The Weekly Sift

Trump’s attempt to roll American history back to some previous era of “greatness” makes a number of old Sift articles relevant again. 

When you blog about current events for more than a decade, sooner or later you look into more or less everything. (I’m sure my friends are sick of hearing me say, “I wrote an article about that once” in response to whatever topic has entered the conversation. People who claim to have read about everything are boorish enough.) So when a world leader tries to reverse history and undo all the progress of the last eight years (or eight decades) — why else would the word again be in his slogan? — you wind up with a perpetual case of deja vu: Didn’t I cover this already?

Good communicators, like good teachers, are shameless about repeating themselves: If it comes up again, they cover it again. It’s foolish (not to mention arrogant) to imagine that your class or your readers have been hanging on your every word and remember perfectly all the points you made months or years ago. The great communicators develop catch-phrases that they keep coming back to, and somehow those phrases never sound old. (How many times, for example, has Paul Krugman satirized the Confidence Fairy, whose magic makes pro-plutocrat policies work out for everybody by raising investors’ and managers’ confidence in the economic future?)

I envy that skill, but I just can’t make myself imitate it. Whenever I start describing the same thing in the same way, I imagine some very smart regular reader saying, “Yeah, yeah, we know all this. Tell us something new.” It’s a weakness. Where, for example, would Donald Trump be if he didn’t hammer home the same false or ignorant points over and over? And his crowds never get bored with the repetition, even when it is so predictable that he can do call-and-response with them. (“Who’s going to pay for the wall?” “Mexico!”)

Anyway, this post is my attempt to start dealing with the inevitable repetition involved in America moving backwards. I’m not going to pretend I’m telling you something new. Instead, I’ll point you at the earlier posts and maybe make some comments about what has changed in the meantime.

Pipelines. Trump has put the Keystone XL and Dakota Access pipelines back on the agenda. I’ve covered DAPL piecemeal (and probably inadequately) in the weekly summaries, but I wrote an article about Keystone in 2013: “A Hotter Planet is in the Pipeline“.

The basic reasoning of that article still holds: Carbon dioxide stays in the atmosphere for a long time, so even if atmospheric CO2 leveled off, we’ve already signed up for a century or so of increasing temperatures. If we burn all the fossil fuels on the planet, that would set off a true ecological catastrophe, putting into serious doubt the Earth’s ability to support a population anything like what we have. So some fossil fuels are going to have to stay in the ground, and the Canadian oil sands are good candidates for that role. So spending money to create infrastructure to make it easier and cheaper to produce Canadian oil-sand energy is a bad idea.

I point I should have hit harder: Pipelines are expensive to build but cheap to operate (compared to other methods of transportation like rail). So the justification for building one involves imagining that the pipeline operates for a long time. In other words, by building a pipeline we’re committing to keep burning large quantities of fossil fuels for decades.

What’s new in the pipeline debate since 2013 is that the pro-pipeline case has gotten worse due to falling oil prices and increased domestic production. The potential profitability of the pipelines has gone down, and the national-security case (i.e., Canadian production lowers our dependence on the volatile Middle East) is less urgent.

Dead voters. As part of his denial that he lost the popular vote, Trump made the claim to ABC that “dead people are registered to vote and voting“. Also in 2013, I covered one paradigmic example of that urban legend in “The Myth of the Zombie Voter“. Leaning heavily on an article from Free Times, I look at what happens when somebody seriously investigates one of those dead-people-are-voting stories you hear now and then.

In this one, the South Carolina Attorney General was on Fox News and a bunch of other conservative media with his claim that he had found 953 votes cast by people who had died before the election. He got that number by running a computer search of voter records versus death records over a decade, and then not thinking too hard about how somebody could wind up on both lists.

The State Election Commission — in South Carolina, mind you, so we’re not talking about a liberal bastion trying to cover its butt here — started investigating the 207 “dead voters” from the most recent election in 2010. They found innocent explanations that knocked that 207 down to 10 suspicious ballots. (For example, some living people mailed in legal absentee ballots, but then dropped dead before election day. In other cases, the poll watcher put a mistaken checkmark next to the name of the dead John Smith rather than the living John Smith. In a whole state, you’d be amazed how often stuff like that happens.) So they turned those ten cases over to the state police.

