Political issues – Page 10

The Trump show’s last season, canceled for bad ratings

Source: Wikimedia Commons

Is the Trump nightmare over? I would say no, not quite. There’s more craziness where that came from in the packed clown car of Trump wannabes and QAnon whack jobs. But I would argue that, now that the 2022 midterm election is over, we’ll be watching Trump through the rearview mirror. He’ll keep trying to scare us, and he’ll keep trying to get into the spotlight and pretend that he’s got us right where he wants us. But even Republicans now know that Trump is a loser. For the rest of us, it’s popcorn time. No matter what happens in the next presidential election in 2024, we now have two good years of deliciously crunchy fresh-popped schadenfreude to look forward to, watching Trump whimper and whine as he is financially ruined, exposed as weak, exposed as a loser, indicted for serious crimes, and put on trial for charges that may well include espionage. As his business crimes and tax returns come to light, we’ll find out who owns him — Russians and some nasty oil people in the Middle East would be a good guess.

If Republicans take the House, then we’ll have to listen to a series of barking-mad “hearings” featuring the likes of Jim Jordan. Even if those hearings become the three-ring circus that Maga Republicans want, the circus will succeed at confusing only the sort of people who watch Fox News. We mustn’t forget that that’s barely four million people at primetime. The craziness that we can expect from a post-Trump Maga House probably would do Republicans more harm than good, because most Americans now know what Trump is. A Republican House would keep reminding decent Americans why they hate Trump. It’s also possible that “establishment” Republicans and even Fox News will try to move on, to something that actually has a chance of working in 2024.

This morning, two days after the election, it’s amazing to me how quickly the media, as foolish and fickle as always, pivoted from pumping the Republican “red wave” to heaping humiliation on Republicans because the red wave didn’t happen — puff them up, then kick them when they’re down. We should always keep in mind that the last thing the media want is competent and therefore boring government. The media, like the Republican Party, now need something new. What will it be?

What are HBO, Disney, Hulu, Amazon Prime video, etc., for after all. That’s where our entertainment should come from, not from Washington, or Mar-a-Lago, or sadistic right-wing circus tricks in places like Florida, Texas, or Arizona. One way of interpreting this election, I think, is that Americans are very tired of the circus. The Trump show has had a run of five or six seasons, same plot, same crappy characters. I’d bet a dollar, plus an 8.2 cent adjustment for inflation, that at this very moment, the grandees of the Republican Party and the media’s best creative geniuses are in meetings behind closed mahogany doors trying to come up with two new blockbuster seasons of — something, something new — to preserve their profits through 2024.

Meanwhile the White House is safe, the courts are still in working order, there’s toilet paper on the shelves, and Republican dreams of everlasting domination just took a big hit. President Biden will continue to focus on things that actually matter. Wouldn’t it be nice if the media would, too. In any case, we don’t have to be afraid of Donald Trump anymore. In the season finale, Trump will go to prison. Then he’ll be history, over in the trash heap section.

Update:

The New York Post, which is owned by Rupert Murdoch, heaped scorn on Trump in today’s edition with a “Trumpty Dumpty” cover.

Another Murdoch property, the Wall Street Journal, called Trump “The Republican Party’s Biggest Loser.”

Andor and us

“Andor,” now streaming on Disney+, is the best television since Game of Thrones. We’re now nine episodes into the season’s twelve episodes. Ken called it “Star Wars for adults,” which is a good description. If the Force exists in “Andor,” it hasn’t yet made an appearance. There are no cuddly animals, no light sabers, and no Yoda-like characters who are all-knowing. These characters — like us — are on their own to deal with a world that is sinking fast into fascism. This is pure politics — a developing rebellion against the fascist Empire.

I very quickly lost interest in the new Lord of the Rings and Game of Thrones spinoffs and stopped watching them. There’s room there for plenty of criticism, but neither of those two series is really worth bothering with criticism. The bottom line for me was just that I couldn’t care about any of the characters.

“Andor,” on the other hand, is loaded with characters whom we can care about, right from the first episode. Those characters who are powerless are increasingly feeling the iron boot of the Empire. Even those who are powerful (a rebel senator or two, for example) would lose their lives in a second if their cover was blown.

Episode by episode, Andor’s parallels with our current political situation become more apparent. I had been wondering how intentional this is. It seems the answer is that it’s very intentional.

