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.

20 November 2017

A Progressive Manifesto


For links to popular recent posts, click here.

[NOTE TO READERS: For about a decade, this blog has had a tradition of publishing a message of hope for Thanksgiving. (See, for example, 2007, 2008, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2015, 2016.) This year, I’m suspending that tradition because I see little but platitudes to inspire hope.

Instead, I’m publishing the following essay, which has been in the works for some time. It’s three main themes—using language accurately, avoiding falsehood and “fake news,” and treating every human being with equal dignity and empathy—might some day bring us Americans back to a place like our original Thanksgiving. There two radically different cultures—including undocumented immigrants from England!—found empathy and good fellowship in helping each other survive and co-exist in a vast wilderness. We are going to have to work hard to recover the hope and promise of that day, but I hope the following essay might help:
]

1. Keeping capitalism
2. Perfecting capitalism
3. Making everyone better off
4. Some specifics Conclusion

What does it mean to be “progressive”? At the moment, many of us define ourselves by what we’re against—blue versus red, liberals versus conservative, left wing versus right wing. We think we know what these words mean, but do we really?

Confusion is rampant today among so-called “conservatives.” For the last seven years, they’ve defined themselves by opposition to Obama and “Obamacare”? But what are they for?

So-called “conservative” members of Congress couldn’t even repeal Obamacare because they couldn’t agree on how to repeal it, at least without depriving over twenty million people of useful health insurance. They still can’t agree on what, if anything, to replace it with. This leaves us all with the strong impression that they just want to tear down what the first “black” president has built, without regard to costs or consequences.

Progressives can do better than that. They’re for Obamacare, not because they think it’s anywhere near perfect, but because it got some fifteen million people, who never had it before, health insurance they can afford. That’s progress, and what makes progress is “progressive.”

But surely the word “progressive” means something more than supporting a single piece of relatively recent legislation. It ought to import a whole political philosophy. Less surely, but one hopes, that philosophy is internally consistent and has some enduring principles. This essay is an attempt to articulate those principles, beginning with the most important.

1. Keeping capitalism. Perhaps the most important way to define modern progressivism is to say what it’s not. Many of progressivism’s opponents try to tar it as “socialism” or even “Communism.”

But it’s not. It never has been and never will be. This name-calling is a lie.

Capitalism is our American economic system. It’s not only ours; it’s everyone’s. All the world’s developed nations, without exception, have variants of a capitalist system. Communism failed miserably in Russia and China after solid, good-faith experiments of 74 and 29 years, respectively. Both have converted to a system of market-based capitalism, with elements of state control and state capitalism.

Like Vietnam, China calls its single political party the “Communist” Party, but for historical reasons only. As one of the oldest surviving civilizations, China likes tradition. Yet its system is highly regulated state capitalism, and in some ways it’s beating us at our own game.

That’s why our national attitude toward China is a combination of admiration and fear. In a mere two generations China has used capitalism to pull over a billion people out of extreme poverty. In the process, it has built much of humanity’s current productive capacity, and it now makes a lot of what we buy. That’s why—among other sound reasons—a trade war, let alone a real war, with China would be catastrophic for our species and its postwar economic progress.

So let’s get this straight, once and for all. Capitalism is the best system for organizing human productive activity that our species has yet found. Until someone invents a better one, we Americans are going to use it like everybody else—except for North Korea, Venezuela and Zimbabwe. Progressives understand this basic point, although sometimes their enemies’ propaganda confuses even them.

2. Perfecting capitalism. Accepting an economic system doesn’t mean accepting everything about it, far less all its consequences. Like each of us humans, capitalism is far from perfect. It’s the best system for organizing productive economic activity yet devised, but it has a lot of rough edges and unintended consequences.

If capitalism were perfect, we wouldn’t have had the Great Depression or the so-called Great Recession, from which we are still emerging. We wouldn’t have had regular recessions and financial panics almost every generation from our days as the Thirteen Colonies to this very day.

We wouldn’t have had slavery or child labor, and today we wouldn’t now have homeless people living in their cars and on our streets. We wouldn’t have an opioid crisis—ordinary middle-class people killing themselves with pain killers because their work (or lack thereof) and their lives have become unendurable. And we would have found a much better, quicker way to get effective aid to Puerto Rico after the most devastating storm ever to hit any part of the United States.

Here we stumble upon the first—and perhaps the most important—positive feature of progressivism: progressives don’t ignore or try to deny flaws and imperfections in themselves or our political system (or anything else). They try to fix them.

This simple point may be progressivism’s defining feature. Progress begins with seeing the need for it, which means spotting flaws in the existing system. You can’t make progress unless you can see, admit, and remedy those flaws.

Many so-called “conservatives” are different. They’re slow to see flaws and quick to deny them. They are fatalistic. When bad things happen, they may see them as just results of “human nature, or “the way things are.” Although they have little or no scientific evidence for their views, some conservatives see global warming as just some unspecified “natural” climate change, which we poor humans didn’t cause and can’t affect. The same lax approach often applies to racial discrimination and the increasing militarization and brutality of our nation’s police.

Why are “conservatives” so? By definition, they like things they way they are. They want to preserve the existing order and almost everything about it.

The key to understanding this facet of “conservatism” is the old saw, “Where you stand depends on where you sit.” Conservatives, or at least their intellectual and political leaders, have it pretty good. The benefits of capitalism have advantaged them, and its flaws and unintended consequences don’t affect them much. So they see the world as being “All right, Jack,” and those who want change as whiners and malcontents.

The Koch Brothers, for example, like fossil fuels because those fuels have made them so rich they can control our politics, deny climate change, and still support the science program “Nova” on PBS. Less-well-heeled people who support the Koch Brothers enjoy their gasoline-fueled muscle cars and don’t want to think about switching to electricity. The tycoons of Twitter and Facebook don’t want to think about how what made them rich and famous also helped Russia divide us and put Trump in our White House, or how their innovations have made “fake news” not just a new term, but a modern reality.

So “conservatism,” as practiced by many today, is not so much a coherent political philosophy as a species of ignorance, inattention and neglect. “Conservatives” might see the need for universal health insurance when they have to step over bodies covered with open sores on the way to their homes or offices, or when their maids, housekeepers, gardeners or contractors bring a pandemic right into their homes. They may see the need to slow global warming after a freak tornado, hurricane or flood wrecks their mansion or inundates their own neighborhood. But by then it will be too late.

Progressives should take pride in this difference. You can’t make things better unless you see the need to improve them. Doing so often requires identifying flaws and mistakes, and only later the means of improvement. All of human progress has come from people—often called “complainers” or “malcontents”—who do that. One person’s complainer or malcontent may be another’s inventor or innovator.

3. Making everyone better off. Although he didn’t live it, Thomas Jefferson penned our most basic national credo. Our two most horrible wars strengthened and refined it. It holds that “all . . . are created equal.” (Emphasis added).

Of course all are self-evidently not equal, far less do they end up that way. Through aptitude, education, family advantage, hard work, and sheer chance, even identical twins can end up in very different circumstances on their deathbeds.

What Jefferson meant and what we now understand was something more subtle. He meant that a society functions best when all have equal opportunity to develop their potential, whatever it may be.

The great modern philosopher John Rawls added a thought experiment to illustrate the point. Suppose you are a disembodied soul waiting to be born, without knowing into what fetus, family or society you might be inserted. If you had a choice, what society would you choose?

If you chose Saudi Arabia, you would have a very small chance of being born into the royal family. (Today, you would have an even smaller chance of being born into the parts of the royal family not detained!) You would have half a chance of being born a woman and so spending your life ruled by men in your family, and (until recently) not even being allowed to drive. If you were born into one of the millions of Filipino or Indian working-immigrant families in the Kingdom, living under conditions not entirely unlike slavery, your life would might be one of toil and suffering. So your odds of having a good life would not be very high.

In the United States, even today, your odds would be better. There’s still a huge middle class that lives in comfort and ease (relative to much of the world). You might get lucky and end up in the womb of a woman in the 1%, or even the 0.1%. But you might also get unlucky and start life in the womb of a poverty-stricken African-American in an urban ghetto, or of a woman on a poor and desolate Indian reservation.

A third choice might be Scandinavia, including Finland. There, you would be guaranteed a full college education, six months off to bear and begin raising your children (dads, too!), and free access to your nation’s best health care, no matter what family you were born into—presumably even a recent immigrant family. Your odds of having a fruitful and happy life would be high, close to 100%. But there is a tradeoff: your odds of being fabulously wealthy and much better off than the rest would probably be smaller than in the United States or in Saudia Arabia, because Scandinavia is famously egalitarian.

