Making It Real

Government, despite its many sins, remains the only institution that can make our freedom real.

— Gregory Downs, After Appomattox

This week’s featured post is “Small-government Freedom vs. Big-government Rights“.

This week everybody was talking about Baltimore

Jurors were unable to reach a verdict on any of the four charges against police officer  William Porter in the death of Freddie Gray.

Porter is one of six officers charged in Gray’s death, and Porter was tried first because prosecutors hoped to use his testimony in the subsequent cases. It’s not clear where the prosecution goes from here.

and Chicago police corruption

The Laquan McDonald story just keeps getting worse. It isn’t just that we have video that shows a police officer blasting away at McDonald for no apparent reason, contradicting all the official reports. It’s that lots of other police officers lied to cover for the killer.

Mayor Rahm Emanuel has already fired Police Superintendent Garry McCarthy, and many are calling for Emanuel’s own resignation or for a recall election. But just changing faces won’t solve this. The Mayor — whoever that turns out to be when the dust settles — needs to make it a priority to change the culture of the Chicago Police Department. What Emanuel has said so far, that he takes responsibility “because it happened on my watch” makes him sound like an innocent bystander, and just doesn’t cut it.

Neil Sternberg of the Chicago Sun Times raises the key issue:

The motto on Chicago squad cars, “We Serve and Protect,” is a phrase without an object. “We serve and protect whom?” The implication is the people of the city of Chicago, and to be fair, much serving and protecting goes on, all the time, all day, every day. … But the ooze from the bad apples spatters [the good police officers], big time. The routine competence and occasional excellence of the department is undercut by a general atmosphere that could be emblazoned on their cars as “We serve and protect ourselves.” The attitude is that their job is so dangerous that their first duty is to each other, and it fosters an insular world of corruption and cronyism.

and that the government will stay open

A budget deal got done. Ezra Klein has a good summary. The bill includes money for the medical bills of the 9-11 first responders. There’s no defunding of Planned Parenthood or blocking of Syrian refugees.

and wild over-reactions to Islam

A world-religions teacher in a Virginia high school assigned students to draw the Islamic statement of faith, the shahada, as an exercise in Arabic calligraphy.

Students were not asked to translate the statement or to recite it. The lesson was found to be in line with Virginia Standards of Learning for the study of monotheistic world religions.

It was similar to a previous assignment that involved drawing Chinese characters, and came out of a standard text.

Well, maybe it was predictable that some Christian parents would object, but who could have predicted how far out of control the situation would spiral? Due to “a deluge of ‘profane’ and ‘hateful’ messages from around the country” the school operated under lockdown on Wednesday and Thursday. Thursday evening, extra-curricular activities were cancelled. Friday, following the advice of local law enforcement, all the district’s schools and offices were closed.

Remind me: Which side are the terrorists supposed to be on?

At Wheaton College in Illinois, tenured political-science professor Larycia Hawkins posted on Facebook that part of her Advent worship this year would be to “stand in human solidarity with my Muslim neighbor” by wearing the Muslim headscarf, the hijab. She said that, as a Christian, she saw Muslims as fellow “people of the book”, and quoted Pope Francis saying that “we worship the same God”.

That was too much for the Wheaton administration, who suspended her indefinitely, commenting:

Some recent faculty statements have generated confusion about complex theological matters, and could be interpreted as failing to reflect the distinctively Christian theological identity of Wheaton College.

Yale theologian Miroslav Wolf, whose book Hawkins had referenced, isn’t buying that the motives behind her suspension are “theological”.

Hawkins asserted that Muslims and Christians worship the same God. She did not insist that Christians and Muslims believe the same things about that one God. … There isn’t any theological justification for Hawkins’s forced administrative leave. Her suspension is not about theology and orthodoxy. It is about enmity toward Muslims.

… When Hawkins justified her solidarity with Muslims by noting that as a Christian she worships the same God as Muslims, she committed the unpardonable sin of removing the enemy from the category of “alien” and “purely evil” other.

It seems to me that once you declare that there’s only one God, you lose the option of claiming that other people worship a different God. You can claim that they have crazy beliefs about God and worship God all wrong, but you can’t claim their omnipotent Creator of the Universe is a different being from your omnipotent Creator of the Universe.

BTW: I wonder if the administration’s unwillingness to interpret away their differences with Hawkins has anything to do with the fact she is the only tenured black woman on the Wheaton faculty. One of the ways unconscious racism and sexism plays out is in the presumption that “he must have had a good reason to do or say that”, while women and blacks are likely to be seen as radical or irrational.

No idea whether there’s any connection or not, but a dozen or so girls at Vernon Hills High School in Illinois have also started wearing a hijab in solidarity with Muslims suffering discrimination.

While we’re talking religion: Fontbonne Academy, a Catholic prep school for girls in Milton, Massachusetts, hired a guy to be director of food services. When he filled out his employment form, though, he listed his husband as his emergency contact. The school rescinded the job offer “because his marriage was inconsistent with the teachings of the Catholic Church.”

Since being Catholic or having a lifestyle consistent with Catholic teachings had never previously been a requirement for directing food services, the guy sued. The school tried to argue that this wasn’t discrimination against gays. (You can be gay, you just can’t get married.) But courts aren’t that stupid, so they lost.

This pattern shows up a lot among people who think they aren’t prejudiced against anybody: I don’t have anything against you or your people, I just object to your attempt to live a normal life. (Go ahead a be transgendered. Just don’t use public bathrooms.)

Franklin Graham, heir to his father Billy’s evangelistic empire, is calling for an end to Muslim immigration “until the war with Islam is over”.

Graham also said Islam is not compatible with American values and therefore the U.S. might have to shut down mosques.

This is precisely why the Founders wanted to separate church and state: Graham’s version of Christianity may see itself at war with Islam, and think that Islam is incompatible with its values, but that crusade has nothing to do with the United States of America.

And before we leave religion entirely, Vox has a great article about the dilemma of Western imams when they see young people getting radicalized. You don’t want them learning Islam with only radical internet chatter for guidance. But

if they do and try [to help] these young people, and for whatever reason it doesn’t work, then they get in trouble. [Police] come knocking at the door saying, “You were in touch with this person and they went overseas. What did you tell them?”

One of the article’s most important observations comes early:

Mosques are where radicalization is stopped: They provide vulnerable Muslims with a sense of community, thus overcoming the isolation that can allow online extremist propaganda to seep in, and they give imams an opportunity to intervene in troubled lives and counteract extremist ideas.

Unfortunately, that kind of social work isn’t what imams are trained for.

There’s also the story of the New Jersey teacher who claims she was fired mostly for being a Muslim; not in so many words, of course, but because she did things (like show a Malala video) that would have been no problem for a non-Muslim teacher. I’m not making a bigger deal out of this because so far all we have is the teacher’s version of events.

but more people should be talking about Flint

Other than Rachel Maddow, national news media hasn’t shown much interest in the Michigan Emergency Manager Law, which allows the governor to appoint a manager for cities and towns that get into financial trouble. The manager essentially replaces the local government, and has the power to do just about anything but raise taxes. (Because taxation without representation would be tyranny, but having your union contract voided without representation is OK.)

As Rachel points out, though, this is a very radical notion: that democracy gets in the way when you’re trying to pay your debts, so it just makes good sense to install what is essentially a dictator. (In practice, the Michigan cities that get in trouble tend to be overwhelmingly black, so to the extent that this law is in the American tradition at all, it’s the American tradition of disenfranchising black people.)

In Flint, one way the emergency manager tried to save money was to start using water from the Flint River rather than continuing to buy lake water from Detroit. Lots of other cities use river water without any problems, but there is an issue: River water is more corrosive than lake water, so (unless treated) it has a tendency to dissolve lead out of pipes, raising the amount of lead in the water.

Well, Flint didn’t take proper precautions, so the lead level in Flint water has spiked, a fact that is likely to lead to permanent neurological damage in Flint’s children, ranging from lower IQs to mood disorders. Friday night, Rachel devoted most of her show to this story, starting with a very enraged reporting of the facts, and followed by an interview with the doctor who found elevated lead in Flint children’s blood.

and you might also be interested in

ProPublica’s “An Unbelievable Story of Rape” is both important and heart-breaking. An 18-year-old woman said she was raped. But when police and her former foster mothers started to doubt her story, she admitted that she made it all up. Then they caught a serial rapist who had her in his notebook, and found the pictures he took.