The Wikipedia article says that Diego Luna, who plays Cassian Andor, and Tony Gilroy, who is described as the “showrunner,” have said that the Andor series is about “how the disenfranchised can stand up to effect change.” Fiona Shaw, who plays Cassian Andor’s adoptive mother, is quoted in the Wikipedia article:

“Co-star Fiona Shaw described Gilroy’s political commentary in the scripts as a ‘great, scurrilous [take] on the Trumpian world,’ adding that ‘our world is exploding in different places right now, people’s rights are disappearing, and Andor reflects that. [In the show] the Empire is taking over, and it feels like the same thing is happening in reality, too.’ ”

This series is so well done that I’ve watched each episode at least twice, and some of them three times. It moves fast, and the details are important.

Are Trumpists aware that Disney is exposing their fascism and motivating the resistance? A little Googling shows that Trumpists are aware, and they’re plenty mad about it, claiming (for example) that Disney risks financial disaster if they alienate half their potential audience. Ha! According to Wikipedia, Andor has been at the top of the streaming lists.

“Andor” is worth studying from several angles, especially how the rebels and the fascists differ in their “moral foundations.” Andor’s fascists, like our Trumpists, are cruel, uncaring, and committed to iron-boot authoritarianism. The motivations of the rebels, more complex and more subtle, are being revealed in the script a bit more slowly. I’ll have more to say about “Andor” in the next few weeks.

Oligarchs and the rest of us

Politico has a must-read piece today, an interview with Fiona Hill: Fiona Hill: ‘Elon Musk Is Transmitting a Message for Putin.’ Part of what makes this interview a must-read is how it exposes the media’s inadequacy in trying to cover something as complicated as Putin’s war against Ukraine. Only a specialist and academic like Fiona Hill can see very far beneath the surface. This interview should have been in the New York Times, not in a secondary source such as Politico.

There’s another important element. Why should a rich American naïf and idiot like Elon Musk figure into this interview? Just what interests do Musk and Putin have in common? Just how often do they talk, and why? This begs a question about another rich American naïf and idiot: Donald Trump. We have never really learned what interests Trump and Putin have in common. How often have Trump and Putin used secret back-channels of communication, and why? Here we could make a long list of the world’s oligarchs, some of whom control countries such as China and Iran, and others who control “countries of particular concern” such as Hungary, North Korea, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan. These oligarchs know each other. Otherwise only the banks know who most of them are. They live in a golden bubble that we common folk cannot penetrate. Only occasionally do we get scraps of information about what they do and the power they have over world events. When their interference with democratic governments is noticed, they pull out all the stops to obstruct our view, as with the matter of Russia’s interference with the American election of 2016.

Here one must speculate. Can there be any doubt that much of what drives world events occurs out of our sight, far beneath the surface, visible only to the very rich and the very powerful? Only occasionally do we see the tip of an iceberg, such as the connection between Elon Musk and Vladimir Putin.

My speculation is that the fundamental conflict driving world events today boils down to oligarchs (who can flourish only under corrupt authoritarian governments) versus the people (who can flourish only in democracies). If this is true, then it begs another question: Why do so many ordinary people, who could never possibly gain admittance to the golden bubble in which oligarchs live, admire these oligarchs and take the oligarchs’ side in this global struggle? There is nothing in it for ordinary people other than misery, exploitation, and loss of liberty, once oligarchs are sufficiently entrenched to be untouchable by the people’s power, with elections made obsolete. Deception and propaganda, of course, are the biggest part of the answer. The oligarchs not only have mastered the art of deception, they even make a profit from it. For every five of us who are pretty good at recognizing the truth, there are another five of us who are willing to pay to be deceived.

The interview with Fiona Hill should raise our awareness not only of the great danger in Europe, but also the great danger here in the United States, where a Republican Party that serves the interests of the global oligarchy might succeed in legally taking control of the United States for the purpose of corrupting the American democracy and handing the country over to the oligarchs. That this was (and is) Trump’s purpose is now completely obvious. The Republican Party is all in. A shocking percentage of the American people actually believe that they would gain from this. They’d barely have a pot to piss in unless they could get a piece of the corruption, but at least they’d own the libs. It’s a pity that we can’t send them on a visit to Russia or Iran or North Korea to get a preview of what’s in store even for those who carry water for the oligarchs. For those of us who resisted, it would be much, much worse.

Trump: How will it end?