If you just think of your own individual circumstances, perhaps the choice would be a matter of taste, or of affinity or aversion to risk. There is something of a gambler in all of us, especially us males. But when you think of your social environment, the calculus changes.

Would you, if you could, be a planation owner in the Old South, surrounded by slaves? Would you be a rich industrialist in a nineteenth century town, surrounded by uneducated workers ill-paid and ill-treated? Or would you prefer to be a knowledge worker in today’s Silicon Valley, well but not exorbitantly paid, with innumerable highly-educated and well-paid friends and acquaintances with whom to socialize and from whom to choose your spouse? Would you choose a life of social isolation through economic superiority, or one both well off and rich in friendship, companionship and the arts?

The nineteenth-century English philosopher John Stuart Mill had no doubt about the better choice. For him, the best society was the one that constantly strives toward the “greatest good for the greatest number.” When a rising tide really does raise all boats—not by “trickle down,” but independently—the disembodied soul is not only more likely to win the placement lottery. That soul and everyone else among the well-educated and well-off citizens will have plenty of interesting friends, an interesting spouse, and a rich and full life.

That is, of course, the type of society toward which Britain and the United States have striven ever since Mill, with all the frolics and diversions to which our fickle species is heir. It seems almost a tautology that all are better off when all have good opportunities. But every once in a while, we forget, lulled by the siren call of the very rich, who want to keep and even augment their astronomical wealth and advantage and invent all sorts of sophistic but plausible reasons why their doing so would be good for the rest of us. The current acme of such sophistry is the notion that the GOP tax cuts for the rich and corporations now under discussion would be good for the middle class.

What distinguishes progressives from so-called “conservatives” and others is that progressives don’t believe a word of it. A good society, progressives believe, is not the castle on the hill (or Trump Tower or Mar a Lago), surrounded by happy vassals (or happy slaves) singing as they labor for their bosses’ benefit. It’s a democratic yeomanry of equal citizens, well-educated, well-experienced and rich in the arts, advancing their society, in full and willing cooperation, using their own well-trained labor and mutual respect. It’s the Normal Rockwell painting of the town-hall meeting, with one farmer expounding his ideas of democracy and proper farming, and the others, having been educated at the local university or community college, listening and commenting with interest, understanding and respect. It’s not even close to a single man (or woman) fixing the fate of a town or plant because he (or she) owns it.

If you prefer this picture as a way of life, you are probably a progressive. If you prefer the castle on the hill, Trump Tower, Mar a Lago and the private plane, you are probably a so-called “conservative.”

If you’re an historian, whether of the United States or of the world, you probably know that human history has been an erratic but discernible progression from the latter to the former. The great mystery of the last two centuries is how “conservatives,” with brilliant propaganda, have managed to convince so many people who will never have the castle on the hill or the private plane that they can, if only they help the rich get richer and everyone else languish.

4. Some specifics. With this background and introduction, we can deduce how progressives would and should react to the social issues of our day. The lodestars are Jefferson’s still-unrealized quest for equality, the general happiness and social riches it provides, and the urge to spot and fix any flaw in our capitalist system that keeps it from providing the greatest good for the greatest number.

a. Making capitalists play by the rules and take their losses. One of the oddest things in recent history is how often progressives’ enemies have tarred them as “socialists” and how often that lie has deluded and confused voters. Neither Social Security nor Medicare is “socialism.” They are government-managed systems in which workers and employers themselves pay for workers’ dignity and health care in retirement.

The only real “socialism” I have seen in the United States in my 72 years has been the post-2008 bailouts that saved bankers from the risks they willingly took and their own stupidity. The bailout money came entirely from government (meaning US taxpayers); not a penny came from the bankers who caused the Crash of 2008. Not only did none of them go to jail; none of them lost their jobs and few lost any money, at least as a direct result of their culpable negligence or fraud. We, the people, paid them off for bringing the economy down with deceit, stupidity and gross negligence because we thought that otherwise the economy would collapse entirely, with even more dire consequences.

So the first economic tenet of progressivism is to make sure things like this never happen again. Gambling is a part of capitalism, if only because it’s sometimes hard to distinguish between gambling and useful investment. But the first rule of capitalism is that the gambling capitalist must man up and take his losses alone. (Virtually all the gamblers who caused the Crash of 2008 were men; women were the whistle blowers.)

To get from here to there, we must do one or more of three things. First, we must separate the gambling (speculation) from the routine part of banking that makes the economy run—things like savings and checking accounts, CD’s, lending and capital formation. We can do this with rules like Glass-Steagall, the Volcker Rule and similar boxing-in measures. Second, we must, carefully and over time, break up the biggest banks, both to reinstate healthy competition and to make sure none is “too big to fail.” Third, we must regulate the big banks carefully to limit the systemic risk they cause and, to the extent possible, curtail greedy and stupid behavior for the purpose of getting rich quick.

A true progressive wants to do all three, plus keep the banks from cheating and swindling helpless consumers. That’s why true progressives love Elizabeth Warren, want to see the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau that she started strengthened, not emasculated, and hate the idea of mandatory arbitration in workers’ contracts with financial institutions.

Another sordid example of “socialism for the rich” involves private, for-profit college “education.” By feeding off government loans to students, it has produced exorbitant executive salaries and profit margins that dazzle Wall Street. Yet despite vacuuming up a quarter to a third of government-funded student loans, it has produced little economic benefit for its students and lots of crushing student debt. To stop this perversion of capitalism, we need only enforce the rules that the Obama Administration put in place and that the Trump Administration is now delaying and seeking to subvert.

b. Beefing up the safety net. Keeping people from falling through the cracks of our capitalist system is not “socialism.” It’s common sense and common humanity.

We don’t want the homeless peeing and pooing on the doorsteps of our homes and businesses. We don’t want people with no access to medical care getting sick and infecting the rest of us. We don’t want people trying to raise a whole family on less than a living wage, thereby stunting their kids or making them delinquents. We don’t want poor people, lacking affordable housing, having to commute two hours each way to work and back, and so wasting our remaining fossil fuels and making our highways more crowded and dangerous. And all the money we give these unfortunates to make their lives minimally tolerable goes right back into our economy because, as a rule, poor and desperate people don’t save much.

There may be a few poor people who game the system and cheat. There are also people who defraud private insurance companies and steal fruit from supermarkets. That doesn’t mean that our system is bad or that we ought to outlaw private insurance or put all our fruits and vegetables in vaults. Most of the attacks on “welfare queens” and the like have been pure fiction, designed to create inter-class and inter-race jealousy and hatred for the purpose of winning elections.

Progressives understand this and want no part of it. If there are serious losses in our safety-net system, serious people will find and fix them, just as they have done many times with the doctors who got wealthy by defrauding the Medicare and Medicaid systems. Poor people rarely resort to that because they are desperate and grateful for the help.

But in all the political storms we should never forget one important thing: Social Security and Medicare are not socialism. They are government-managed programs for which workers and their employers pay, not government.

c. Creating good jobs by repairing and improving infrastructure. At two distinct points in time—before Trump took office and at his nine-month mark—I described the benefits to our middle class of the good jobs that a massive infrastructure-building program could bring. Unfortunately, in over nine months as president, Trump has failed even to begin planning for such a program. That failure is his greatest betrayal, so far, of the workers who voted for him.

Rebuilding and improving our national infrastructure is the simplest and least risky way of bringing good jobs to the masses of skilled workers made unemployed or underemployed by globalization and technological change. Unlike protectionism, tariffs, or Trump’s abortive “border adjustment tax,” infrastructure building won’t hurt our trading partners or violate any postwar trade agreement. It won’t even make our trading partners angry.

Our nonprofit, nonpartisan American Society of Civil Engineers says that defects in our infrastructure will rip $3.9 trillion from our economy over the next four years. That’s over twice as much as Republicans propose to rip from our economy by borrowing to fund big tax cuts for corporations and the rich. If we just dropped those cuts and applied the borrowing to our national infrastructure, we could provide good, well-paying, non-outsourceable jobs to millions of skilled workers, and we could avoid an even greater hit to our national economy. Most of the workers wouldn’t even have to relocate for their new jobs (unlike the oil-fracking roustabouts in North Dakota) because worn out and obsolete infrastructure is everywhere.

