasions, China also had nothing like the world’s muscular, proselytizing religions, Christianity and Islam. So it never experienced anything like the West’s Protestant Reformation, which recognized individual thinking and personal conscience and reduced the abstract, doctrinal supremacy of an all-powerful Church.

China’s congenital approach to what passes for “religion” there is decidedly secular. As close as China ever came to the world’s muscular religions was Confucianism. But Confucianism is nothing like Christianity or Islam. It’s a practical recipe for paternalism, ancestor worship, and submission to authority, with nothing supernatural in sight.

After observing (at a safe distance) the centuries of brutal religious wars in Europe, not to mention those in the Middle East, which still plague us today, China desperately wants to keep things that way. That’s why it comes down so hard on the Falun Gong and the Uighurs.

Finally, China never had anything like the Anglo-American rule of law, which grew out of Magna Carta and ultimately produced the Nuremberg Trials. In contrast, the “law” in China is simply a recording of the government’s current thinking, which is intensely practical and always flexible.

That’s why China’s Xi could reduce the once-nine-member Central Committee to seven members and marginalize it as a policy-making body in a mere handful of years. Like Britain, China has no written constitution.

It’s also why the National People’s Congress looks so strange to us, with its prolonged, televised sessions of massed functionaries applauding Xi, and its routine near-unanimous votes. The National People’s Congress is not a real legislature at all. It’s a means for the Emperor to communicate in person with his top-level Mandarins, aka “Communist” Party leaders, so as to manage understanding of and buy-in for his unilaterally decreed policies.

So what’s the bottom line on China? For us in the West, it’s simple but sobering. China is an ancient Empire now thriving after a two-century slump wrought, in large measure, by Western colonialism. It’s an Empire utterly foreign to the West, in ways both good and bad.

Except under the Khans, China has never entertained dreams of global or even regional conquest. Instead, it has been content to tolerate (and occasionally to nurture) “near abroad” buffer states like Vietnam and North Korea. Since World War II, in which it was butchered by Japan, China has participated in only two wars, both by proxy and both close to its borders—in Vietnam and Korea.

In comparison, we Americans have fought in Korea, in Vietnam, in Kuwait and Iraq (in Gulf I), in our two longest wars ever (in Iraq and Afghanistan), and even in Grenada. And far from being mere border-protection wars, most of these were fights to extend power and abstract ideology halfway around the world. For most of a millennium, China has done nothing of the kind.

Over the centuries China has succeeded in assimilating (mostly peacefully) some sixty different ethnic and linguistic groups into what it calls “Han Chinese” culture. It’s now trying to teach them all Mandarin as a spoken language, while nearly all of them already know the Chinese hantsu ideographs that make Chinese writing unique.

Insofar as China is concerned, the assimilation of Tibetans and Uighurs is just part of an ancient process that China has managed effectively, if not always humanely, over millennia. For China that gradual but relentless assimilation is as natural and inevitable as the tides.

We in the West can deride and rail at China for this approach to nation-building. We can invent science-fiction myths like the “Borg” (“You will be assimilated!”) to dramatize our cultural antipathy to what the Chinese have been doing for centuries. But it seems to have worked for them. And can we honestly say—especially as they suffer and die from poverty and neglect in large numbers during the current pandemic—that the way we treat our own Black and Brown people is vastly superior?

To me, the trick to understanding and dealing with China begins with its written language. It’s non-alphabetic characters are so numerous, complex and cumbersome that they require most students to devote most of their youths just to learning to read and write—a process that essentially ends at about age eight for students of alphabetic languages.

Chinese hantsu do not lend themselves easily to abstract thinking. So despite its huge population, China has not been in the forefront of the advances in theoretical physics and biology/medicine that have transformed our world for the last century and a half.

Likewise, China has failed to develop a government under or tradition of the rule of law, perhaps because the rule of law depends on deductive reasoning in the abstract. On the other hand, China doesn’t have a whole lot of abstract “thinkers” who believe that “freedom” means refusing to abide the minor inconvenience of wearing masks in the middle of a pandemic.