The reporters do a good job of not demonizing the police involved in the case, most of whom are women. Figuring out what to make of the testimony of someone who has been traumatized is genuinely difficult, and the detectives’ training didn’t adequately prepare them for a case like this.

In the middle of an otherwise serious poll, PPP asked 532 Republican primary voters whether they would favor or oppose bombing Agrabah. 30% said yes and only 13% no. 41% of Trump voters favored bombing Agrabah.

Agrabah is fictional; it appears in the Disney movie Aladdin. You have to wonder what results they’d have gotten if they’d asked about bombing a real city in a Middle Eastern country our government is on good terms with, like say Riyadh or Abu Dhabi. A similar question in a poll of 532 Democratic primary voters found only 19% willing to bomb Agrabah, with 36% opposed.

The Republican responses to reality-based questions were pretty remarkable as well. 34% support Trump. Combined with Ted Cruz’ 18%, that’s a majority. 54% support Trump’s call for a ban on Muslims entering the country. 46% support a national database of Muslims. 36% believe the totally baseless claim that thousands of Muslims in New Jersey cheered when the Twin Towers fell on 9-11.

Interestingly, 55% of the Republicans support raising the minimum wage to $10 or higher.

Fareed Zakaria debunks the “mystical powers” Republicans assign to the phrase “radical Islamic terrorism”. (Read his WaPo column or watch him present it on CNN.) Zakaria has been using the phrase himself since 9-11, so he can testify that “it gives absolutely nothing in the way of an answer or strategy to deal with terrorist attacks.”

The best proof that calling radical Islam by its name provides no solutions is that the Republican candidates had none at Tuesday’s debate. After all the huffing and puffing, the most aggressive among them proposed more bombing, no-fly zones and arming the Kurds.

These are modest additions to Obama’s current strategy, each with its own problems. … judgment calls, not no-brainers.

… Strangely, after the GOP candidates boldly and correctly described the enemy as an ideology — which is much broader than one group — they spoke almost entirely about fighting that one group. Even if the Islamic State were defeated tomorrow, would that stop the next lone-wolf jihadist in New York or Paris or London?

Zakaria calls attention to a great line by Seth Meyers:

So [Obama] used the words ‘radical,’ ‘Islam,’ and ‘terrorism,’ he just didn’t use them in the right order. Which would be a problem if it was a spell and he was Harry Potter, but he’s not, so it isn’t.

I’m way behind in my debate watching. Let me say, though, that I’m pleased to see Clinton and Sanders continue to take the high road. Sanders famously refused to make an issue of Clinton’s emails in the first debate. In Saturday’s, Sanders apologized for the data-theft incident that made such a flap this week; Clinton accepted and said they should move on.

and let’s close with something topical

Bad Lip Reading does Star Wars.

December 21, 2015 – 10:35 am Categories: Weekly summaries | Comments (12)

Small-government Freedom vs. Big-government Rights

The issues of Reconstruction continue to animate today’s political rhetoric.

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One of the central words in conservative rhetoric is freedom. The far-right members of the House are the Freedom Caucus. Nate Silver did the math, and found that the 2012 Republican platform mentioned freedom four times more often than the Democratic platform. At times they even push it to absurd lengths: To chide France for not supporting the invasion of Iraq, House Republicans renamed their cafeteria’s french fries “freedom fries“.

Freedom is so universally cited by conservatives that liberals often satirically suggest the explanation “because freedom” for any conservative proposal that doesn’t add up. (Wonkette: “Ben Carson will defund commie liberal colleges, because freedom.” Josh Marshall has used “Because Freedom” as a satirical headline at least twice.) Freedom, they’re suggesting, is just a buzzword conservatives throw out whenever they have no substantive justification for what they want to do.

Its not that Democrats don’t like freedom, but they tend to talk about particular freedoms (freedom of choice) rather than capital-F Freedom as an abstract entity. They’re more likely to talk about rights: voting rights, abortion rights, civil rights, and so on.

There are, of course, a large number of counter-examples in both directions. (Gun rights, for example, or FDR’s “freedom from want” and “freedom from fear”. [1]) But in general, the parties are talking about two subtly different concepts: Freedom, particularly the way conservatives use it, is inextricably linked to small government: Freedom means the government doesn’t get in your way.

Rights on the other hand, only exist if society provides some method of enforcement. Without a court you can appeal to when your rights are violated, and ultimately, without a police force or army that will enforce that court’s judgments, you don’t have any rights. Black children, for example, didn’t begin to acquire a right to an equal education until President Eisenhower sent the 101st Airborne Division to Little Rock. Rights require some kind of government to enforce them, and if the forces that want to violate your rights are strong, you need a really big government. [2]

A simple example: If you want to be able to buy a little marijuana and smoke it without fear of narcs busting down your door, you want freedom. But if you want to be sure that what you buy really is marijuana, that no toxic or addictive chemicals have been added to it, or that the seller won’t just bash you over the head and take your money without giving you anything, then you’re looking for your rights as a consumer. Your freedom just needs the government to get out of your way, but your rights require government involvement. [3]

The relative value of freedom vs rights depends in large part on how much power you have. If you are wealthy, well-connected, or otherwise privileged, then there are all kinds of things you could do, if government would just stay out of your way. But if you are poor, then the barriers you face have more to do with your lack of resources than with government regulations.

Powerful groups can defend their own prerogatives whether they have government-enforced rights or not. Nobody has to force lunch counters to serve whites; no parent has to go to court to make the local public school offer courses in English; Christian children aren’t pressured to say “under no God” in the Pledge of Allegiance; and men in the workplace don’t have to wonder whether a glass ceiling is holding them down. But the rights of less powerful groups depend on government.

In the course of a typical workday, a woman who makes fries at McDonalds isn’t all that constrained by the government. Sure, taxes are taken out of her paycheck; she has to keep her hair covered while preparing food and wash her hands after using the bathroom; and she faces the threat of jail if she skims from the till, but the whims of her shift manager are a far bigger source of oppression than all the pencil-pushers in Washington.

On the other hand, the guy who owns her McDonalds franchise faces constant assaults on his freedom. He can’t pay his workers the $5 an hour he thinks they deserve, even if they’re so desperate they would have to take it. He can’t demand that they work in unsafe conditions. He can’t extract sexual favors from them. His kitchen has to face health inspectors. He has to make sure the trash is properly disposed of. Zoning keeps him from expanding to the new location he wants. And on and on and on. Everywhere he looks, there’s a regulation or a bureaucrat or a potential lawsuit. Tyranny, that’s what it is.

Several of those restrictions on his freedom are what the government has to do to establish the woman’s rights. She has a right to a basic level of respect and fair treatment from her employer, and (without government) she lacks the power to make him respect those rights.

That’s why American political rhetoric about freedom has such a bizarre history: a lot of it comes from slave owners. “Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery?” Patrick Henry demanded in the speech that ends with his memorable: “Give me liberty or give me death!” But he died owning 65 slaves. James Madison enshrined freedom of speech and freedom of religion in the Bill or Rights, but owned over 100 slaves. Thomas Jefferson is said to have owned 600 slaves in the course of his life, and a sizable chunk of his surviving descendants were fathered on a slave.

Confederate rhetoric was full of freedom, and the corresponding threat of “tyranny” or “slavery” (for white Southerners) if their cause did not prevail. In the first line of his famous speech “Slavery a Positive Good“, Senator John Calhoun warned that if the South didn’t respond to even the slightest encroachments on the institution of slavery, Southern whites were “prepared to become slaves”. In his inaugural address, Confederate President Jefferson Davis invoked “the consent of the governed” to justify a government that disenfranchised not only all its black subjects, but many poor whites as well. “All we ask is to be left alone,” said Davis. Left alone, that is, to enslave others.

The things powerful people want to be left alone to do have changed over the years: Now they want to be able to pollute rivers, get miners killed, refuse to serve gays and lesbians, use the public schools to promote their religion, put obstacles in front of minorities voting, and so on. But the basic rhetoric has stayed the same: If you just keep the government out of everybody’s way, then we’ll have freedom.

And it’s true: We will have freedom, but we won’t have any rights that more powerful people want to take away.

To see these concepts worked out in the most extreme way, pick up Gregory Downs’ recent book After Appomattox: Military occupation and the ends of war. It tells the story of the post-surrender occupation of the South by the U.S. Army, and the official state of war that continued until the last Confederate state had its representatives seated in Congress in 1871.