Progressives want desperately to begin this process, not just to give good jobs to people who’ve lost them, but also to make our country better. Government-funded infrastructure improvements would make workers’ lives better and help business grow and prosper. They would make traffic flow more smoothly both on land and in the air. They would make air and water cleaner and sewage less likely to get loose in a flood. They would make it easier for businesses to communicate and transport their raw materials and their wares. The whole project would be a massive win-win, with no hit to our trading partners at all.

So why wasn’t this the first thing Trump did in office? Beats me. Instead, he spent months trying to repeal Obamacare, with no viable replacement and so far no success. Now he’s trying to divert an infrastructure-sized amount of money to the rich and corporations in tax breaks.

It’s hard even to call giving new tax breaks to those who don’t need them “conservative.” But it’s easy to see how rebuilding and improving national infrastructure would make progress in our national commerce and create good jobs for our middle class. Perhaps Trump has put this issue on the back burner just because, if he didn’t, someone might accuse him of being “progressive.” And that—God forbid!—would contravene the strict tribalism that has characterized both political parties, especially the GOP, for nearly a generation.

d. Offering Medicare for All. Single-payer health insurance is not “socialism.” As with any insurance program, the insureds pay for it, with taxes, premiums, or both. They just pay much less than in a multiply balkanized private system because the single pool of insured risk is so much larger. To that extent, single payer isn’t socialism; it’s arithmetic.

The number, incidence and expense of things that can go wrong with the human body are infinitely higher and more expensive than risks covered by auto or property insurance. So you need a big pool of insureds to lower the premiums. Ideally, you want everyone in the country to be in the same pool; with 310 million insureds, you can have much lower premiums. That’s why virtually every other developed nation has a single-payer system.

Our insurance system is insane for having insurance pools balkanized by state, employer and multiple private insurers. Competition won’t lower premiums, because competition doesn’t work the same way for insurance as it does for other businesses. You can lower premiums by being more efficient in administration, but only so far. To lower them significantly, you need more insureds in the same pool, i.e., you need a bigger risk pool to soak up all the likely losses.

The other insanity of our thousand-payer system is accounting. Just accounting for the profit, let alone paying it, raises administrative costs by 60%. For example, three out of eight employees in my local medical laboratory work full time just verifying private insurance coverage and helping to administer multiple private insurance plans.

Progressives know two other things about single-payer or Medicare for All. First, it’s not “socialized medicine.” It’s efficient insurance. Nothing about it will own, control or runs doctors’ practices, hospitals or medical groups. It’s all about how premium payments get applied to the bills. That’s all.

The second thing that progressives know is that single-payer, even if financed by taxes, will not nationalize the entire health-insurance market. It will provide a single national insurer for basic, necessary coverage and maybe also for cheap, catastrophic coverage. But there will always be room for private insurers to offer more, just as they do in every developed nation that has a single-payer system. No one is going to outlaw capitalism in health insurance, any more than in any other field of our economy.

For example, as genetic medicine develops, based on each patient’s own personal genome, it’s likely to be quite expensive, especially at first. Private insurers will offer coverage to people who can afford it—even while genomic diagnostics and treatment are experimental—long before genomic medicine is a made a routine part of “basic” health-insurance coverage. There’s nothing wrong with this: eventually, when tried and tested, genomic medicine will make its way into the “basic” single-payer health insurance because progressives want all our citizens to be basically healthy.

Even for basic insurance, a single, national insurer will win only if and to the extent it can offer lower premiums by virtue of its much larger risk pool and lower administrative costs. No one—least of all any progressive—is going to outlaw private insurance.

e. Rationalizing our defense. Two things are odd about our national defense. First, we spend more on defense than the next seven nations combined. Second, much of that expense is unnecessary.

We and Russia have the dubious distinction of having enough nuclear weapons—each!—not only to annihilate each other completely, but to extinguish our species and perhaps all life on Earth. You think this might be overkill?

In the early the nineteenth century, Abraham Lincoln announced our national invulnerability to invasion in a famous quotation set out below. We have only gotten more invulnerable. Since Lincoln’s announcement, the only force ever to invade our Mainland was Pancho Villa’s. He got run out quickly and eventually was killed. Pearl Harbor and 9/11 were localized sneak attacks that killed a lot of people but, in the end, accomplished little except making us angry.

Provoked by 9/11, Dubya invaded and occupied two sovereign nations (Iraq and Afghanistan), in both of which we are still fighting (in Iraq unofficially), over fourteen and sixteen years (respectively) since we began. President Obama, in contrast, executed bin Laden using two helicopters filled with Navy Seals.

There’s are at least two lessons in this. First, you can get bogged down in “forever wars” when you fight far beyond your own borders for unclear reasons and with no exit strategy. That’s a lesson we should have learned in Vietnam, where we ended up losing over 58,000 Americans, and killing and estimated 3.5 million Southeast Asians, all while fighting on the wrong side, first for a colonial power (France) and then for a series of corrupt and rotten dictatorships. It’s also a lesson that General and later Secretary of State Colin Powell taught us explicitly in Gulf I, but which we still have failed to learn. Evidently, we are slow students.

Second, in the nuclear age, when nuclear weapons deter invasion and aggression by state actors, smaller and more accurate is better. We are never going to use our fifty megaton “Doomsday” H-bombs except to extinguish our species. What we need are much smaller, more accurate and stealthy weapons to take out the likes of Kim Jong-Un and his crew in their bunkers, “decapitate” North Korea, and forestall a big conventional war.

So when our military-industrial complex proposes a strategy of ever-bigger is better, and of fighting two World War II-size wars at once, progressives ask “why?” and “where will those two huge wars come from?”

Progressives also tend to favor diplomacy. There’s too much at stake in military conflict today—even with conventional weapons, let alone nuclear ones—to think that war can ever solve more problems than it creates. Just look at Syria today, Yemen, or Iraq.

With diplomacy alone, plus economic sanctions, President Obama prevented war with Iran and set back its nuclear-weapons program by a year to a year and a half, for at least ten years. After growling and cursing at that solution, President Trump has been able to do no better.

For reasons I have outlined in another essay, we Americans are risk-averse people. So we have had extreme overkill in our defense preparedness, and we tend to be trigger happy. Progressives know that much of this is unnecessary and has been unwise. They are eager to reduce our impulsive and unwise foreign involvement, especially in combat, and to put our own house in order.

f. Moving speech toward the truth. The toughest nut for progressives to crack is speech. Maybe that’s true for all Americans.

Our First Amendment makes speech practically inviolate. You can say or write anything you want—besides revealing state secrets, threatening the president or other public officials, or inciting immediate violence.

Even if what you say is false or fraudulent, you’re likely to get off unscathed. You might lose a civil suit if you lie about a business competitor, or if you lie recklessly about a pol or other public figure. You might even go to jail. But in practice few sue, and even fewer prosecute.

In our society, habitual liars usually pay no price at all. Exhibit A is our current president.

That’s so because we Americans have a theory, called the “free marketplace of ideas.” It holds that, in a cacophony of differing points of view, the truth eventually will out. The remedy for bad speech, the theory goes, is more speech, including good speech. Censorship of any kind is anathema to us.

Unfortunately, the Internet and social media have blown that theory all to Hell. Social media have put people in their own little bubbles, where they only read things they customarily receive, and they receive (or read) only messages that agree with their preconceptions.

The Internet has overseen the formation of little “cliques of consciousness,” analogous to cliques on a high-school playground. Progressives are in one corner, conservatives in another.

But that’s not at all where it ends. The cliques are as fine-grained as you can imagine. There are cliques that think all police are out of control, cliques that imagine conspiracies to murder fetuses, cliques that think Hillary organized them, and cliques that think Obama is a Muslim who tried to prime Iran to take over the Middle East. It’s hard to imagine any conspiracy theory so wild or bizarre that it doesn’t have at least a small Internet clique that believes it, and that reinforces its false belief with e-mails, Tweets and Facebook postings.

Social media have also accustomed people—especially our young—to treat messages that may come from complete strangers as if they came from trusted friends. The result is a field day for lies, which today include both amped-up political demagoguery and “fake news.”

Both come from such variant sources as pols, obscure operatives, various paid stooges and trolls (including Vladimir Putin’s), and Russian intelligence services. (So far we have no evidence that China is directing such garbage our way. China just has a strong defense, using a huge phalanx of censors to delete from its part of the Internet both real and fake news that China’s leaders deem too “political.”)