What China has developed is an intensely practical society. Its reasoning is not abstract or deductive but depends on practical cause and effect. “If we do this, they’ll do that.” “If we don’t do this, they’ll do that.”

Take Hong Kong, for instance. Most of the world is aghast that China just took a big step to assimilate Hong Kong, imposing a vague and overbroad Mainland security law not just on Hong Kongers, but on foreign residents and visitors to Hong Kong as well.

To Westerners, that step was a gross breach of Britain’s 1997 handover agreement with China, which was supposed to preserve a “one-nation, two systems” approach until 2047. But this breach of abstract principle didn’t bother China. What mattered to China’s leadership was practicalities.

By the terms the agreement, it’s now just two years shy of halfway to China’s inevitable assimilation of Hong Kong. Whenever that assimilation came, it would let China do whatever it wanted with Hong Kong, even by the agreement’s own terms. So that ultimate assimilation was just over a single generation away.

As a result, Hong Kongers were getting restive, especially youth just starting families. They knew that, according to the letter of the agreement, their kids would be living under Mainland Chinese law in the primes of their lives. So they wanted change now.

But the change they wanted is anathema to the Emperor and his Mainland. They want a unified China, if only to expunge the shame of having had pieces of their country carved out by Western colonial powers for two centuries. They want at all costs to crush any move toward independence, let alone secession, for Hong Kong. So they had to nip the restiveness in the bud.

If they had sent in the People’s Liberation Army, there would have been a bloodbath (cause and effect). The whole fiasco would have looked a lot like Tiananmen Square: it would have been a black mark for China and a disaster in international diplomacy. It would have further alienated Taiwan and solidified international support for Hong Kongers, the Taiwanese, the Tibetans and the Uighurs. It would have made assimilation far more difficult, and the difficulty would have only grown with time.

So China instead chose a practical path. It put immense pressure on the Hong Kong government to adopt China’s proposed draconian security-extradition law. That law has converted Hong Kong, overnight, into a Mainland Chinese satellite, effectively cutting the agreement with Britain 27 years short. But what better practical alternative did China have?

Now many Hong Kongers will leave their beloved home, as will many businesses. But the same thing happened 23 years ago, as a vast exodus of Hong Kongers inflated real-estate values around Vancouver. The world adapted, and the sky didn’t fall.

Hong Kong will lose a lot of good and smart people, who will have to adapt to colder foreign climates. But life will go on. There will be no massacre, no war. Eventually, many of the exiles, being Chinese after all, will serve as willing or unwilling business and social ambassadors for the Mainland. A few will form foreign centers of resistance, but China couldn’t have helped that.

Given the realistic options available, and its goal of eventually re-acquiring a foreign enclave once divested through forced colonization, what other choice did China have? And what other choice does the West really have? Hong Kong is small and overpopulated, and any attempt to save it by force of arms would only kill the goose that lays the golden egg.

Can we really say this kind of practical reasoning is as bad as that of foes who plunge into war or terrorism because they think God wills it, or because some abstract principle like Communism requires it?

And what can we Americans say in defense of our own extreme veneration for the written word? We have a whole class of jurists, called “originalists,” who think our most fundamental law just parrots what people alive in 1791 wrote about nuclear weapons, cyber-bullying, the Internet, modern jihadism, sex-change operations, clean hospital abortions and vaccines—none of which existed in their time. How, pray tell, does that specious reasoning differ from the Taliban or Christian fundamentalists seeking wisdom in the words of ancient scriptures written over a millennium ago?

We Americans allow corporations, sexual predators and scoundrels like our president to silence good people with non-disclosure agreements. Most of all, we still live under a grossly non-representative governmental structure, with an outmoded Electoral College and a Senate in which over half our population has only 18% of the votes. We do so, because, unlike Britain, we have a written Constitution that can’t be changed except by Herculean effort.