Having more manpower to devote to the task, the staties found innocent explanations for 7 of the 10, expressed doubt that even the other three were intentional fraud, and decided not to prosecute anyone. In sum, this is what the AG’s breathless hype boiled down to: Out of the 1.3 million votes cast in South Carolina in 2010, as many as three votes might have been cast illegally in the names of dead people, but the state police believe that zero dead voters is also a strong possibility.

Since 2013, I keep observing that this outcome is typical of massive-voter-fraud stories: There’s usually just enough evidence to make suspicion seem reasonable, but as soon as somebody gets serious about investigating, the case evaporates.

Terrorism. The possible return of torture, and a variety of other policies that are supposed to “get tough on terrorism” makes one very old post — it goes back to my Daily Kos days before I started the Sift — relevant: “Terrorist Strategy 101: a quiz“, which I updated on its 10th anniversary in “Terrorist Strategy 101: a review” in 2014.

The point of both posts is that terrorists want you to “get tough” on them; that’s often the whole point of what they’re doing.

If you’re a would-be Supreme Leader, it’s a huge challenge: Around the world, people would rather get on with the business of living than give their all to the Great Struggle.

Somehow you have to screw that up.

So your big mission — which, ironically, you share with the extremists on the other side of the spectrum — is to flatten the bell curve. In order to bring your air-castles to Earth, you need to make the center untenable. All those folks who consider themselves moderates — if you let them, they’ll muddle along while you get old and the Great Historical Moment slips away. You need everyone to realize right now that compromise is impossible, the other side can’t be trusted, and we all have to kill or be killed.

Perversely, your best allies in this phase of the struggle are the people you hate most, who also hate you. Of course you’d never actually conspire with them, minions of Satan that they are. But you don’t need to, because the steps in your dance are obvious from either tail of the distribution: rachet up the rhetoric and escalate an attack-and-reprisal cycle until compromise really is impossible and everyone is radicalized. Only after the center is gone do the two extremes meet in the second round of the play-offs. It’s a very basic pattern of history, and it never changes: from Caesar/Pompey to Bin Laden/Cheney, extremists have to come in pairs, because they need each other.

So who is ISIS’ greatest ally in the world right now? Donald Trump.

Religious Freedom. Among other things, the Neil Gorsuch nomination represents the Religious Right’s first return on its investment: It surrendered all its principles by supporting a non-religious confessed pussy-grabber for president, and in exchange Trump has given them a Supreme Court justice.

What makes Gorsuch a hero to the RR is his appellate-level Hobby Lobby decision, which prefigured Justice Alito’s 5-4 majority opinion at the Supreme Court. I discussed what’s wrong with Alito’s decision in “How Threatening is the Hobby Lobby Decision?” But the more general piece I want to call attention to is the earlier “Religious Freedom Means Christian Passive-Aggressive Domination“.

[C]onservative Christians need to divert attention from the people they are mistreating by portraying themselves as the victims. And that requires cultivating a hyper-sensitivity to any form of involvement in activities they disapprove of. So rather than sympathize with the lesbian couple who gets the bakery door slammed in their faces, the public should instead sympathize with the poor wedding-cake baker whose moral purity is besmirched when the labor of his hands is used in a celebration of immorality and perversion.

There’s a name for this tactic: passive aggression.

Obviously, if we all developed such hyper-sensitivity and got the law to cater to us in this way, society would grind to a halt. Why should a Hindu waitress be forced to choose between losing her job and enabling your barbaric cow-eating? Why are atheist cashiers required to distribute pieces of paper that say “In God We Trust”?

