Two Superstitions Ruining the US

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.

Superstition: “1a: a belief or practice resulting from ignorance, fear of the unknown, trust in magic or chance, or a false conception of causation . . . 2 a notion maintained despite evidence to the contrary[.]”—Miriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, Eleventh Edition (2003).

“Pro-Trump political influencers have spent years building a well-oiled media machine that swarms around every major news story, creating a torrent of viral commentary that reliably drowns out both the mainstream media and the liberal opposition.”

“The result is a kind of parallel media universe that left-of-center Facebook users may never encounter, but that has been stunningly effective in shaping its own version of reality. Inside the right-wing Facebook bubble, President Trump’s response to Covid-19 has been strong and effective, Joe Biden is barely capable of forming sentences, and Black Lives Matter is a dangerous group of violent looters.”—Kevin Roose, “What if Facebook Is the Real ‘Silent Majority,’” New York Times, August 27, 2020.

Introduction: A New Dark Age?
Superstition 1: “Free trade and free markets make everybody better off.”
Superstition 2: “Free speech is good even when it deceives, distracts, divides and destroys.”
Conclusion

Introduction: A New Dark Age?

Roman senators killed their own Donald Trump, Julius Caesar, on the Ides of March, March 15 of 44 BCE. But his assassination ultimately made little difference. As the National Geographic so succinctly stated, it caused “a long series of civil wars that ended in the death of the Roman Republic and the birth of the Roman Empire.”

Thereafter, no democracy with the power and scope of ancient Rome emerged until well into the Age of Enlightenment. So the democratic hiatus after Rome’s fall lasted nearly 1,800 years—about a third of our species’ recorded history. Much of it was a time of feudalism, near-perpetual wars, intellectual stagnation, racial and religious intolerance, and superstition—the Dark Ages.

This sorry history reveals all that Trump’s misbegotten reign may ultimately put at risk, even if it ends next January. His laziness in thought and action, his incompetence and corruption, the division and hate he has fostered, the low people he has put in high places, and the bad ideas he has put forward with Big Lies could outlast his term of office.

But the Age of Enlightenment was, most of all, an age of big ideas. We might keep its flame going if we can distinguish useful big ideas from superstitions.

Our lodestar ought to be science. In the four centuries since Galileo proved that the Earth orbits the Sun, we have visited the Moon and are planning our way to Mars. Where once we fought plagues with exorcism, blood-letting and burning each other at the stake, we now have antibiotics, CAT scans, and gene-sequencers. We can decode a virus and synthesize vaccines from the most fundamental building blocks of life: proteins and nucleic acids.

Unfortunately, all that progress now stands in jeopardy, at least in the West. The menace is two modern superstitions or, in the dictionary’s words, “notion[s] maintained despite evidence to the contrary.” One Trump himself has fought, albeit crudely and haphazardly. The other Trump has exploited shamelessly. Both are intensely fashionable among our elite and could long outlast Trump.

Laboratory science can’t dispel them, because they are social, political and partly economic. You can’t put a nation, let alone our entire species, into a test tube. But if we in the West don’t soon give them up, China, which follows neither, will own our species’ future as far ahead as the eye can see.

Superstition 1: “Free trade and free markets make everybody better off.”

This first great superstition goes by many names. They include “globalization,” “free trade,” “free markets,” and (mostly in Britain) “liberal economics.” Whatever we call it, its essence is simple. We believe that giving businesses free rein to pursue profit for their owners and masters, in global free markets with few or no restraints, will produce the best of all possible worlds.

Leave aside this superstition’s close resemblance to the more generalized “best of all possible worlds” trope that consumed the French aristocracy until the French Revolution. (Voltaire also ridiculed it in his famous work “Candide, or Optimism.”) Leave aside the notion’s formal repudiation, before Congress, by no less a free-market guru than Alan Greenspan, at least on the limited question whether free financial markets automatically correct their own excesses. Leave aside the facts that no scientist worthy of the name would ever seriously entertain such a broad hypothesis, and that economics purports to be a science. Leave aside the realization that there is no possible way to test such a superstition scientifically, even in theory, because the words “always and ever” are implicit in it.

Just look at the practical consequences of turning this superstition into global economic policy. Tens of millions of jobs have left the United States and much of Europe, possibly never to return. Hundreds of millions of developed-nation workers worldwide, who used to make cars, appliances, tools, machines, hardware, clothing and furniture, have been reduced to hawking foreign-made products or flipping burgers (or their European equivalents). Thus deprived of the dignity of important work, and reduced to the near-peasant status of low-level servants in a “service” economy, they have slowly lost their prosperity, their self-respect, their jobs, their factories, their families, their communities, and (through despair and substance abuse) their lives.

Donald Trump is our president because, as selfish and erratic as he is, he became their champion. He promised to bring back their jobs, sagging pay, dignity and political influence. In a different way, with less demagoguery and law-breaking, Boris Johnson achieved Brexit because British workers seemed to want it.

Yes, globalized free trade (along with the nuclear deterrent) has helped to avoid major wars among major powers since World War II. It has done so by shifting competition from military conflict to industry and commerce and by making the great powers economically interdependent. Yes, the globalized economy has raised almost a billion people in poor countries out of extreme poverty. Yes, free-market globalization has “defeated” obsessive central control of national economies under Communism, albeit mostly because its chief practitioners (Russia and China) voluntarily gave Communism up after seeing how it had failed them.

But those “gains” have come at a terrible cost to the West. Unemployment, underemployment and lack of dignified, well-paid work have caused an inchoate and incoherent rebellion among workers in developed nations worldwide. Trump and Brexit are its products. Economic equality has fallen to levels rarely seen in the West since Genghis Khan conquered much of Eurasia. According to Oxfam, eight men now own half the world’s wealth.

And within each developed nation, wealth and economic power have become so concentrated that a new, more fluid oligarchy is rapidly replacing the landed aristocracy that ruled mankind throughout the Dark Ages. Since 2014, sober analysis of US government reveals that, in its policy choices, the United States is more an oligarchy than a democracy.

As for motivation, what do you think? Did the corporate elite who have become our oligarchs do it all for the sake of raising foreign peasants out of poverty and forging a new and better global order? Or did they do it to enrich themselves beyond measure, as the natural consequence of turning their self-serving superstition into hardened policy?

Western economies still see themselves as sleek and speedy cars, with powerful engines fueled by private greed. They laugh and scoff as visions of collective farms and government control of industry fade in their rear-view mirrors.

But they’ve failed to notice the front wheels coming loose. The foundation of any industrial economy—its workers—are hurting badly, unhappy and starting to rise. Already they have produced Trump’s presidency and Brexit. At the same time, the industrial base—the other foundation of any industrial economy—has migrated abroad. At home it has shrunk to such a degree that the US no longer makes the basic hardware that underlies all manufacturing or the protective equipment it needs to protects its people in a pandemic.

As Republican data guru Kevin Phillips wrote fourteen years ago, the US is now following Spain, Holland, and Great Britain down the road of financialization to economic and industrial weakness and geopolitical irrelevance. Can a nation that doesn’t make its own nuts and bolts and subassemblies (or protective equipment) ever compete in science and technology, let alone warfare, with the nation that makes most of those things for it?

There are solutions to these problems. They don’t involve “socialism,” Communism, or the type of micromanagement of business and enterprise exemplified by Soviet Russian and “Red” Chinese collective farms. They do involve giving up our blind faith in “free trade” and “free markets” as the sole source of all that is good and true.

We Americans still command the world’s second biggest market, after the EU. Economic alliances with our “free-nation” allies could expand that market further, to rival if not exceed China’s.

We could devise and erect intelligent, precisely targeted tariffs and trade barriers to neutralize international wage differentials, in order to revive our manufacturing and industrial base (and our allies’). We could re-employ legions of unemployed and underemployed skilled workers—at living wages and with strong unions—before they lose their skills. We could re-invigorate our industrial and applied scientific and technological research establishment. We might even start making nuts and bolts and subassemblies again, so we can at least have a credible claim of being able to resist the nation that now makes most of them for us.

We can renew and expand our world-beating research partnerships between government and industry, as embodied in DARPA and ARPA-E. That partnership used tax dollars to fund basic research, which private investors just will not support, and applied research with too low a chance of success and too long a time frame to attract private investment. (The Internet arose from a DARPA project.) We can hold some, but not all, of our innovations close enough to our chest to make sure that American workers and American investors get the first crack at exploiting them and making follow-on inventions.

In short, we can modify our nineteenth- and twentieth-century plans for success with such changes as are appropriate to this new century, when we must both compete and cooperate with an enormous, rising power that follows its own, completely different rules. What we can’t do, without fading from historical relevance, is continue believing blindly in our abstract economic superstitions as if we had learned nothing from the hard lessons of the last twenty years.

Superstition 2: “Free speech is good even when it deceives, distracts, divides and destroys.”

The second superstition that is killing Western democracy is equally decisive in its effect but more subtle in its action. It’s the notion of “free speech” as a near-absolute good.

What many Americans—and perhaps most of the world—don’t understand is that our First Amendment forbids censorship only by the government, including both our national government and the states’. There is no constitutional rule in America forbidding censorship, slanting, propaganda or outright lies by private media organizations.

All “news” media in the United States are privately owned and run, except for PBS, NPR, and a few others that are technically private but under a form of public stewardship. As a result, anything goes in our private American media, anytime, anywhere.

That’s why Fox and Sinclair have become the most powerful right-wing propaganda organs in human history—far surpassing Josef Goebbels’ efforts for the Nazis. It’s why Jack Dorsey’s Twitter can promulgate many of Trump’s 20,000 lies and misleading claims (so far) as Tweets with little or no practical repercussion. It’s why Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook can foster, for profit, the kind of under-everyone’s-radar alternative reality described in the second headpiece quote above.