The Brits’ democracy has lasted far longer than ours—over eight centuries, if you count from Magna Carta. Ours could end this year or next, if we are foolish enough to re-elect Trump or allow him to steal the presidency. If that happens, the USA would have lived as a democracy less than 245 years, or about one-third as long as Britain’s already has lasted.

So as we Americans try to throw off the yoke of the worst presidency in our history—something akin to the reigns of Nero, Caligula and Commodus combined—we ought to be a little humble and circumspect. Our much-vaunted system hasn’t been working so well recently, whether in making basic common sense, or in applying science to fight the pandemic.

We don’t have to like China, and we don’t have to honor its not-so-infrequent inhumanity. But we do have to respect its achievements and success as the oldest and most populous continuously operating empire in human history, and as a force in human history to be reckoned with, including the present.

Trump’s puerile attempts to demonize China are just one of his many evil stupidities. They’re one that could bring on the Apocalypse in so many ways, military or economic. That’s a kind of cause and effect that all sane people everywhere should seek to avoid.

We have to live with China, and we’re not always going to get our way. So we’d all better start thinking hard about how to get ourselves out of the the moral, medical, economic and social slump we find ourselves in. A weak nation—which is what we’re becoming fast—will provide no counterweight to China.

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Charles Booker, a Chance Missed

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Charles Booker, a Chance Missed

I’m sorry I didn’t support Charles Booker while I had the chance. I discovered his candidacy only weeks before Kentucky’s recent Democratic senatorial primary. There he faced Amy McGrath in the Democratic race to challenge Mitch McConnell this fall. Booker lost by only some 15,000 votes. When asked how he could have done better, he didn’t see any big mistakes. He said he needed more money. I could have given him a bit more, and I’m sorry I didn’t. Let’s be clear. I’ve never lived in Kentucky and never will. My interest as a progressive is in retiring Mitch McConnell. If there were ever a Senate Majority Leader who got lost so far down in the big boys’ pockets that he can’t see out, it’s Mitch. McGrath is a woman and an ex-fighter pilot—both good things for politics. We have too many men in power who’ve never experienced what they (too-easily) send our “all volunteer” forces to do. Booker is Black and a full-bore progressive. He grew up just blocks from where police gunned Breonna Taylor down in her Louisville home. He joined street protests against police killings and structural racism. All those are good things, too. What made the Booker-McGrath race so consequential was the big question it addressed. Who can better help us take our country back from the oligarchs, the bosses, their bought pols, and the self-obsessed 1%? Is it moderates, who may be able to drag votes from people who are undecided and confused? Or is it true progressives, who have a clear plan to develop a more just, equal, fair and sustainable society? McGrath, who won, is the moderate, while Booker, who lost narrowly, is a genuine progressive. The Democratic party has chosen a moderate in the presidential race, if only to play it safe. But the same questions resound in races across the country. Democrats could, if they chose, give the moderate/progressive question a fair test there, without putting the future of American democracy at stake. In particular, the race for the best Dem to beat Mitch could have helped us know whether clinging to moderation is a viable and necessary strategy or just a fearful cop-out that betrays traditional Democratic values. To have a fair test, you need a progressive candidate who is smart, strategic and non-ideological. You need someone like Elizabeth Warren or Stacey Abrams. They can explain to voters how progressive plans will better their lives, without using a single word or slogan from the last century’s ideological wars. Booker is in that league. You can tell from every word in his interview by Isabella Grullón Paz, published in today’s New York Times [on page A21]. Here’s what Booker said about health care: “I spent the majority of my campaign explaining how a Black person can win in rural parts of Kentucky and how the issue of rationing insulin is not partisan. And so when I tell my story of nearly dying from diabetic ketoacidosis, and explaining that’s why I fully support Medicare for all—because nobody should die because they don’t have money in their pocket—people get it.” Maybe Booker got a late start. Maybe the media got a late start in covering his extraordinary candidacy. But I’m not blaming anyone else. I got a late start in finding out about Booker and in inquiring of Democracy for America, an organization that I support and that supported Booker. All I know is that, if I had read Grullón Paz’ interview with Booker before the vote, I would have switched my support from McGrath to Booker and doubled down. There must be millions like me: comfortably retired Geezers, hiding at home from the pandemic, with little to spend our money on but trying mightily to restore the democracy we once knew in our youths. I know that pols with Booker’s self-evident talents for explaining what matters and how things work, without anger or ideology, are too good ever to pass by.

