2017 ends tonight, and apparently a fair number of people in the U.S. are bidding it farewell with a grumbled "Good riddance."
You'd expect it from those who are at all left of center; for them, the only good parts of the past year were the ones where Congress couldn't get its shit together enough to enact key parts of the conservative agenda. But a significant portion of conservatives weren't impressed by the year's (lack of) accomplishments, while others were shocked by how thoroughly the Trump administration has succeeded the late Barnum & Bailey and Ringling Bros. Circus as the world's most head-spinning three-ring collection of sideshows. Neither populists nor economists are optimistic that the recently enacted tax "reform" plan will achieve anything its sponsors claim it will, other than pay off the legislators' most well-heeled campaign donors. The culture wars have been at fever pitch, and even outside the political realm, people feel things have been off; I've lost count of how many online writers have apologized for their lower word count for 2017 and blamed it on despondency over the course of modern events. (Seeing my own five-months-plus gap in writing here, I should probably avail myself of the same excuse...)
Older politics-watchers will remember when, back in 1979, rookie President Jimmy Carter proclaimed America was suffering from a national malaise; contrasting then and now makes me wonder what the modern equivalent would be if the same speech were given today: a national Lyme disease? America's bout of severe clinical depression?
I've written a lot here about my opinion that one way to cool down our political knife fights would be to shift the battlegrounds from the winner-take-all federal level to local forums where each community could separately tailor its solutions to its own needs and values. And I'll no doubt expand on that in the future. But let's face it: All that would do, even if we can accomplish it, is reduce the levels of political enmity — we'd be screaming at each other less, but we wouldn't actually solve any of the genuine problems we share, particularly the economic ones like how, in an increasingly automated world, we'll still have jobs tomorrow to pay the bills.
The definition of poverty keeps changing from generation to generation, at least on the level of "how much stuff can a poor person have" — where once it meant living and working on land you didn't own, huddled with your few possessions in a dirt-floor shack that you could be ejected from the moment you pissed off the local minor noble, now you can have a home with utilities, food, even your basic set of home electronics (TV, smartphone, etc.)1 and still not be making it. But it's still possible to define poverty in a way not connected to personal inventories: It's the state of having the literal necessities for survival but with little or no guarantee that you'll continue to have those necessities in the future. With "poverty" defined that way, "falling below poverty level" is better known as "dying" (you didn't have what you needed to survive), and you "get out of poverty" when you have a better than 50-50 likelihood of being able to maintain the necessities (e.g., you have a stable job and/or are confident you can get another one if that one goes away; you own some assets and have some rainy-day savings set aside, etc.)
Likewise, you can define being "wealthy" as the state where you're certain you have, and will continue to have, what you need to survive and can devote as much of your remainder of money, time and energy as you choose to nonsurvival activities ("I've always wanted a yacht. Now my only worry is how big a boat to get.")
In between those extremes is the multitude we call the middle class, the majority (at least in the Western world) of people, who have achieved some level of security in their survival, but not an absolute security. It's a very half-assed way to define such a large group — "those people who can't be described as either poor or rich" — but it's a very muddled group, with people whose biggest financial worry is not being able to afford imported stone for their countertops still likely to insist that they're middle-class too. (No, guys, check out how your income compares to national averages; with worries like that, you're probably at least in the top fifth of earners.) But one thing is a constant for this muddled "middle class" group: when times are good with no financial clouds on the horizon, they're able to prop up their security levels and indulge in their own nonsurvival activities (vacations, entertainment, not-strictly-functional goods like "nicer" furniture, etc.) But when those clouds start blotting out your sunlight, now you'll be worrying about how long and how well that job, those savings, your home equity and other assets will act as bulwarks against the total insecurity of poverty.
And a lot of people have been seeing dark clouds hovering in their financial skies for a good long time now. You want an explanation for the popularity of both Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders in the 2016 races — including the significant number of people who thought well of both of them — "increasing levels of insecurity among the electorate" is as good a reason as any of the other ones out there.
But even though voters have spent the past several years insisting to pollsters how important an issue the economy is for them, and showering candidates with more devotion than they deserve because they talk that economic talk, they're still waiting for the Powers That Be to finally acknowledge out loud that the status quo is showing cracks and that an entirely new political track may need to be taken. Instead it's the same old shticks: From the left, it's "Prop up the labor unions that hardly anyone even belongs to anymore; whip up some regulations that we lack the resources to enforce, so they'll only be good for pissing off employers and consumer financers; encourage people to leave their rusty, dying towns for our vibrant cities where, when they can't get jobs there either, they can sign up for free job retraining programs that have never had much in the way of demonstrated success. Now go away so we can worry about genuinely poor and downtrodden people some more." From the right, we're still getting "don't worry, we're funneling more money to rich businesspeople so they'll be more effective Job Creators and their money will revitalize the economy as it trickles down to you, even though the supply-side economic theories we use to prop this idea up haven't ever actually resulted in these outcomes. Now go away; we're busy figuring out other ways to remove your oppressive loser boot from the necks of the deservedly wealthy and ease the suffering you've caused them with your neediness."