Progressives have a tough time recognizing this problem because they are used to treating speech—any speech—as a social good. Older progressives often don’t see the threat because they were raised in an age when we had three professional TV networks, each imbued with the ethos of impartial, truthful and professional journalism epitomized by Walter Cronkite.

In contrast, we now have a complex of media in which anyone can write anything, without attribution, and have it appear alongside messages from readers’ closest friends and beloved relatives. Worse yet, the disorganization of social media reinforces this confusion of sources. The “walls” of Facebook pages have completely random organization: a call to attend a white-supremacist or Communist rally can appear just before or after a close friend’s pictures of a marriage or a new baby.

Twitter is similar. Hashtags are useless when the relevant “grain” of thought is (now) 280 characters, and the Tweets come at you rapidly in random order, like bumper stickers on a highway. (Try summarizing this essay in 280 characters; you think you might lose a bit of substance?)

If our society survives, some day historians will view Facebook and Twitter much like cigarettes. They are so bright and easy to use that they are addictive; our current president is just the most notable addict. But because they are easy to use and so intrinsically disorganized, they encourage impulsive, thoughtless and disorganized communication and behavior. They affect the quality of human thought much as smoking cigarettes affects our individual health: their deleterious effect, like lung cancer, grows over time and may take decades to develop.

Our brains are masses of neurons about the size of grapefruits. Those grapefruit-sized masses are trying to comprehend an Earth astronomically larger, and a Universe unthinkably larger still.

The only way our tiny brains can hope to do those jobs is by abstracting and carefully organizing the little information they can manage to contain. And the only way they can do that is by spending time, in quiet contemplation, to organize the myriad impressions that our senses provide us each day.

In duplicating the random, jerky and impulsive character of our daily sensory lives, Twitter and Facebook are at war with the processes of contemplation and thinking. Those processes began with the invention of writing, our “coolest” media. They accelerated when writing shifted from recording business transactions to handling larger questions. Now, with the speeding bumper-sticker impressions of Facebook and Twitter, that social evolution is going into reverse.

If we apply our hard-won social-evolutionary ability to think abstractly to the Dark Side of the Internet, we can identify three enormous problems that we must solve soon. First, when everyone can write messages to anyone and have them appear like personalized notes, alongside messages from family and friends, how do we restore healthy skepticism in recipients? How do we even foster recognition and consciousness of sources? How can we alert recipients that some messages ultimately come from (or are avidly re-Tweeted by) their enemies, even foreign ones?

Second, how do we control the modern tendency of electronic media—in ones that purport to use writing, like Facebook and Twitter—to duplicate the random, jerky, haphazard character of our individual daily sensory impressions? Compare, for example, any modern movie to an award-winning movie from the 1940s or 1950s. You will note a vast difference in direction. In the old movie, the camera holds steady to film a scene complete with dialogue and actors’ reactions. In the new one, dialogue is incomplete or overlapping, and a hand-held camera jumps around in a state of perpetual motion among people, cars, and often sudden violence.

Doesn’t this vast change in how movies are filmed send a subliminal message: that our human lives are jerky, impulsive, disorganized and threatening? And don’t Facebook and Twitter reinforce that message in our supposedly “coolest” medium, writing?

The third problem is one that hasn’t hit us hard yet but is coming as inexorably as death and taxes. What do we do when these random, jerky “messages” contain video and audio made out of whole cloth, with the same techniques with which everyday movies create alien science-fiction worlds or worlds from legend or myth? How then do our impressionable youth separate fact from fantasy, fake news, and propaganda?

Our electronic techniques for simulating reality have far outstripped the average person’s ability to distinguish fiction and propaganda. And the gap will only get bigger as so-called “virtual reality” gear comes on line. Imagine, for example, a full-motion audiovisual antiabortion ad, showing a nearly-full-term fetus dragged out of the womb, uttering its first cry, and then being skewered by the forceps and dumped into a biological waste bin.

This never happens in real life. But what non-medically-trained anti-abortion zealot would know? The technology now exists to make such a lying video clip, and to make it a fully convincing simulation of reality for anyone who hasn’t been to medical school. Virtually every science-fiction, horror and fantasy film now produced uses technology capable of making such a clip seem real. How are we to interpret our First Amendment when such a clip appears on Twitter and on the Facebook page of every voter in a red state?

George Orwell was on the right track. In his dystopian novel 1984, he imagined a dictator called “Big Brother,” who controlled the masses by controlling, through television and radio, how they viewed the world. What Orwell never told us is how Big Brother got his start. Now we can easily fill that gap: Big Brother could have taken over a thriving democracy simply by using electronic communication—today’s Internet—to propagate convincing lies, complete with fake full-motion audiovisual clips.

So progressives are caught on the horns of a dilemma. They believe devoutly in freedom of expression. It’s the means by which they promulgate their complaints about flaws in the system and their suggestions for making it better. But because free expression is their bread and butter, they may miss the threat that free expression can pose to democracy when it morphs into fake news, propaganda, or an information war propelled by all the reality-simulating resources of modern technology.

g. Perfecting Jefferson’s imperfect credo. After such a depressing analysis of the risk of free speech subverting our democracy, I’ll end this essay on a more encouraging note. Progressives’ belief in Jefferson’s credo—“all . . . are created equal”—can help solve all our problems, perhaps even the problem of bent free speech.

The recognition that all of us are human and “endowed with certain inalienable Rights” is but a baby step away from a second key understanding. All of us want much the same things: freedom, health, a basic standard of living, the right to practice our various religions (or none at all), absorbing and useful work, and the ability to raise and educate our kids. The more we recognize and appreciate our essential sameness as humans, the less we will divide ourselves into warring clans, whether red and blue on election day, or North and South Korea in a threatened mini-Armageddon.

Thus the credo of equality holds within it a source of peace. If others are just like you, regardless of race, religion, national origin, language, culture, and sexual preference and identity, then you have no need to lie to them. You can convince them of your views with empathy, real facts, and human understanding. You can have confidence in your ability to do so because of the human similarities that you credit and share.

This was exactly how human history’s four great “leaders of color”—Mahatma Gandhi, Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., Nelson Mandela, and Barack Obama—accomplished their respective political “miracles.” This was how our President John F. Kennedy and the Soviet Union’s General Secretary Nikita S. Khrushchev avoided nuclear extinction of our species during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Each understood his adversary’s love for his country and his people, and each understood the yearning of the other’s people to live and develop in its own way.

As I’ve outlined in another essay, it took great judgment and wisdom—against a cacophony of conflicting advice—for Kennedy and Khrushchev to reach this mutual understanding and, from it, to make a practical deal to end the crisis. (Unbeknownst to the two leaders at the time, it also took the cool and wise judgement of a Soviet submarine flotilla commander named Vasili Aleksandrovich Arkhipov. While under water in an overheated sub, Arhkipov refused to authorize the use of Soviet nuclear torpedoes and so avoided a naval nuclear Armageddon.) But the basis of that understanding was the simple realization that, despite huge differences in location, geography, history, ethnic origin and ideology (capitalism versus Communism), all were equal and basically the same.

We seem a long way from this understanding today. Our American political parties are divided within themselves, as well as between themselves. Seemingly longstanding nations can dissolve into internal dissension in places once as stable as Britain, Spain, Scotland and Catalonia.

Yet there are tried and true ways of handling internal divisions, including federalism, as the United States and the European Union so ably demonstrate. As the dust of division starts to settle, progressives will look toward those ways, rather than to war or irreconcilable political conflict, in order to make progress.

5. Conclusion. So there you have it. Progressives do have a coherent and comprehensive political philosophy. It revolves around the notions that all human beings are similar and to be treated as equal, with equal rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, and that continual but gradual striving for improvement—progress—is the chief source of peace and the primary goal of political action.

The basic notion of equality and equal opportunity underlies progressives’ economic and social philosophy: that all are better off when society is more level, when leaders work toward Mill’s “greatest good for the greatest number.”

Thus progressives are dead set against the kind of extreme economic inequality that has crept up upon us Americans since the 1970s. They want a society with equality and equal opportunity built in. They reject the rigged system and the “trickle down” theories that force the poor and middle class to eat the crumbs from the tables of the 1%.

Progessives want a society whose rules create the broadest and happiest middle class—in which great wealth is possible for anyone smart and ambitious, but not the rule of inheritance for a whole class, and certainly not the rule for organizing society. They want the rich and powerful to pay their fair share of taxes to make that society possible, and so to pay back the society that made them rich and powerful in the first place.