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What’s in a Name, or How GOP Extremists Win

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“What’s in a name? That which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet . . .” — William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, Act II, Scene 2

“Sticks and stones may break my bones
But words will never hurt me.” — Old folk saying used to encourage taunted children

Introduction
The basics
Real-life examples

Liberal
Democrat

The power of subliminal positive spin
Conclusion

Introduction

Of course both the Bard and the old savants were literally right. Making up or changing a name doesn’t literally change the underlying reality. Nor can a name break bones by itself.

But both also were wrong in important ways. We humans are social and political animals. The primary means we use to communicate, socialize and govern ourselves is words.

So names matter. They matter a lot, especially in politics. They can supercharge propaganda. They can become weapons. They can corrupt and sour democracies. They can provoke wars, oppression, riots and lynchings.

Indirectly, they can kill people and destroy democracies. That’s what they’re doing, right now, today, in the United States of America.

“Applied philology”—the engineering of words, names and nicknames—is a vastly underrated tool of politics and propaganda. [See, for example, this post and this one.] Today one American political party exploits it far more cleverly and effectively than the other.

You don’t have to think long to see which. Even Donald Trump, for all his public stupidity, scattered brains, and wishful thinking, is a master of the trade. That’s a big reason why his popularity still sits near a rock-hard 40%, despite innumerable blunders in word and deed.

None of this makes much sense in logic. That’s why intellectuals, lawyers, professionals, and policy wonks have such trouble dealing with it. As my first Russian teacher told us, language is psychological, not logical. This essay explores that under-appreciated truth in politics and explains what progressive people and our pols might still do about it, although the hour is late.

The basics

There are two ways in which modern propagandists prove Shakespeare wrong. The first is to change the connotation of a name without changing the name at all, or maybe only a little.

Let’s take the Bard’s rose, for example. Roses have thorns; they can stick you. After a while, their petals darken, flatten and fall off. As they do, their scent sours and becomes putrid. Wait long enough, and mold and rot set in.

All this is but the hard truth of nature and the facts of life. Wait long enough, and beauty ever fades and dies.

Simply by emphasizing these harsh realities, over and over again, a good propagandist can take the bloom off the rose. With the aid of modern mass media, including social media, she can change the connotation of the name: the mental image or impression that a word conjures in human minds. Like Pavlov’s dogs, people repeatedly “dosed” with images of thorns and blood, petals falling off and putrefying, and colors and bloom fading, can change their minds about roses. They may begin to buy their loves carnations or daisies instead.

The Internet lends itself brilliantly to this sort of verbal re-engineering. It never tires. It can repeat the same slant a million times, with a million variations, wrought by myriad trolls and spooks in different, secret places, or spawned automatically by algorithms. It can hit consumers where they’re most vulnerable, on their Facebook Walls, amidst stories and images of their friends’ and families’ graduations, career triumphs, births, marriages and deaths.

The second way in which modern propagandists prove Shakespeare wrong is to change the word, either subtly or completely. The GOP did this in comparing Bernie Sanders’ mild democratic socialism with images of and rants against Soviet Communism, caricatures of Fidel Castro’s Cuba and Nicolás Maduro’s Venezuela, and predictions of the death of free enterprise.

In replies to a comment on this blog, I’ve explained in detail the vast differences involved in this invidious but bogus comparison. Yet the points are subtle and detailed and incapable of fitting on a bumper sticker. No doubt they elude the vast majority of voters who see the comparisons. Polls confirm that progressive candidates—including even Elizabeth Warren, who insisted throughout that she is a capitalist—suffered from those comparisons, despite their deficiencies in accuracy and logic.

