Diatribes of Jay

This blog has essays on public policy. It shuns ideology and applies facts, logic and math to social problems. It has a subject-matter index, a list of recent posts, and permalinks at the ends of posts. Comments are moderated and may take time to appear.

30 September 2020

The Cornered Rat


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.

After covering most presidential debates on this blog for thirteen years, I bailed out last night. I quit after 20 minutes. That’s 22.2% of the debate, less than one quarter.

I couldn’t bear to watch the (verbally) violent disposal of a cornered rat. I found it painful to see Trump talk and shout over the moderator, Chris Wallace, and his opponent, Joe Biden, while lying and making things up with even more than his usual abandon.

The spectacle was degrading, demoralizing and demeaning to the very notions of democracy, respectful debate, and civilization itself. It was a travesty of our alpha-male-ape ancestors’ trial by combat, or medieval knights’ jousting contests, but in context more like children arguing on a playground. As the PBS pundits who watched the whole gruesome thing (and their citizens’ focus group) concurred, no one who watched it all learned a thing.

Why no one foresaw this dismal but predictable outcome is hard to understand. Wallace, of course, was supposed to be neutral. Perhaps he tried to be. But as a legitimate newscaster with a reputation for being tough on Trump, he, too, fell within the cornered rat’s fury.

He should have had means to cut off each speaker’s microphone, perhaps with a red light to let him know. But no mere off switch could ever fill the void of self-control, self-discipline and respect for others that is Donald Trump.

And therein lies the tale of last night’s debate. Our unfit president has made a career of breaking every known rule of law, custom, diplomacy, tradition and decency, and of flaunting his infractions. Underneath it all, he has had some accurate gut feelings about where his own personal interests lie. Now, he must know the end for him is nigh.

For the walls are indeed closing in on Donald J. Trump. According to a vast array of polls, he’s losing his bid for re-election. Even the thirteen-point test of Professor Lichtman—the only expert to have predicted Trump’s win in 2016—shows him losing now.

But that’s just the beginning of Trump’s Shakespearean downfall. As the New York Times’ exposé of his tax returns suggested, Trump has failed at almost everything he’s done except his “reality” TV show “The Apprentice.” His casinos, his hotels (except for Trump tower), his golf courses, his winery, his airline, and most of all his adjudicated-as-fraudulent “university”—suffered bankruptcy, were sold at a loss, or have been losing reams of money.

Throughout his term as president, Trump has never shown the slightest sustained interest in policy, serious problem solving, or even reading the briefing papers painstakingly prepared for him by the experts who work for him. What he wanted as president, evidently, was to continue his career of aggrandizing himself and “monetizing” his personal fame.

But when he falls from presidential power and immunity, all that stops cold. The $421 million that he now reportedly owes soon comes due. Neither Deutsche Bank nor Russian oligarchs will have any reason to lend him money. Officials and business people worldwide will no longer have reason to curry his favor by joining his clubs or patronizing his properties.

Then the curtain will have parted on the Wizard of Oz, revealing a once-successful carnival barker, now a bully and con-man, entirely out of his league and out of options. Then the avalanche of lawsuits, foreclosures and criminal prosecutions will begin. There will no longer be a Department of Justice memo to protect Trump as a sitting president.

A man who spends so much mental energy calculating what’s in it for him must know this. At some half-conscious level he must foresee his utter downfall. So we can expect Trump’s public utterances (including his midnight Tweets), his actions, his debating, and his decisions as president to become more and more bizarre, self-focused, erratic and dangerous as the campaign season and his lame-duck presidency drag on.

It’s now incumbent on our public guardians—in our Department of Justice, our intelligence agencies, our career bureaucracy, our career military, and our press—to be on guard against the cornered rat’s fury as his downfall comes to its slow but inevitable conclusion. Those who guard the briefcase with the Nuclear Button, in particular, must be prepared to save the world.

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27 September 2020

Don’t Forget the Senate!


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.

As I write this, there are five weeks and two days until the last vote must be cast. So this is it! If you want your contributions to affect this fall’s election, you must send them to Biden and other Democrats within the next month, the sooner the better.

While you dig as deep as you can to save our democracy, think about the Senate, too.

Trump’s latest ploy to steal the presidential election reportedly involves having Republican-controlled legislatures in key battleground states steal their states’delegations to the Electoral College. But there’s no electoral college for Senate seats. So even if Trump can steal the Electoral College, and even if he can pack the Supreme Court with a rushed-in replacement for the late Justice Ginsburg, he can’t steal senators’ elections, at least not with plausible legality.

This point makes taking back the Senate as important for Democrats as helping Biden win. A Democratic Senate is not just a good adjunct to a winning Biden-Harris ticket. It’s a vital backstop for democracy in case they lose.

With majorities in both the House and the Senate, Dems would control the entire lawmaking and investigative machinery of Congress. They would also control the Senate’s power to “advise and consent” to judicial appointments, international treaties and high-level executive appointments.

Controlling the Senate would thus provide six big benefits for democracy and Democrats, even under a second term of Trump. First and foremost, a united Democratic House and Senate could pass legislation to aid our suffering public and collapsing economy. They could establish clear, mandatory, science-based rules for fighting the pandemic. They could, for example, pass the Heroes’ Act as originally proposed by the House.

Of course Trump could veto these bills. But would he? Trump’s decisions revolve around his own ego and bragging rights. So he might well sign good legislation and try to steal the credit for it. He has shown again and again that he’ll cast his fellow Republicans and GOP ideology under the bus as long as can chalk up a “win.” His own ego is the only sure guide to his action.

Second, a Democratic Senate could stop the appointment of unqualified and extreme right-wing judges. By repeated refusals to confirm appointments, if necessary, it could require that any judges newly appointed to both the Supreme Court and lower courts be in the mainstream of judicial thinking and prepared to resist executive tyranny. This brake on polluting our judiciary with ideologues would limit the carnage of Trump’s legacy.