Even the weak restraint of defamation law, which curbs only “reckless” falsehoods about public figures like Trump’s political opponents, doesn’t apply to social media like Facebook and Twitter. The reason is an appalling last-minute statutory amendment exempting social media from centuries-old rules. In truly Orwellian fashion, this blanket exemption is called Section 230(c)(1) of the “Communications Decency Act.”

The superstition underlying this destructive license is easy to state but hard to remedy. We Americans believe, in our bones but without evidence, that free speech is always good, that more speech is better, and that the only good remedy for bad speech is more speech.

That notion worked in our Colonial era of printed pamphlets. It worked in our Golden Age of the three TV networks, exemplified by Walter Cronkite, with their strict codes of factual accuracy, honesty, verifying sources and correcting errors obsessively, and general professionalism. It was starting to fail in the cable-news era of sensationalized lies, promulgated by oligarchs in their own long-term quest for riches, self-serving policies, and yet more political power. It has self-evidently failed miserably in the modern Internet era of “many to many” communications. There anyone, anywhere, with zero credentials and zero at stake, can start a rumor, invent a fake fact, nurse a grudge, incite a riot, inflame hatred, or push the public toward rebellion, race riots, or war.

If Donald Trump wins re-election, he will do so with the loyal support of vast reaches of our private “anything goes” media empires, and with the acquiescence or profit-driven negligence of the most powerful social media on the Internet. And he will have won with his 20,000-plus falsehoods unchallenged in the minds and the media bubbles of many Americans.

One sad truth of modern American media is that TMI (“too much information”) helps keep voters imprisoned in their separate and contradictory media bubbles. The Internet and electronic media generate whole libraries of new data and lies every day. No single human being-not even paid professionals-can keep up with it all. So people naturally sort themselves into their bubbles in large part because of the undrinkable volume of “news.”

If you can view only a small part of what’s available, why not look at what confirms your preconceptions, validates your thinking, and makes you feel better, or at least more self-assured? And if “more speech” is a reliable remedy for bad speech, how does it work when the public is already operating at full saturation?

Modern media’s undigestible volume of speech was not a problem in our Colonial days of printed paper pamphlets, or when we had only three high-quality TV news networks. It is today.

Thus does “free speech” actually work now, in twenty-first-century America. Much of it comes from actors—even outright criminals—with personal and political agendas and no legal, moral or professional restraint. They include pimply teenagers in their bedrooms, social outcasts and white supremacists in their squalid apartments, anonymous political trolls, paid political “operatives,” agitators, propagandists, foreign spies and disinformation experts. And we haven’t even yet reached the stage of digital technology—coming soon—when bad actors will be able to produce fake video indistinguishable technically from reality, as least by examining nothing more than the bits and bytes of the video lie itself. Then we will have to devise some way of reliably validating reality to defeat them.

It should be self-evident by now that our peculiarly American version of “free speech” is not working. It has morphed into an extreme form of verbal and video license. It’s busy destroying our culture, our social cohesion, our politics, our civil discourse, and our society. If it puts Trump back in the White House again, there will be no going back, except perhaps after a new bout of Dark Ages.

In this case, as in the other, identifying the problem is not hard. What’s harder here is finding a good solution.

In general and in the abstract, free speech is a good thing. Aided by Gutenberg’s printing press and Martin Luther’s Protestant revolution, it sparked the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, enabled the rise of science and modern democracy, and gave us our modern world. It lets me write this blog. So we have to thread the needle and find a way to keep the baby while throwing out the rancid bath water. That’s not easy.

One key, I think, is the distinction between facts and opinion. Everyone is entitled to his or her opinion, including crackpots and foreign spooks, as long they clearly identify what they say as opinion. But when you say that vaccines cause autism and have killed millions, that Joe Biden advocated defunding the police when he had not, or that Trump’s “leadership” has put our nation in the global forefront of effective pandemic fighters, you’d better have proof.

This approach might involve a national panel of experts, public or private, tasked to debate key issues of political and near-historical fact. A “jury” of randomly selected citizens might sit in judgment, and their verdict could be widely publicized and taken as truth, subject to possible modification with changes in circumstances.

Another answer might be a beefed-up law of defamation, without a stricter standard for disapproving false political discourse, and without requiring a particular plaintiff to show personal injury. If you deliberately promulgate something proven false, and if a plaintiff or the state can prove personal, political or social motives and consequences, you ought to be held responsible somehow, even if the only sanction is public shaming. Or you might have to pay a fine calibrated to dent your personal or corporate net worth, and so reduce your power to go forth and lie again. (This approach would not stray too far from the old law of defamation, now repealed for social media: it let cases turn in part on the truth of falsity of allegedly defamatory material, which a jury would determine based on evidence.)

Whatever we do, we can begin by repealing Section 230(c)(1) of the Communications Decency Act. At a minimum, that would recruit Jack Dorsey and Mark Zuckerberg into the fight to save our democracy. Right now, they seem to be sitting on the sidelines, raking in the cash while feigning just enough interest to keep a feckless Congress at bay.

In the absence of our First Amendment, the old English common law might have arrived at some of these solutions eventually. After all, it had developed our now-neutered law of defamation over centuries, on a case-by-case basis. But our American First Amendment would preclude a defamation-based solution, to the extent it relied on state suits or prosecution. Unfortunately, our American penchant for putting everything in writing, including statutes, has practically wiped out the case-by-case evolution that once characterized English common law.

As things are, with most of our law compiled in statutes and with Congress divided and confused, any such solution is no more likely to happen than the repeal or revision of our First Amendment. Meanwhile, more adaptable authoritarian societies, like China, Russia, and even Iran, have been moving to protect themselves from the Internet’s cesspool. Unfortunately, they do so by limiting not just the sewage, but honest and useful opposition, too.

The Chinese are the people farthest along in protecting themselves from the anarchy and the flood of sewage on the Internet. Yet they are also the farthest along in using modern technology to build a durable surveillance state in the interest of social stability-something the US and Europe are unlikely ever to do.

So whatever solution the West adopts, it probably won’t be like China’s. But we can’t go on forever as we do today. We can’t have the public’s mind continually poisoned by millions of anonymous liars and schemers, who work freely and often for profit, far beyond the reach of law or any sense of responsibility, professionalism or honesty.

Internet-fueled demagoguery is real. Fake news is real. Trump’s 20,000-plus lies and near lies are real. Government by Tweet, including many falsehoods, is real. Information bubbles are real, and some of them are filled with falsehoods. We can’t put our heads in the sand and pretend these things don’t exist or are inconsequential. At least we can’t and expect to survive as a democracy.

Conclusion

The West is rife with has-been empires, including democracies. Greece was the first to implement and record democracy’s abstract principles. Rome was the first nation to build a great empire on a foundation of democracy. Where are Greece and Italy today?

Spain and Holland once had global empires of shipping, trade and colonization. Britain added the rule of law and abstract principles of justice. But is Spain or Holland a geopolitical mover and shaker today? Is Britain, let alone after Brexit?

More than any other nation in human history, the United States has leveraged the power of realism, science, truth, technology and law to project geopolitical power and dominate our species’ thinking, culture, arts and dreams. But the United States is now in self-evidently precipitous decline. We now believe in and do things that no one of my generation ever could have imagined, until Nixon, Reagan, Gingrich, Dubya, McConnell and Trump inculcated us with durable superstitions. (Two of those once-unthinkable things were electing Trump president and failing to remove him despite clear evidence of his law-breaking and treason.)

History gives no nation a guarantee of success. Every nation has to think, work and persevere to succeed, every step of the way. If we Americans persist in clinging to our superstitions, rather than recognizing our problems and finding practical solutions, our promise and our “exceptionalism” will slip away, just like the dreams of all the other faded Western empires.

Along with our geopolitical and industrial power will go the dreams of widespread personal freedom and true equality of opportunity that have animated our Republic since our Founding. Those dreams are worth cherishing and advancing. But to save them we must give up our superstitions, embrace Reason and Science, and start acting like rational beings again. To do that, we must start inventing practical solutions for our very real problems. Most of all, we must stop dismissing every plausible solution as inconsistent, in the abstract, with our superstitions.

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The GOP’s Final Night: A Full-Metal Demagogue on Fantasy Island

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.

If rhetorical excess were the sole qualification for the presidency, Trump would win again hands down. I trained as a scientist during the analogue era, so my personal Lie-O-Meter has a needle with tiny pegs at the ends of its range. When Trump called his reluctant and half-hearted pandemic mobilization the largest since World War II, my needle nudged the “pants on fire” peg. When he said that Biden had called for a complete shutdown of our economy—a “surrender” not a “solution”—my needle hit the peg so hard it bent.

When Trump claimed he had done more for African-Americans than any president since Abraham Lincoln, my needle wrapped around the “pants-on-fire” peg, disabling the meter. (Ever heard of Harry Truman, who desegregated the entire US military, or Lyndon Johnson, who secured and signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965, which ended Jim Crow in law, if not in fact?)

With my Lie-O-Meter thus disabled, I had to let professionals produce a full tally of all the lies, half-truths and exaggerations in Trump’s hour-and-ten-minute speech. I laud them in advance for doing this onerous but necessary work. If no one calls him on them, Trump will double down on lies.

My mind then turned to general themes, of which I found four. The first was classic demagoguery, going back through Hitler to Caesar. Trump claimed that Biden had betrayed the people for an unnamed “elite,” and that only Trump would fight for them.