That’s also how Trump’s pejorative nicknames work—the very same way that a childish bully or frat boy (like George W. Bush) uses nicknames to belittle, taunt and dominate rivals. The whole enterprise may be puerile, but it works. It works because it’s psychological, not logical. In order to have a significant political effect, it need only poison a small minority of voters’ minds. (Recall that Trump won in 2016 in key battleground states by margins of 1-2%.)

As crude as these propaganda ploys may become, they can fly under the radar of intellectuals and most other abstract thinkers. For them, the label on the box doesn’t matter; only what’s inside the box counts.

But most voters are not experienced in abstract thinking. They’re practical people who often take a label at face value, as the embodiment or essence of what’s in the box. If the label has a negative connotation, so be it. No one ever thought a leader as understated, methodical, careful, and law-abiding as Barack Obama could successfully be labeled a “tyrant,” at least in the minds of some voters, until he was.

Real-life examples

Name-calling and name-slanting are not just hypothetical dangers. They’ve actually moved the needle of national public opinion in my lifetime.

Liberal

Take the word “liberal,” for example. In my childhood, it connoted a simple, clear position on the political spectrum. A “liberal” was an empathetic, caring voter who supported liberty and freedom for all people, a strong safety net for the unfortunate, fair and equal treatment for minorities, strong labor unions, regulation to reduce pollution, laws to limit individuals’ industrial and financial power and ensure fair competition, and prioritizing domestic justice over optional foreign wars.

Today—through the “miracle” of applied philology—the word “liberal” has morphed into something entirely different, at least for a vast array of voters. It has come to mean a shaggy, lazy, rule-breaking, sexually promiscuous, child-neglecting (or baby-killing!) protestor or rioter, who comes from a minority, or who coddles them, and is habitually weak on national defense.

Don’t ask me how the GOP’s right-wing extremists accomplished this verbal transformation. It took decades, and all the power of Fox’ moron-pundits and the Internet. But now the transformation is a fait accompli, at least among a substantial minority of voters. For them the term “liberal” goes right along with the nickname “libtard”—meaning “liberal retard” or “(mentally) retarded liberal”—which expresses the same general negative connotation more forcefully.

Ironically, the very same word, “liberal,” still has something close to its original meaning among conservative intellectuals. When used in connection with our globalized economy, it refers to the values of the Enlightenment, but as applied to corporations and businesses, not people. It means a political environment that gives free rein to business formation, operation and expansion, with low taxes and light regulation and few or no restrictions on trade. The British weekly The Economist, for example, uses the word and its root regularly, in such phrases as the “liberal economic order” or economic “liberalism.”

Incongruous, even weird? You bet! The word “liberal” now connotes for many a despicable human being, while it remains for some an adjective for laudable policy governing businesses and corporations. How’s that for prioritizing wealth and power over humanity?

As crazy as it may seem, all this is as real as the tip of your nose. Voters and pols who’ve been victims of this legerdemain in applied philology, aka “propaganda,” now have explicitly recognized both the fact and the power of it. They’ve abandoned the term “liberal” and now call themselves and their ideas “progressive.”

That was a good strategic philological retreat. After all, who can stand against progress?

Democrat

What the GOP did with the word “Democrat” is both more subtle and more insidious. Its transformation rose to philological and propagandistic brilliance.

In my youth, the word “Democrat” (with a capital “D”) was a noun, and only a noun. It connoted only a person: a member of the Democratic Party. The word “Democratic” was an adjective—the only relevant adjective—and part of the party’s proper name.

Today, after two decades of effort by right-wingers, the word “Democrat” (with a capital D) has become an adjective with the form of a noun, as in the phrases “Democrat party,” “Democrat bill” or “Democrat program.” That jarring and ungrammatical use has two powerful, under-the-radar emotional effects. First, it implies that Democrats are not small-d democratic, or at least not the only ones to be so. Second, as a noun used as an adjective, “Democrat” is grammatically jarring and so feels like an epithet. All by itself, it casts an awkward, negative spell over the entire Democratic (capital-d) enterprise and its practitioners.