As I’ve described several times before, the Reconstruction Era is the unspoken reference behind a lot of the current conservative usage of tyranny, particularly as it relates to tyranny being overthrown by armed civilians. The tyranny in question was the military occupation of the South, which was absolutely necessary to guarantee any rights at all to the newly freed slaves. A terrorist insurgency by Confederate veterans eventually made the occupation more costly than the North could stomach, and black rights all but vanished after the troops were withdrawn, leading to the Jim Crow era.

Downs describes the philosophical shock that many Northerners suffered when they realized that slavery couldn’t be eliminated just by issuing proclamations or passing Constitutional amendments.

Wartime emancipation and the postsurrender struggle against slavery forced Northerners to examine the question of whether people could be free without the intervention of the government.

The law might say one thing, but the facts on the ground said something else.

[S]lavery endured on the ground well after the end of fighting. Of the nearly 4 million slaves in the United States in 1860, the vast majority were still held in bondage as the Confederate armies surrendered.

Slaves only became free when troops were around to prevent the masters re-asserting their ownership.

Ambrose Douglass, held a slave in North Carolina, captured the relationship between emancipation and the soldiers’ presence. In his area, “I guess we musta celebrated ‘mancipation about twelve time … Every time a bunch of No’thern sojers would come through they would tell us we was free and we’d begin celebratin’. Before we would get through somebody else would tell us to go back to work, and we would go.”

Many whites saw the same reality:

Arkansas’ U.S attorney similarly wrote that “he who stands between the late master and the freedmen for their protection, must be backed by the power of the bayonet.”

To the former Confederate, though, “bayonet rule” looked more like this:

Northerners knew they wanted to end slavery, but had no clear notion of what freedom would mean for the ex-slaves.

As freedpeople taught officers about the enduring power of slavery, soldiers and ex-slaves together developed the notion that freedom meant accessible rights. … [E]x-slaves found it easy to invoke rights as the measure of what it meant not to be enslaved. As slaves, they had virtually no rights they could defend in court. Looking to the experience of free people around them, they defined freedom in part as the opportunity to have these basic rights — marriage, control of children, property ownership, travel, and contract — protected by the government. … Instead of a march to freedom, with its connotations of separation from the state, freedpeople and soldiers described a walk toward government.

In particular, black men’s right to vote was established on paper by the 15th Amendment. But in reality, it only existed only where federal troops guarded the polling places. When the troops were withdrawn, Confederate veterans terrorized blacks who tried to vote. Ultimately, new state governments elected almost entirely with white votes disenfranchised blacks almost entirely until the federal government re-inserted itself into the situation in the 1960s through the Voting Rights Act.

Downs draws the conclusion:

[L]ooking at the story after Appomattox forces us to confront the dismaying, necessary fact that our own contemporary freedom and civil rights are in some ways the products of war powers. Even the rights we cherish are often fashioned by coercion.

So bear that in mind the next time you hear a conservative politician wax eloquent for freedom and against big government. How many of your rights will have to go away in order to allow the powerful people he represents the freedom he wants them to have?

[1] The confusion is amplified by two rhetorical back doors. In general “freedom from X” is a roundabout synonym for “the right to not-X”. So “freedom from want” includes a right to a minimum level of food and shelter. Conversely, the “right to be let alone” is a fairly broad description of what I am calling “freedom”.

[2] One popular conservative trope is that our rights come from God, not from the government. Ted Cruz said:

What is the promise of America? The idea that, the revolutionary idea, that this country was founded upon, which was our rights, they don’t come from man. They come from God Almighty. And it’s the purpose of the Constitution … to serve as chains, to bind the mischief of government.

While an appeal to the Declaration of Independence’s soaring rhetoric “All men … are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights” is inspiring, it is also ineffective, because God is notoriously poor at policing rights-violations in a timely manner. His mills, after all, grind slowly.

[3] In this case, as in many others, the two notions are in opposition. What about the seller’s freedom to lie to you, to cheat you, or to bash you over the head? Your rights depend on restricting his freedom.

December 21, 2015 – 8:25 am Categories: Articles | Comments (30)

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The Monday Morning Teaser

I’m at a Holiday Inn Express with the slowest wifi in the known world, so any time predictions on this week’s Sift are iffy.

This week’s featured post will be “Small-government Freedom vs. Big-government Rights”. It explores a key difference in liberal and conservative rhetoric: When conservatives talk about “freedom”, they usually mean the absence of government, while when liberals talk about “rights”, they typically are referring to prerogatives that wouldn’t exist if government weren’t there to defend them. The clearest illustration of this difference in American history comes from a new book After Appomattox by Gregory Downs, which shows how the rights of the newly freed slaves depended on the presence of Union soldiers, who suppressed the freedom of the Southern whites to re-assert their dominance.

The weekly summary will cover developments in the Freddie Gray and Laquan McDonald police-violence cases, the deal to keep the government open, a variety of bizarre religion stories, the Flint water scandal, and a very sad and instructive story about a rape investigation, before closing with some Bad Lip Reading of Star Wars.

Times? Geez, who knows? I’ll stay with it until I get stuff out.

December 21, 2015 – 6:38 am Categories: Morning tease | Comments (1)

If

If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs, and blaming it on you …

— Rudyard Kipling

It is no accident that President Obama’s America has given rise to Donald Trump.

— Ben Domenech

This week’s featured posts are “How Republicans Trumped Themselves” and “The Leadership We Need“.

This week everybody was trying to figure out what to do about Donald Trump

In “How Republicans Trumped Themselves” I pull together a chorus of voices that diagnose the Trump phenomenon as a symptom of a larger ill: The GOP has been pandering to bigotry for decades, and conservative media has created a safe zone for every kind of conspiracy theory, no matter how poorly grounded in reality it might be. Now that bigotry and that disregard of facts is being used against them.

In “The Leadership We Need” I take a more abstract look at leadership, and describe how to tell a Leader from a Demagogue.

Meanwhile, this guy knows how he wants to respond.

In “How Republicans Trumped Themselves“, I briefly quoted Heather Hogan’s article “This is How Fox News Brainwashes Its Viewers“. That article examines the complete Fox propaganda cycle and deserves to be read end-to-end.

and the Paris climate agreement

Grist does a good balancing of the good and bad.

The COP21 conference brought every country to the table, they all accepted the science of climate change, and they agreed to work together to do something about it. But some proved more ambitious than others, and the rich countries didn’t come up with enough money to get the best deal possible.

The bottom line is that the agreement gets us far closer to containing climate change than we were two weeks ago, but still far short of where we need to go. In fact, we won’t even know for years what it will accomplish. How much the agreement reduces greenhouse gas emissions, and through that reduces warming, will depend on whether countries meet their targets for curbing emissions and deploying renewable energy and whether they ramp up their ambition in the years ahead.

and the aftermath of mass shootings

Here’s what we now know about the San Bernardino shooting. 14 people were killed and 22 injured by a married couple, Syed Rizwan Farook and Tashfeen Malik, who were killed in a subsequent shootout with police. In the attack they used two semi-automatic rifles, two semi-automatic pistols, and an “explosive device”.

The weapons were acquired legally by Farook and his friend and next-door neighbor, Enrique Marquez. They were illegally modified to accept larger magazines. Farook took out a $28K loan two weeks before the attack, which may have been used to buy guns, ammunition, and other supplies for the attack.

Farook was born in the United States. He was a Sunni Muslim who traveled to Saudi Arabia more than once. In 2014 he met Malik there, and she came to the U.S. under a fiancé visa. While they appear to have had online contact with terrorist groups, so far there’s no indication that they actively belonged to a larger cell, or that anyone (with the possible exception of Marquez) helped them plan or finance their attack.

Apparently, they were both already “radicalized” when they met. Farook attended a mosque, but stopped going there a few weeks before the attack, so it seems unlikely that somebody there whipped him up to do this. There is no evidence that anybody else at the mosque was involved.

In short, San Bernardino does not seem to be an example of the kind of thing we’re being told to fear, and wouldn’t have been prevented by the anti-Muslim proposals we’re hearing: The attackers weren’t infiltrated into the U.S. by ISIS, they weren’t recruited at a mosque, and it’s not even clear that keeping Malik from entering the country would have prevented Farook from launching an attack.

To me, Farook and Malik look a lot like Robert Lewis Dear, the Planned Parenthood shooter, or Dylann Roof, the Charleston church shooter. None of them seem to have been agents of a larger conspiracy, but they are all examples of what can happen when unstable people believe the kind of hateful, irresponsible rhetoric that is so easy to find these days, and then easily acquire deadly weapons.