Authoritarian dreams of global domination. Source: Wikimedia Commons

Salon has an excellent interview today with George Conway, who formerly was a Republican and a Justice Department lawyer. Conway is asked all the right questions. Conway is well positioned to be taken seriously. His answers, I believe, are spot on. Everyone should read this article, but it boils down to this: Yes, Trump is going to be indicted and convicted. But Trump also is going to try to do as much damage to the country as possible as he goes down, just as he did when he was voted out of the White House:

Trump ‘will be convicted of multiple felonies’: George Conway on the bumpy road ahead
Longtime GOP lawyer says Trump won’t take a deal and will call for MAGA violence — but his time is almost up

But even with Trump ruined and silenced, we still will be stuck with the Republican Party. Conway says:

“Trump is also going to cause damage to the Republican Party. The party is finally going to realize that Trump will take them down with him. It is going to be very ugly all around. In the end, though, it will get better. Once Trump is dealt with, there’s the other problem that must be confronted: Trump let all the termites into the basement of the house. The Big Lie and the election deniers and all the assorted lunatics who have taken up residence in the Republican Party and are now its base must be pushed out.”

Conway wisely deflects some of the deeper questions on the grounds that he is not a psychologist. I’m not a psychologist either, but I’m going to stick my neck out.

I think that one of the things that decent and reasonable people must learn, if the United States ever returns to stability and governability, is that about a third of the population are authoritarians, and that authoritarians always damage the social fabric. In more stable times, these people go about their sorry little lives, unorganized yet always doing the damage they always do. But that damage occurs in much smaller spheres — families, communities, and workplaces. But if an uber-authoritarian with a big megaphone comes along with the right lies and stirs up enough rage, then an entire country can find itself in danger. There are only two requirements: A total madman such as Donald Trump, and a megaphone to retail the lies and rage, which the right-wing media and social media have eagerly supplied to Trump and Trumpism.

It is considered shrill and rude to say it, but I believe that it has to be said. That is that the line between authoritarian and “conservative” is thin and vague. The difference is that conservatives retain their decency and moral sanity. Authoritarians do not. George Conway is a conservative, but he is not an authoritarian. Hence Conway eventually saw through Trump and felt shame for having been deceived. The great danger to democracy occurs when authoritarians and conservatives vote the same way. Combined, they come to more than 50 percent, though probably only barely more than 50 percent. It’s probably reasonable to say that about 30 percent of the population are hopeless authoritarians, and about 20 percent are conservatives who, though regressive, racist, and easily deceived, still have a grip on decency and moral sanity.

Jonathan Haidt, who is a psychologist, would have us believe that conservatives and authoritarians are just as psychologically and morally competetent as the rest of us, but that they just have different “moral foundations.” But love for authority, and the hatred of out-groups, are sorry, and dangerous, moral foundations. As I said, I’m not a psychologist, but I believe that Jonathan Haidt is dangerously wrong and has done great harm by encouraging blindness to the actual nature of authoritarianism. Conservatives teeter between clarity and delusion, as Conway says in the interview when he acknowledges his shame for voting for Trump in 2016 and for not seeing sooner what Trump really is. But authoritarians are not capable of that kind of insight, and they’re not going to change. That’s where we are today: Authoritarians quickly got on board with Trump. The Republican Party brought the easily deceived conservatives on board. Combined, they have enough power to threaten democracy and the rule of law, the barriers that stand in the way of their dream of total authority over the rest of us.

The Republican Party should have kept Trump from running for president back in 2015. One of the purposes of political parties is to screen candidates, keep out the crazies, and field candidates who will promote the party’s principles. But the Republican Party, having abandoned its principles to decay into a Trump cult, has failed again and again to do its job. My guess is that Republicans believe that sticking with Trump is their only hope for the 2022 mid-terms. But if the Republican Party retains any grip on political sanity, it will pivot away from Trump after November 8 and start to cut Trump loose, knowing that Trump is going down and that Trump as a strategy for 2024 would be a recipe for the biggest landslide against Republicans in history. Then the question will be: Will the Republican Party start to recover its political and moral sanity? Or will it find another Trump to ride all the way to hell?

A vision of the Trumpian hellscape

The posthumous execution of Oliver Cromwell, 1661

My old friend Jonathan Rauch has an excellent piece in the Atlantic today, “We Don’t Have to Speculate About Trump’s Next Term: The former president and his allies have explained their plans quite clearly.” This piece is a must-read. I agree with everything Jonathan says except for one thing, which I describe below.