This claim might seem a small variation on his earlier boast that “Only I can fix it.” But it could be far more effective. The mad rush toward globalization, which threw millions of Americans out of jobs and created our oligarchy, was endorsed by, if not a product of, our elite “thinkers.” Distracted by the shiny abstractions of “efficiency” and “profit,” they forgot basic cause and effect, which outsider Ross Perot had discerned. The Dems can moot this theme by pointing out how little Trump has done to bring jobs back, including his failure to rebuild our infrastructure.

The second theme was one the entire convention so far had telegraphed. Biden, the GOP claimed unanimously, has been hijacked by “far left radicals” and socialists. This claim is harder to sell because: (1) Biden beat Sanders and Warren on precisely this question; (2) Biden is well known as an ideological moderate; and (3) socialists are not generally understood as “elite,” so Demagogic Theme 2 conflicts with Demagogic Theme 1.

Trump’s third demagogic theme was one of Democrats encouraging violence and hobbling the police. It was just such a law-and-order theme that put Richard Nixon and Bush I in the White House.

But its effectiveness for Trump today depends on how events unfold. The American public has more immediate worries than increasing protests and lawlessness: the ever-worsening pandemic, the aftermath of Hurricane Laura, and the prospect of more flooding to come. As the New York Times reported, the increasing frequency of severe storms (if not the global warming that causes them) is already moving public opinion toward abandoning flood-prone areas rather than repeatedly rebuilding them. Whether protest-triggered violence stays atop these disasters in the public mind depends in part on the efforts of Democrats and progressives to contain it, at least until the election.

The final general theme offered Democrats a good opening to attack. It was, in essence, a head-in-the-sand approach. Virtually the entire positive thrust of this final night of the GOP Convention was to tout the pre-pandemic economy—for which Trump took full credit while inheriting it from Obama. Trump promised he would conquer the pandemic and that a good economy would return. He ignored the entire subject of global warming or—if you prefer “conservative” political correctness—the self-evidently increasing frequency of devastating storms.

This willful ignorance of unpleasant facts gives the Dems obvious openings, especially if things go south. Trump’s hundreds of admirers before the White House podium were packed together, without social distancing. They were cheering, chanting and rising and sitting together, with only a tiny minority wearing masks. If the pandemic worsens, the media will repeat these clear transgressions of scientific advice in an endless loop, and the GOP and Trump will suffer for them.

An implicit theme that could counter the “law and order” push was the Republicans’ own lawlessness. Never since the White House was built over two centuries ago has it been used for a political campaign. Arguably the Hatch Act forbids doing so. Yet Trump used it for the Republican Convention and produced a Fourth-of-July-style fireworks display over the National Mall and the Washington Monument.

This and Trump’s earlier military parade are the kinds of things that the Soviets did in Red Square and the Chinese do in Tiananmen Square today. They are not things that democracies do, for they confuse the awesome power of the state with partisan politics. These facts probably trouble Biden supporters more than Trump die-hards, but they might have some effect in influencing undecided voters.

One final feature of Trump’s demagoguery is worth noting. Although his words were fiery, his delivery was not. His raspy voice lacked timber and volume, and his tone lacked emotional affect, so much so that he seemed to be just going through the motions.

My first reaction, quite early in the speech, was to think, “This man is sick; he might have heart disease or be coming down with Covid.” But I’m a world-class hypochondriac. The source of his weakness might have been as simple as him having been told to stick to his script if he wanted to have a chance of winning, and him finding no pleasure in stifling his usual random ad-libs. (Discipline comes hard to Trump, which is why most military leaders can’t stand him.)

And so the GOP’s grand exercise in denial and demagoguery limped to its anticlimactic conclusion. When it was over, I heaved a sigh of relief.

But I had had to watch it. Until mid-November, we will not know whether this election marks the revival and restoration of our democracy or its end.

Evil is indeed banal. Whether this banal demagoguery will repel voters or draw them deeper into the Pit is hard to foresee. But the answer could fix humanity’s fate for much of the next millennium. If our own democracy, with all its checks and balances, succumbs to such crude authoritarianism, what others can long remain standing?

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GOP Day 3: Message from an Alternative Universe

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.

Day 3 of the GOP’s virtual convention could have been transmitted from another Universe. It was a Universe in which Joe Biden promised to defund the police, rather than repeatedly refusing to do so. It was a Universe in which Biden would bring socialism to America, after having repudiated Medicare for All, and after having beaten the only Democratic candidate (Sanders) to have endorsed socialism.

It was a Universe in which the direst threat now facing American cities is the flames of protest-driven violence, not a still-raging pandemic or a Category 5 hurricane about to devastate the Gulf Coast. It was a Universe in which global warming doesn’t exist, and there is no less costly alternative to burning fossil fuels until we’ve turned their every last drop into greenhouse gases. It was a Universe in which Trump, after having made every effort to demean, belittle and marginalize Black Americans, undermine their just causes, and normalize white supremacy, trotted out a team of hitherto hidden supporters—including a Black former football star and a white team manager, to give full-throated homage to his “leadership.”

It was a Universe in which “professors and protestors blame others,” as one speaker said, but not our president, who passed the buck to governors and mayors, scientists and even mask wearers for failing to contain the virus and so devastating our economy. Most of all, it was a Universe in which the normal rules of cause and effect don’t apply. Speaker after speaker told of soulful conversions and positive life changes without even attempting to relate them, in any way, to Trump, the GOP or Trump’s presidency. The flow of their “logic” was as ludicrous as “I’m a good person who has overcome real obstacles, so vote for Trump.”

The culmination of the evening, of course, was Mike Pence’s speech accepting re-nomination for vice-president. The pundits at the PBS Newshour seemed to think that it was par for the course in political conventions. But I had a different take.

I have seen Pence brush off hardened newspeople who question his lies (like Judy Woodruff) with a dismissive air and a look that says “How dare you question me!” Last night I saw him all but call Democrats baby killers. He does this with impressive gravitas and the absolute certitude of a man who believes, deep in his heart, that God is on his side. He reminds me of the Taliban and the Islamic State.

Joe Biden is right. Our democracy is on the ballot. I think ours may be history if Trump wins another four years. But that’s not my worst nightmare. My worst nightmare is that Trump’s ticket wins and—whether through death, disability, resignation or impeachment and removal—Pence ends up in the Oval Office.

Trump is erratic, scatterbrained, chaotic and indecisive. He’s done a lot of damage, but his many personal weaknesses make him less dangerous. He’s the crazy uncle we just can’t get rid of.

Pence is nothing of the kind. He’s deliberate, methodical, careful and adamant, even in his lies. Like Hitler, he picks the most strategic lies to repeat endlessly; he doesn’t waste time or credibility flogging minor ones, like the relative size of Trump’s inaugural crowd. Trump lies too much; Pence lies just enough. As his speech last night so well demonstrated, Pence has the potential to become a superior demagogue.

While purporting to be a Christian, Pence has, methodically and deliberately, compromised many Christian and American values. Like most of Trump’s enablers, he has endorsed, implicitly or explicitly, violations of law, immunity from legitimate investigation, cruelty to the vulnerable and the helpless, malign neglect of the poor, extortion, gross corruption, and pardoning convicted but supportive criminals.

Unlike Trump, Pence doesn’t have the excuse of being unable to discern right and wrong through the fog of his own psychic needs. Like Bill Barr, he seems to have chosen the Dark Side to get closer to power; but Pence is a stronger and a tougher man than Barr.

Trump’s many and obvious personal faults—including his craving for attention and praise—make him malleable. Pence has none of those weaknesses. Trump has a will of mush, Pence a will of steel. He’s Caesar to Trump’s Nero or Caligula. And he’s the ultimate authoritarian: he’s sure he knows what God wants. If he ever gets the chance, he could become an American Stalin. That’s an alternative Universe I don’t want to see even in my nightmares.

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GOP Day Two: Credit-Grabbing, Demonizing Dems, but No Plans for Anything

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.

In 2007, I wrote a post explaining why I had stopped watching presidential debates. They had become like “mood” ads for cars that associate a brand with sex, speed, excitement, power or safety, without ever telling you much about the car. A car, after all, is a machine; it’s not your sex life, your career or your family. It might help to know something specific about it and how it differs from competitive products.

Most debates don’t give you anything like that. Among the many mostly-irrelevant things candidates sell us is this: “They tell us little inspiring stories about other people that they’ve heard. They praise others’ heroism, hoping some will rub off on them.”

The most memorable moments of the GOP’s virtual convention last night were of that sort. They were not just stories; they were “show and tell” sessions led by the master political showman himself. Literally worming his big body between and beside them, Trump had others tell their tales of kindness, grit and transcendence. He supervised and commented, as if he had personally gotten them to do it all and deserved to bask in their glory.

There was a Black bank robber who had found Jesus in prison and, upon release, had formed an effective group to transition formerly incarcerated people to normal life and jobs. There was a policemen who had adopted the baby of a pregnant drug addict he had found on the job. There were five immigrants who achieved naturalization, after years of patient effort and waiting. Trump presided over their ceremony, as if he personally, and not the law, were conferring their new citizenship.

Forget that Trump, in his public statements, has not been noted for kindness to either criminals or immigrants. Forget that he has used the scourge of drugs to scare and inflame. Forget that Mexican border apprehensions alone exceeded 850,000 in the last fiscal year. Forget that Trump has reduced legal immigration to historic lows, like those after “Red scares” early in the last century. What does it tell you about Trump’s policies or plans—or even his on-the-job-competence—that he (or his party) employs talented PR folk who can put on heart-warming shows?