To me it barely matters which crazy set of beliefs your violence arises from, whether it’s that ISIS is the proper political heir to Muhammad, that the white race is facing a battle for its survival, or that Planned Parenthood is dismembering babies for profit. As responsible people, we should be trying to prevent all crazy ideologies from inspiring violence.

Amanda Marcotte put it well:

Liberals understand that there are theological and political differences between the different kinds of radical fundamentalism that lead to terrorism, but we are keenly aware that people who pick up a gun in the name of God have more in common with each other than they do with the rest of us.

The Daily Show‘s Jordan Klepper discovers that becoming an effective good guy with a gun is harder than it looks.

Meanwhile, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau welcomed the first planeload of the 25,000 Syrian refugees he has promised to take in by the end of February. So Canada, a country with a fraction of our population, is taking in 2 1/2 times as many refugees.

But I’m sure that when the Canadian experiment goes smoothly, and none of their refugees gets involved in terrorist attacks, American conservatives will see the err of their ways and happily increase the number of Syrians we’re giving refuge to. Won’t they?

and Islam

For some reason, this year I haven’t gotten around to writing all the book reviews I planned. So as a down payment on a longer post, I’ll leave you with two quotes from recent books about Islam. Both books portray Islam as more diverse and more flexible than is commonly imagined by the American media.

From Michael Muhammad Knight’s Why I Am a Salafi:

A text’s repeatability in part depends on the potential for its old words to produce new results. A verse remains powerful not because it imposes its meaning on the future, but because it accommodates the future’s needs: The verse is not bound to its author or its first audience.

From Shahab Ahmed’s What is Islam?:

Some years ago, I attended a dinner at Princeton University where I witnessed a revealing exchange between an eminent European philosopher who was visiting from Cambridge, and a Muslim scholar who was seated next to him. The Muslim colleague was indulging in a glass of wine. Evidently troubled by this, the distinguished don eventually asked his dining companion if he might be so bold as to venture a personal question: “Do you consider yourself a Muslim?” “Yes,” came the reply. “How come, then, you are drinking wine?” The Muslim colleague smiled gently. “My family have been Muslims for a thousand years,” he said, “during which time we have always been drinking wine.” An expression of distress appeared on the learned logician’s pale countenance, prompting the further clarification: “You see, we are Muslim wine drinkers.” The questioner looked bewildered. “I don’t understand,” he said. “Yes, I know,” replied his native informant, “but I do.”

and Peanuts

Marking the 50th anniversary of A Charlie Brown Christmas, how the whole thing came to be, including a certain amount of the spiritual journey of Charles Schulz.

An attempt to enlist the Peanuts characters in the War on Christmas yielded some pushback.

I’m not the only one who’s been making the analogy between guns and security blankets.

and you might also be interested in

On a blog he shares with his son, Sift reader Bill Camarda recently posted a piece he called “My America“, in which he presented a personal, positive vision of what America has been and could become. My point in mentioning it is not so much that this particular post should go viral, as that the idea behind should: What if people all over the country started writing their own “My America” and posting it to whatever blog, Facebook page, or other outlet they had access to? That might be a constructive response to the bigotry and hatefulness that seems to be running so wild these days — more constructive than wringing our hands and saying “Isn’t what Trump just said awful?”

I’m not sure what mine would say, but I’m thinking about it.

We’re not quite at the point of a government shutdown yet, but the agreement to prevent one is proving hard to work out.

Jon Stewart came back to The Daily Show briefly to try to shame Congress into taking care of the 9-11 first responders.

The irony of global interdependence:

Russian production of T-shirts with anti-Turkish slogans has been delayed by disruptions in fabric imports from Turkey, Russian media reports said Wednesday.

President Obama’s reluctance to plunge deeper into the Syrian mess looks a lot better when you compare him to less cautious leaders, like Putin. Knowing when not to act is as big a part of leadership as knowing what to do.

and let’s close with some fascinating possibilities

Up until now, attempts to replace meat with vegetable products have ranged from unsatisfying to downright awful. But here are two attempts to attack the problem on a deeper level. First meat

and then eggs.

In either case, the point isn’t to do away with animal products. But what if the number of situations where doing without them feels like a hardship got much smaller? That could make a huge difference in both public health and the environment.

December 14, 2015 – 11:50 am Categories: Weekly summaries | Comments (4)

The Leadership We Need

When Donald Trump’s supporters are asked what they like about him, one phrase that always comes up is “strong leader”, and a contrast is drawn between Trump and President Obama, who is a “weak leader”.

People who think that way must have a very different view of leadership than I do. But this is the kind of thing we don’t talk about much. In our public discussion, leadership is like art: We all think we know it when we see it, so we don’t need to define it.

But I’m thinking we do need to define it, so I’m going to take a few paragraphs to say what I think leadership is, and how our current would-be leaders are succeeding or failing at it.

Here’s what leadership means to me: the ability to see a practical path to a better world, and to convince enough people to join you on the journey that you can actually get there together.

Given that definition, there are several ways that would-be leaders can fall short:

  • Idealists envision a better world, but have no practical plan for getting there.
  • Visionaries get so far ahead of the People that few can follow them.
  • Academics lack the ability to communicate their vision or persuade the People to believe in it.
  • Panderers do not present a vision at all, but simply tell the People what they want to hear.
  • Demagogues take advantage of the People’s ignorance, greed, and fear to gain power for themselves. If they lead anywhere, it is to a harsher, more hate-filled, and more violent world.

This doesn’t correspond directly to a Left/Right spectrum, but there is a broad correlation: Liberals have a weakness for Idealists (of course a book about a “better world” with a view from space on its cover is liberal) and Visionaries, while Conservatives love their Demagogues. All political movements have their Academics and Panderers.

A good way to sum up the Clinton/Sanders argument among Democrats is that Clintonistas see Sanders as a Visionary, while Sanders supporters see Clinton as a Panderer. Sanders’ program sounds great to most Democrats, but the question is whether the larger public is ready for it. And Clinton is saying a lot of progressive things right now, but will she still be saying them in the general election when she has a different audience?

One test of leadership that all the Republican presidential candidates are failing is to tell the American people the truth about climate change: It’s happening, it’s caused by burning fossil fuels, and there will be serious economic, humanitarian, and even military consequences if we don’t take dramatic action. No one on the Right wants to hear that (and people on the Left aren’t wild about it either), so the conservative candidates (most of whom are smart people who probably know better) avoid the problem when they can and openly deny it when it comes up. That’s pandering.

Democrats pander in a more subtle way. Candidates (especially Clinton) are reluctant to face the gap between the size of the country’s problems and the size of their proposed solutions. Raising the minimum wage or re-jiggering student loan programs isn’t going to reverse the country’s polarization into rich and poor. Effective gun control will require more than just background checks and assault-weapon bans. And so on.

There’s a tricky road to walk here: A Leader would be pushing for the small steps s/he can hope to take in the short term, while continuing to build support for actions big enough to make a difference. (One possible role model is how before Pearl Harbor FDR walked the narrow path between Visionary and a Panderer as he coaxed the public towards entering World War II. He didn’t seek a premature declaration of war that Congress would have voted down, but he prepared for war with the nation’s first peacetime draft and an increased defense budget. And by swapping destroyers to Britain and then getting the Lend-Lease program through Congress, he clearly identified the country with the Allies.)

The difference between a Leader and a Demagogue can be hard to see when you get caught up in the passions of the moment, but if you introspect a little you can feel it in your heart. A Leader calls out the best in his or her followers. Under the influence of a Leader, you feel more courageous, more hopeful, more generous, and generally more heroic.

These famous words of JFK’s inaugural address could come from either a Leader or a Demagogue:

Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and the success of liberty.

What marks that address as leadership is what so many of the people he inspired went on to do: join the Peace Corps, or go to Mississippi for the Freedom Summer. They took risks and inconvenienced themselves for the benefit of others. Listening to Kennedy made them better people.

But those who listen to Donald Trump (and to a lesser extent several other Republican candidates) become angrier, more fearful, and more self-centered. They want to make their enemies suffer. They want to send other people to fight in the deserts of the Middle East, but they don’t volunteer to go themselves. Trump tells his followers not that they need to sacrifice, but that they’ve sacrificed too much already. It’s time for other people to sacrifice: the Hispanics, the Muslims, the Syrian refugees, the inner-city blacks.