Third, the Senate has the power to confirm high-level executive appointments, including those to Cabinet positions. Trump has tried to bypass this power by making “acting” appointments or leaving key positions vacant. But he can only fill “acting” positions for so long, as a federal court recently ruled. In the long run Trump must get his high-level executive appointments confirmed by the Senate. So a Democratic Senate could halt the long march of Trump’s cronies, campaign donors and unqualified right-wing extremists through the halls of our Executive branch.

Fourth, the Senate’s “Advice and Consent” power under Article II, Section 2, Par. 2, applies to treaties, too. There it requires a two-thirds vote. Does that same requirement for two-thirds approval also apply to withdrawing from treaties?

Logic suggests “yes.” But I’m not aware of any Supreme Court decision on the matter. Perhaps we have never had such a profound and controversial spate of withdrawals as we now have with the Iran nuclear deal and the Paris Climate Accord together. At very least, a hardball approach by a Democratic Senate could cast doubt on these ill-advised withdrawals and give our allies some comfort.

Fifth is the impeachment power. Trump never got a fair trial last year because the Republicans controlled the process and reduced the trial to a sham. Under a Democratic-controlled Senate, there could be a real trial of new impeachment counts from the House, with live testimony and evidence of all of Trump’s crimes and abuses of power. The Senate might even compel live testimony from Trump himself. Or, if he refused to show up, he would suffer adverse inferences.

A Democratic Senate could tie up Trump in a major impeachment process dealing with all his many crimes and abuses of power—most of which were not addressed last year. These include: (1) his asking China and Russia, not just Ukraine, to aid his re-election, (2) his abuse of the pardon power to save his convicted cronies, (3) his attempts to destroy the independence of our Department of Justice and intelligence agencies for his personal benefit, (4) his misuse of his office to direct both our own and foreign officials to his commercial hotels and golf courses, (5) his apparent attempts to retaliate against whistleblowers and lower-level officials who testified against him, (6) his repeatedly and consistently trying to circumvent the Senate confirmation process by appointing unqualified donors and cronies as acting heads of federal agencies, and (7) his stonewalling subpoenas and congressional attempts to investigate all the foregoing.

The sixth and final benefit of retaking the Senate is its electoral appeal. Poll after poll shows that voters prefer divided government. They think it keeps unreliable pols of both parties in line. If that feeling prevailed even under moderate and cautious Obama (and it did!), how much more sense does it make with a president as erratic, inconsistent and willful as Trump?

In politics as in war, the best strategies have more than one prong. There is always a fall-back plan or a second line of attack. In this pandemic year, flexible tactics are essential, when Democrats’ main champion is 77 years old.

So if you really want to bet on preserving American democracy, don’t place all your bets on Biden and Harris. Save some money for the Democrats most likely to flip Senate seats.

You can find a good list of them here. I’m making recurring contributions to Democrats Barbara Bollier in Kansas, Sara Gideon in Maine, Theresa Greenfield in Iowa, Jaime Harrison in South Carolina, Mark Kelly in Arizona, Amy McGrath in Kentucky, and Raphael Warnock in Georgia. If you donate on Act Blue, you can spread your payments out by making weekly donations with your credit card.

With the election so close now, Act Blue allows weekly donations that end after the election. All you have to do is click the right button. If Trump pulls off his audacious theft of the presidential election, the democracy you help save may be our own.

Footnote 1. Many absentee ballots will be counted after the election date, but all votes must be cast by that date. (Some states allow absentee or mail-in ballots to be counted if postmarked by election day, although received later. Check your state’s official website for information.)

Footnote 2. Our Constitution says that “Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors” for the Electoral College. (Article II, Section 1, Par. 2; emphasis added). So Trump’s reported scheme is to have Republican-controlled legislatures in key battleground states appoint electors loyal to him, regardless of the popular vote in those states. The pretext for this extraordinary move would be claims of massive voter fraud connected with mail-in voting. (Trump has already laid the groundwork for such claims by recommending fraud himself. He’s suggested that his voters vote twice, once by mail and once in person.)

Footnote 3. Senators, too, used to be appointed by state legislatures. But under our Seventeenth Amendment, the people have elected federal senators directly since 1913.

Footnote 4. Though Chief Justice Roberts would preside over any Senate trial, he has no vote. As an institution, the Supreme Court has no say at all over impeachment. It’s entirely a political process, in both substance and procedure, and a Democratic-controlled Senate would set the rules. (Article I, Section 5, Par. 2 says, “Each House may determine the Rules of its Proceedings . . . .”)

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24 September 2020

The Party of Domination


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.

What makes Trump tick? Many pundits see him as out for himself alone. Of course he is. His own sister said so.

But does that explain how he rose to be president? He’s broken almost every promise he made and reduced us to a national state of quivering indecision in a deadly pandemic. Yet polls say a huge minority would still follow his seductive red MAGA hat into Hell. Why? Is self-evident self-obsession his political “secret”?

An old student and friend of mine from Ohio voted for Trump and has since repented. He recently texted me that “Most middle-class folks here in Ohio just want to see and listen to one liners that say Trump is going to take care of them, and that is all they need to hear.” Later he texted his own repentence:
“The only reason I voted for him was because I wanted to ‘stir things up’ in Washington a bit. Never thought he would be a good president. But man oh man, [I] never ever dreamed [of] getting this amount of incompetency and destruction.”
Why haven’t others seen the light like my friend? Why is Trump’s support still rock solid, never falling much below 40%? Why isn’t it plummeting as the pandemic’s death toll rises toward 200,000 and as a gridlocked Congress, under Mitch’s “leadership,” refuses to plug the drain in our economic bathtub as middle-class jobs pour out? Why can’t the common-sense workers who are the backbone of this nation see Trump’s total lack of human virtue, intelligence, discipline and human concern for the people he’s supposed to govern?

Something much deeper and more sinister than the most successful con job in human history appears to be afoot. Sometimes it almost seems as if Trump enjoys other people’s pain. I got that feeling when he mocked a disabled reporter. The feeling became stronger as he urged his followers and police to hurt criminal suspects and protestors.