To me, it is incomprehensibly stupid that the Republican Party and its Trumpists believe that they can create some sort of right-wing, white-people, Christian nationalist utopia. That’s absurd. Given the power, what they actually would create is an American hellscape in which turmoil would escalate until Trump was removed from the scene, permanently. Trumpists imagined that their attack on the U.S. Capitol was some sort of popular uprising of the people, aimed at overturning tyranny. It was no such thing. It was a pathetic, tin-hat, squalid imitation of the real thing, led by and executed by the worst kind of fools, a beer-hall putsch fantasy. For an example of the real thing, take a look at photos of Sri Lankans storming their presidential palace to take down a corrupt family dynasty. The American people would not for long put up with Donald Trump as king.

I sent an email to Jonathan about his Atlantic piece:

Great piece in the Atlantic. I disagree on only one point. I don’t believe that the public would ever accept authoritarianism. I’m not sure that Trumpian authoritarianism could even creep, given that we know from the start who he is and what he is up to. Having long ago imagined the worst and having watched reality turn out twice as bad as what I imagined, I’ve also tried to imagine how we would resist. The coasts, starting in California, simply would not put up with it. I don’t think that a minority authoritarian American government could ever be anywhere close to stable. Republicans would move quickly to cut up the social safety net and enact all sorts of injustices, which would be gasoline on a fire. If elections don’t matter anymore, then MAGA types don’t matter either (or at least matter as much), and Trump’s contempt for such socially inferior creatures would start to show for those who don’t toe the line. The more cruel and showy the clampdown — which the Trumps and MAGA true believers would insist on and relish — the more determined the resistance. Inflammatory brown-shirt cruelty would be everywhere in social media, even if the media aren’t properly covering it. The far left, which is arming and which would double down and grow (see https://www.reddit.com/r/socialistra) would start to return fire. They’re weak, but as they grow I’d expect them to employ sophisticated guerrilla tactics. The intelligentsia are never powerless, especially up against a Trumpian idiocracy. The Democratic Party would have some ideas, too. I have enough faith in the American military that I think it would take Trump longer to corrupt it (meaning that they’d carry out any order that Trump gave) than we, or Trump, might think. Our NATO allies would find ways to apply pressure. Trumpian stupidity and incompetence would be a great weakness. Stability based on compliance could never be achieved, and I don’t think there is enough police power for a forced form of stability. I am confident that the people’s power to resist a tyrant is greater than a tyrant’s power to resist the law and the people. Not only are they a minority, I’d expect overall support for Trump to diminish, and quickly, not grow. I have no idea how Trump eventually would be deposed, but he would be, nor can he even live much longer. Don Jr. is far too stupid to lead the dynasty they want, though no doubt he’d love to try. They can’t shoot everybody. A couple of hundred thousand people swarming the White House, à la Sri Lanka, would be far from impossible, and that would be a start.

That said, though, I don’t think there is a snowball’s chance that Trump will return to power. I think he is legally doomed and that there is time to finish him off and lock him up (as well as some members of Congress) before January 2025, no matter where we find ourselves in January 2025. I wouldn’t be completely surprised if there are indictments ahead of the November election, since the DOJ is under increasing pressure to justify itself.

This was Jonathan’s reply:

Excellent analysis. I hope you’re right!

I think you probably are right, but we’ve already seen so much that was previously unthinkable. Nothing in my scenario is unrealistic, and most of it either already happened or was attempted and might have happened.

The most discouraging thing to me is that I now think it’s very possible that the American public–at least the necessary critical mass–would accept creeping authoritarianism of the Hungary variety, and many would welcome it. I’ve experienced a crushing crisis of confidence in the public’s understanding of and commitment to constitutional democracy. I’m quite depressed about it. See, eg…

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/08/political-extremism-fatalism-maga-threat/671234/

Your comments here, as always, are welcome.

Lying isn’t as profitable as it used to be

Alex Jones. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

Members of the reality-based community should cheer, gloat, and enjoy the schadenfreude after the jury’s decision yesterday in the Alex Jones defamation trial. Jones has been ordered to pay $4.1 million in compensatory damages and $45.2 million in punitive damages to the parents of a 6-year-old boy killed in the Sandy Hook school shooting. Jones had come up with the conspiracy theory that the shooting never happened and that it was staged by anti-gun activists.

Jones has made many millions of dollars as a professional liar: creating conspiracy theories and selling them to right-wingers. Jones, for example, helped spread the conspiracy theory about “Pizzagate,” the claim that a pizzeria in Washington was being used by Democrats for child trafficking and Satanic ritual abuse. Yesterday’s verdict should serve as a warning to all the other profitable outlets for right-wing lies.