Both Leaders and Demagogues will call on you to be strong, but the Leader will have you focus your strength on the real enemy, and take the risks associated with opposing strength to strength. The Demagogue will offer you scapegoats, weaker people you can beat up on.

Both a Leader and a Demagogue will leave you feeling energized, but if you introspect honestly, you can tell the difference: The Leader calls on you to find virtues you didn’t know you had, to be better than you have ever been. The Demagogue gives you permission to be worse.

You can tell.

December 14, 2015 – 10:21 am Categories: Articles | Comments (12)

How Republicans Trumped Themselves

You can’t complain just because somebody demagogues better than you do.

This week the airwaves were full of Republicans wringing their hands: What can the Party do about the wave of bigotry and hatred that Donald Trump has unleashed on their presidential primary race? How can they avoid a backlash that could wash away their 2016 chances?

That sentiment had been brewing for months, but it came to a head last Monday afternoon, when Trump made his proposal to ban Muslims from entering the United States. So let’s start there: Exactly what did Trump propose?

Keeping Muslims out. His initial announcement wasn’t very specific — Trump’s proposals seldom are — and the first campaign spokesperson who elaborated said that American Muslims who leave the country wouldn’t be able to come back. (“Mr. Trump says ‘everyone’.”) But Trump backed off of that. So fine, Shaq can attend the Rio Olympics if he wants, and Dave Chappelle can do a show in London. They don’t have to quit America for good because of their religion.

But if a businessman from Indonesia wants to come over to negotiate a deal, or his wife wants to shop on Rodeo Drive, or his children want to see Disney World or study engineering at Purdue — no. They can’t come, because they’re Muslims. Now, their passports don’t have MUSLIM stamped on them, so it’s not clear how we’d know to keep them out. (Asking would only keep out the honest Muslims, which kind of misses the point. Maybe the Trump administration could require everybody who goes through customs to spit on a Qu’ran or something.) But let’s not get lost in the details of enforcement. Trump hasn’t thought about them, so why should we?

Trump supporters wave off criticism by pointing out that the ban is supposed to be temporary. But Trump defined the end point as “until our country’s representatives can figure out what is going on”. When CNN’s Don Lemon asked what that meant, Trump replied:

Why is there such hatred and such viciousness? Why is somebody willing to fly airplanes into the World Trade Center? … Where does this hatred come from? Why does it come? We need to figure it out.

In other words, lifting the ban is tied to a question from 14 years ago, one that has been answered many times, but with an answer that Trump and his followers don’t like. Why do they hate us? Because for decades we overthrew their attempts at democratic governments and installed brutal dictators who would sell us oil. Because our troops kicked down their doors and dragged their fathers off to hellholes like Abu Ghraib. Because we send our killer drones wherever we want, and deny that most of the people we kill are innocent. In short, many of the people who hate us have very good reasons that Trump and his supporters have no interest in doing anything about, except possibly adding to them.

So basically, Trump’s ban would stay in place until he’s willing to learn things he doesn’t want to know. That doesn’t sound very temporary to me.

This time he’s done it. The immediate talking-head response to Trump’s proposal was that this time he had finally gone too far: The American people would recoil in horror at the thought of turning away refugees and immigrants and students and tourists because we don’t approve of their religion, a religion shared by millions of loyal American citizens, decorated American soldiers, and two members of Congress.

Well, most of the American people, maybe. Whether or not they are horrified, 57% told an NBC/WSJ poll that they disagree with keeping Muslims out of the country, while only 25% agree. (Count CNBC pundit Larry Kudlow among those who disagree, but only because he wants something more sweeping: “I say seal the borders. … We need a wartime footing if we are going to protect the American homeland.” And Laura Ingraham: “I’d do a pause on all immigration.”)

However, this is a primary campaign, not a general election. And Republican respondents were split: 38% for Trump’s proposal and 39% against. So in a multi-candidate field, the Muslim ban seems to be helping him. His lead in the RCP polling average is as big as it has ever been.

Locking up the racist/fascist vote. The anti-Muslim proposal increased the number of people willing to describe Trump as either a racist or a fascist — a term I discussed two weeks ago. But whatever you think of that usage, the undeniable racists and fascists have started welcoming Trump to their ranks. Former KKK leader David Duke has endorsed Trump, saying that he “understands the real sentiment of America”.

Buzzfeed reports:

Visitors to the website for the Council of Conservative Citizens — a white nationalist group cited by Charleston church shooter Dylan Roof — will find a steady stream of pro-Trump articles.

BF quotes the white supremacist website American Renaissance:

If Mr. Trump loses, this could be the last chance whites have to vote for a president who could actually do something useful for them and for their country.

and neo-Nazi Stormfront radio personality Don Advo:

whether or not Trump wins, his campaign is “gonna give people the ability to come openly out of the shadows and really work very hard for something that will have a lasting effect.”

“This anger, this fire, is not going to go away,” he said. “It’s not going to go away at all. And that has not been noticed by the neocons — or perhaps we should them neo-Cohens — in the Republican Party.”

The Establishment still doesn’t understand. Republican establishment types may not grasp the implications of being “neo-Cohens” yet, but they finally do seem to be getting the message that Trump could be nominated, with catastrophic short-and-long-term effects on the Party. A year ago, it seemed possible that Jeb Bush or Marco Rubio might finesse a campaign that appealed to the Republicans’ Southern white base without being so blatantly bigoted as to drive Hispanics and all other non-whites and non-Christians into a coalition against them. But that option has pretty well vanished. (Second place in national polls and first place in Iowa have been taken by Ted Cruz, who is not that different from Trump.)

What Republicans still don’t seem to grasp, though, is that they did this to themselves. William Greider traces the problem back to the deal between Richard Nixon and Strom Thurmond that created the modern GOP, the “Southern strategy”. All that time, country-club Republicans and racist working-class whites have had little in common, but

Nixon and his successors hid behind ideology and obscured the contradictions by pursuing a strategy I would call “no-fault bigotry.” Every now and then, especially in election seasons, the Republicans played the race card in dog-whistle fashion to smear Democrats, with savage effect. The GOP never attempted to repeal civil-rights legislation but sought cheap ways to undermine enforcement and remind whites, South and North, that the party was on “their” side.

… So what caused the current rebellion in the GOP ranks? It finally dawned on loyal foot soldiers in the odd-couple coalition that they were being taken for suckers. Their causes always seemed to get the short end of the stick. The GOP made multiple promises and fervent speeches on the social issues, but, for one reason or another, the party establishment always failed to deliver. … the Republican establishment brought this crisis on itself by cynically manipulating its own rank and file.

Paul Krugman echoes the point:

But there is a strong element of bait-and-switch to this strategy. Whatever dog whistles get sent during the campaign, once in power the G.O.P. has made serving the interests of a small, wealthy economic elite, especially through big tax cuts, its main priority — a priority that remains intact, as you can see if you look at the tax plans of the establishment presidential candidates this cycle.

Sooner or later the angry whites who make up a large fraction, maybe even a majority, of the G.O.P. base were bound to rebel … So along comes Donald Trump, saying bluntly the things establishment candidates try to convey in coded, deniable hints, and sounding as if he really means them.

And Timothy Egan writes:

What [Trump has] done is to give marginalized Americans permission to hate. He doesn’t use dog whistles or code. His bigotry is overt. But the table was set by years of dog whistles and code. The very “un-American” sentiment that Republican elders now claim to despise has been a mainstay of conservative media for at least a decade.

When truth stops mattering. One more point is needed to complete the picture: the Republican embrace of post-truth politics. A party that exploits ridiculous conspiracy theories to energize its base — Birtherism, known falsehoods about Benghazi, Obama is a Muslim, the persecution of American Christians, the “war on cops” — has no defense when a better liar comes along.

Republican Congressman Deven Nunes has only been in office since 2002, but he reports a startling change in his communications from constituents.

“I used to spend ninety per cent of my constituent response time on people who call, e-mail, or send a letter, such as, ‘I really like this bill, H.R. 123,’ and they really believe in it because they heard about it through one of the groups that they belong to, but their view was based on actual legislation,” Nunes said. “Ten per cent were about ‘Chemtrails from airplanes are poisoning me’ to every other conspiracy theory that’s out there. And that has essentially flipped on its head.” The overwhelming majority of his constituent mail is now about the far-out ideas, and only a small portion is “based on something that is mostly true.” He added, “It’s dramatically changed politics and politicians, and what they’re doing.”