The tragedy is that clueless Democrats have themselves, willy nilly, adopted this bit of subtle philological bias. They now use it routinely, in acts of unknowing verbal self-abuse. To me, that’s like Joe Biden calling himself “Sleepy Joe.”

Whether Democrats do this out of simple carelessness, or out of the politeness and cooperative spirit that traditionally characterized them, I can’t tell. But the end result has been utter capitulation to a nickname that jars, sounds like an epithet and abandons the very notion of democracy to authoritarian right-wingers. Repeated over and again, hundreds of times a day, this distortion of good English and good manners drives its point home like a poisoned spear.

Nothing else, to my mind, shows so clearly how today’s Trump-tromped Republicans, while often bereft of logic, good ideas and basic decency, have pounded Democrats into the sand on the field of philological combat. The contest to date has been entirely unequal. It’s as if a nineteenth-century boxer trained under Marquis of Queensbury rules were trying to fight a modern Brazilian Judo master in a ring without rules.

The power of subliminal positive spin

Not all of Republicans’ applied philology involves belittling the opposition. Some involves subtle or not-so-subtle self-aggrandizement.

Take the so-called “Tea Party,” for example. In reality, it was an extremist rump group of GOP House members bent on political extortion through shutdown. At the height of their power and influence, two-thirds of them were from Old South and Border States, and 20% from Texas alone. Not a single one hailed from the largely progressive state of Massachusetts.

Yet by adopting the incongruous name “Tea Party,” they all sought to evoke the historical aura of New England, the American Revolution, the Fourth of July, and the now-mythical act of rebellion in which early colonists threw British tea into Boston Harbor as a protest against taxation without representation. Their group name evoked the hazy glory of our Founding, while their policies exalted the rich, the powerful, the militarization of our police and foreign policy, and the greatest and most widespread economic inequality since the abolition of slavery.

Conclusion

It’s both shameful and tragic that Democrats and progressives have let this verbal farce go on for so long without effective challenge. Perhaps they still harbor a naive but touching faith in the durability of the kind of Reason and respectful debate that once undergirded the Enlightenment and our Founding.

But Reason and cooperation have had their day. We now live in an Orwellian age where lies, demagoguery, extortion, coercion, and corruption are becoming ways of life. This deviation could be temporary, but it could mark a trend.

In such an age, the Internet and its social media, if not all electronic media, are two-edged swords. We once hoped they might lead to new age of free expression and popular empowerment. But they seem, in recent times, to have morphed into juggernauts of propaganda, brainwashing, bullying and lies. The trolls, spooks, oligarchs, political “operatives” and power-brokers who actually pull the strings hide under layer upon layer of digital and legal anonymity.

So unless Democrats and progressives want to bring knives to a gunfight, and consequently to lose quickly, they are going to have to get smarter and tougher. They are going to have to stop leading with their chins. They are going to have to stop touting “socialism” and even “democratic socialism,” as Bernie did.

Instead, they are going to have to recognize how decades of media lies, distortions and demagoguery have thoroughly tarnished the word “socialism” in American political discourse. They’ve made it, in many voters’ minds, synonymous with the Hammer and Sickle, the gross failures of Chinese and Russian Communism, Fidel Castro’s Cuba, Maduro’s Venezuela, and the death of free enterprise. So progressives are going to have to use simpler, less abstract and less loaded words—just as Elizabeth Warren and Stacey Abrams do—to explain what they stand for and how it will improve voters’ lives.

Most of all, progressives are going to have to do better than use slogans that play into demagogues’ hands, like “Defund the Police” or “Abolish ICE.” These banners may express justified horror at real excesses and injustices of our over-militarized (and often downright cruel) police and immigration services. But philologically and politically, they have a fatal flaw: they sound like nihilism to many voters.