The next most salient thing from last night was the diatribes. Like Cicero railing against Carthage, Trump’s two sons, Don Jr. and Eric, produced thunderous tirades against the Dems and Joe Biden. The Dempocalypse they predicted included riots, looting, homes under siege, socialism, Communism, and the loss of freedom to think and speak. (This after Biden had roundly beat the socialist Bernie Sanders.) The speeches were long on abstractions and polysyllabic words, big on fear and loathing, but short on concrete examples, logic and common sense. They were, in Shakespeare’s words, “a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” I doubt they convinced any viewer not already hiding under his bed with a locked and loaded AK-47.

Trump’s daughter, Tiffany, produced a feminized version of the same thing. More a lament than a tirade, it predicted that Biden as president would cause the loss of all we hold dear. The only strong impression it left me was that Tiffany has too many teeth.

So what did we learn last night about Trump’s plans for the pandemic? Not much. We were told there are several vaccines on the way, including one from the “Warp Speed” program that Trump waved his hands over. Most of the programs are from abroad and beyond Trump’s reach. But we already knew that.

As for the thing we face that could cause many more deaths and far more suffering than our worst war ever—global warming—we were told absolutely nothing. Trump has no plans to deal with that because he thinks it’s a hoax. His entire party follows like the lackeys they are, despite growing concern in the business community that the GOP is supposed to represent. Meanwhile, California is being consumed by record wildfires, whose smoke is polluting the whole Southwest, and two hurricanes are bearing down on New Orleans. (The Dems should pound this glaring omission to death.)

So it went. Nine years ago, I took stock of our ten most serious national problems, which then had had an average longevity of 17.5 years, now 26.5 years. I didn’t include health insurance because Obamacare had just passed two years before and seemed promising. I didn’t include systematic racism and historic division because I wasn’t sufficiently sensitive or prophetic. But of the ten generation-long problems I described, only one—foreign oil dependence—has been more or less solved by now, and by the private sector, not any pol. And anyway oil is running out worldwide.

So what, if any, plans for anything important did the GOP’s video extravaganza lay out? Nothing I can recall. Lots of claims were made about past actions, many of them false or misleading. Secretary Pompeo told us that his “leadership” has made the world safer for us and for freedom. He spoke from Jerusalem as if we owned it (which our evangelicals surely wish). But even he didn’t state any policies or plans, just foreign-policy “spin.”

So when you get right down to it, a vote for Trump in 2020 is just as much a gamble as it was in 2016. You put all your money down on double green zero and wait to get rich without effort or to throw yourself off the nearest bridge. As Sarah Palin might say, “How’s that workin’ out for ya, America?”

One unusual thing that Trump’s operatives did try to offer is pomp and circumstance. In his naturalization “ceremony” and in his introduction to his wife Melania’s utterly forgettable speech, Trump used the White House as a prop. His own walks were replete with liveried soldiers opening doors and a band playing “Hail to the Chief.” Melania’s walk down the Rose Garden Portico, with the closely assembled but maskless GOP multitudes applauding vigorously, was reminiscent of Vladimir Putin’s walk down the Kremlin’s long hallway on his inauguration as Russian President in 2018.

I wondered whether Trump’s staff had gotten the idea from the Russians. (Maybe not; Putin’s walk was much longer and the Kremlin’s bigger halls filled with many more sycophants.) But Trump himself or someone on his staff apparently thinks that Americans, or at least die-hard Trump supporters, long for a monarch. So much for “freedom” and self-determination.

So there you have it on Tuesday, August 25, 2020. No plans for anything, as usual. Ciceronian diatribes against demonized opponents. Credit stolen from ordinary people’s lives and achievements, and the trappings of a king. If our Founders rolling over in their graves could generate electricity, they ought to be making enough now to retire two coal-fired plants.

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The “Big Lie” Convention

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The Republicans’ virtual convention got off to a great start last night in galvanizing Trump’s base. But that, apparently, wasn’t its sole purpose. Speakers like Herschel Walker (the Trump-befriended Black football star), Governor and Ambassador Nikki Haley and Senator Tim Scott seemed bent on humanizing Trump and his party. They softened some hard edges—far more than Trump ever does or tries to do himself.

These effective speakers had to have had a bigger purpose in mind than just making Trump’s die-hards feel better about themselves. Doing that, after all, would produce no net new votes. So we can assume that someone among the night’s producers had in mind “broadening the base” for the run-up to the actual election. If so, the night posed a question that is existential not just for American democracy, but for any democracy in the Internet-electronic age: how much can Big Lies sway voters?

At the dawn of the electronic age, after radio but before television, Nazi Minister of Propaganda Josef Goebbels and Adolf Hitler invented the “Big Lie.” The question they posed was simple: could a bald lie, with little or no factual basis, be sold to a whole people with constant repetition by authority figures?

The answer they found was a resounding “yes.” The Nazis sold several Big Lies, but perhaps the most egregious involved German Jews.

Before Nazism, German Jews loved German culture, science, commerce and industry and were successful participants in them. But the Nazis’ lie portrayed them as spies, saboteurs and traitors, responsible for deliberately contributing to Germany’s economic carnage after losing World War I.

The result was the so-called “final solution,” in which Nazis systematically murdered six million German Jews and other “enemies of the people” in the Holocaust. One of many things that made this particular Big Lie so horrendous was that most of the people whose extermination the Nazis had used it to justify were not foreign enemies, but loyal German citizens. Many who had the means to do so declined to flee Germany in time because they just could not believe that their own government would treat them so.

All this may seem but history. Yet it’s hardly forgotten. Today, in a reformed and repentant Germany, golden paving stones recall the fates of all known victims of the Holocaust, engraved with their names and dates of deportation to the death camps. These stones lie in virtually every city, suburb, town and hamlet of modern Germany, testaments to the lethal power of Big Lies.

The Nazis drove their Big Lie to its horrible conclusion with the most primitive electronic media now in wide use: radio and film. TV hadn’t yet been invented. In addition, Goebbels made a big mistake: he aimed his propaganda too high, using the elite of pre-war Germany’s sophisticated film and theater, rather than aiming his lies at the working masses.

The Nazis could sell this catastrophic Big Lie to the German people with only radio and film, and by aiming above most of the German public’s heads. How much better could Trump and the GOP do with television, cable, the Internet and social media to play with, let alone with Fox’ moron pundits and the likes of Limbaugh and Carlson, who aim their lies directly at the intelligence and ire of ordinary, non-college-educated workers? That, my friends, is the existential question posed by the first night of the Republicans’ virtual convention, if not by the rest of it, too.

The Big Lies the Convention served up are pretty easy to identify. In rough order of importance to a hypothetical rational electorate, there are five.

First, it lied that Trump gave us the Obama Expansion, rather than slow it down by unneeded tax cuts for the rich, failing to rebuild our infrastructure, a counterproductive trade war in China, and (most recently) failing to fight the pandemic first. Second, it lied that Trump fought the virus promptly and effectively, rather than blaming it on China, saying it would “go away,” refusing for months to force production of PPE, tests and ventilators under the Defense Production Act, disclaiming all responsibility for a coordinated federal response, forcing premature opening of businesses (causing spikes in contagion), and recommending untried and even farcical cures like hydroxychloroquine and ingesting bleach.

The other three Big Lies are closer to Hitler’s fateful lie about German Jews. The third tars Black people and their sympathizers of all races as promoting violence and “carnage” in American cities, when all they want is to stop wanton police violence against innocent Black people, or violence grossly out of proportion to their offenses. The fourth paints Joe Biden, who was chosen as candidate precisely for his moderate, incremental, non-threatening approach, as “far-left” radical who will promote violence, revolution and “socialism” (the last after he beat Bernie Sanders precisely on that issue). The fifth Big Lie is simple and concrete: it’s that Biden, who has repeatedly and publicly repudiated and disavowed defunding the police, has really made doing so part of his platform.

What gives these Big Lies their existential menace is not just their substantive importance. Lies have always been a part of electoral politics. It’s the phalanx of private and invisible actors who stand behind some or all of them: Fox, Sinclair, Limbaugh, Carlson, and legions of domestic and foreign trolls, spooks, political operatives and Lenin’s well-named “useful idiots.” Other, far more powerful private individuals, like Mark Zuckerberg and Jack Dorsey, spread the Big Lies for profit, or claim they can’t profitably stop them.

Today’s Big Lies are not only unprecedented in the number and power of their spreaders; they are unique in scope. When the Nazis told their Big Lies, they knew they were deluding the people. They justified doing so for the recovery and greater glory of a Germany then suffering the economic pain of the Weimar Inflation—the worst developed-nation inflation in human history.

In contrast, today’s Big Liars pretend to be creating “our own reality,” as Dubya and Cheney described their enterprise. They think that, if enough people come to credit their Big Lies, they can become as good as Truth. With Trump, it’s hard to tell what he really believes, but it often seems he believes at least many of his 20,000 lies and misleading statements.

This has never happened before, except in George Orwell’s dystopian novels. Yet it’s precisely Donald Trump’s modus operandi and the reason he sits in the White House. For him, as for Hitler and his crew, Big Lies have been a successful electoral strategy.

Our First Amendment is helpless against this tide of lies. Its theory is that Truth will emerge from a cacophony of competing voices. But human society never had to deal with a system in which every person with an Internet connection, including our President, can serve up his own Big Lies with practical impunity.

The relentless advance of technology will only make it easier to produce Big Lies—and “fake news” to back them up—with greater and greater verisimilitude. In a few years, it will become impossible even for the smartest experts to distinguish fake video from the real thing, at least by examining the video alone. You might have to be an all-seeing historian just to know what’s real and what’s not.

This is the existential threat to democracy, not to mention any rational society, that Donald Trump and his Republican lackeys present. It’s the same threat that Orwell foresaw in fiction most of a century ago. But today it’s real, and its technology and power are all on the side of the Big Liars.