So in practice, these are going to be special rights that apply only to Christians from relatively popular sects like the Catholics or the Baptists, or to people from smaller sects who agree with Catholics or Baptists on some particular point of doctrine. Seriously, is a court going to rule that a Christian Scientist nurse can refuse to participate in any healing activity other than prayer? Can a pharmacist who practices Dianic Wicca decide that distributing Viagra to men (who might be rapists, after all) violates her religion? [Full disclosure: The church I belong to is testing whether our religious freedom allows us to defy our local historical commission and put solar panels on our historic building. If more non-Baptist-or-Catholic groups sue for the same rights as popular Christians, these laws will fall of their own weight.]

The law as it was interpreted before Hobby Lobby and before the RFRA gave Americans all the religious freedom we need, as I outlined in 2015 in “Religious Freedom: Colorado’s Sensible Middle Way“:

Let me take this out of the gay-rights arena with a hypothetical example: Suppose I represent an atheist group that is about to celebrate its tenth anniversary. I go to a baker and ask for a cake. Suppose I want him to write “God is Dead” on the cake, and he refuses. If I sue, then I believe he should win the case, because his freedom of speech is violated if he’s forced to write something he doesn’t agree with.

But now suppose we didn’t get that far: As soon as I say why I want a cake, the baker responds, “I’m not going to make a cake for an atheist group.” All I want is a cake with a 10 on top of it, and he says no. Now if I sue, I believe I should win, because the baker is discriminating against atheists as a religious group. In other words, a business open to the public should be (and I believe is, without any new religious-freedom laws) free to refuse to endorse an idea, but it should not be free to refuse service to people merely because they practice or promote that idea.

Bigotry and Racism. Wednesday, Ted Cruz called the Democrats “the party of the Ku Klux Klan“, a charge that never seems to die, no matter how out-of-date it is. In 2012, I did the research and spelled out how white racists moved from the Democratic Party to the Republican Party over a period of decades in “A Short History of White Racism in the Two-Party System“.

The Jeff Sessions nomination brought the usual squeals of horror that Democrats wanted to talk about race. One of the constant myths of American politics is that liberals throw around charges of bigotry and racism lightly, as ways to shut conservatives up. The truth is quite the opposite: Conservatives have redefined bigotry and racism so tightly that they become practically useless concepts.

Last summer I spelled this out in “What Should Racism Mean? Part II“:

In today’s Newspeak, as spoken by devotees of AmCon, racism has been stripped of all meanings beyond getting up in the morning and saying “I don’t like Mexicans, I’m going to go out and try to make them look bad.” It applies to active white supremacists like David Duke, and no one else.

Part I was from 2014. It lists a series of incidents where President Obama and his family provoked outrage by doing things that all presidents and their families do, but which had never bothered anybody when the president was white. Admittedly, that’s not KKK-style racism, but it’s something.

If you don’t want to call it racism, fine. But it’s a real phenomenon; it needs a name. What do you call it? … For a lot of whites who don’t harbor any conscious racial malice, things just look different when blacks do them. What do you call that?

And the answer, of course, is that conservatives don’t want to call it anything. They would rather never talk about it.

And finally, combining this category with the religious freedom category above, is the Sift’s third-most-popular post ever “You Don’t Have to Hate Anybody to be a Bigot“. It reviews the long (and mostly forgotten) history of religious and intellectual justifications of bigotry, which were created and believed by generations of people who claimed (probably sincerely, most of them) that they didn’t hate anybody.

With no one left to defend them, our memory of the social conservatives of the past reduces to Simon Legree, KKK lynch mobs, police unleashing dogs and fire hoses against peaceful marchers, and the white rabble screaming obscenities at little black girls on their way to school. The thoughtful, intellectual, devout defenders of an unjust status quo are forgotten, because their memory embarrasses their heirs.

Consequently, in every generation, the well-considered, devout bigotry of nice people is presented to the world as a new thing. They’re nothing like the villains we recall from past social-justice movements. This time they have good reasons to block progress. They have looked deep into their souls and read their Bibles and taken it to the Lord in prayer. They don’t hate anybody, they just believe that the world as it was when they were growing up was endorsed by God, and they want to stop today’s amoral radicals from upsetting God’s appointed order.

In other words, they are just like every generation of social conservatives before them.

So that’s this week’s trip down Memory Lane. As we keep moving backwards, I suspect it won’t be the last.