This trend may have gotten worse recently, but it isn’t new. David Frum wrote about it in 2011:

Backed by their own wing of the book-publishing industry and supported by think tanks that increasingly function as public-relations agencies, conservatives have built a whole alternative knowledge system, with its own facts, its own history, its own laws of economics. Outside this alternative reality, the United States is a country dominated by a strong Christian religiosity. Within it, Christians are a persecuted minority. Outside the system, President Obama—whatever his policy ­errors—is a figure of imposing intellect and dignity. Within the system, he’s a pitiful nothing, unable to speak without a teleprompter, an affirmative-action ­phony doomed to inevitable defeat. Outside the system, social scientists worry that the U.S. is hardening into one of the most rigid class societies in the Western world, in which the children of the poor have less chance of escape than in France, Germany, or even England. Inside the system, the U.S. remains (to borrow the words of Senator Marco Rubio) “the only place in the world where it doesn’t matter who your parents were or where you came from.”

And AutoStraddle‘s Heather Hogan more recently described the effect on a personal level:

Over the last ten years, everyone I know has lost a friend or family member or mentor to Fox News. Like me, they have watched helplessly as people they love have become part of the conservative punditry herd and, over time, traded their compassion for paranoia; their thoughtful opinions for manufactured outrage; and their empathy for hateful rhetoric.

It seems quaint now that, back in 2008, John McCain corrected a questioner who said that she couldn’t trust Barack Obama because he was “an Arab”. He defended Obama as “a decent family man and citizen that I just happen to have disagreements with on fundamental issues”. (Trump, facing an even more outrageous questioner this September, did nothing of the kind. He later criticized McCain’s response, saying McCain was “harsh” when he “ripped the microphone out of the woman’s hands”. Actually, McCain reached for the microphone while saying, “No, ma’am.”)

But the McCain of 2008 was already a dinosaur in Republican circles. His younger running mate, Sarah Palin, catered to misperceptions of her audience, understanding that anything goes if it whips up your supporters.

Eight years later we have Donald Trump, who doesn’t know or care much about reality, but is really good at whipping up his supporters. Unreality, along with the irrational fears and passions it commands, is a powerful weapon in politics. The problem is that no one can own it. If you use it, you have no safe refuge when someone turns it against you.

December 14, 2015 – 7:55 am Categories: Articles | Comments (4)

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The Monday Morning Teaser

A few hours after last week’s Sift got finished, Donald Trump made his don’t-let-any-Muslims-in proposal, which seemed to be about all anybody could talk about for the rest of the week. Not to write about that would feel like dodging, but at the same time I don’t want to repeat the same oh-isn’t-that-horrible reaction you’ve been hearing all week.

Not that it isn’t horrible, but you know that already. Is there anything more insightful to say about it? The articles that I found interesting this week focused on where this stuff comes from and why there is an audience for it: Republicans and their conservative media have been building that audience for years, using white Christian identity politics to manipulate working-class whites into supporting the candidates of the corporate establishment. They’ve built an echo chamber where bizarre conspiracy theories and simplistic views of economics and foreign affairs can avoid the friction of the real world. Now that Trump is playing their game better than they do, they want to call a foul.

I’ll sum up that point of view in the first featured post “How the Republicans Trumped Themselves”. That should be out shortly.

But there’s something else that I think needs to get out there. What Trump’s fans love about him is that he is a “strong leader”, and I feel like that idea needs to be taken on more directly — because what he’s doing doesn’t fit my notion of leadership at all. So the second featured post will be “The Leadership We Need”. That still needs work, so I’m not sure what time it will post.

The weekly summary will discuss the aftermath of the recent mass shootings, quote two new books that illustrate the complexity and diversity of Islam, and pull together a few of the Peanuts references that have accompanied the 50th anniversary of A Charlie Brown Christmas, before closing with two attempts to enlist high tech in the effort to replace meat and eggs.

December 14, 2015 – 7:21 am Categories: Morning tease | Comments (2)

Thoughts and Prayers

Your “thoughts” should be about steps to take to stop this carnage. Your “prayers” should be for forgiveness if you do nothing – again.

— Senator Chris Murphy (D-Connecticut)

Just another day in the United States of America, another day of gunfire, panic, and fear.

— BBC intro to the San Bernardino shootings

This week’s featured posts are “Guns are security blankets, not insurance policies” and “The 2016 Campaign: a mid-course assessment“.

Last week’s post about fascism, “The Political F-word“, had one of the best first weeks in Weekly Sift history: At 7700 hits so far, it’s already the 15th most popular Sift post ever.

This week everybody was talking about mass shootings and terrorism

It’s been fascinating to watch the radically different responses to two terrorist attacks that happened within a few days of each other: San Bernardino and Planned Parenthood. Liberals had just about the same response to each: It’s way too easy in the United States for somebody to get guns and start shooting people.

For conservatives, on the other hand, the Planned Parenthood shooting in Colorado Springs was just one of those things. It’s the price of living in a free society and there’s really nothing to be done about it. The San Bernardino shooting, though, was something Muslims did, so it is a national emergency that requires carpet bombing or maybe a ground war.

Personally, I don’t care whether the person who shoots me is a Muslim extremist or a Christian extremist. Heck, if there are Zoroastrian extremists, I don’t want them to shoot me either. (Funny how you never hear about somebody gunning people down for atheism.) Mass shootings are the problem we need to solve, not just a particular kind of mass shootings.

President Obama’s speech Sunday night was basically a stay-the-course speech. It was well-reasoned (because what we’re doing to fight ISIS is mostly well-reasoned already), but I suspect it did little to slow down the national panic.

The problem Obama is facing is that most of the dramatic actions he could take — indiscriminate bombing or a ground invasion of Syria, harassing Muslims in the U.S., etc. — would do more harm than good. He’s quite correct that ISIS is hoping for those kinds of responses. It’s worth noting that hardly any of the public figures who criticize Obama for not doing enough have offered any detailed suggestions. They want to “get tough” and take strong action, but exactly what those actions would be is left vague.

Strangling an insurgency without creating a new insurgency is a long, slow process. As sad as that thought is, we’re lucky to have a president who understands it.

Peter Beinart wrote an insightful article about Obama’s thinking on terrorism.

Obama is a kind of Fukuyamian. Like Francis Fukuyama, the author of the famed 1989 essay “The End of History,” he believes that powerful, structural forces will lead liberal democracies to triumph over their foes—so long as these democracies don’t do stupid things like persecuting Muslims at home or invading Muslim lands abroad. His Republican opponents, by contrast, believe that powerful and sinister enemies are overwhelming America, either overseas (the Rubio version) or domestically (the Trump version).

For them, the only thing more terrifying than “radical Islam” is the equanimity with which President Obama meets it. And, to their dismay, that equanimity was very much on display on Sunday night.

and guns

I tried to keep “Guns are security blankets, not insurance policies” focused, so I had to edit out this second point:

Guns don’t protect freedom, they threaten it. One of the what-if fantasies that justifies a well-armed civilian population is: What if the government becomes tyrannical? Won’t we want to have the ability to launch a Red-Dawn-like insurgency?

A bunch of things are wrong with this fantasy, the biggest being that my handgun or hunting rifle wouldn’t be much use against the U.S. Army, if it ever came to that. The historical references people back this point with are also usually dead wrong. (No, Hitler didn’t confiscate the German people’s guns.) The actual examples of tyrants being overthrown in recent history aren’t stories of civilian militias shooting it out with the army. Instead, they involve mass demonstrations by unarmed people, raising the prospect either of the army or powerful foreign protectors turning against the government. (See: Arab Spring, or the overthrow of the Shah of Iran.)

There is, however, one example from American history that fits the civilian-militia scenario perfectly: the Ku Klux Klan’s resistance to the occupation of the South after the Civil War. (I have written about this before; for a more detailed discussion, read the recent book After Appomattox by Gregory Downs or Eric Foner’s Reconstruction.) At the end of the Civil War, the U.S. government recognized that simply freeing the slaves on paper wasn’t enough, because the white-supremacist power structure of the Southern states would quickly re-assert itself and deny any real rights to black citizens. Tens of thousands of Northern troops occupied the South for several years, attempting to establish a social order in which blacks and whites were equal under the law.

To the former rebels, this was tyranny imposed by a distant government in Washington DC. They wanted to restore the pre-war whites-only power structure, in which blacks were subject to separate, harsher laws that they had no voice in either making or enforcing. To that end, the KKK unleashed a campaign of political terror, attacking not Army units, but political gatherings of blacks and pro-government loyalists, and assassinating numerous public officials who attempted to enforce the federally-mandated laws.