The same feeling has become even more prominent lately. Slowly but surely, the word “dominate” has drifted into Trump’s all-too-public stream of consciousness. It popped up after he cleared Lafayette Park of peaceful protestors for his Bible-flaunting photo-op. It’s popped up again and again, seemingly whenever Trump promotes his lie that our cities are going up in flames of racial protest. We must, he says, “dominate” the streets of our cities to prevent protests from turning violent.

It almost seems as if Trump—perhaps the least introspective leader ever—is getting to know himself. So let’s review the record.

Trump won’t tell us details of his business career or his early academic record. He’s gone to great length to keep his tax returns and his college grades and test scores secret. But his business career is pretty much an open book.

That book is not pretty. It shows a vast field of human wreckage: defrauded students, unpaid employees, stiffed contractors, and six corporate bankruptcies. (Bankruptcy is, after all, just a perfectly legal way of stiffing those you owe.)

They say that Trump is “transactional.” Of course he is. Isn’t every businessman?

The whole point of business is to make transactions in which you gain. Jeff Bezos became the richest man in human history by offering a great bargain. He let people shop for everything from their homes, and he broke a dismal rule of salesmanship from time immemorial: “caveat emptor”, or “let the buyer beware.” In a masterful use of the Internet’s unique “many-to-many” communication capability, Bezos let past customers review and even pan his products for prospective customers’ edification. He gave much for what he got, and the rest is history.

But Trump didn’t just gain a little more than he gave. Instead, he crushed people he dealt with: customers, employees, contractors and (for his so-called “university”) students. He didn’t just strike a good bargain; he dominated. He did so in part by stonewalling, and in part by massive litigation. He earned his reputation as one of the most litigious businessmen today.

So what led this prince of domination to become our president? I think he was and is in precise synergy with what the “Grand Old Party” had become. His quest for domination was, and is, a perfect fit for the party’s recent history and direction. Again, let’s review the record.

Why has the GOP sought to repeal the Affordable Care Act (“Obamacare”) ever since it passed into law? Why has it never—to this day—proposed any real alternative, let alone in any detail?

The answer, I think, is simple. The current scheme of employer-provided, private health insurance is just one more way for employers to dominate workers. If your family’s financial ability to see a doctor when a loved one is sick or injured depends on your job, that’s a big reason to stick with that job and knuckle under to your bosses.

In normal times, workers didn’t think much about this control. But the pandemic has brought it right up to top of mind. Millions who’ve now lost their jobs in the pandemic-caused recession understand a painful truth. They’ve also lost their access to health care just when they need it most.

Why does the GOP relentlessly support this cruel system, even after the pandemic has made its human and public-health dysfunction self-evident? The question answers itself: a system that puts health insurance under employers’ control is just another means of dominating workers. That’s what the oligarchs and bosses want, or don’t want to give up, and they now control the Republican Party.

As in doctors’ offices and hospitals, so in our fields, hospitality industry and slaughterhouses. Even Ronald Reagan once advocated “amnesty”—using that very word—for the millions of undocumented immigrants long living and working hard among us. But Trump and the modern GOP have made demonizing undocumented workers a key part of their messaging.

The key word here is “workers.” As I’ve noted at greater length elsewhere, a single, simple law could freeze undocumented immigration cold in its tracks. Just penalize employers—with a fine several times their wage savings—for every undocumented immigrant they hire. Put the burden on the bosses to check and reject the undocumented. Then jobs for undocumented immigrants would evaporate, destroying the magnet that draws them to cross our borders in a steady stream.

The GOP has never proposed doing that. Why? Because the GOP is the party of bosses. Nothing promotes bosses’ domination like workers who fear being deported with a single phone call.

So our eleven million undocumented workers (mostly from Mexico and Central America) have become a class of serfs. They cannot unionize or protest their pay or working conditions for fear of deportation. Their unlawful presence in America gives the oligarchs and bosses an entire class of helpless people to dominate. They work for low wages and often under appalling conditions to increase the bosses’ profits. Their dismal labor conditions led to their taking a huge hit in the pandemic.

Despite all the noise and bravado about slowing illegal immigration, the last thing the GOP bosses want—in jobs now done by the powerless undocumented—is lawful residents or American citizens in those jobs asserting their legal and constitutional rights, let alone forming unions. Bosses’ biggest nightmare is César Chávez’ United Farm Workers union writ large, in our slaughterhouses, restaurants, hotels and fields. But the GOP has learned from that mistake: it no longer supports anything like the old bracero program, which once gave undocumented farm workers temporary legal status, which they leveraged into some semblance of workers’ rights.

The GOP’s and Trump’s resort to domination as a governing strategy goes far beyond controlling workers’ health care and maintaining eleven million undocumented workers as a huge class of serfs. It’s even a tactic for winning elections.

What does the slogan “own the libs” really mean? The word “own” is just good shorthand for “dominate”—one syllable for three.

More than that, the slogan is a slice of demagogic genius. Hidden deep within our lizard brains, especially in the male of the species, is an urge to dominate and control others. That urge grows stronger when we are unhappy or dissatisfied or feel aggrieved. The more helpless we feel, the more we dream of dominating others.

Over the past two generations, our oligarchs have made tens of millions of our own skilled workers helpless. They’ve done so by selling their jobs and factories to China, Mexico and other developing countries, inexchange for reductions in wages. If our workers acted as they had done during the early part of the last century, they would have formed a movement, organized unions and made themselves less helpless through collective bargaining.

But in this case they couldn’t do that. They would have had to organize along with workers in China, Mexico, Vietnam and Bangladesh. That was a step too far for American labor to take.

Enter the GOP propaganda organs: Fox, Sinclair, and useful idiots like Rush. Helpless workers have no chance of dominating the bosses who sold their jobs and factories offshore and who have taken over much of the Republican Party through campaign contributions and corporate lobbying. So what did these organs of propaganda do? They displaced helpless workers’ urge to dominate others onto the Democrats and progressives—the “libs.”