Fox News, you’ll remember, has been sued for $1.6 billion by Dominion Voting Systems because of the lie that Dominion rigged the 2020 election against Trump. That trial has been scheduled to start April 17, 2023.

The market for lies has a supply side and a demand side. One of the most puzzling things for those of us who live in the reality-based community is that there is such a huge demand for lies. There are the big guys, such as Rupert Murdoch and Alex Jones. But for every big guy, there are a thousand little guys trying to get attention and make a buck. YouTube is full of them. As for the other places in social media where such types hang out, I don’t even go there.

As for the people who consume the lies, it’s no wonder that they do so poorly in the world and that they require “elites” above them and scapegoats beneath to blame for their sorry circumstances. Adaptation to a complex and changing world requires knowledge of that world and smart choices based on that knowledge. Those who try to live in that world by applying lies rather than knowledge are certain to do poorly, with only their grievance and rage for comfort. It probably would be easy to show that right-wing lies actually are a drag on the economy, on account of the millions of people who are poorly adapted to the real economy because of their consumption of lies. Those who profit are the people who require the disinformed hordes as a power base, and those who’ve figured out how to make millions of dollars selling lies.

It is incomprehensible to me why right-wingers (including some members of the U.S. Supreme Court) think that making defamation suits easier by overturning New York Times v. Sullivan would increase right-wing power by making it easier for right-wingers to sue what they call “the liberal media.” The liberal media sometimes make mistakes, but they don’t lie, and they don’t need to lie. Unless right-wingers completely corrupt the courts (they’re working on it), they can’t win in court, because courts won’t tolerate the kind of stuff that fuels the right-wing disinformation economy (such as Trump’s Big Lie about a stolen election). Without the huge economy of lies, the Republican Party as we know it would cease to exist. If it were easier to sue, outfits such as Fox News would either have to clean up their acts or get sued out of business. Alex Jones probably did just get sued out of business.

The epistemology of derp

Paul Krugman’s column today is about crypto currency, “Crypto Is Crashing. Where Were the Regulators?” But my subject here isn’t crypto currency. Rather, it’s the many, many ways in which people allow themselves to be deceived, and the many, many ways in which people try to deceive us.

As for how people allowed themselves to be deceived about crypto currency, Krugman writes (the italics are mine): “The way I see it, crypto evolved into a sort of postmodern pyramid scheme. The industry lured investors in with a combination of technobabble and libertarian derp.”

That started me thinking about derp. It’s a beautiful word that almost defines itself. Krugman uses the word fairly often, probably because economic derp is so common. But there are many kinds of derp. Our lives are a minefield of derp. If our defenses against derp are weak, then we’re going to get things wrong. When we get things wrong, we are vulnerable to misjudgments that can lead to all sorts of trouble. Did you receive a phishing email and fall for the derp? Oops. There went your bank account. Did you drink bleach during the Covid lockdown? Oops. There went your esophagus, your stomach lining, and half of your intestines.

Epistemology — the philosophy of how we know things, how we discover new things, how we disprove things, and how we correct our errors — is very complex and very well developed. More than once in my life I’ve been accused of wanting to be right, as though that is an insult. Perhaps it’s thought to be an insult because wanting to be right is assumed to be about policing the errors of others. But that’s not it at all. It’s about applying good sense and skepticism to what we allow into our heads. It’s about making good decisions. It’s about not being prey in a world of derp. And yes, whether you want to call it policing or not, it’s also about saying that’s derp when confronted with derp.

I often read books that go over my head and that are more than I can understand. Usually, though, that’s worth the effort, because something can be gleaned. There are three subjects in particular about which I would like to know a great deal more but which are subjects that go over my head: physics, mathematics, and philosophy. The over-my-head book that was most recently on the nightstand is Of Two Minds: The Nature of Inquiry (James Blachowicz, State University of New York Press, 1998). I bought this book a while back because I’d come across references to the book which suggested that Blachowicz delivered a whipping or two to Karl Popper, whom many mongers of the smarter sort of derp take to be the last word in epistemology. I have learned the hard way that when someone is hectoring us with derp and makes a reference to Karl Popper, our derp detectors should light up.

Before, say, the days of cable television in the 1980s, it was fairly expensive to dispense derp. Historically people certainly found ways to do it. Pamphleteering, for example, which was often anonymous, is an important part of American and British history. But few people could afford the printing costs. But we now live in an era in which dispensing derp is nearly cost-free. It was cable television, for example, which brought us television preachers. The derp quickly created a lot of rich preachers. A decade later (1996), cable television brought us Fox News. When derp comes via email, we call it spam. And then came Facebook and all the other low-cost distributors of derp, derp, and more derp.