If you want to know why authoritarian governments are growing worldwide like grass after a spring rain, it’s not some mystery of history. Their spread has coincided almost exactly with the spread and dominance of the Internet and social media.

It’s not that common citizens in countries as diverse as China, Egypt, Hungary, the Philippines, Poland, Russia, and Turkey have suddenly become sheep. It’s that strong men everywhere understand that Big Lies are the political analogues of nuclear weapons in the Internet Age. They want them for their own, and they want to control others’ Big Lies, not to mention truths, by hobbling the Internet.

Whether human democracy can survive this onslaught, or whether George Orwell was a real-life Cassandra, remains to be seen. It’s one of many things that, as Biden said, are on the ballot this fall. It may be the one that matters most.

P.S. Watching PBS Newshour’s coverage of the first night of the Republicans’ convention was sobering. You could see on the analysts’ faces their appreciation, if not awe, at how slickly effective many speakers’ Big Lies were.

All talk of an easy Biden victory had vanished by the evening’s end. But, surprisingly, no one mentioned the elephant in the room: the fact that much of the slickness arose from boldly stated Big Lies. Maybe no one saw the elephant; maybe we’ve all, including hardened journalists, become inured to “truthiness.” If so, that bodes ill for the election and our collective future.

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“President Joe Biden”: the Dems’ Final Night

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The capstone on the Dems’ virtual convention fell into place last night. The edifice didn’t totter, as some had hoped it might. Instead, the capstone fit neatly and gracefully. It reflected the light that was Joe Biden’s chief metaphor for the night. It made it easy to imagine him sitting in the Oval Office come January and putting an abrupt end to our long national nightmare.

We live in a nation of license, not freedom. No one has to wear a mask, and many who don’t brag of their indifference to infecting others. Anything goes on our cable media, where so-called pundits make “points” like bullies or frat boys on a high-school playground. Anything goes on social media, where trolls, foreign spooks and paid political operatives post their disinformation right next to announcements of your friends’ and families’ weddings, births and graduations. Anything goes on Twitter, where a president who should be getting a good night’s sleep (so he can figure out how cause and effect impact real Americans) avenges real and imagined slights with insulting Tweets throughout the wee hours.

After four more years of this insanity, we all might have forgotten what a president looks and sounds like. Last night, Biden reminded us. He jogged our dim recollection that our president is supposed to work for us.

Accused of being full of gaffes, Biden served us a Lincolnesque blend of emotion, reason, empathy and policy. [Clich here for a transcript.] He hit all the buttons, from Trump’s catastrophic failure to handle the pandemic to reviving national research and development, from a raised minimum wage to creating millions of climate-saving jobs, from deeply held family values to the faith that conquers despair, from abiding trust in the dignity of every person to seizing this unique moment in history, when we have a chance to beat back the plague of racism and unite our people once and for all.

Yes, as Biden said so well [set the timer at 4:30], character, decency, science, democracy and who we want to be are all on the ballot. But we’re also supposed to vote for our president. By his demeanor and his example, not just his words, Biden reminded us what a president is supposed to be and do.

As a hedge against gaffes, Biden’s pre-speech bio reminded us poignantly that he has suffered from stuttering since childhood. So even if he had stumbled in speaking, that would show us nothing about his mind or his heart. He didn’t.

All in all, the capstone fit the edifice well. Trump may have mastered the art of using Twitter to distract, divide and delude. But the Dems seem to have mastered the newer art of using virtual gatherings to inform, unite, enlighten and inspire.

No in-person convention could ever have given remote viewers the chance to hear 287 speakers state their views and tell their stories. Nor could it have given the most important speakers the power to be heard in an intimate setting, to set their own pace and tone, without the distractions of applause, crowd reaction, interruptions and floor discussions. If nothing else, this tour de force of virtual media probably gave “real” in-person conventions the coup de grace.

Can the GOP match this masterpiece next week? It’s hard to see how. From the marvelous roll call of all states and territories, to last night’s friendly round robin among Cory Booker, Pete Buttigieg, Amy Klobuchar, Beto O’Rourke, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and Andrew Yang, the Dems’ virtual convention was all about teamwork. It reminded us just how strong and deep the Dems’ bench is.

In contrast, Trump is a one-man show. As his presidency crumbles under the all-pervasive domination of a single, unintelligent, incurious, increasingly senile narcissist, so must his campaign. Sycophants and lackeys do not a deep bench make. So expect the GOP convention, like Trump’s White House, to miss the mark by a mile, making it all about him.

For once the Dems put aside their usual fractiousness in the exigency of the moment. They have created a new media animal: the virtual, major-party convention. It was a smashing success.

Expect the GOP and the president, weighed down by his barrage of scatterbrained Tweets for every occasion, to fall short. Just as the GOP has no plan to control the pandemic, no plan to revive our economy, no plan for health insurance, no plan to fight climate change, and no plan to restore our foreign prestige, it’s still, as of Thursday night, trying to figure out what to do on Monday. Caligula cannot manage, let alone lead. But we knew that two millennia ago.

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The Dems’ Third Night

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The Dems’ third night of their virtual convention differed from the first two. The first two celebrated America, its history, its diversity, its promise, and its potential for unity even today. Testimonials of Republicans fed up with Trump showed how good people still can come together for the nation’s sake.

The third night darkened the mood considerably. It brought us back from America’s promise to the nightmare we are living today. It gave us images and tales of domestic abuse, the tragic results of gun violence, devastation from climate change, businesses and farms struggling and dying from Trump’s misrule and the pandemic, and people suffering terrible ailments while fighting a health “care” system that, until Obamacare, wouldn’t pay for their care.

The climax of the evening was President Obama himself. For the first time ever in my memory, he really took off the gloves. During his campaign and for much of his presidency, the strongest thing he had said was that an adversary’s lies were “inaccurate.”

But last night he told it like it is:

“For close to four years now, [Trump has] shown no interest in putting in the work; no interest in finding common ground; no interest in using the awesome power of his office to help anyone but himself and his friends; no interest in treating the presidency as anything but one more reality show that he can use to get the attention he craves.”

“Donald Trump hasn’t grown into the job because he can’t. And the consequences of that failure are severe.”

Strong men anger slowly. So it’s taken Obama nearly four years, or nine if you count from Trump’s first “birther” lie. And he didn’t get angry for himself, but for us. With the mien of a “tough love” uncle, he told us we could lose everything unless we stand up to the bully now.

Obama didn’t just give us that avuncular advice. He put it in historical context. Starting from a Constitution that validated slavery, he traced our slow, painful march toward equality through Emancipation, Women’s Suffrage, Jim Crow, the civil and voting rights acts, John Lewis’ “good trouble,” and the multiracial uprising after George Floyd’s police murder, following so many other needless killings. He told us, in effect, that all we have to do now to deserve the sacrifices of so many who came before us—and those of all the youngsters who fell on the beaches at Normandy—is to vote. If we fail, we’ll devalue all their sacrifices and our heritage, not to mention lose our democracy.

Obama’s speech was filled with historical perspective and deep insight. It was one for the ages, well worth watching or reading. If the Dems win and begin the transformation of our nation that now lies within our grasp, that speech may go down in history with Lincoln’s Gettysburg address, or his Second Inaugural engraved on the walls of the Lincoln Memorial.

No doubt Obama’s speech made everyone who heard it long for his steady hand as president. But unfortunately it overshadowed those of the night’s three leading ladies: Hillary Clinton, New Mexico’s Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham, and Kamala Harris herself.

Harris did a good job of telling the story of her strong and loving family, her upbringing as a first-generation American (born in Oakland, CA!), and her circuitous path to her present position. She presented well as a kind, concerned and caring pol. She did what she had to do to humanize and define herself before Trump’s and Fox’ propagandists get a crack at her. But her speech was too long, and her mostly successful attempt at sweetness and light just couldn’t compete with President Obama’s ringing warning of existential danger.

So all in all, night three was a little schizophrenic. It called out our Trumpocalypse in all its menace, at the same time as it tried to introduce VP-Candidate Harris as a caring, nurturing moderate, not a bomb-throwing socialist. These were hard messages to make coherent. What most viewers will remember, as no doubt will history, is Obama’s powerfully ominous warning. Perhaps that’s for the best.

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Time Lags and the Killing of Obama’s Expansion

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[To jump to the principal post, click here.]