The brilliance of this propaganda ploy is its psychological ju-jitsu. It allows workers made helpless and redundant by globalization to feel like winners. If they ride with Trump, they can “dominate” as voters even as they themselves are dominated and rendered helpless as workers. The GOP and Trump have gotten workers to participate enthusiastically in their own domination, by letting them make believe they are dominating others.

The smarter ones may understand that it will take some time for even the best of international trade policy to bring their old jobs back. In the meantime, they can see themselves as dominators, not dominated. And by glorifying their Second-Amendment rights, energizing so many personal fantasies of pistol power, the GOP doubles down on the very same psychological strategy. Nothing so attracts loyalty like giving the powerless reasons to feel powerful, even if their supposed power works against their own economic interests.

Never mind that the “libs” had wanted to empower workers by letting them form unions and strengthening their safety net. Never mind that the “libs” had fought the bosses alongside workers in labor movements from the late-nineteenth and early twentieth-centuries to the present day. Today’s GOP propaganda organs recognized and exploited a hard and damning truth: many so-called “libs” had drunk the Kool-Aid of “globalization.”

Among those who drunk deeply was Bill Clinton. He had beaten both GHW Bush, the Republican, and Ross Perot, the third-party candidate who had foreseen the dangers of globalization. Perot even warned of a “sucking sound” of jobs going south to Mexico. But rather than heed that warning and work with it, Bill tacked and triangulated to maintain his popularity, leaving the forces of globalization to do their worst. Bill even signed, with great fanfare, the deregulatory bill that paved the way for the Crash of 2008.

As a result, the GOP’s propaganda apparatus has had over twenty years—and plenty of good material—to convince workers that Democrats and the “libs” were their enemies. The Dems and the “libs,” said the bosses, were the same people who had sold workers’ jobs overseas and who had helped rogue bankers kill a perfectly good economy with their greed and stupidity.

The result was skilled workers’ desire to “own the libs.” Donald Trump’s presidency followed logically as night the day.

When Trump granted Rush the Presidential Medal of Freedom, he was not just sticking a thumb in the eyes of Democrats, progressives and every journalist with an ounce of professional integrity. He was making a sincere gesture of gratitude, for a duping job well done, on behalf of the entire oligarchy. He was also granting an award by proxy to Fox and Sinclair, which had done most of the heavy lifting.

Domination of course lies at the heart of the GOP’s strategy for entrenching its control of our Supreme Court by any and all means. The GOP stonewalled President Obama’s attempt to replace the late Justice Scalia with eight months to go before the next presidential election. Now it chafes at the bit to replace the irreplaceable Justice Ginsburg with less than seven weeks to go. The hyprocrisy of Mitch and his colleagues is self-evident and shameless, but that doesn’t matter. The whole affair was and is an exercise in domination—exploiting the tragedy of Justice Ginsburg’s death to dominate the process of making and validating law.

So there you have it. Trump won’t let his college grades or test scores be known. He doesn’t read his briefing papers. He contradicts himself regularly, sometimes daily. His own hand-picked Secretary of State reportedly called him “a fucking moron.” But Trump has a secret nuclear weapon of demagoguery: he’s tapped into the atavistic human urge to dominate others, especially when things go wrong. He and his GOP play that urge like a cheap fiddle.

All this explains the durability of Trump’s support. It also explains much of the gender gap. Unlike males’, females’ evolutionary roles depend on their cooperating with and nurturing others, not dominating them. So women’s urge to dominate is generally weaker than men’s. The same analysis explains even the smaller gender gap in the South, where bossism and domination have been so engrained in the culture for centuries as to infect both genders.

Domination is not just a large part of the secret of Trump’s success. It’s now an unwritten rule of the Republican Party’s internal operation. It explains why former enemies like Ted Cruz and Lindsey Graham have knuckled under to Trump’s “leadership,” acting like cowards and converting their party into a cult of personality. It explains why only one Republican, presented with evidence of Trump’s treason and obstruction of justice, voted to remove him from office.

Domination even explains why Trump would cozy up to leaders like Kim Jong Un, Xi Jinping, Vladimir Putin and other authoritarians. He seems to admire them and dream of emulating them.

Those dreams are dangerous. If we want to defeat Trump soundly, and not just narrowly, we’ve got to address this urge to dominate among our voters. It may be the linchpin of Trump’s durable support, compensating for his meanness, many lies and blunders. (It may even benefit from his meanness.)

So we’ve got to re-displace skilled workers’ many legitimate grievances in more productive directions. We’ve got to help them see that dominating the Democratic Party and its leaders, who want to help them and traditionally have, is self-defeating.

More generally, we’ve got to get all voters to understand that the urge to dominate others is democracy’s hemlock. It led to Germany’s Nazi psychosis, the Holocaust, and the most horrible war in human history. While we’re not far down that road yet (we hope), a second Trump term could drag us much farther. Every step toward domination as a dream, let alone a way of life, brings us closer to the abyss.

Foonote: “Donald is out for Donald, period,” said his sister, Maryanne Trump Barry.

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20 September 2020

Focus or Die


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.

Duck the Distractions


We now have the worst president in our history. Congress impeached him for abusing his power and obstructing Congress, against a background of what earlier ages would almost certainly have called treason. The Republican majority in our Senate acquitted him of these charges on (except for Mitt Romney) a purely partisan basis. He has completely botched our national response to the most deadly pandemic in a century, throwing us into the worst economic recession since the Great Depression. In the process, he has reduced us to quivering national uncertainty on such basic practical precautions as masks, distancing, avoiding crowds and the use and value of treatments and vaccines. Under his über-incompetent “leadership,” we have achieved a “record” for our nation: the demonstrably worst response to the pandemic of any developed nation.