Progressives want to bring such a society closer to realization by much the same techniques that FDR and his successors did during and after the Great Depression and World War II. They want universal health insurance, with a whole-nation risk pool. They want a strong safety net to protect the lives and dignity of the old and those (like coal miners and many factory workers) displaced by technology, environmental threats, or globalization. They want a massive program for repairing our infrastructure— funded with about the same amount of borrowing that Republicans would use to lower taxes on the rich—to bring back good, self-respecting, non-oursourceable jobs and so strengthen and expand our middle class. They want peaceful, non-militarized policing of cities, with equal respect for all minorities, including especially our long-abused African-Americans and Hispanic immigrants.

But progressives most definitely don’t want to replace capitalism and its just risks and rewards with systems that have been wholly discredited in lengthy fair trials in Russia and China. They want to make capitalism work better by soothing its discontents and by making even the most powerful bankers play by its rules and take their losses like real men.

In short, progressives, at their name suggests, want progress, in both equality and in perfecting our capitalist system which, although the best our species has discovered so far, is still a long way from perfect.

There is one dark cloud, however, in this bright picture. At the moment, progressives have no better solution for our greatest threat than anyone else. In an age in which Russian intelligence plants or re-Tweets fake news to divide us, and in which our own president casually lies on a regular basis, our people need some help in deciding what is real and what is fake. If they don’t get it, they could soon disintegrate into blind warring clans—the “ignorant armies [that] clash by night” of which Victorian poet Matthew Arnold once warned us.

Besides global warming, this is the toughest challenge our society faces today. All of us Americans are so used to an “anything goes” attitude toward speech, and a deep aversion to censorship, that we just don’t know what to do about rampant lies, let alone ones that modern technology can make seem so real.

The people who brought us the technical means for the dramatic change in our perception of truth—our Mark Zuckerbergs—are so enamored of the potential of their creations for good that they are blind to the Dark Side. Meanwhile, the very notions of truth and reality are dissolving in a barrage of conflicting assertions and conflicting views of reality, some entirely manufactured, with absolutely no useful indicia of reliability or even of origin.

A possible partial solution, consistent with American values, is to require every message, Tweet, or Facebook post intended for an audience of more than one to contain both the name of its author and the other person(s), if any, who financed or ordered its dissemination. That requirement would be a start, but it would be devilishly hard to enforce. (One of Putin’s trolls’ favorite tricks was to re-Tweet a nasty bit of native fake news, millions of times, and so to get two ignorant Internet armies to begin their battle.)

Another possible partial solution might be to designate someone as a “fact-checker” to evaluate the veracity of suspicious posts. But this would be a Herculean task, not only due to the astronomical volume of messages, but due also to the difficulty of chasing down whoever received them (and how), posting on their many Facebook walls, and hoping they might read the rebuttals.

In the old days, pre-Reagan, the FCC’s “fairness doctrine” required the very same broadcast station that had aired an attack on a political candidate to air a response. That rule made it likely, although still not certain, that the attack’s original audience would hear or see the response. But there’s no such simple solution in the field of social media, if only because the attack would have had so many recipients, in so many variant Facebook walls or Tweet streams, that the response, even if received, would most likely just get lost.

The more you think about the problem of fake news and the Internet, the less you see any simple solution. Perhaps the best thing progressives can do is to sound the alarm and recognize that this, like global warming, is a real and pressing problem that demands practical solutions, not heads in the sand. Meanwhile, our own self-interested pols, like our friend Vladimir, will continue to probe a hole in our society and its defense as big as the Moon.

Endnote 1: Before this post was published, The Economist reviewed the history of profit-making colleges using government loans to students for subpar educational “services.” Among its damning assessments of this largely parasitic “industry” were these nuggets:
“Only 23% of students at for-profits finish their degrees, but nearly all accumulate lots of debt. Tuition rates were often set to maximise federal loan dollars, the principal source of revenues. An investigation by Congress showed that for-profits were, at their height, hoovering up 25% of [Department of Education] student-aid funds and 37% of post-9/11 GI Bill benefits, although just 10% of college students attended them. The best study so far, examining the tax returns of 1.4m students, found that ‘for-profit education does not have a meaningful private return to the student’ and ‘the majority of schools appear to have negligible average earnings effects’.”
The kicker was the industry’s and conservatives’ collective response to two rules adopted by the Obama Administration to shape these parasitic firms up. The rules allowed students to stop paying on their education loans if they could prove that their for-profit schools had deceived them, i.e., had committed fraud in marketing or recruitment, or that their “education” had provided no economic benefit.

The Trump Administration, under Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, has a huge backlog of cases seeking to enforce these rules and is proposing to modify or drop them. Apparently the “conservatives” now in power would prefer that swindled students take the economic hit so that yet more government money could be available (in the form of student loans) to fund the schools that swindled them.

DeVos of course purports to be a “conservative” maven, reforming education for the better while making it serve private profit. But is this a tale of true capitalism—vigorous competition to improve something at real financial risk—or of rich parasites feeding off a rotten limb of government? Hint: In 2009, Bridgepoint Education’s CEO reportedly was paid $20 million, while ITT Tech earned a 37.1% profit. Even seven years later, according to Forbes, none of the top executives of Harvard, Princeton, or Yale made even a tenth that much.

Endnote 2: What marked the 2008-Crash bailouts as pure “socialism for the rich” is the fact that all the bailout money came from government, and none from any of the parties who were bailed out. It might have been different, for example, if the bailed-out banks had for decades been paying a small tax on speculative financial transactions, which had accumulated to a level that could finance the bailouts. That kind of tax would be analogous to the FICA payments that workers and employers pay for the purposes of accumulating a fund to finance workers’ social security in retirement. It would be a form of self-financed insurance, not socialism.

But that’s most definitely not what happened. After the Crash, many progressives proposed precisely such a small tax (1% or less) on speculative transactions, in order to build up a “rainy day fund” to insure the nation and its people against the next financial panic. So what did the bankers do? Through their lobbyists, they resisted that tax as if it were a pandemic. Evidently, they preferred socialism for the rich over a rational financial-panic insurance scheme for which they would help pay.

Endnote 3: “All the armies of Europe, Asia, and Africa combined, with all the treasure of the earth (our own excepted) in their military chest, with a Bonaparte for a commander, could not by force take a drink from the Ohio or make a track on the Blue Ridge in a trial of a thousand years.” — Abraham Lincoln, in his Lyceum Address, January 27, 1838.

Links to Popular Recent Posts

permalink

11 November 2017

Seven Reasons Why Trump Could be Impeached and Removed Next Year


For links to popular recent posts, click here.

1. He is disloyal and unreliable.
2. No one in Congress really knows or likes him.
3. His “magic” is fading fast.
4. The “pussy” tape is a crouching tiger.
5. The national revulsion at male sexual predation is a cresting wave.
6. Trump is his own worst enemy.
7. Tuesday’s drubbing, or next year’s, will wake even the sleepiest GOP member of Congress.

1. He is disloyal and unreliable. Donald Trump’s concept of loyalty runs in one direction only: up. He expects constant sycophancy, as in the famous Cabinet session in which he ordered every member to sing his praises. But displease him or disappoint him, and he will throw you under the bus before you can blink.

Not only that, if it serves his purposes he will belittle you and you and your service and even publicly humiliate you. Ask General Flynn, Paul Manafort, Rick Gates, George Papadopoulos or Ed Gillespie. Also ask Cabinet members who are still with him, including Rex Tillerson, General Kelly and Jeff Sessions.

2. No one in Congress really knows or likes him. National politics probably depends less on personal friendship now than ever before. The constant demands for fund raising, media massaging, and interaction with constituents leave little time for socializing or cultivating friendships among members.

But even in this cold environment, Trump is unique. Before entering the White House, he had no experience in politics whatsoever, and therefore no chance to cultivate even bare acquaintances with members of Congress. What personal ties he may have are temporary ties of convenience, undermined by his well-known refusal to direct loyalty down and his ignorance of congressional history and procedure.

3. His “magic” is fading fast. Members of Congress should have known that breaking all the rules of tact, diplomacy, and coalition-building endemic to politics is not a recipe for success. Maybe some did.

Most Republicans went along with Trump because he somehow became their party’s nominee and, to everyone’s surprise, he won. But his win did not change the rules of politics any more than they changed the laws of gravity.