Ultimately, the KKK succeeded in throwing off the “tyranny” of Washington, resulting in the Jim Crow era.

In other words, in the historical example that best fits the pro-gun rhetoric, it was the federal government that was fighting for real democracy and freedom, while the armed civilian militias were fighting to take rights away from the new citizens (who we think of as minorities, but who actually constituted a majority in Mississippi and South Carolina).

Something similar is happening today in the recent abortion-clinic violence: The federal government protects the right of women to make their own decisions about their pregnancies, while an armed minority wants to make those decisions as dangerous as possible, and ultimately to intimidate citizens into not using their rights. The point isn’t to fight the Army, it’s to assassinate doctors and terrorize pregnant women.

I hate to admit it, but I understand why Congress doesn’t want to ban people on the no-fly list from buying guns. The no-fly list is already a little constitutionally suspect, because it works a real hardship on people without due process of law. You don’t know whether you’re on the list or why, and you have no recourse for getting your name off. The list is a product of the executive branch without any judicial involvement, so theoretically you could wind up on it just because somebody in the White House doesn’t like you. (I used to bitch about this kind of thing all the time during the Bush administration, so I sort of need to stay consistent.)

We tolerate the no-fly list because we all believe we’ll never be on it. We ought to be figuring out some more acceptable way to replace it, not increasing its influence.

and prayer

The New York Daily News called attention to the cynical use of prayer as a response to a massacre, and Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy offered the tweet at the top of this post.

I’ve updated the Conservative-to-English Lexicon to include a definition of prayer:

A way to appear to take action on issues you don’t actually care about. Example: the prayers routinely offered for the families of victims of mass shootings.

Naturally, conservatives took offense at the aptness of remarks like Senator Murphy’s, or the Daily News cover to the right, charging that they denigrated religion and the power of prayer. Ted Cruz called it “prayer shaming“.

Nothing of the kind is happening. The point is that we can all pray for ourselves, we don’t need to elect representatives to do it for us. We elect representatives to exercise the powers of government, which Republicans refuse to do whenever action would offend the NRA.

I have a suggestion: Whenever Republican candidates are asked about how they plan to combat ISIS or limit government spending, they should offer their prayers and move on to the next question. I think any candidate who tries this will soon discover exactly how much stock the conservative base puts in the power of prayer unsupported by any direct human action.

and the Paris climate talks

The shootings have driven the Paris climate summit off the front pages, but it’s still happening. In the long run, it might be the most important thing that’s happening right now.

and you might also be interested in

The House has been repealing ObamaCare every month or two for years now. Well, they finally got a repeal through the Senate, using the “reconciliation” procedure that is immune to filibusters. So this is the first ObamaCare repeal that has made it to President Obama’s desk, and he will veto it.

MaddowBlog’s Steve Benen notes that this was a vote to increase the number of uninsured Americans by 22 million, and that it’s a trial run of a repeal procedure that presumably will work in 2017 if Republicans win the White House. However, it’s not clear that Senate Republicans could stick together if they were really taking health insurance away from millions of Americans. (Two Senate Republicans defected on this bill; more might if they couldn’t count on a presidential veto.)

Meanwhile, Paul Ryan promised:

we think this problem is so urgent that, next year, we are going to unveil a plan to replace every word of Obamacare.

Benen observes that it’s only been six years since ObamaCare became law, and that Republicans have been promising to unveil a replacement any minute now for most of that time. Somehow, the “urgent” replacement never comes together.

This point is routinely lost on much of the chattering class, but Republicans don’t actually like health care reform, which is why we’ve waited so many years to see a plan that still doesn’t exist. GOP lawmakers didn’t see the old system – the bankruptcies, the uninsured rates, the deaths, Americans paying more for less – as a problem requiring a solution, which is precisely why they haven’t invested time and energy in writing a detailed reform blueprint.

So coal baron Don Blankenship was convicted of conspiring to violate coal mine safety standards. Those violations played an important role in the Upper Big Branch mine disaster that killed 29 miners in 2010. But assuming Blankenship can’t get his conviction overturned on appeal, at worst he faces one year in prison, and he might get off with a fine.

“The jury’s verdict sends a clear and powerful message,” U.S. Attorney Booth Goodwin said. “It doesn’t matter how rich you are, or how powerful you are — if you gamble with the safety of the people who work for you, you will be held accountable.”

To me the “clear and powerful message” seems a little different: If your gamble results in a deadly disaster that makes the national news, then, years later, you might face some fairly minimal consequences. If my spouse or parent were one of those 29 dead miners, I wouldn’t feel vindicated.

Trump’s bogus claim that Muslims in Jersey City cheered on 9-11 reminded me to recommend a comic book: the current Ms. Marvel is a Muslim high-school girl from Jersey City. The comic is well-written, and the main characters are very believable teen-agers.

It’s the season for politicians to send their supporters cards with heart-warming holiday themes, like the Confederate flag, or the whole family standing in front of the tree with guns.

I believe I’ve previously posted my opinion that Ben Carson is a crackpot. Here, he tells a group of Jewish Republicans a tall tale about how the Star of David (that Carson sees) on the one-dollar bill came to (not) be there.

Meanwhile, Donald Trump made sure Jewish Republicans understand that he sees them in terms of stereotypes.

In Tuesday’s NYT, Thomas Edsall’s column “Donald Trump’s Appeal” didn’t use the word fascism, but otherwise echoed a lot of the themes in last week’s Sift article “The Political F-word“: the need for a social-psychology explanation, a focus on the white working class, and supporting Trump as a response to humiliation.

When I first saw the picture, I assumed Dick Cheney had been put into stasis, like when Han Solo was frozen in carbonite. But no: A bust of the former VP is being displayed at the Capitol.

and let’s close with something you won’t hear at the office

You know the kind of motivational consultants who do presentations at big companies, teaching everybody how to relax and focus? I don’t think they’re going to use this guided meditation.

Runner-up: the Dalek Relaxation Tape.

December 7, 2015 – 12:17 pm Categories: Weekly summaries | Comments (10)

The 2016 Campaign: a mid-course assessment

We’re still almost two months away from the Iowa caucuses, but it already seems like the 2016 presidential campaign has been going on forever. Pundits started speculating about it even before all the 2014 races were decided. And although I resisted that temptation as long as I could, I’ve been writing about it since the spring. So I think it’s time to take a step back and assess both how the campaign is going and how I’ve been doing at covering it.

Before I do that, though, I need to set up the proper expectations. I’ve been covering the campaign as a Democrat. (The claim I make is only that The Weekly Sift is honest, not that it’s unbiased or non-partisan.) So my coverage of the Democratic race centers on my own decision as a New Hampshire voter about who I’m going to support in the primary. Conversely, my coverage of the Republican race is sizing up the opposition:  Who are we likely to face in the general election? What forces are brewing in the Republican electorate, and how can we counter them?

With that distinction in mind, I’ll discuss each party individually.

Democrats. Clinton is now leading Sanders 60%-30% nationwide, according to Quinnippiac, up from 53%-35% a month ago. More and more, it looks like the Republicans sealed Clinton’s nomination at the Benghazi hearings.

The silver lining for Sanders is that he performs slightly better in head-to-head match-ups with Republicans: Clinton beats Trump (47%-41%) and Cruz (47%-42%) while Sanders’s leads are larger (49%-41% and 49%-39%).

I’m inclined to discount that Sanders advantage for a simple reason: The Republican attack machine that has been after the Clintons since 1992 hasn’t really taken aim at Sanders yet. So far, Republican anti-Sanders comments have been more-or-less generic attacks on a socialist running for president. They haven’t gone after him personally yet, and they haven’t started making up complete crap about him — which they will if he gets nominated.

If you think Bernie’s upright nature protects him from this, you’re kidding yourself. Anybody can be lied about. (Remember Kitty Dukakis burning the American flag? Or Michelle Obama’s “whitey” speech? George W. Bush — the guy who dodged Vietnam by using political pull to score a cushy stateside National Guard spot — managed to turn John Kerry’s war record against him.) Picture Sanders wanting to talk about the minimum wage or his infrastructure-building jobs plan, but instead having to fend off totally baseless questions about illegitimate children or male prostitutes. How hard would it be to get some Russian emigre to claim he was in the KGB in the 1980s, and Sanders was his agent? I doubt Bernie has the temperament to deal with that kind of stuff, while Hillary clearly does.