Beyond this we have five enormous, long-term problems to address. First is stopping the acceleration of global warming, which threatens stronger and more frequent storms, more devastating droughts and wildfires, the northward march of tropical diseases, and eventually inundation of our coastal cities and diminution of our food supply. Second is managing our fraught relationship with China, as it rises to global power, thereby avoiding what could be a cataclysmic war.

Third is preserving and restoring our very own democracy against (a) voter suppression, gerrymandering and other dirty tricks; (b) the politicization of our science, Justice Department and intelligence services; (c) the nearly daily lies and distractions of the most successful demagogue in our history; and (d) explicit threats of our rogue president to ignore, falsify and/or dispute the coming election results.

The fourth long-term problem is reducing the greatest economic inequality in our (and perhaps world) history, under which eight individuals own half the world’s wealth, and six of them are Americans. Fifth and final is hastening our slow retreat from institutionalized racism, and eventually overcoming an horrendous four-century (and counting) history of racial and ethnic oppression.

Of these problems, the first two are existential for our entire species, and the next two are existential for our own democracy and our way of life. The fifith and final could become existential if not addressed soon.

Against these undeniable threats to our future happiness, prosperity and even survival, we face incessant distractions from our supreme demagogue and his party. His stream-of-consciousness Twitter style and his party’s media savvy vomit distractions like chaff behind a Nazi fighter seeking to avoid our radar.

Two new distractions have emerged just since last Friday. The first is filling the Supreme Court seat of the late Justice Ginsburg. The second is the effect of the first on the legal precedent of Roe v. Wade and hence the legality of abortion throughout the United States.

In the best of times, these would be unwanted distractions. If the Dems win the presidency and the Senate, they can (and should!) undo, by packing the Court, any lame-duck filling of Justice Ginsburg’s now-vacant seat. If the Dems don’t win, the worst president in our history will then fill Justice Ginsburg’s seat (if not filled earlier) and appoint even more extreme so-called “conservatives” as other sitting Justices inevitably retire or die. So who wins this coming election is infinitely more important than who wins any last-minute battle to fill Justice Ginsburg’s seat.

As for abortion, it’s an extremely complex issue. It’s use for demagoguery has always worked best for the Republicans, who’ve oversimplified it and exploited it relentlessly. I will go to my grave believing that Dubya became president, in an otherwise close election, by demagoguing the social issues of abortion and homosexual marriage. By engaging on an abstract issue with little practical effect, which in law has little to do with national politics, the Dems may have inadvertently enabled eight years of lousy government and two unnecessary wars.

Apparently Trump and the GOP mean to repeat this “success.” By stirring the pot of pro-choice reaction, they hope to provoke extreme positions on Dems’ part and thereby pull the electoral rabbit out of the hat once again.

This is a trap that Democrats must avoid to save their chances to take back our country. As hundreds of leading Democrats argued today in a full-page ad in the New York Times (NYT Print Edition, Sunday, Sept. 20 at A9), they can and must do so by remaining open to pro-life candidates and voters. If the party’s most pro-choice contingents respond with alarm—if they alienate potential pro-life supporters or allow themselves to be tagged by Trump and his propagandists as so doing—they could miss the main chance. In the process, they could abet the destruction of American democracy.

This they must not do.

It’s a trap, folks. Avoid it as you would avoid Covid-19. From now until November 3, the highest need is profound and simple: focus on nothing other than the main chance. Get rid of Trump and take back the Senate. The choice to focus or die has never been clearer.

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19 September 2020

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg


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.

A Giant Among Men

She was small in stature. She died shrunken by age and the ravages of the most terrible of cancers.

But in her impact she was a giant—a steadfast warrior for justice. Among all the men and women who ever served on our High Court, she was one of the handful whose legacy matched her title—“Justice.” She was one of the best of the best.

She forged a compass for women, showing the way to influence and power. Her most famous judicial sentence was this: “The gender line [of discrimination] helps to keep women not on a pedestal but in a cage.” With that simple truth, she goaded us Americans to make better use of the wisdom and talent of half of our species.

Respect for women was hardly her sole obsession. Justice Ginsburg fought relentlessly for the individual over corporate and monetary interests, for the family over exigency, for minorities over institutionalized oppression and false assumptions of inadequacy, for people over the kind of facile “pragmatism” and “efficiency” that maims and kills.

She was a humanist in every sense of that word. She valued people over pitiless and often cruel abstractions. She knew what’s real and what matters in human life.

As we survey the wreckage that male pride has wrought in our time, we cannot help but mourn Justice Ginsburg’s passing with sobs of loss. She will be missed.

But she leaves behind a rich legacy. There are her many opinions—some for the majority, some in dissent. There are her books and the films about her, including “The Notorious RBG.” There are the precedents that she established and influenced, which will roll down the centuries as American common law. Most of all, there are living women in our judiciary, our Congress and our executive branch, whom she inspired and for whom she cleared roadblocks.

Justice Ginsburg could not hold out until the hoped-for end of our would-be tyrant’s term. She died tragically on the eve of Jewish New Year 5781.

But as long as our species survives, her memory will survive, too. It will remind us of the human values that jurists should promote. It will remind us that her gender offers special insight into what makes us human and how to build a thriving and just society. Her name will still stand for justice, equality and humanity when the dismal succession of male tyrants and ideologues becomes a footnote to history, and our enhanced empathy and cooperation take us to the stars.



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11 September 2020

Fall: the Reckoning


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.

We like to think we are Masters of Nature. Nothing debunks that lie like Fall.

Nothing betrays so vividly that we are creatures of our planet. We are locked into the rhythm of seasons set by the tilt of Earth’s axis 23.5 degrees from the plane of its orbit around the Sun.

In the Northern Hemisphere, Fall is a time when squirrels stop prancing and playing and start collecting and storing their acorns. It’s a time when colder weather empties parks and beaches of people, in anticipation of their being washed with rain and covered with snow. It’s a time when stock markets crash: October 1929, September 2008 and now early September 2020, in what will undoubtedly be called the “Covid Crash of 2020.” (The Internet and electronic trading appear to have accelerated the stampede of fear that inevitably follows the much slower stampede of greed and euphoria.)