So far, Trump’s breaking-all-the-rules “magic” has failed to inspire or permit any major legislative achievement or any breakthrough in foreign policy. His party has become a herd of cats, unable to work together to pass laws, in part because it has broken all the rules for passing major legislation, including hearings, giving members time to read drafts, deliberation, and compromise.

Freshman members of Congress, brought in by the Trump tide, may think this is how the system is supposed to work. But the leadership of both Houses and the more experienced GOP members know better.

That’s why so many experienced GOP members have announced their retirements this year. The don’t want to work in a Congress with no rules because they expect their best efforts to be futile. And they expect to be challenged, if not defeated, by primary opponents having no coherent policy proposals and no idea how Congress works. Thus does Trump’s “magic” conduce to anarchy.

4. The “pussy” tape is a crouching tiger. One of the least explained phenomena of the Trump presidency is the failure of his “grab ‘em by the pussy” tape (euphemistically known as the “Hollywood Access” tape) to destroy his candidacy. There are three plausible reasons for this surprise.

First, Wikileaks released reams of theretofore secret but hacked DNC e-mails approximately one hour after that tape was released. The news media properly focused on those e-mails, which were more recent, more substantive and more properly “political” than the decades-old “pussy” tape.

Second, educated women likely to be most swayed by the “pussy” tape were also those most likely to be swayed the other way by the hacked e-mails, the disorganization and high-handedness among Democrats that they showed, and their additional evidence of Hillary’s tin ear and lack of political judgment. For many of these sophisticated women, the e-mails may have pushed semi-conscious suspicion and distrust of Hillary over the line.

Third, the “pussy” tape may actually have helped Trump’s candidacy among men, especially those without a college education. Trump’s “magic” among men derives largely from unthinking admiration for an alpha male—a dominant male who takes and uses power regardless of right or wrong and regardless of consequences. For men, Trump’s sexual predation may actually have boosted that admiration by making Trump seem a man who could get away with anything, perhaps even keeping his implausible campaign promises.

The least likely explanation for the apparent impotence of the “pussy” tape is the one offered by the Trump campaign itself: the supposed “brilliance” of trotting out Bill’s accusers to air their stories. It would be hard to imagine a man or woman, let alone a college-educated woman, so lacking in logic as not to ask, “what has this to do with Hillary?”

Now that Hillary is out of the picture, the educated women who ought to have been appalled by the “pussy” tape are free to reconsider their failure to react.

5. The national revulsion at male sexual predation is a cresting wave. The most casual observer cannot fail to notice this unprecedented phenomenon in American politics. Women of both parties and all classes have become fed up with sexual predation by men in positions of power, including pols.

It is absolutely no coincidence that the explosion of accusations and witnesses is coming now, after the “pussy” tape failed to keep Trump out of the White House and his win emboldened and encouraged sexual predators of all kinds. Indeed, the explosion of accusations is probably, at least in part, a delayed, collective reaction to the “pussy” tape and its implications for a sitting president.

If this analysis is correct, the intensity of antipathy to Trump on the part of women, including the relatively uneducated, is about to take a quantum leap. That antipathy will further erode his “magic.” As men consider the implications for their wives, daughters, sisters and mothers, it will also erode their admiration for Trump as an “invincible” alpha male.

6. Trump is his own worst enemy. He’s a liar, braggart, and bully whose public utterances are often nasty and inconsistent to the point of being scatterbrained. He might avoid his personality causing universal revulsion if he kept a low profile. But he hasn’t.

Virtually every day, Trump’s Tweets cause his face and his voice to appear on the daily news and intrude into every American’s home. There the full force of his narcissism, scattered brain, personal nastiness, and tendency to blame everyone else for his own failures are on full display.

Trump is not the nice but dumb guy that Dubya was, with whom voters would have liked to have a beer. Nor has he the pleasant, low-key personality of Obama. The more voters see and hear him in full force, the more they will come to detest him. And the more our various minorities come to see how serious is his bigotry, the more their resistance will harden into action.

For nine months, voters have been seeing him almost every day. As this trend continues, Trump’s “magic” will go into reverse, as it apparently did for Luther Strange and Ed Gillespie.

7. Tuesday’s drubbing, or next year’s, will wake even the sleepiest GOP member of Congress. Forget about any collusion with the Russians. There is ample evidence of Trump’s and his family’s use of the presidency for their own personal profit to impeach and remove him. All that’s lacking is political will: impeachment is, in the final analysis, a political process.

Trump hasn’t been impeached so far for two reasons only. He represents and purports to lead his party, and his “magic” rule-breaking somehow appeared to have paved a path to political power, donors’ satisfaction, and actually getting something done.

Now, after nine months, it’s painfully apparent that real accomplishment is elusive because Trump is an abysmal political leader who has failed to see, let alone to cure, his party’s ideological divisions. At the same time, his breaking-the-rules “magic” has had little force in keeping others in power, at least after Tuesday’s special elections. This persistence of the laws of gravity should surprise no one except the pols whose wishful thinking made them willfully blind.

Herd behavior is tough to predict. Republicans are well known for acting in lockstep and following their leaders, except apparently in passing legislation under Trump. So when Trump’s support among Republicans goes, it will go with the speed and force of a stampede.

When that will happen is hard to tell. Some trickles among non-retiring members, like leaks flowing under a failing dam, likely will appear in the next weeks or months, especially if the first attempt at tax cuts is the fiasco that now threatens.

But the best guess is that ever-cautious and ever-hopeful Republicans will wait for the 2018 midterms to make their move. If the results are similar to Tuesday’s, the chances of an impeachment will rise at least to better than even. That would be a blessing for both parties, for our Republic, and for our dignity as a nation.

Links to Popular Recent Posts

permalink

04 November 2017

Why this White Geezer is Looking for Black and Brown Candidates to Support



For links to popular recent posts, click here.

What a Difference a Day Makes!
(Dems Sweep Special-Election Day)

    “We will not condone hatred and bigotry. . . . It’s going to take a doctor to heal our differences . . . . and the doctor is in!” — Doctor and Democrat Ralph Northam, Governor-Elect of Virginia
Yesterday Democrats swept the nation in various special elections, most notably in Virginia. Here, from this source, are some key results:

Virginia
    Dem and Doctor Ralph Northam wins governorship by margin of 8.6%, drawing more votes than any previous Virginia governor.

    Dems also elect attorney general and lieutenant governor; latter becomes first African-American elected to statewide office since L. Douglas Wilder became governor in 1989.

    Northam wins DC-suburban district held by GOP congresswoman by 13% margin.

    Control of statehouse is uncertain, pending recounts—a result no one expected—as Dems pick up at least fourteen seats in statehouse, mostly for unknown, first-time candidates.

    All fourteen statehouse seats that Dems flipped were held by GOP men; ten will now be held by women.

    First openly transgender pol (now woman) wins seat in statehouse, defeating man who self-described as Virginia’s “chief homophobe.”

    Nonwhite voters turned out at presidential election rates.
New Jersey
    Dem Phil Murphy takes governorship by 13% margin over Chris Chistie.
Washington State
    Dems take control of state senate, giving Dems full control of all three West Coast states: California, Oregon and Washington.
Georgia
    Dems pick up three seats in state legislature, replacing Republicans who left their seats.
Maine
    Citizens expand Medicaid by popular initiative—the first such in nation—by a 20% margin, despite massive influx of out-of-state money against their initiative.
City Elections
    Charlotte and Fayetteville, NC: Dems take both mayorships, giving Charlotte its first-ever African-American mayor (who was heavily outspent).

    St. Petersburg, FL: Dem defeats GOP mayor by tying him to Trump and climate denial.

    Manchester, NH: Dem Joyce Craig becomes first Dem mayor in fourteen years.

    Minneapolis, MN: Andrea Jenkins, elected to city council, becomes first transgender woman of color elected to public office in any major US city.

    St. Paul, MN: first-ever African-American mayor elected, in city whose population is only 15.7% black.

    Philadelphia, PA: Progressive civil-rights lawyer Larry Krasner becomes city attorney despite record of suing police and massive right-wing campaign against him.

    Provo, UT: In only notable GOP win yesterday, pragmatic Republican wins mayorship of Utah’s third largest city, replacing Jason Chaffetz, who quit to become Fox talking head.

    Seattle, WA: First woman since 1920s becomes mayor and first Lesbian mayor ever.

Health care as vital issue: In Virginia, voters citing health care as most important of five selected issues favored Dem and Doctor Northam by 54% margin.