The Dems’ Virtual Convention

Is a virtual convention like those “cookieless cookies” that we Geezers eat to save our hearts—devoid of all the fat and most of the sugar we used to love? So far, the answer is no. The Dems adapted to the medium and hit the ball out of the park. For at least a couple of decades, direct primaries have made conventions little more than show. Nothing both important and substantive happens in them any more. When it does—as in the Dems’ rules-and-delegates brouhaha in 2016—it’s painful to watch and hurts the cause. In-person conventions have become zombies, surviving without purpose or life. Pandemic necessity has revived them. They are now four-day-long infomercials about the party, its candidates, their character, their values, their supporters, and (of course) how bad the other guys are. They’re chances to capture voters’ heads and hearts with far more than thirty-second sound bites or the pressured 90-second answers in debates. For those purposes, the Dems did a superb job. I’m a substance guy. I value a high truth-to-words ratio. To me, the highlighters of the first two days were Bernie Sanders, Michelle Obama, Bill Clinton, and Colin Powell, in that order. In a short speech, well worth watching, Sanders laid out precisely what’s at stake in this election. Donald Trump’s kingly reign is “not normal.” Sanders then told us precisely what that Dems plan to do about it if they win, as specifically as he could in the time given. Michelle Obama translated what Sanders had said into the softer language of female caring and empathy. She raised a question key to our national survival: will our kids and grandkids think this is normal? If so, nothing else matters; our democracy is doomed. With his usual incisiveness, Bill Clinton pointed out that leadership doesn’t mean passing the buck, as Trump did to states, cities and everyone but himself. And Colin Powell—who might have been our first Black president but for the GOP’s three-generation electoral strategy of racism—told us how badly Trump has weakened us. (Think that Powell, who kept Bush I out of Baghdad, would have mired us in two needless wars, which have become the longest in our history? Racism doesn’t just hurt its direct victims; by depriving us of the full use of talents like Powell’s, it hurts us all.) The Dems made mistakes, of course. At one point on the second night, vibrating, highlighted all-caps words overlaid the video, as in ads for used cars. If there’s any more of that garbage on tape, there’s still time to edit it out. But everything else worked well. The first day’s testimonials of reformed Republicans, including former Ohio Governor John Kasich and a bunch of ordinary voters, was strong. The second-day’s non-speaker highlight was the virtual roll call of States. It did three things. First, it tallied the primaries’ results and showed where Sanders had significant support. Second, it properly paid homage to Sanders and his supporters for making invaluable points about gross economic inequality, abysmally inadequate health care, and longstanding racial injustice, and for getting solutions into the party’s platform. Third, the roll call showed—graphically and demographically—what a marvelously broad, diverse and inclusive nation we have, and why we need a government to match. Can the GOP beat that beautiful display of inclusion and variety with its usual image of burly white guys in red MAGA hats backing Trump up? It’ll be interesting to see how the GOP roll call rolls out, or whether they’ll even have one. Can a Trump in-person rally attract more than the people who are there in person? Last but not least, there was Dr. Jill Biden. Such an intelligent, dedicated, caring, dynamo of a woman, a teacher no less! Can Melania ever match that? Will the GOP even put her on, with her perpetual air of a woman utterly dominated and utterly unhappy, waiting with pitiful patience to get her long-delayed reward? Again, we’ll see. But it’s hard to see how even Hollywood’s best, who mostly oppose Trump wildly, could do a better job for him. How can you “spin” the facts of 170,000 mostly needless deaths, or our nation’s dismal record in pandemic fighting? How can you morph a soulless narcissist into a man who, under stress of a hard job and personal tragedy, took time to befriend an elevator operator? How can you disguise those selfsame burly white guys in MAGA hats, some bearing semiautomatic weapons (like the “protestors” in Michigan’s capital), as neighbors and friends who care about voters and their families? It’s a tall hurdle for the GOP to jump next week. The Dems have so far set the bar high.

“[Trump] inherited the longest economic expansion in history, from Barack Obama and Joe Biden. And then, like everything else that he inherited, he ran it straight into the ground.”—Senator Kamala Harris, in her maiden speech as the Democratic vice-presidential nominee. [Set the timer at 11:24]

There are many ways to deceive voters. You can simply lie or mislead, as President Trump has reportedly done 20,000 times. Or you can use derision and sarcasm, like a frat boy in a clique on a high-school playground, as Fox did in treasonously retarding our diplomatic efforts to deal with Kim Jong Il and his nukes.

But one of the most effective means of duping voters is to lead them to false conclusions that come “naturally” but erroneously. The field of economics is rife with opportunities for that kind of scam.

Perhaps the simplest and easiest scam relies on a hard but common truth. It takes years for changes in government policy, good or bad, to affect the whole nation’s economy for better or worse. (For a different kind of deception based on a common misconception about the price of solar energy, click here and scroll down to “The PR Hack’s Method.”)

Time lags in the responses of our huge economic “system” to policy changes are an intrinsic feature of a complex economy of 330 million people with many moving parts. Whenever a president, the Fed, or our Congress makes a significant change in economic policy, the real effects of that change usually take years to show up. Only the stock market, which measures collective greed and fear, responds more quickly, and often erroneously.

Voters often tend to assume that, because B followed A, A must have caused B. But that’s not necessarily so. Because time lags in big national economies typically take years, something that happened long before A may actually have caused B.

And so it was with the Obama-Biden-Pelosi Expansion. Mere days after President Obama’s first inaugural, Sen. Mitch McConnell declared making President Obama fail the GOP’s immediate goal. For a purely partisan ploy, the idea made sense, because of the economic time lag.

Obama took office just four months after the Crash of 2008. That was the greatest financial panic since the Crash of 1929, which brought on the Great Depression.

Most economists think that, despite FDR’s heroic efforts and a then fully Democratic Congress, the Great Depression never really ended until we got into World War II in December 1941. That delay was over twelve years. So based on general principles and actual history, the GOP had every reason to expect the Crash of 2008 to last at least four years, i.e., all of Obama’s first term. If, as then seemed likely, there were not much of an improvement by its end, the GOP could blame it all on Obama and maybe win back the presidency. For unscrupulous people bent on gaining and keeping power above all else, that ploy was well worth a try. (We won’t even mention the incessant resort to virulent racism.)

That’s just what the GOP tried to do. It skimped on a much-needed stimulus package, begrudging the bare minimum needed to keep the financial system from collapsing. Due to GOP opposition, Democrats’ attempts to stem losses in the housing market and save millions of individual homeowners from foreclosure never got congressional buy-in. For more details on how the GOP and Mitt Romney rolled out this cynical “blame Obama” strategy in 2012, click here.

But in the end, the GOP scam failed for two reasons. First, Obama, his then VP Joe Biden, and Nancy Pelosi are skilled pols. They added some things to the general stimulus, including bailing out the American auto industry and increasing its sales with “cash for clunkers.” Second, the American economy proved to be far more resilient than many expected: except for housing, the Crash turned out to be mostly confined to the finance sector. It didn’t contaminate all the real economy.

So what actually happened was a classic “V-shaped” recovery. Following is a graph of quarterly net private-sector job gains or losses, in thousands, for the entire nation, for the calendar years 2006-2011:

The raw data came from the Bureau of Labor Statistics website. What they show is that, by year-end 2010, under Barack Obama’s wise and steady hand, private-sector job growth had rebounded to about the same level as under George W. Bush, in the last full year pre-crash.

The Obama stimulus—called The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009—passed in February 2009. The time lag between that big policy change and the right edge of the “V-shaped” recovery was less than two years. With skill, determination, and an understanding of basic economics, Obama, Biden and Pelosi had made a classic “V-shaped” recovery in record time. That’s a very fast turn of our ocean-liner-sized economy after a change of heading at the helm.

Now comes Donald Trump. He knows nothing at all about how anything works, except for his own fragile ego and the power of extortion. Under his über-incompetent rule, today’s GOP continues to blame Obama, Biden and Pelosi, who actually fixed it, for the Crash of 2008 that the GOP’s deregulatory mania and coddling of Wall Street had helped cause. But that ongoing propaganda enterprise pales when compared with the GOP’s current scams.

In the first and most evilly audacious, the GOP is pushing to “reopen” the national economy in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic by forcing “reopening” down workers’ throats. The coercive method is simple: depriving workers and hard-hit cities and states of the cash they need to survive economically beyond July. Without enforceable lockdown orders, and with workers’ unemployment insurance reduced or ended, they would have to go back to work or starve and be evicted, health risks be damned.

Trump and the GOP have pretexts for this coercion, endorsed with a straight face by multiple GOP Congresspeople. The main claim is that restoring the extra $600 per week of unemployment benefits, which has now expired, would encourage workers not to seek jobs. A secondary talking point is that states, counties and cities, which are mostly under water, don’t “deserve” any more money because they’ve “mismanaged” the grossly inadequate sums they’ve already been given.

This is nothing less than scorched-earth class warfare. The assault on supplemental unemployment insurance is an assault on private-sector workers. The skimping of money for states and localities—most of which, unlike the feds, have to balance their crashing budgets by law—is an assault on public-sector workers. Unless reversed, it will soon force mass dismissals of police, fire-fighters, teachers, bus- and train-drivers, garbage collectors and public health officials, among many others. They will find themselves among the ranks of laid off in the middle of a pandemic.

This is a ploy to force workers to go back to work, regardless of their safety, and to downsize local government by sacrificing public workers, so their bosses and private businesses can thrive, and so Trump can steal credit for continuing the Obama-Biden-Pelosi Expansion.

Beyond its sheer inhumanity, this economic coercion has two logical flaws. First, there are no jobs for most of those who’ve lost them, at least in the private sector. Customers fearing the pandemic, not government, have shut down most businesses that “pack ’em in.” That includes theaters, restaurants, public gyms, sports stadia, airlines, cruise ships and even bars and barber shops. Those businesses aren’t going to be thriving anytime soon, regardless of how much economic pressure misguided government policy puts on laid-off workers.

Second, by depriving idled workers of the now-expired “extra” unemployment benefits, the GOP has drained the economy of its life blood, consumer spending, just when it needs it most. The same is true of state and local public-sector workers idled by plunging state budgets, with no decrease in public demand for their services. Stopping their salaries kills general demand by putting less money in their hands as consumers. But the pandemic has actually increased demand for public-sector workers in public health. Nevertheless, cash-strapped state and local governments may soon have to start laying them off.

As the pandemic resurges this summer, and perhaps gets even worse in the fall (as happened in 1918), this class warfare is not just figurative. There have been dead bodies, mostly of workers and their loved ones who risk exposure to the virus. And there will be more. Already there have been over 160,000 deaths, including workers in over-stressed hospitals, on the front lines of testing and contact tracing, and in slaughterhouses and closely-packed assembly lines. Workers in schools, if not the kids themselves, may soon be next.

So there you have it: open class warfare, with jobs and consumer spending under siege, and with actual corpses resulting. And there is no end in sight.