Why is all this so? It’s pretty simple. Fall marks the end of the euphoria of summer and a transition back to the harsh reality of life on Earth.

Don’t take my word for it. Go back to the first recorded democracy, ancient Greece, and more than halfway to the dawn of recorded history. Go back to Aesop’s fable of the grasshopper and the ants. In late Fall, the music-playing grasshopper begs for food from the ants, who’ve industriously stored it in summer, anticipating Fall. It’s a tale with a simple moral: if you don’t get serious before Fall, you won’t have anything to eat in winter.

A friend and former student of mine, Rod Haven, has an interesting take on our Grasshopper-in-Chief. He voted for Trump in 2016 but has since repented. Here’s what he says:
“Trump supporters simply . . . cannot string more than one fact together at a time. . . . Most middle-class folks here in Ohio just want to see and listen to one liners that say Trump is going to take care of them, and that is all they need to hear.”
Yet Fall is upon us.

This year, it’s not just the usual colder weather and shorter days. It’s Covid and its economic effects, too. It’s people having to cluster indoors and give up social distancing because of the cold. It’s “freedom”-loving grasshoppers not wearing their masks, or wearing them on their chins or under their noses, where they don’t do much good. It’s other grasshoppers spreading the lie that vaccines don’t work. It’s kids staying home from school and parents slowing realizing that, as clever and resilient as they think they are, they aren’t teachers. They don’t have the knowledge, the training, the experience, or the patience. (Maybe Covid will at last help teachers get some respect, if not salaries that reflect their value!)

And this is just the beginning. What hotspots will emerge when people are clustered indoors and can’t distance themselves properly? What failures of foresight, imagination and general seriousness will maim our systems production and distribution? what excesses of cartoon ideologies? Will some foods and other necessities become as scarce as masks, toilet paper and isopropyl alcohol have been for so long?

Sooner or later, the grasshoppers’ la-di-da incompetence and “it’s all right, Jack” euphoria will take their toll. Trump has put grasshoppers in charge of everything from our Post Office, through the EPA, to our Interior, Justice and Agriculture Departments and international trade. Many are not just grasshoppers; they’re corrupt, ill-informed, deniers of science and stupid, too. They’re living proof that you don’t have to be smart to be rich, especially if you got so by inheritance. So which system will break down first? Let’s take bets.

Here in Santa Fe, NM, the daytime temperature dropped from 90°F to 37°F in just a couple of days. Sometimes Fall can come with a vengeance. That seems to be true all over this year. Covid makes it all worse, especially for the non-white, the unemployed, the aged, and the evicted.

The season is well named. Sometimes it feels like falling. This year, as our stock markets, our economy and our collective health go into free fall, the name is especially apt.

Holding elections in mid-Fall is a good idea. The season brings voters back to reality, and the timing lets it set in. The question before us is whether more voters are ants than grasshoppers, and whether even some grasshoppers can see the writing on the wall. The answers will fix our nation’s fate for years to come, perhaps forever. Where is ancient Rome today? Where is Aesop’s Greece?

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07 September 2020

Bleeding Versus Lockdown and Awakening: the Truth of 2020 America


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 it bleeds, it leads.”—Old rule of media sensationalism, derived from the era of William Randolph Hearst, driven to a dark art form by Rupert Murdoch’s Fox empire, and sunk to its present depths by anonymous trolls in the age of Facebook and Twitter.

    “How many times must a man turn his head and pretend that he just doesn’t see?”—Nobel Laureate Bob Dylan, “Blowin’ in the Wind.”
Ur-demagogue Donald Trump is trying to get us Americans to see our nation in flames, beset by unruly and violent protesting mobs. As Paul Krugman reasoned in a must-read column, that’s just about all he’s got. It’s a last-ditch lie by a president drowning in his own excrement—a narcissist who grabbed power with lies, ruled by lie, and would lie us all into Hell if we let him.

The solution is simple, but it goes against the grain of most modern media. Tell the truth and tell it big. Tell it even if it doesn’t bleed. Shout the tranquility of a nation huddled and sequestered against the pandemic. Shout it from the rooftops!

Krugman did just that. In his very first paragraph, he described a peaceful, tranquil, even subdued New York City. New Yorkers were enjoying a bright, calm day in late summer, as in ages past. The only somber notes were the strange quiet, the closed shops and the partly empty streets—all due to the virus.

That, not violence, is our nation’s central truth as summer turns to fall in 2020. We are not a nation of cities in flames. We are a nation of cities mostly shut down by a new virus and our government’s spastic and inept response to it. What subsumes our cities is anything but turmoil. Our offices, streets, theaters, bars, restaurants, hotels, gyms, stadia and aircraft routes—and many of our schools—are strangely quiet.

We are a nation hunkered down. We await the advent of Reason, in the form of Science, to save us. We await a vaccine. Or we await—at long last—a bit of coherent planning for testing, contact tracing and quarantining, which so may other nations and a few of our own leading States have used to get the virus under control.

So what should our media do? They should “tell it like it is.” That might seem dull. But they should broadcast scenes of quiet, leafy suburbs, half-empty streets, socially-distanced parks and beaches, ballparks with empty stands transmitting “virtual” play, and other subdued signs of our times. They should show us as we are: a nation quietly waiting for a reprieve from a sentence of disease and death meted out by the misrule of an inept braggart and con-man.

What we need to see most is not rare episodes of short-lived and well-contained violent disorder. We need more perspective on what’s really happening, day after day, in the vast reaches of our diverse nation.

That goes double for our greatest national tragedy and national shame—our “original sin.” From shortly after white European refugees came to this continent, the central truth of their relationship with others has been violence and domination. They have applied these “means” both to those they found already living here and to those they brought here, by force, from Africa and the Caribbean to toil as slaves.

After four centuries of unremitting atrocities and denial, a great awakening is coming to our white population. Trump, his GOP lackeys and his fawning media are trying mightily to suppress it. But it’s happening nevertheless.