Gun policy as vital issue:Voters picking guns as top policy issue split their votes in Virginia.

The big themes of this special election were:

1. Progressives and marginalized groups won big, including women, African-Americans and LGBT people. It’s not who you are or whom you love, but what you can do, that matters. This has been our American credo since Plymouth Rock, and it’s coming back!

2. Dems won just by being uniters, not dividers, and being reasonable. Divisive identity politics failed. A new grand coalition of white progressives and long-marginalized minorities is rising from the ashes of the Republican Party, which Trump and Bannon’s firebrands are busy burning down.

3. Voters are still fuming, big time, about having their health insurance taken away or made unaffordable.

4. Guns don’t matter so much after Las Vegas. The tragic Southerland Springs church shooting proved that neither Texans nor devout Christians are invulnerable, and that living in the countryside is no shield.

5. Disgust for Trump’s bigoted, divisive and scatterbrained “leadership” and hope for a better future combined to get out the vote. Hope rules, not fear, although indignation helps!

6. (Former) President Obama and Attorney General Holder worked behind the scenes, challenging vote suppression and gerrymandering in court and helping to get out the vote. Their work is beginning to turn the red South blue.

7. Despite the many structural flaws in our government, it’s not acres or counties that matter. It’s people. And people with hope are invincible.

On to Alabama in December and a new South and new nation in 2018!



1. “America” is an idea: equality of all people.
2. Our social evolution is now stepping backwards.
3. Equality makes us strong.
4. Hope is stronger than fear.
5. The demographics of hope, not fear, can save us.
6. We are so close to the tipping point.
7. My own faith and hope guide me.

Our nation is balanced on a knife edge and falling toward the Dark Side. Ronald Reagan’s “shining city on a hill” is growing more tarnished by the day.

Why is this so? We have forgotten who we are, what struggles we have fought and won and why, and what has propelled our once- and now-again isolationist society into global leadership. Only remembering will bring us back and “make America great again.”

At this peculiar time in our own and world history, the only way to do that is to continue the trend that Barack Obama epitomized as president: the inclusive celebration of all our talent at the highest levels of our society. We must not just continue this trend, but exalt and revel in it. Here’s why:

1. “America” is an idea: equality of all people. Unlike most other nations, but like the EU, the United States is not based on race, creed, or ethnic group. We did not arise by evolutionary accident. We are a planned community.

The people who populated our original thirteen colonies were mostly outcasts and refugees. They fled religious and political persecution in Britain and later other parts of Europe. They came here not for better jobs or warmer climate. (Our Northeast, where they settled, was a harsh wilderness, with colder winters than anywhere in Britain.) The Pilgrims and others who followed them were chasing an idea: the idea of liberty and freedom for all.

The nation we have today is a product of deliberate social engineering. It’s based on a single, simple idea. “All . . . are created equal,” wrote Thomas Jefferson in our Declaration of Independence. All have equal rights to “Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.” All have equal rights to speak, write, assemble, practice their religions (whatever they may be, even atheism), and to “petition the Government for Redress of Grievances.”

Our First Amendment comes first because it’s the essence of who and what we are. Even though our original Constitution recognized and perpetuated slavery, there’s no restriction in our First Amendment. By its very language, it’s universal. Congress shall make “no law,” it says, abridging the rights of free people. (You hear that, NFL?)

2. Our social evolution is now stepping backwards. When we fought our Revolution for independence from England, our big idea was just an aspiration. It was far from realization. The ellipsis in “all . . . are created equal” was filled with a single gender, excluding more than half of our species. The man who wrote those words, Thomas Jefferson, kept slaves. Our Constitution deprived them of the right to vote and counted them as only three-fifths human.

But we grew. We evolved socially, much faster than any biological evolution. We fought our two greatest wars to bring our big idea closer to realization.

We fought our Civil War—still the bloodiest war for us in our history—to abolish slavery. After its end, we adopted the Thirteenth through Fifteenth Amendments, which formalized the abolition of slavery and made our former slaves (and all others) free and equal citizens. Our Fourteenth Amendment recognizes “[a]ll persons born or naturalized in the United States” as citizens with full “privileges and immunities.” (emphasis added)

By 1870, when all three Civil War Amendments had been ratified, the gender bias in our original Constitution was gone. It took another fifty years and the Nineteenth Amendment to give women the right to vote. But we got there.

The second-most-bloody war for us was our war against Nazi Germany and Japanese Imperialism. It was the only war in our history in which our goal from the very beginning was our enemies’ “unconditional surrender.” Neither we nor our Allies had imposed that stringent condition in World World I, in which we had fought Germany the first time. Instead, we had participated in the Versailles Treaty, which remade the map of Europe and imposed the harsh conditions on Germany that ultimately led to World War II.

Why did we demand unconditional surrender in World War II? The Nazis, with their theory of “Aryan superiority,” contradicted the very idea that made (and still makes) us a nation. The Nazis touted the false idea of racial superiority that we had fought our still-bloodiest war to expunge from our own nation. The result of Nazi rule in Germany was the Holocaust, as well as an abject loss that better social policy might have avoided.

Although less theoretical and less open about it than the Nazis, the Imperial Japanese employed the same theory of racial superiority to motivate their troops. Their results included the Rape of Nanking. Together, the Nazis and Imperial Japanese committed some of the greatest wartime atrocities in human history.

So when General Kelly ignores abolishing slavery as the primary and most important cause of our Civil War, he reveals far more than historical ignorance or amnesia. He commits a profound sin against the very idea that makes us a nation. He takes a giant step backward in our social evolution, and all of mankind’s, against the tide of history that so many Americans died to help push forward. For a military man, that may be the most cardinal sin imaginable: to misname why so many of our and others’ brave soldiers died.

Unfortunately, General Kelly speaks for this Executive and for its two casual but profoundly mistaken notions. The first is that abolition was but a sideshow of the Civil War. (It was not; it was the main event.) The second is that the “good cause” of states’ rights could have justified or provoked our bloodiest and most horrible war without the economic benefits of slavery to the Southern ruling class. For these falsehoods, among many others, Trump’s presidency and Kelly’s affirmation of its roots in tribalism comprise the biggest step backward we have taken since the Vietnam War.

3. Equality makes us strong. So far, all this is just history and theory. Yet the egalitarian theory of our nation has had a vital practical result. Under the stress of war, pandemic or financial panic, it makes us stronger as a society than any other in human history. Or at least it once did.

Our most terrible foreign war was World War II. In it, African-Americans fought bravely against Nazi racism, although many of them were second-class citizens here at home, suffering under Jim Crow in our South. The sons of Japanese-Americans and of Japanese immigrants interned in concentration camps in our West fought so bravely against the fascists and Nazis in Europe that their all-Japanese 442d Brigade became the most decorated in the entire war. Their brigade liberated the Dachau death camp and, but for General Patton’s order to hold back, would have liberated Rome.

Why did African- and Japanese-Americans fight so hard for a nation that treated them so badly at home? The bare promise of equality in our Constitution, as amended, and our Founding documents gave them hope. They believed in the idea that makes us a nation. They believed so strongly that many laid down their lives for it, knowing even as they drew their last breaths that they would never see its realization.

They would not, but their sons and daughters or grandsons and granddaughters might. And that hope was enough to inspire them to heroism. Surely that same hope can get their modern counterparts to register and vote.

4. Hope is stronger than fear. For individuals, fear is our species’ strongest emotion. There are valid and obvious evolutionary reasons for this: fear motivates individual survival.

But for a society, hope is the stronger emotion, and by far the one with more positive results. People can do horrible, irrational things out of fear. They can mount a massive surprise attack on Pearl Harbor. They can incinerate civilians in London with V-2 rockets. They can fire-bomb Dresden or Tokyo or nuke Hiroshima and Nagasaki. They can build death camps for the industrial-scale slaughter of living people.

But hope is an uplifting emotion that heals wounds and drives progress. Hope is what put Barack Obama in the White House, despite the rampant racism that we all now see still exists.

Hope is what gave us the president who healed our broken economy, who saved our American auto industry, who brought justice to bin Laden with two helicopters full of Navy Seals (rather than invading and occupying two sovereign nations—Iraq and Afghanistan), and who started to wind down our two longest wars.

Only when the sons and daughters of Africa saw that white people would vote in numbers for a half-“black” man for president did they surge to the polls in droves. It was hope, not fear, hate or compromise with evil, that gave us our most progressive president since the three assassinations of the 1960s. It was hope, not fear, hate or compromise with evil, that gave us our only president since Eisenhower to win two terms with clear and uncontested popular majorities.