This is not something that can be solved at local levels, not in an age where money, jobs and entire industries can hop around the country — hell, across the entire globe — in a way that the workforce will never be able to match. Well, maybe that's not entirely true. The rational, peaceful solutions we need are only possible on a national level. Unrest, riots and revolutions can happen wherever people are pissed off enough. It's happened in many different places and times when a population has thoroughly lost its sense of stability and security. How about we don't try to find out whether that can happen here and now?
1 People of Certain Socio-Political Persuasions point to these kinds of goods as a sign that the people who have them aren't really poor and are just conning the welfare agencies, or else as proof that the people are poor because they willingly mismanage what money they have. To the first argument, I'd just point out that you're obviously not the sort of person who's ever needed to walk in the door of the local Rent-A-Center to get some appliance for a low monthly rate that's payable forever, or to buy your stuff outside stores altogether ("I can sell you one of these TVs that just 'fell off a truck' for a real low price; whaddya say?"). To the second argument, of course many poor people mismanage money; where are they going to learn how to manage it well? Save that contempt for people who make a good chunk of cash and still mismanage it; there's no shortage of rich people who've fallen into, or flirted with, bankruptcy.
Sunday, December 31, 2017
Sunday, July 16, 2017
The 51 percent problem, Part Two
OK, that was kind of a long delay between Part One and Part Two. I got distracted; sue me.
So when we left off, we had a federal government that didn't seem to be able to achieve many of its goals even though the same party has control in all three branches; a nearly evenly divided electorate whose Hate the Other Side knob has been cranked up to 11 and glued in place; a large portion of the same electorate feeling that the government isn't responsive to their wants; and a set of constitutional rules that practically everyone sees as getting in the way, one way or another, but with nowhere near the consensus needed to change any of them — and no good argument for doing so, either, beyond "make it impossible for the Other Guys to win." Is all this still the case, two months later? Check, check, check and check.
C'mon, did anybody expect anything else?
Maybe it's time for all the terminally outraged politics-watchers to avert their eyes from Washington, D.C., for, say, more than five consecutive minutes and go find some arena in which what they do can matter.
People who are philosophically into political conservatism (note that this does not necessarily equate to "Republican Party") have been arguing for some time that the federal government has habitually trespassed on issues that, constitutionally, belong to state or local governments. More than half a century ago, they began crapping up this argument by trying to use it to defend institutional racism in ex-Confederate states, which was a near-fatal fuckup not only on the part of the nation's Bigoted Asshole contingent but every other political type who decided it was OK to get into bed with bigoted assholes if it got the necessary votes. From that point on, merely uttering the phrase "states' rights" was understood as code for "I have a cloak and hood made out of white bedsheets tucked in the back of my closet, and I'm so fucking xenophobic that I'm grossed out by the mere idea of pursing my lips over a water fountain where the lips of a darker-skinned person have also been poised."
And people who are dogmatically into religious conservatism have jumped enthusiastically aboard this "states' right to persecute" bandwagon in the decades since ... except for, of course, the times they had, or thought they had, enough federal legislative power to force their church's tenets into national law, and just maybe they could find some plausible non-Establishment of Religion rationale that the Supreme Court would swallow. So far, their victories have been few and/or brief — tough titty for them, but happy news for all the people who don't belong to a religious-fundamentalist church.
But here's the thing: Scrape off all the shit smeared on the "states' rights" concept by bigots, and there's a real point behind it. Until we can all collectively chill out enough to stop using the law as a blackjack with which to beat people simply for being different enough from us that we're weirded out, we could at least slow the march toward Civil War II by acknowledging that Washington is a piss-poor place to have that fight. (And in fact, it pretty much says so right in the Constitution, which lays out what Congress can and cannot do.)
Instead, try just leaning on any sympathetic U.S. representatives and senators to vigorously safeguard your rights, whether your concept of same is gun ownership, LGTB freedoms, whatever. Then turn your attention and your energies to your local government and your state government; that's where many of the real battles are going on, and no matter what your politics are, I guarantee your opponents are already swinging their swords in those arenas, and maybe winning: If you're a staunch conservative, you've probably already noticed that a solid majority of statehouses are in your camp already and can offer up the victories that have been lacking in D.C.; if you're a diehard liberal, you just as likely know the urban centers are where your allies are, and maybe you should steal the defense of "community standards" from the old-school conservatives and fight for cities' rights.
Granted, it'll be hard to break the members of Congress of their federal-meddling habit. They've long found ways to get around the constitutional limits on what they can legislate; the usual dodge is simply to offer massive funding to states, but only to those states that do what Congress wants them to. If you're old enough, you'll remember one of my favorite examples: the national 55-mph speed limit, imposed (and routinely ignored, eventually weakened, then totally repealed) because we'd had one of our periodic gasoline crises at the time (mid-1970s), and environmentalists swore we'd save a lot of gas (we didn't) if we all cruised our highways at that supposedly maximally-efficient speed. But it'll be easier for Congress to mind its own business if We the People would stop trying to make every fucking issue their business.