I think it’s unfortunately true these days that many people — if not most people — just don’t have the ability to defend themselves from derp. Some derp has become so sophisticated that having a Ph.D. is insufficient protection, at least where there are underlying susceptibilities. Some intelligence is required to detect derp, the more intelligence the better. Some education is required, the more the better. But character flaws also make people susceptible to derp — authoritarianism, narcissism, meanness and prejudice of every type, and (it’s a biggy) a craving for religion. Millions of people live in the trifecta of derp: They’re not very smart, they have weak educations, and they’re moral morons. Such people live in an alternate universe of purest derp, with just enough contact with a rational world to get in out of the rain.

I’ve hastily come up with a list of some categories of derp. If you’d like to add to the list, please leave a comment.

• Libertarian derp, with a hat tip to Krugman. There are well-funded think tanks that develop libertarian derp — for example, the Cato Institute. Billionaires and techno-utopians such as Elon Musk use the media to dispense libertarian derp.

• Right-wing derp. We’re utterly inundated with right-wing derp these days. It may be as close as your dinner table. Unless you’re off the grid or something, there is no escaping it.

• Centrist derp. The mainstream media are full of centrist derp. For publications such as The Atlantic, it’s a business model. Here I owe another hat tip to Paul Krugman, who I believe came up with the term “radical centrist.”

• Leftist derp. This is not nearly — not anywhere near — as common as centrist derp would have us believe. But it does exist. Think Glenn Greenwald or Jill Stein, the kind of leftists who are aligned with Russia.

• Religious derp. My personal epistemological view is that all religion is derp. But there are of course many religions and many degrees of religious derpiness.

• Marketing derp.

• Sucker derp. Think spam, phishing scams, pyramid schemes, and anyone who uses any form of derp to raise money.

• Doomer derp. You’d better buy your guns and ammo now to protect your family from the civil war that is going to start any minute. Trans athletes are going to groom our children and bring down the wrath of God on our once-great nation!

• Sentimental derp. Someday you, too, will find true love.

• Techno-utopian derp: Social media will bring us all together! Technology will save the planet! Artificial intelligence will save us from our ignorance! The meta world will be better than the real thing!

• Economic derp. Cutting taxes makes everyone better off and increases government revenue!

• Hero derp. I can’t stand the sight of Elon Musk, but he has millions of fan boys, most of whom, I’m pretty sure, also consume libertarian and techno-utopian derp.

• Distraction derp: Flood the zone with shit! Antifa did it! But her emails!

• Elitist derp: The New Yorker.

Part of the problem is that so many people love their derp. Without derp, their lives would be empty. And yet derp is the very thing that makes their lives so pathetic.

First Fiona Hill, now Cassidy Hutchinson

I have written here in the past about Fiona Hill, the Russia expert who worked in the White House and who gave such brilliant testimony during Trump’s second impeachment. Fiona Hill went on to write a beautiful book, There Is Nothing for You Here. Yesterday, during the sixth of the January 6 committee’s televised hearings on the Trump coup attempt, Cassidy Hutchinson gave similarly extraordinary testimony.

Hutchinson is only 25, and as I took note of her perfect poise, her perfect diction, and her unwilting and respectful character when caught in the klieg lights between two hostile centers of political power and between tyranny and justice, I thought about what a privileged background she must have had to find herself as a witness to so much power at such an early age. But I was wrong about the privilege. Rather than a creature of Harvard, as I would have guessed, Hutchinson actually attended a modest public university, Christopher Newport University in Virginia. She is a first-generation college student. Obviously, like Fiona Hill, Cassidy Hutchinson is extremely gifted, and it wasn’t privilege that got her to where she is. We probably will see much more of her in the future, if (a big if) the Republican Party can throw out the Trumpists and choose leaders with integrity. The hearings have shown us that at least a few such Republicans remain.

We still haven’t seen whether the Republican Party has figured out that its only hope is to cut Trump loose and let Trump fall back into hell. Republicans may try to brazen it out until the November election, hoping that they can regain enough power in Congress to throw the country back into Trumpian chaos, and back on the path to theocracy and fascism. And honestly, if the American people choose theocracy and fascism in a fair election, then Americans will have brought on themselves the horror of the years that will surely follow. We must never forget that Trumpist Republicans are a minority, that the party as currently constituted can gain power only by lying and cheating (do we need more proof than what January 6 provided?), and that iron-boot rule by a corrupt minority could never be stable in a country like America. There would be chaos until the majority regained control — Americans who want to live in a democracy under the rule of law, Americans who are better educated, who can distingush truth from lies, who produce most of the country’s wealth, and most important people of character who can see the difference between honorable human beings and lying con men with the maturity of an eight-year-old.