The awakening has many causes and manifestations. Cell phones and body cameras bear undeniable witness to the pointless murder and maiming of so many Black citizens, like George Floyd and Jacob Blake. Our media now seem willing to investigate and report these atrocities, rather than suppressing them, as earlier, to maintain the “Thin Blue Line.” Meticulous exposés by leading Black historians and intellectuals like Vann R. Newkirk II, Ta-Nehisi Coats, and Nikole Hannah-Jones detail the dismal history of White Terror and white economic domination by exclusion, deception, fraud, swindling and threats of violence.

We now know well the multiple layers of historical depredation: the post-Reconstruction night riders, the Ku Klux Klan, the lynchings, the apartheid, the poll taxes and literacy tests, the modern vote suppression, the redlining, the theft of land through fraud and violence, the exclusion from banking and finance, the dismal excuses for schools, the food deserts in the ghettos, and the relentless blaming of the victims. Our educators more often write textbooks that tell it like it was and is; they condemn the whitewashed Lost-Cause lies of “Gone with the Wind” and “Birth of a Nation.” We feel a rising urge to pull down monuments to false and traitorous men and replace them with statues of true heroes and patriots.

Now in our seventies or older, we Boomers grew up with great artists giving us the same painful truths more succinctly, in the spare words of song. We came of age hearing songs of protest by artists like Dylan, Peter, Paul and Mary and Joan Baez.

As we Boomers age and our short-term memories fade, ghosts of these songs drift through our minds in snippets of half-forgotten poetry. The quotation from Bob Dylan, above, is just one example of many.

Our Boomers’ generation may have been one of the most self-focused in human history. But there’s at least one thing we can be proud of: our sense of justice and righteousness. We helped push through the civil-rights gains of the sixties. We were young then, and we are old now; but we can rejoice that, after a half-century hiatus, the great awakening that we felt just beginning to stir so long ago is finally gaining momentum.

Millions of white people joining Black Lives Matter marches are a central truth of our times. At long last, a majority of the now-waning majority is coming to its senses. Coming just a generation before our white majority fades into demographic oblivion, their epiphany is ironic. But it’s real and important nevertheless.

So the central truth of this age and this election is not just one more dismal attempt by the plutocrats’ party to scare working and aging whites into voting against their own economic interests. It’s not just one more Hail Mary pass to steal an election by raising yet another Willie Horton bogeyman. It’s a vast awakening among white people—all people—to the horror of four centuries of oppression and discrimination and the very real chance for much-delayed redemption. It’s the realization that we all must stand and vote together to save our democracy and our economy.

It’s the dawning awareness of the secret behind Nelson Mandela’s “miracle.” White fear reflects no reality of organized Black-on-white violence. There’s not nearly enough of that to shake a nation. There never has been. White fear comes from knowing that you or those who look like you have wronged your neighbors so hard and for so long, and that all must live among those who’ve been wronged. Replace that dismal knowing with an honest quest for compassion and justice, and the fear vanishes like a bad dream. It yields to determination, to solidarity, and to hope.

That’s what’s happening in America today: whites awakening by the millions.

So something unambiguously positive and hopeful is rising from the ashes of the most vile political regime since the Confederacy. That’s what our media should be focusing on relentlessly, and what our Boomers and others should be watching, not the few and transient eruptions of what bleeds.

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03 September 2020

Human Evolution is on the Ballot


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 a brief update on Chancellor Merkel, click here.

The choice we face this November is not just between two wildly different men and two wildly different political parties. It’s also a choice between our biological evolution and our social evolution. That choice may determine whether our species can rise above our ape origins—whether we can survive in an age of global warming, nuclear weapons, frequent pandemics and Orwellian technology of surveillance and control.

Biologically, we evolved in small clans dominated by alpha males. That is our instinctive model.

The alpha male didn’t have to be smarter or better than the rest. All he had to be was bigger, stronger, quicker to anger or good at fighting and intimidating other males. Dominating others was his job and his skill.

Doesn’t that description fit Donald Trump perfectly? Is he smarter, better informed, or wiser than his rivals? (Hint: he doesn’t even read his briefing papers!) Or is he just good at dominating others and giving that impression?

Why have so many former rivals, including Ted Cruz and Lindsey Graham, knuckled under to Trump? How can you explain his mode of “debating”? He ducks the truth. He changes his mind and direction at random. He brags and praises himself endlessly. He fakes or ignores substance and reason.

But he’s all full of insults, “chops,” derision and humiliation—the tools of male-ape-like domination on every school playground and in every college fraternity. So is Trump a Man of Reason or a successful alpha ape?

Jesus told us, “Love they neighbor as thyself,” and “Love they enemy.” He probably didn’t have in mind putting children in cages, ripping them from their parents’ arms, tear-gassing and baton-bashing peaceful protestors, or bad-mouthing every racial, ethnic and religious minority in this great, diverse nation of ours. He probably didn’t have in mind mocking and humiliating people with physical disabilities. Those are not acts of a Christian or a modern human leader, but of a dominant alpha ape trying to keep his rivals and subjects cowed and in line.

Jesus was no alpha ape. Western folk have worshipped or respected him for over two millennia. But sometimes we forget. Sometimes the pull of our biological evolution—domination by an alpha-male ape—is just too strong.

Julius Caesar, Adolf Hitler, Josef Stalin, and Mao Zedong were no accidents. Nor today are Bashar al-Assad, Jair Bolsonaro, Andrzej Duda, Rodrigo Duterte, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Viktor Orban, Vladimir Putin, Abdel Fattah el Sisi, or Xi Jinping. They were and are all cases of backsliding down our evolutionary pathway to alpha-male-ape domination. Not surprisingly, many of them have caused—or are now preparing—our species’ greatest disasters and worst atrocities.

Men like Trump, Hitler, Stalin, Assad and Caesar don’t just corrupt their governments. They corrupt whole societies and cultures, too. For them, domination and violence are ends in themselves. Their people learn those dismal lessons through repetition, example, and subjugation. They teach us to revert to troglodytes.