We need that hope back. Our current president’s disgraceful coddling of white supremacists and hatred against Mexican and Muslim immigrants has made bringing hope back difficult for anyone with white skin. Even Bill and Hillary, who are not themselves racists, stooped low enough to appeal to racists to slake their boundless ambition. And today our chief progressive leaders—Bernie Sanders, Cory Booker, and Elizabeth Warren—seem to ignore the element of racial animus as if it were an invisible gorilla sitting on our dining-room table.

In this atmosphere of willful blindness, how can anyone revive the hope we progressives need to win, unless they carry evidence of authenticity in their very genes and upbringing? With the stench of white supremacy permeating our politics, and with white progressives strangely passive in the face of evil, what will motivate black and brown people to register and vote?

5. The demographics of hope, not fear, can save us. Worrying about how to pry white supremacists and their apologists away from their sins is a fool’s errand. In the long run, they will awaken to the idea that makes us Americans. Or they will not, and our nation will become like others and follow them into the dustbin of history.

But as the great British economist John Maynard Keynes once said, in the long run we are all dead. In the meantime, we progressives have elections to win and ideas to protect.

How do we do that? Do we follow Donald Trump in coddling, cozying up to and apologizing for white supremacists and dog-whistle-blowing candidates? Do we wring our hands and shade our speeches and our policies to win their votes? Or do we focus on the voters who put our first “black” president in the White House and gave us our first truly progressive Executive since Jack, Martin and Bobby were shot down?

Pollsters obsess incessantly about numbers. But you can’t measure intensity with polls.

You can’t measure the strength of my outrage, as 72-year-old white man, at how—and for how little reason—Eric Garner, Freddie Gray, Sandra Bland, and Walter Scott died. You can’t measure the strength of Lt. General Ray B. Silveria’s outrage at the disrespect and insults that our black USAFA cadets had to suffer while acquiring the skills to defend us and our big idea.

You can’t measure the wave of hope that made Obama our president. You can’t measure the wave of despair and disgust at the vile person who sits in the White House now, and at the vile, hateful, know-nothing “philosophy” that has suffused our government at the highest levels. You can’t measure the wave of disgust and nausea that overtakes people like me, who are well enough informed to understand the health-insurance, tax, student-loan and other scams that people in high places are trying to foist on our fellow Americans.

Four of the greatest leaders in human history understood this basic point. Mahatma Gandhi freed his hundreds of millions from what was then the greatest empire in human history. The Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. freed his tiny 12% minority from the insult of Jim Crow, i.e., institutionalized and legalized racism. Nelson Mandela negotiated freedom and majority rule for his people—the vast majority of South Africans—from inside a prison cell. Barack Obama gave us Americans the first progressive revival since our three great leaders of the 1960s died in a hail of gunshots.

All four accomplished these “miracles” without violence. All four relied on empathy, understanding and hope, not fear or hate. And all four, perhaps not coincidentally, were “people of color” struggling against a vast multitude imbued with a false sense of racial superiority and armed with indisputably superior weapons.

As a white progressive, I have no hesitation in following such leaders. I am ready to lay down my white privilege, just as so many have laid down their lives, for the idea of America. Indeed, I am eager to do so.

I have absolute faith that there are millions of white people, probably tens of millions, much like me. The trick is to get them to see their true selves and what really makes us all Americans.

6. We are so close to the tipping point. I’m also a rational man, trained in three distinct careers of Reason: physics, law practice, and law teaching. And Reason shows that we are so close to recovering our nation’s soul.

The demographers tell us that we will be a “majority-minority” nation by 2043, if not sooner. In less than a generation and a half, we will have no racial or ethnic majority at all. We will all be members of minorities. Then we will have to realize our key idea, or we will fall apart in hatred, enmity and squabbling.

So what should we do now, before that tipping point arrives? Should we compromise with or coddle the supremacists and their apologists and try to escape our inevitable destiny? Should we turn our backs on our most trying struggles and the progress they have forged? Or should we embrace the future with both arms and bring it closer today?

So far, all the pols and pollsters have obsessed about the Northern-Midwestern states and their white “defection” from the Democrats. Michigan, Ohio, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania are in our “Rust Belt.” They are the states that Hillary had hoped and expected to win but lost.

Neither Hillary nor her husband Bill is a racist. Bill earned the sobriquet “first black president” for his willingness to appoint people of color to high positions and consult them seriously. But Hillary and Bill betrayed our national credo of strict equality several times (see 1 and 2) while she (or her consultants) saw doing so as expedient in the heat of the 2007 primary campaign.

African-Americans have long memories. After all, they’ve been disrespected and oppressed for four centuries. Can you blame them for balking at trusting white candidates, after such a betrayal even by Hillary and Bill?

For us white voters, it may have been just a transient and temporary lapse. But for people of color it was a lapse in what matters most. After such a disappointment, they may need candidates from their own ranks to regain hope. Is that so hard to understand?

In any event, the action in America today is not in the Rust Belt, but in the South, where it has been for nearly 150 years. Southern demographics are changing, as Northern geezers move South in or near retirement, bringing their values with them. People living elsewhere are also moving South for good jobs in an improving regional economy. Southern ideas are changing under this onslaught of newcomers.

In the South, people of color are coming into real power, for their portions of the population are much larger there than anywhere in the North or Rust Belt. If we can just inspire their hope, by giving a chance to pols who look like them, we can “flip” the key Southern States and change the South forever.

If we can do that, we can change Congress and so change our nation and the world. It’s not Michigan, Ohio, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania that will matter; it’s Georgia, Florida, North Carolina, and Virginia. This is why the Kobach vote-suppression commission is trying so hard to suppress voting by African-Americans.

7. My own faith and hope guide me. As I’ve written in this blog before, I don’t care whether my leaders are white, black, brown, yellow, red, or purple with polkadots and little wiggly antennae. All I want is leaders who are progressive, intelligent, empathetic and effective. I was happy with Barack Obama in the White House, and I’d much like someone like him back.

Call it reverse prejudice, if you like. But I don’t think it really is. It’s a preference based on past performance, of the four great “leaders of color” mentioned above. It’s a respect for the perseverance of our African-Americans, who’ve kept hope alive for four centuries, only rarely—and in small numbers—resorting to futile armed rebellion. But most of all, it’s a goal of my own: that with some deep thought and constructive action, we can bring the 2043 racial tipping point closer by giving hope to those now in despair.

Today’s Republican leaders often ridicule what they most fear. Just so, Sarah Palin derided “that hopey changey thing” that put Barack Obama in the White House. Just so, Mitch McConnell and scamster Paul Ryan deride the community organizing skills that (former) President Barack Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder are using at this very moment to turn the red South blue.

If only we progressive whites can help them, we can forge a permanent coalition among progressive whites and now-despairing people of color. We can form the grand coalition of workers, regardless of tribe, of which our progressive forebears could only dream. Our nation has not seen anything like such a coalition formed since FDR won by a landslide, in the depths of the depression, in 1932. But the time is ripe for one now.

Donald Trump is a backlasher’s backlasher. He has zero experience, zero aptitude for constructive politics, zero understanding of policy. He can’t keep an idea in his head for longer than a Tweet, and he changes his position weekly, if not daily. Virtually everything he does revolves around erasing the presidency of his predecessor, who just coincidentally happened to be half-black. In addition, he is the single most nasty, vile, selfish and self-centered excuse for a human being I have seen in national politics in my 72 years. Can we all say “flash in the pan”?

The question before us is who will follow Trump (assuming he doesn’t extinguish our species with a general nuclear war, for example, with Russia). If we progressive whites can team up with people of color, the vast majority of whom are Democrats and progressives, we can make 2043 come sooner and transform our nation now.

If you credit this thesis, there are several organizations you can join and assist, including Democracy for America and Color of Change. If we all help these dedicated experts and put our shoulders to the wheel, we can have a progressive Congress (or at least a progressive Senate) next year, and a worthy successor to Barack Obama in the White House by 2020.

But we won’t get there by coddling white supremacists or their apologists, by seeking a “middle ground” between good and evil, or by letting political consultants with spreadsheets but no moral compasses control our thinking and our action. We’ll get there only by following our hearts and the lodestar that has made our nation “exceptional” from its very beginning: the belief that “all . . . are created equal.”

Links to Popular Recent Posts



permalink