This is how low one of our two great political parties has sunk. This is how it has bypassed the normal economic time lags and turned the Obama-Biden-Pelosi Expansion—the longest in American history—into the Trump Pandemic Depression. November’s election may be the very last chance for voters to rescue our economy and our democracy, as well as tens of millions of innocent workers laid off and made destitute in the middle of a still raging pandemic.

While Trump and his GOP lackeys are not in lock-step on every tactic in this class warfare, they all come at it from the same direction: their own personal interests. Trump wants the stock market and economy to rebound prematurely, no matter how many sicken and die, and long before workers and consumers feel safe, so he can claim economic recovery and win the coming election. His sycophants want to keep their political power by continuing to delude the same workers they have scammed for twelve years.

If the pandemic had never happened—or if they had managed it well—they might have pulled the whole scam off. Trump’s blunderbuss whole-commodity tariffs are terrible economic policy, known as counterproductive from actual experience for about a century (ever heard of Smoot and Hawley?). So is Trump’s would-be Cold War with China: like most of what Trump thinks and does, it’s childish, impetuous, and ill-thought-through. It hasn’t begun to bring jobs back from offshore and rebuild our industrial infrastructure, which our oligarchs willfully sold and moved abroad. Only sophisticated, carefully targeted “rifle-shot tariffs” might do that trick.

Despite these gross blunders in policy, the usual time lags in national economic response might have given Trump a second term. It has been less than three years, eight months, since Trump took office and began messing almost everything up. Under normal circumstances, that would not be enough time to degrade the robust Obama-Biden-Pelosi Expansion significantly. The still-rising economic indicators were just beginning to level off when the pandemic struck.

But the pandemic did strike. It’s what economists call an “exogenous” economic force: something out the blue that breaks all the usual rules. It cut short the normal time lags before the effects of bad policy show up. In fact, it’s now cutting our economy stone cold dead, mostly because Trump and his lackeys failed to take the pandemic seriously and screwed up our national response to it as badly as was humanly possible.

So now, Trump, the GOP and we, their hapless victims, can only dream of the kind of V-shaped recovery that President Obama, then Vice-President Biden and Speaker Pelosi engineered after the Crash of 2008. Instead, what we have so far is an L-shaped crash in employment, with a increase in unemployment from 7.1 to 23.1 million in a single month, and with only a small and tentative recovery in jobs since then:

[Click on graph for clearer image.]

Very likely, the jobs curve will soon turn down yet again, as we see the effects of: (1) an ongoing surge in Covid-19 infections and deaths likely to get worse with cold weather and the advent of flu season, and (2) Trump’s and the GOP’s continued skimping on unemployment compensation and money that states, counties and cities need to pay their own employees and stimulate demand. But those effects, only indirectly from the pandemic (mediated by Trump’s and the GOP’s über-incompetence), will probably not show up in full force until after the election.

Meanwhile, we are left with a drop off a sheer cliff, followed by a small and soon-to-be-abortive rise, caused by our president and his Republicans putting their own short-term power interests above the nation’s and its people’s economic and medical survival. Our economy has fallen off a precipice. Your family likely will suffer yet more, because Trump and his GOP care more about their personal political fortunes than about whether you and your family survive or become unemployed and destitute, then sicken and die. It really is that simple: if they had cared about you or your family, they would have taken on the virus first, not Democrats and people of color.

Footnote 1: This economic near-miracle undoubtedly derived also from the fact that the Crash was a product of and threat to bankers primarily; it didn’t much affect the real economy outside of housing.

The V-shaped graph overstates the beneficence of the recovery, because it reflects only private-sector jobs. It doesn’t include government jobs. Total job growth was actually lower than the graph shows because the GOP was trying to drown government in a bathtub at the same time as President Obama was trying to grow all jobs.

Footnote 2: The graphed raw data come from this source and this path: Unemployment: Upper Top Picks: Check box for “Unemployment Level - LNS13000000”: scroll down and click on “Retrieve data.”

Endnote: As if all this were not bad enough, the Trump Administration appears to be hiding the numbers, or at least making them hard to see. The data for the V-shaped graph of the Obama-Biden-Pelosi recovery came from a Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) mini-server that is no longer operative. I can assure readers that I faithfully compiled that graph from data on that mini-server for a footnote in a post published on this blog in November 2012.

Today, the best data I could find on the BLS website was on this page, which tallies and graphs job losses and job gains separately, making it hard to see their net effect without a lot of further work.

Whether the BLS’ current political management deliberately made it hard to see the net change in jobs over time, I leave to the reader to decide. But why would any rational person want to compile and graph job gain and loss figures separately, except to make analysis difficult and let the president brag about job gains without referring to simultaneous job losses?

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Kamala Harris, Catalyst

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.

Last week, my wife and I made a bet. She bet that Joe Biden would pick a white woman as his running mate. I bet he would pick a Black woman. The loser in the bet would have to wash the other’s car.

All week long I felt uneasy, almost fearful, and not because I dreaded washing my wife’s car. She’s an intelligent woman, and I worried whether she might be right. For far too long, Democrats have helped (mostly inadvertently) to institutionalize racism by failing to speak, act and fight against it at every opportunity.

Could this have been yet another instance in which fear of others’ racism in the voting booth leads Democrats to abandon their principles? Could this have been yet another case of Democrats letting a crisis and “good trouble” (John Lewis’ immortal words) go to waste—in this case the national, multiracial uprising after George Floyd’s police murder?

My first reaction on learning of Harris’ selection was cerebral. I had to reconcile my preference for others with Biden’s selection. I thought about how Harris’ empathy and immense debating talent could help the ticket win, and possibly also to govern. And of course I felt relief that Biden had not made the catastrophic blunder of pushing yet another all-white ticket at this historic inflection point.

As the evening wore on, as I watched the thrown-together bios on TV, a strange thing happened. A soothing calm, akin to resolve, overtook me. For the first time since Trump’s unforeseen election, which had happened four years ago as I awoke from shoulder surgery, I felt an unaccustomed sense of confidence. I began to feel that, yes, everything could turn out all right.

A great weight had lifted from my heart. If an otherwise comfortable white Geezer could feel that way, you can imagine how much-maligned and much-neglected people of color and young folk feel, not just here at home, but all over the world.

Despite our national psychotic break in electing and failing to remove Trump, we Americans are still the last, best hope of mankind. Our credo of “all . . . are created equal” still pulls migrants to our shores. Just the idea of having an equal opportunity to succeed—even if it’s often illusory—pulls them in like a magnet. And they enrich us with their hopes and can-do spirit.

Earlier this week PBS Newshour aired a feature on migrants hiking through Panama’s Darien Gap. It’s some sixty-five miles of tropical rainforest, beset with torrential rains, swollen rivers, poisonous snakes, avaricious (human) coyotes, and murderous bandits. After (and if) exhausted and hungry migrants make it through, they have another thousand-plus miles of trek to reach our borders and claim asylum or other immigrant status. (Right now, some 2,000 of them are frozen in place, in a tiny village in Panama, by the pandemic.)

Yet still they come. The intrepid trekkers included Jamaicans, like Senator Harris’ father and Colin Powell’s parents. They also included Pakistanis fleeing Taliban terror. Pakistanis—so far from their homes and anything like their native climate or arid mountain terrain! Yet still they come, with the same spirit as the indentured servants who endured months-long ocean voyages in the dank holds of sailing ships to build this nation from scratch.

The Republicans have had forty years to destroy our nation with their “greed is good” and “profit above all” philosophy. They have incited and exploited fear and hatred of immigrants at the same time as they kept them in fear and legal limbo in order to exploit them as docile workers. Trump’s corruption, incompetence and nastiness are the logical conclusions of the GOP’s governing philosophy for two generations. So is its outrageous but persistent coddling of racists.

Trump’s crude efforts to divide us by race, national origin, religion, ethnicity and sexuality are just a continuation of the divide-and-conquer policy that defeated our late-nineteenth-century progressive labor movement. It took the Great Depression for our workers to overcome that division, unite, unionize and build the most prosperous and egalitarian consumer society in human history. That society lasted until Ronald Reagan began destroying it by crushing the Air Traffic Controllers union and making “It’s your money” the catchphrase of our people’s relationship to their own government.

Now we have another Depression in progress—the Pandemic Depression, which Trump’s corruption and incompetence helped cause and accelerate. But that’s not all. Our demographics are changing, gradually but inexorably. By 2043 we will have no ethnic or racial majority. Non-Hispanic whites will be like everyone else, just another big chunk of ice dissolving in the great Melting Pot. An alliance among people of color and white progressives, within that Melting Pot, could soon change this nation’s politics as never before.

The demographic end was never in doubt, and it’s not now. The question before us is whether that great Melting Pot will still be a democracy and the envy of the world. Kamala Harris’ candidacy and her possible future presidency bring us closer to a favorable answer to that question.

But make no mistake about it. Senator Harris is a cautious, careful, order-seeking, left-leaning moderate. In that respect she’s much like President Obama, now and then. She’s 55 years old. She has her governing philosophy—and her empathy—worked out. She’s not likely to morph suddenly into a radical or firebrand.

But isn’t that how catalysts in chemistry work? They don’t change themselves. Instead, they promote powerful chemical reactions, without themselves changing or being consumed.

Just so, Harris will move us gently and surely toward our no-majority, fully egalitarian society, step by careful step. The journey may be steep and hard at times, but we will get there, just like most trekkers through the Darien Gap. At least that’s what gave me hope, and a startling dose of calm resolve, for the first time since President Obama left office.

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Our Modern Congress: Designed to Fail

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.

For the principal post, click here.