The teaching is easy because it’s instinctual. It all fits nicely into our evolution out of alpha-male-dominated clans. Subjection to a male monarch or despot almost feels “right”—even today, and even if the despot in question is far from ideal. Just ask Bill Barr.

So flirtation with despotism, even as we try to maintain democracy, is no anomaly or passing phase. It derives from a fundamental conflict—a contradiction—in our biological evolution.

On the one hand, we evolved as clans of individuals dominated by alpha-male apes. On the other hand, our chief evolutionary advantage over all other species on our planet was and is our ability to empathize, communicate and cooperate. We didn’t build skyscrapers, aircraft, Moon landers or the Internet by taking orders from a single alpha male, let alone by fighting among ourselves.

If nothing else, the specialization that our complex society requires precludes us from taking all our orders from single alpha male. No single individual can command all the knowledge and expertise—from transplanting hearts to piloting an aircraft to designing and programming computers—that we need to make our complex society run. That’s one of many things tragic and frightening about Trump: he doesn’t know it all but thinks he does, so he often countermands the orders of those who do. Just ask Anthony Fauci.

Today it’s up to our social evolution—which is much weaker but works much faster than biological evolution—to make the final choice. We can choose to prioritize our chief biological-evolutionary advantage—cooperation among specialists—over the part of our biological evolution that is holding our social evolution back. We can resist the instinct that propels us into subjugation to a single alpha ape, and thence to error, tribalism and catastrophe.

Today the choice is especially urgent. We no longer live in a state of nature. Our collective civilization has come to dominate our globe. It threatens our biosphere and our own survival. We can destroy ourselves with the global warming we have caused, which is now accelerating, jolted by positive feedback. We can maim or extinguish ourselves by making war with nuclear or biological weapons, or by neglecting the pandemics that occur now more and more frequently as we pack ourselves more densely onto our limited globe.

Or, if we choose, we can try to build a paradise on this Earth by cooperating and competing rationally. We can choose life with our individual minds.

How do we do that? It’s hard to see how if we continue letting individual alpha males dominate us, as if we were still apes living in small rival clans.

Fortunately, there are alternatives. While despotism, monarchy and empire have dominated our species’ short recorded history, there are some rules of social evolution than can guide us back (or really, forward!) to rational democratic rule. The good news is that they also have a biological basis.

First, we can vote for, fund, and support female leaders, no matter our own gender. Females were bystanders in our alpha-ape stage, never participating in the endless quest for male domination. They were and are the victims and survivors of alpha male misrule. They pick up the pieces when alpha males’ grandiose plans for dominance come to naught, or to catastrophe. They have to love and raise all their children despite an alpha male’s favoritism, dominance, absence, abuse or oppression.

Today’s gender gap is real. But it’s not just an electoral phenomenon. It’s evolutionary. It’s biological. At this stage in our social evolution, when our entire species is turning toward domination by and subjection to individual males, it’s a strong anchor to windward.

The second winning strategy is similar. We can vote for, fund, and support minorities. Doing so won’t just reduce undeserved white privilege, which would be a benefit in itself.

Even more important, supporting leaders from minorities will advance the causes of empathy, communication and cooperation among us. Who among us has felt the lash of dominance and cruelty more than our various minorities, with Black people most aggrieved? Their experience, struggle and suffering, with patience and perseverance, has fostered understanding and empathy, if not in all, at least in the best. And who but the best can succeed in a white-dominated world?

Given the choice, if all were still alive, who wouldn’t prefer Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., to Donald Trump? Who wouldn’t pick the late John Lewis over Jim Jordan?

No, this is not reverse sexism or reverse racism. It’s an evolutionary and cultural strategy. It’s picking leaders who are most likely, by virtue of their social evolution—their ancestors, education, upbringing, suffering and struggle—to appreciate and heal the excesses of our day. It’s picking leaders whose social evolution and/or life experience is an antidote to the biologically-based domination and cruelty of alpha-male apes like Donald Trump.

If you want to know why Trump is president, and why so many of his erstwhile rivals and enemies are now his lackeys and sycophants, it’s not his “magic” as a demagogue. It’s not his personal “skill.” It’s something much, much deeper and more dangerous than that. It’s an instinctual yearning for alpha-male-ape leadership left over from our biological evolution and still buried deep inside each of us.

Once we understand that, the desirability of the Biden-Harris ticket becomes plain. It offers a White House with a male and a female, a white leader and a Black leader. If offers two people humbled and tempered by circumstance—one by personal misfortune and the other by institutionalized racism.

In Kamala Harris, it offers the prospect of female leadership—an alternative to the driving force of male domination that has so often led to despotism, war, neglect, and suffering. Instead, it offers the rare kind of empathy and instinctively equal treatment that female leaders have given us, from Queen Hatshepsut through Queen Elizabeth I to Angela Merkel.

If you want to crush an enemy or an already oppressed minority, pick a man as your leader. If you want a happy, peaceful and productive family, pick a woman. Female leadership, albeit rare, has changed human social evolution for the better, in fundamental ways. Just look at Angela Merkel’s Germany and its Energiewendethe most impressive and extensive conversion to carbon-free energy outside of France, whose 75% nuclear electric grid had given it a big head start.

Addendum 9/4/20: As if to confirm the foregoing favorable evaluation, the Washington Post today published a review of Chancellor Merkel’s 2015 immigration policy, which admitted over one million desperate, mostly Muslim refugees into Germany. According to the Post, the refugees have assimilated well into Germany, with nothing like the crime wave that demagogues, including Trump, had predicted. The surge of German right-wing sentiment that their migration provoked is now subsiding. And Chancellor Merkel says she would admit the refugees again because “they have to be treated like human beings.” So this female leader has not just put Germany in the forefront of the fight against climate change; she also solved a difficult refugee crisis with a unique blend of humanity and German efficiency. If only our president could emulate her accomplishments!

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