I can claim deep insight into exactly one New Hampshire Democrat — me. Here’s what I’ve been thinking: I agree with Sanders’ positions more than Hillary’s, but I think Hillary is the stronger general-election candidate for the reason I just gave: She comes pre-slimed, while we don’t know yet what a slimed Bernie looks like. That leads to this perverse logic: The more convinced I am that Clinton will be nominated, the likelier I am to vote for Sanders.

The scenario I worry about with Hillary is that she’ll make a strategic decision to move to the right for the general election. For example, she picks a red-state Democrat for VP — some white male who is NRA-acceptable, wants a more active war against ISIS, and repeats a lot of Republican talking points about “religious freedom” and “all lives matter” and so on. Not only would that bode ill for a Clinton administration, it’s also the only way I can see her losing — by depressing turnout among the young and non-white parts of the Obama coalition.

So while I want Clinton to be nominated, I also want her to know that the party has a left wing she can’t take for granted. I doubt Elizabeth Warren wants to be VP — I think she likes the job she has — but if not her, I want some other very solidly liberal VP like Sherrod Brown or Al Franken. I want Clinton to run to raise turnout, presenting a strong contrast with the GOP on climate change and guns and income inequality and racism. (Incidentally, raising turnout is also the best way to get the Senate back and narrow the gap in the House.) When the primary rolls around, the best way to send Clinton that message might be for me to vote for Bernie.

Republicans. According to CNN, Trump is solidly atop the Republican field with 36% and Ted Cruz is second at 16%. (Cruz’ showing represents a 12-point surge since the mid-October poll.) Pre-season favorite Jeb Bush is sixth at 3%.

It’s time to start reviewing some of the assertions I’ve made about the Republican field. The boldest one (from July) was that Trump isn’t running a serious campaign, because when the time came to put up real money — in November and December, I thought — he won’t do it.

That’s what happens when the crystal ball shows you a half-truth: Trump hasn’t been putting up serious money: The NBC News pie chart on the right shows him spending just $217,000 on TV ads, compared to Bush’s $28.9 million. (Here in New Hampshire, I still haven’t seen a Trump ad.) What I didn’t foresee was that money would be having so little impact this late in the campaign. Will Trump ever need to put up significant amounts of his own money? If that time arrives, will he do it? We still don’t know.

My comments about Chris Christie look a little better: After seeing a Christie town hall meeting in April, I predicted that his skill in that format would pay off in New Hampshire — maybe not enough to win the primary, but enough to do better than pundits were predicting at that time. That seems to be happening. A recent PPP poll has Christie rising into fourth place in NH with 10%, leading Carson (9%) and Bush (5%).

I discounted Rubio’s chances because he was everybody’s second choice, but didn’t clearly represent any of the GOP’s four factions. That was also in April, when I didn’t foresee that the leading Corporatist candidates (Bush and Walker) would run such terrible campaigns. Today, Rubio looks like the Corporatists’ only chance for an acceptable nominee.

Sticking with the four-faction (Corporatist, Theocrat, Libertarian, and NeoCon) analysis, the big news is in the Theocrat wing, where Huckabee and Santorum have failed to catch fire, and Cruz is starting to edge out Carson. The Libertarian wing of the party has proven to be a non-factor. (Early on, Rand Paul decided he had to transcend his Libertarian base if he was going to win the nomination, and no one has tried to pick it up from him. As a result, both Paul and the Libertarians are nowhere.) What nobody could have foreseen was Trump’s appeal to NeoCon voters: When there’s a terrorist attack, he surges. But Trump seems to be transcending the factions: He also gets considerable Theocrat support, despite having no religious credibility at all.

In March I wrote:

The hardest factor to predict is how well candidates will perform on the campaign trail. … I expect Cruz and Christie to perform well, and Jindal and Paul to perform badly. (Watch Paul’s interview with Rachel Maddow.) The big wild card is Bush, who has never campaigned for national office, or for anything at all since 2002.

Well, now we know about Bush: He’s an absolutely terrible campaigner and debater. All the money in the world can’t save him.

So my four-faction analysis has shrunk to three factions, and at the moment it produces Trump, Rubio, and Cruz as finalists. If you’re wondering why I focus so much on which Democrat can do better in the general election, just say “President Cruz” a few times and I think you’ll understand.

December 7, 2015 – 10:25 am Categories: Articles | Comments (7)

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Guns are security blankets, not insurance policies

The famous sci-fi author William Gibson once tweeted:

People who feel safer with a gun than with guaranteed medical insurance don’t yet have a fully adult concept of scary.

That simple observation actually explains quite a bit about the gun-control debate.

If you’ve ever wandered into an argument over guns and gun control, you’ve undoubtedly noticed that the two sides talk past each other. Proponents of gun control quote statistics: how many more shooting deaths we have in America than there are in countries with fewer guns, how many more suicides or police deaths there are in well-armed states, and so on.

Pro-gun advocates are more likely to tell stories, and often those stories are dark what-if fantasies: What if home invaders came to kill you, kidnap your baby, or rape your teen-age daughter? What if you were a hostage in a bank robbery? What if you were at a restaurant or grocery store when terrorists broke in and started killing people? Wouldn’t you wish you had a gun then?

Such stories are easily stretched to indict even the mildest forms of gun control, like limiting magazines to ten shots: Picture your wife hiding in a closet with a handgun. Before she hid, she already gotten off a few shots at the invaders, and now she’s not sure how many shots she has left. Don’t you wish now you’d been able to buy her a gun with a larger magazine?

What we’re seeing here is that there are two very different ways to think about risk and security. In the one Gibson describes as the adult way, you focus on the most likely risks and come up with ways to mitigate them.

Shortly after 9-11, I remember seeing a security expert interviewed on TV. (I wish I could remember enough details to google up a link.) The host asked what Americans could do to be safer, and the expert responded: “Wear seat belts and don’t smoke.” His point was that although spectacular risks like terrorist attacks may plague your imagination and call for spectacular remedies, more mundane risks like car accidents or cancer are far more significant, and there are a number of dull-but-effective things you can do about them. [1] If you’re just trying not to die, that’s the place to focus your efforts.

But you can also think about risk the way that children think about monsters in their closets. In that mode of thought, the problem isn’t the real-life probability of danger, it’s that a dark fantasy has gotten into your head and you can’t get it out. If you’ve ever dealt with a frightened child or remember being one, you know that you can’t solve a closet-monster problem by finding statistics to demonstrate how low being-eaten-by-a-closet-monster ranks among childhood death risks. Instead, you need to come up with some talisman or ritual that creates an aura of safety. The child needs a security blanket or a teddy bear, not more accurate information about relative risks. [2]

That’s the need that guns fulfill for most of their owners. [3] They’re security blankets, not insurance policies. The point isn’t that home invasion is a major risk in your life, that you are well-trained enough to win a middle-of-the-night shoot-out if home invaders show up, or even that you have a practical way to get the gun out of its safe-storage location in time to use it at all; it’s that when the home-invasion fantasy plagues you, you can tell yourself, “It’s OK. I have a gun.”

[1] One of those risks is suicide, and owning a gun increases it. Everyone has suicidal thoughts from time to time, and gun-owners have a very convenient and effective way to take action on such thoughts. Statistically, you are far more likely to kill yourself with a gun than to kill a terrorist or a home invader.

[2] Fear of flying is a second example of this pattern: If you’re afraid to fly, statistics about the safety of commercial air travel miss the point. The problem isn’t that you have incorrectly assessed the relative risks of flying vs. driving; it’s that you can imagine being completely helpless while the plane is crashing. What you need is some talisman or ritual that will keep that thought out of your head for a few hours.

[3] Of course, there are people who have real security problems whose solutions involve guns: presidents, for example. That’s why the complaint that it’s hypocrisy for Obama to advocate gun control while armed men protect him and his family is so off-base. Four of our 44 presidents (Lincoln, Garfield, McKinley, and Kennedy) have died by assassination, several others have been shot at, and all frequently receive threats. If you’re president, assassination isn’t a monster in your closet, it’s your most significant risk of dying.

Likewise, if you deal drugs, or regularly transport large quantities of cash to the bank, or have some other risk factor that makes death-by-violence more than just a what-if, your gun might be more than a security blanket. But if so, you are in a small minority of gun owners.

December 7, 2015 – 8:35 am Categories: Articles | Comments (28)

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