The media coverage of the hearings has been quite good. I haven’t had much to say about it because there’s little I can add. But I do try to connect the dots and look ahead at the probabilities of what might happen next. I’ve been saying for a very long time that Trump will go to prison. I should have said that it will take a while to put him there, but at least now just about everyone can see that Trump is going to prison. Do the leaders of the Republican Party see that now? If they do, how might they change course? And does Trump himself now see that he’s going to prison? Does he have lawyers who are not lunatics like Rudy Giuliani and John Eastman? If he does, then Trump has to know what’s going to happen. He could easily lose his freedom once the first indictments are filed, even before he goes on trial. If I were Trump, I’d gas up the family jet and move to Russia. Since Trump kills everything he touches, Trump’s assistance would be invaluable in helping Putin crash and burn, bringing regime change to Russia.

Yesterday’s hearing added something very important above and beyond the testimony about Trump’s legal liability. That was details that help expose Trump’s infantile character to those who have previously refused to see it — smashed dishes, lunch and ketchup thrown against a White House wall, the enraged attempt to throttle a Secret Service agent, the eagerness for violence in demanding that the rioters be allowed to keep their weapons, the apparent approval of allowing a mob to hang his own vice president. That such a man ever got inside the White House is a stain and a shame that this country will have to bear for as long as there is an America. I take some comfort in knowing that, though we’re still living through the chaos, at least history will have the full story of what happened, thanks to the January 6 committee.

Pity the poor witches

A Facebook meme

The day before the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, there were stories in the media about an effort in the Scottish Parliament to pardon the thousands of witches who were burned at the stake in Scotland between between 1563 and 1736.

Earlier this year, Nicola Sturgeon, the First Minister of Scotland, had given a speech in which she said the victims were “accused and killed because they were poor, different, vulnerable or in many cases just because they were women.”

There are some interesting — and I think revealing — elements in the history of witch executions in Scotland. For one, there is evidence that Scotland executed five times as many witches per capita as other parts of Europe. For two, most of the witch-burnings occurred in the Lowlands of Scotland, not in the Highlands. Why might that be?

King James VI of Scotland (1566-1625) considered himself an expert on witchcraft. He wrote a book, Daemonologie. According to Wikipedia, “James personally supervised the torture of women accused of being witches.” Thus it was largely James VI who stirred up the witchcraft hysteria in Scotland. (James VI of Scotland later became James I of England. It is for this monster of a man for whom the King James translation of the Bible is named. They never tell the whole story in church.)

It was in the Lowlands of Scotland (Edinburgh and to the south of Edinburgh) where English-speaking Anglo-Saxons were concentrated, along with — of course — the influence of the church. But the Scottish Highlands remained largely pagan and Gaelic, and thus “witches” were respected — and needed — in the Highlands as wisewomen, herbalists, and healers.

This is yet another example of the moral differences between pagans and the people of the church. Because of the church’s claim to a patent on the moral high ground — one of the greatest frauds of Western civilization — the abiding superior wisdom of the pagans sometimes takes centuries to be acknowledged, which is why the Scottish Parliament is taking up the issue of witchcraft in the year 2022.

Even worse, though, than the church’s lack of moral wisdom — still with us today no less than in 1566 — is its eagerness for persecution and domination, even to the point of genocide. In the past I have written often about early Christianity’s genocides against the pagans of Europe. Canada today, and to a lesser degree the United States, is dealing with the church-state collusion and cruelty toward Native American children in the boarding schools that attempted to strip the children of their native culture — cultural genocide. Many children died in those schools. The Christian religion, like Islam, is a proselytizing religion that believes it has a mandate from God for domination of the world and of everyone in it. There is much we still don’t know about what Christian missionaries have done to powerless poor people all over the world.

There is a straight line, centuries long, from James VI of Scotland to the morally defective church people of today, especially those who are able to acquire and wield the power of the state in the service of their religion. Their purpose, still, is punishment and domination — for example, Clarence Thomas, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett of the U.S. Supreme Court. Anyone who has seen the hatred and depravity flashing in the eyes of Clarence Thomas and Brett Kavanaugh, or the almost soulless emptiness and stuntedness in the eyes of Amy Coney Barrett, can see that a concern for the unborn is not what motivates them. It is their lust for domination that motivates them. Or, to use Nicola Sturgeon’s words, their hatred for the poor, the different, and the vulnerable.