How, pray tell, do these slogans differ from the GOP’s oft-repeated but never (so far) realized push to “Repeal Obamacare”? Over twenty million people now rely on Obamacare for health insurance, including coverage of pre-existing conditions. Most of them vote. So how does threatening to pull the rug of health care out from under so many voters advance the cause of so-called “conservatives,” let alone the public health in the midst of a pandemic?

However cruel and misguided our current policing and border protection may be, great swaths of voters rely on them for protection against crime and gangs, and for accepting only the immigrants that we, the people, actually want, or that justice requires admitting. Even loved ones of non-white men murdered by the police call them under extreme circumstances, just as Carlos Ingram Lopez’ grandmother did.

So don’t threaten to abolish something that many voters respect and rely on without offering a better alternative. Make your slogan something positive, like “De-Militarize the Police,” “Community Policing with a Heart,” “Police with Humane Help,” or “Humanize ICE and our Immigration System.”

It’s not easy to pick just the right word or slogan to express an idea for improving our society. In fact, it’s one of the hardest conceptual tasks in politics.

But it’s vital for winning votes. Getting just the right word or slogan can change the world, just as have Jesus’ bumper stickers “Love thy enemy” and “Love thy neighbor as thyself.”

In this critical task, progressives’ reliance on intellectuals and the highly educated can prove a handicap. Smart people don’t rely on the label on a box; they look into the box to see what’s inside. But smart people also don’t give as much weight to size, power, strength, wealth, conformity and celebrity as many voters do. So if they want to start winning, Democrats and progressives are going to have to tailor their slogans and their messages to the vast majority of voters, for whom the label on the box can matter as much as or more than what’s actually inside.

There are recent signs that progressives are catching on. For decades, they’ve struggled to answer a simple, vexing question: what to name the group among us who are the subjects of our most long-lasting, durable and virulent oppression and prejudice?

At seven syllables, “African-Americans” is too long and unwieldy. It’s also factually wrong: a lot of people within the group have nothing to do with Africa, except for distant and long-forgotten ancestors. And a lot of Americans of African descent are white.

As for “black” (the ordinary English adjective), it’s wrong chromatically, genetically, culturally and morally. It lumps together far too many different people, of far too many different skin tones, from too many different countries, linguistic groups, tribes and cultural backgrounds. It also smacks of the slaveholder’s “one-drop” rule, invented to convert people into durable property, even the progeny of white rapists.

But sometimes the most ingenious solutions are the simplest. Begin the word “Black” with a capital “B,” and it becomes a proper noun. Then it can mean what its users want it to mean, while also connoting a degree of respect.

The proper noun “Black” is also broad enough to run the gamut of victims. It can include: (1) an impoverished descendant of slaves living in the ghetto, (2) a business entrepreneur who has to fight conscious and unconscious racism every step of the way, (3) a well-educated immigrant from Jamaica or Ghana, who must deal with unaccustomed prejudice on first stepping off the boat, and (4) even Tim Scott, our Republican Senator from South Carolina, who must suffer unwarranted assumptions about people who look like him even as he wends his way in his business suit to cast his senatorial vote.

In retrospect, the philological task looks simple. Just pick a clean, respectful, single syllable, and make it a capitalized proper noun, to denote the entire group whose mistreatment for four centuries is our greatest national tragedy and our greatest shame. Yet it took all of those four centuries to pick just the right word.

The morals of this story are clear. Words matter. Names matter. Getting just the right word, name or slogan can take lots of time and thought, as well as trial and error. But none of that effort is ill spent.

In fundamental ways, Shakespeare’s memorable quotation got it wrong. The clan names that his star-crossed lovers bore did lead, almost inevitably, to their tragic and untimely deaths.

Call it naming. Call it “framing.” Call it what you will. But getting the name or slogan just right is a fighting skill in politics. In that skill, the right wing has beat the left wing all hollow for at least a generation.

So it’s a skill the left had better learn fast. Otherwise, dumb slogans like “Defund the Police” and “Abolish ICE” will let right-wing demagogues imprison the left in verbal cages, re-elect Trump, and kill our American democracy stone cold dead.

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