“Vice-President Kamala Harris”

Doesn’t that sound good? She would not have been my first choice, but there are many good reasons for picking her. She’s young (55), bright, articulate and a superb debater and “attack dog.” She will make mincemeat of Mike Pence. She might even get The Donald to come unglued. (If anyone can do that, a Black woman who is self-evidently smarter, better informed and quicker than Trump can. Let the Twitter wars begin!) Harris has the law-enforcement credentials to blunt any attack on the ticket as “soft on crime.” Her selection, all by itself, puts a dagger in the heart of white supremacy. She’s a native-born American of Jamaican and (East) Indian descent. With any luck, her path-breaking candidacy will inspire the 270,000 Indian-Americans who live in Dallas-Fort Worth or Houston to help turn Texas blue. Joe Biden waited as long as he could to name his running mate. Now that we know, we can starting thinking about his Cabinet. Here are my picks: Secretary of State: Barack Obama Secretary of Defense: James Mattis Attorney General: Eric Holder (again) Antitrust Division Chief (DOJ): Tim Wu Secretary of the Treasury: Elizabeth Warren Secretary of Labor: Bernie Sanders Secretary of Energy: Lynn Jurich Secretary of the Interior: Jay Inslee Secretary of Homeland Security: Beto O’Rourke Secretary of Education: Janet Napolitano Secretary of Health and Human Services: Julie Gerberding Secretary of Housing and Urban Development: Cory Booker Secretary of Transportation: Mary Barra Chairman, Council of Economic Advisors: Paul Krugman Next opening on Federal Reserve: Carmen Reinhart Ambassador to Ukraine: Alexander Vindman Special Envoy to the Middle East: Tom Friedman This is the kind of government we can have if Biden-Harris win. We can also fix Congress (see below). There is no time to look back. Now it’s all hands on deck until January 20.

“Each House may determine the Rules of its Proceedings . . .”—U.S. Const., Art. I, Section 5, Par. 2 (in part)

Last week the United States Congress failed a critical test. With thirty-plus million people unemployed, and millions facing hunger, eviction and destitution, it failed to pass a vital second relief bill.

Think of Congress as a spaceship on the launching pad. It didn’t even rise off the pad. As it struggled to get airborne, it collapsed on its side and exploded, immolating its “payload,” the American people. Then the President tried to cobble together a relief package of vague, misleading and utterly inadequate unilateral decrees.

Why did Congress’ rocket ship explode so catastrophically? Under its rules of operation, it had been designed to fail. Changes in how Congress works have made failure inevitable for about a generation.

The good news is that we can fix it. We can do so without amending our Constitution. We can even fix it without reforming our malapportioned Senate, whose distortion of majority rule can’t be changed without every state’s consent. Democratic majorities in both Houses could fix Congress’ biggest and most recent design failures by two simple majority votes on congressional rules next January. Read on.

The crux of the matter is bipartisanship. Everyone claims he’s for it, including our President, the most obnoxiously partisan president in our history. A lot of these claims are lies and spin. But what the President or individual members of Congress say or think doesn’t really matter. Today’s rules and customs of both Houses are designed not just to make bipartisanship fail, but to make it virtually impossible.

Take the failed relief bill, for example. The Democratically controlled House passed a full relief bill, with $3 trillion of rescue money, on May 15, almost 90 days ago. In the Senate, Republicans outnumber Democrats 53 to 45, with two independents, Bernie Sanders (from Vermont) and Angus King (from Maine), caucusing and usually voting with the Democrats. The Vice-President could break a tie vote. So all the Democratic bill would need to pass, in theory, is the support of six out of 53 Republicans, enough to force a tie that the VP could break.

This year, 23 Republicans must defend their seats in a time of pandemic resurgence and economic collapse. Think that just six of them—a little over one-quarter—might like to have their names on an economic rescue package before facing the voters?

By this reasoning, a straight, bipartisan vote—on something like the Democratic bill, or some reasonable compromise—would have passed in a few days of haggling. So why didn’t it?

The reason is that the Senate today is not a bipartisan institution. As the Senate works today, a bill gets to the floor for discussion and a vote only if and after it has received a majority vote in the majority caucus, in this case of the Republicans. And that vote never occurs unless the Majority Leader (now Mitch McConnell) determines, in his wisdom, that a majority of his own caucus favors it and so actually authorizes the vote.

Under this regime, for example, a small minority of the whole Senate, amounting to about a quarter of all its members, can block any bill from getting to the floor for a vote. Here’s an example of how this recipe for minority rule works in practice:

How Congressional Failure Works In a Divided Chamber
Party/Faction	% of Party	% of Whole Chamber
Majority Fringe	51%	26%
Majority Mainstream	49%	25%
Unified Minority	100%	49%

If the majority mainstream votes with the unified minority, their combined vote is 74% of the whole chamber, but the bill can’t advance because the majority fringe has a majority of the majority caucus (approximately 51% to 49%). So the majority fringe can block the bill in caucus, even though it has only 26% of the whole chamber’s votes, while 74% of the full membership support the bill. (Note that in the Senate, but not in the House, each percentage point of the chamber’s vote represents one indivisible member.)

In theory, six or more Republicans could put a relief bill over the top in the Senate, even now, if the bill could come to a vote in the whole chamber. They would if they could—in order to serve their constituents and save their own skins in the midst of our current health and economic meltdown. But they never get the chance. Instead, the extremists, and pols who think they can ride out the disaster because they don’t face re-election for two or four years, call the shots, by virtue of the precondition of a majority vote in the majority caucus. This is democracy?

Under a thing called the “Hastert Rule,” the House now works exactly the same way. It’s named for Denny Hastert, a convicted felon and former high-school basketball coach who somehow got elected to the House from Illinois and somehow got chosen by the GOP as Speaker. Under that rule, which even Nancy Pelosi seems to follow today, nothing gets to the floor of the House for a vote unless it first has won a majority vote in the majority caucus, in our time the Democrats.

Think about that for a moment. Suppose each House is almost equally divided among the two parties, as is often the case these days. Suppose that the majority party has a bare 51% to 49% majority of all the membership. Under the “majority of caucus” rule in each House, the majority of the whole chamber can’t advance a bill unless it has a majority of the majority, or 26% of the whole chamber. That means a small minority of more than 25% of the whole chamber, which happens to comprise a majority of the majority, can block any bill in the majority caucus, even if the other party (49%) is wholly for it. Under those circumstances, every bill that needs bipartisan support requires a 75% supermajority of the whole chamber to pass.

Funny thing, that. In the entire US Constitution, there is no specific requirement so stringent for voting in Congress. Even ratifying international treaties in the Senate, or removing a president after impeachment, requires only a two-thirds vote, or 67%. (The Constitution’s sole three-fourths requirement is for eventually ratifying a constitutional amendment by the individual States, after its approval by two-thirds of each House.)

So both Houses of Congress have, by their own internal rules and customs, effectively raised the requirement for a winning vote on anything, in either House of a closely divided Congress, to something like a supermajority of three-fourths. That’s a proportion so large as as to be mentioned in our Constitution only once, for the number of states needed to ratify amendments.

If you’ve ever wondered why today’s Congress can’t get anything done, it’s not the meanness or recalcitrance of its current members. It’s these rules.

Oddly enough, the Constitution nowhere states that Congress is to do its business by a simple majority. It does require that a majority of each House “shall constitute a Quorum to do Business.” (Article I, Section 5; emphasis added.) That requirement was apparently designed to avoid “midnight” legislation by tiny cabals, at a time when some members could take two to three weeks to cross the country from their home states to the Capitol on horseback.

But the Framers probably failed to specify majority rule in general only because they assumed it. After all, majority rule had been the custom of every democracy ever, from ancient Greece and Rome to the British democracy since Magna Carta, from which we separated in 1776.

More to the point, nothing in the Constitution prevents each House from determining, in “the Rules of its Proceedings,” that it will follow the custom of majority rule that has defined democracy throughout human history. The Democratic Party and Candidate Biden could make that a goal of their respective platforms and promise to re-institute majority rule in both Houses of Congress, if they win both, as soon as the new Congress convenes. They should do so.

While they’re at it, Democratic congressional majorities should also abolish filibusters and Senate holds. “Holds” are fake “filibusters” in which an individual Senator doesn’t even have to speak himself or herself hoarse, like Jimmy Stewart in the classic movie, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, but just sends the Majority Leader a note. Filibusters were invented to delay and insure debate, not to give a legislative minority veto power, far less individual Senators. But in recent years Republicans have used filibusters for vetoes at 142 times the “traditional” rate from World War I to the Vietnam War.

So it’s time to retire filibusters and holds and get back to the fundamentals of democracy: majority rule. Our Constitution never mentions filibusters: they were an invention of later Senate rules makers, intended only to impose reasoned delay, as a means to avoid parliamentary tricks during once-a-century partisan divisions. They were never intended to impose routine vetoes by legislative minorities, as they do today.

As for today’s bizarre, undemocratic, and partisan “majority of majority caucus” rules in both Houses of Congress, it’s useless to speculation on their motivation. But their effects are absolutely clear. They vastly increase the power of the Speaker of the House and the Senate Majority Leader, rendering each House an authoritarian, not deliberative, body ruled by a de facto dictator. They also give individuals (in the Senate) and rump minorities (in both Houses), including fringe groups, effective veto power over legislation. And so they strangle bipartisanship in its cradle.

It doesn’t matter which party started strangling first. Both claim the other did. But either party could promise, if given a majority, to return to simple majority rule with a possibility of bipartisanship. It could do so just by changing the rules in each House, by simple majority vote. Think a few voters, now waiting in fear for Covid-19, joblessness, hunger, eviction and destitution to ruin their families, might respond to that kind of promise?

Footnote: “[N]o State, without its Consent, shall be deprived of its equal Suffrage in the Senate.” US Constitution, Article V (in part).

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