Much has changed over the centuries as the arc of justice moves on. To say that we don’t burn witches anymore is one of the ways we shed light on the idea of the arc of justice. But the minds of morally defective church people have not changed. They are authoritarians, and they continue to crave the legal right to be the cause of domination and punishment in whatever form they can get it. Donald Trump — their King Donald — emboldened them, empowered them, and let them loose. They are on our backs again. As always, women, children, and anyone who is different will pay most heavily. It remains to be seen how long it will take to throw them off our backs, especially given that the U.S. Constitution is so easily weaponized to block human progress.

My claim here is radical, but I believe it to be true. My claim is that authoritarians are not merely benignly different, with different views about what is good and what is wrong. My claim is that they are morally defective, and that they do vast harm and cause great misery in whatever century they live. They fight against the arc of justice because, in a just world, their lust for domination and persecution is thwarted.

“Visit to the Witch,” Edward Frederick Brewtnall, 1882

Avoiding (and detecting) fallacies

The Rhetoric of Reaction: Perversity, Futility, Jeopardy. Albert O. Hirschman. Harvard University Press, 1991. 198 pages.

Political discourse is a minefield of fallacy. Whether we are considering the arguments of others, or framing an argument of our own, an undetected fallacy may lead us badly astray. Those who argue in good faith work hard to avoid fallacy. Those who argue in bad faith — and there are a great many of them — knowingly employ fallacy and try to sneak it past us. Sometimes they even seem to believe what they say.

Everyone who is exposed to what we call “the marketplace of ideas” should be familiar with the categories of fallacy. Wikipedia has an excellent and concise list of them: List of fallacies.

Hirschman’s The Rhetoric of Reaction is an exploration — partly historical and partly rhetorical — about three categories of fallacy that have repeatedly been employed to block human progress.

The perversity fallacy claims that any attempt to improve the common good will inevitably end up doing the exact opposite of what was intended. An example is the claim that aid to the poor will only make them poorer and further entrap them in poverty.

The futility fallacy claims that any attempt to improve the common good is inevitably useless and will have no effect. An example is the claim that allowing more people to vote (former slaves, say, or women) will not really change anything, because there is some sort of natural law that dictates that “the more things change, the more they stay the same.”

The jeopardy fallacy is even sneakier. The jeopardy fallacy claims that any attempt at new progress will inevitably destroy previous progress. An example is the claim that democracy will destroy liberty.

Hirshman includes a quote from a Briton, Sir Henry Maine, who was arguing in the 19th Century that democracy would destroy economic progress:

“Universal suffrage, which today excludes Free Trade from the United States, would certainly have prohibited the spinning jenny and the power loom; it would certainly have forbidden the threshing machine.”

Historically, the same arguments against progress have been used over and over again. The enemies of progress keep on being wrong, and human progress has been steady, though slow, for hundreds of years.¹

Do progressives ever make fallacious arguments? Of course they do. Hirschman even has a chapter about that. I am going to make a fallacious claim here as an example. That claim is that conservatives are inevitably much more wrong than progressives because of the “arc of justice.” That is, human progress is inevitable, though gradual, and thus attempts to block progress inevitably and eventually fail, ensuring that conservatives are wrong, wrong, and wrong again.

What is the fallacy in that claim? It’s the proposition that progress is inevitable and the proposition that something we could call the “arc of justice” actually exists. There is a great deal of evidence for the arc of justice. We don’t burn witches anymore; we don’t allow people to own slaves anymore; we don’t put gay people in prison anymore. But despite the evidence for ongoing progress, I cannot prove the existence of an arc of justice any more than an argument from futility can prove that things never really change. Still, I can modify that claim and have a better chance of being right. Here is a modified claim: If there is such a thing as the arc of justice, then the opponents of progress are doomed to almost always being wrong.

I have tried to avoid polemic here, because Hirschman’s book is certainly not a polemic. He does say, though, in his final chapter, that conservatives have effectively used ridicule and a mocking attitude against progressives, while progressives have remained “mired in earnestness.” So here I will indulge in a bit of un-earnest ridicule: Show me a conservative, and I will show you a mean, wrong, wrongheaded person who knows next to nothing but thinks he knows quite a lot. It may be possible to prove me wrong, but it may not be easy.

1. Thomas Piketty, A Brief History of Equality.