If you're a conservative, you've likely been demanding Washington deal with one or more of these issues: "Promote and reward those who share my religious values, and restrict and punish those who don't," "Where business rights and employee/customer rights conflict, protect business rights," "Stop illegal immigration" and/or "Cut my damn taxes." For the first, as I said above, you shouldn't be holding your breath with regard to religion-inspired law, regardless of how the Supreme Court skews ideologically (remember, to the court, "conservative" currently means "strict constructionist" on constitutional matters); the second (business rights) is doable for interstate commerce, and for the rest it's just a matter of ensuring Congress doesn't put business-regulation mandates into its state funding; the third (immigration) is tougher than it looks, since there are even conservatives with reasons for winking at illegals and it'll cost a shitload more money to step up deportations to any realistic extent; and for the last (damn taxes), it's absolutely possible to get them cut, but don't be surprised if the cuts are way smaller than you're expecting, since three-quarters or more of federal spending goes to things you probably like (defense, Social Security, Medicare), while things like foreign aid or funding for public arts and broadcasting actually turn out to be tiny percentages of the budget. (Not to mention that in general, red states appear to get proportionally more federal funding than blue ones do, so maybe the budget cuts will hurt proportionally more.) So maybe, on the federal level, you might want to pick your battles with a narrower focus anyway.
If you're a liberal, your big issues are "Protect those who share my social values, and restrict and punish those who try to oppose them," "Make life fairer for the little person" (though for a vocal contingent on the left, "little person" gets effectively replaced by "only members of the identity groups we've labeled as 'oppressed' "), and "provide and preserve a government-funded safety net for people who fall on hard times." Your first (social values) is achievable provided you stick to civil rights as your social value; even most of the courts will back you there, but anything else is going to run into either constitutional hurdles or the simple fact that you don't have a lot of federal friends right now. The second (fairer lives), I'll admit, is a really broad umbrella; I opened that umbrella simply because liberalism is all about using government, in varied and numerous ways, to achieve "fairness"; the viability of your goals there are basically the same as for upholding your social values (i.e., tough to get nationally given the current political mood, except where civil rights come into play), and if you want to commit to the "oppressed identity group" definition, you've either already recognized that this makes the "non-oppressed" feel excluded and lean toward your opponents, or you never will. The last issue (safety net) is probably the most doable, at least as far as preserving what's there already — I'm pretty sure the conservatives who are ideologically opposed to programs like Social Security are wildly overestimating how many voters would support cutting them — but you might have to retreat to smaller governments if you want to keep welfare-style programs intact. So, again, pick your battles.
Reading over what I've said here, I'm guessing a socially conservative reader is thinking I'm an asshole (and I'm OK with that, because I think social conservatives currently have way too much of the busybody in them); a fiscal conservative is saying "this doesn't go far enough" (but consider that going further fiscally might generate more pushback from your countrymen than you can handle); and the liberals, of all their fiscal and social flavors, are either pissing and moaning or tacking this blog on their "Contains Microaggressions: Never Read Again" shit list.
But bear with me, conservatives: State and community rights are a big part of what your ideology is all about, aren't they? If you're not happy with the idea of enhancing them and backing off federal mandates, then maybe it's time to admit that what you really want is to jam your groupthink down people's throats even in the country's liberal enclaves, to suppress everyone and everything that isn't like you — the very thing liberals accuse you of, and what you suspect they're hypocritically doing to you themselves.
And, likewise, liberals: You're supposed to be for tolerance and diversity, right? Doesn't that include letting conservative regions of the country live their lives their own way? Maybe you'd be believed more on that subject if, say, some leftists didn't prod the ACLU to go running off with court orders every time some high school football players decided they wanted to be led in prayer on the field before the game. (And don't get me started on all the squawking over public holiday Nativity scenes/menorahs/etc. we've had to endure over the years. These are not attempts to impose institutional Christianity on the masses, folks, or at least they're hilariously ineffective ones, since no one's ever found any people who rushed out to convert after any of these incidents.)
What we might find out, if we concentrated on letting lesser governments set more of their own standards, is whose ideas are the best ones — e.g., would more people be happier in "low-tax, business-friendly" areas or "well-regulated, more-public-services" areas? When I'm feeling at my most cynical, I wonder whether that's why so many people want One Big Solution: because maybe if alternative solutions were allowed, theirs wouldn't fare too well in the comparison.
Shit, I hope not. And, really, I usually don't think that; what I do think is that in governance, One Size Fits All often doesn't apply. And that, at least in today's political climate, we're likely better off having lots of little local squabbles than this huge one that's done such a good job eroding our very sense of national unity.
So when we left off, we had a federal government that didn't seem to be able to achieve many of its goals even though the same party has control in all three branches; a nearly evenly divided electorate whose Hate the Other Side knob has been cranked up to 11 and glued in place; a large portion of the same electorate feeling that the government isn't responsive to their wants; and a set of constitutional rules that practically everyone sees as getting in the way, one way or another, but with nowhere near the consensus needed to change any of them — and no good argument for doing so, either, beyond "make it impossible for the Other Guys to win." Is all this still the case, two months later? Check, check, check and check.
C'mon, did anybody expect anything else?
Maybe it's time for all the terminally outraged politics-watchers to avert their eyes from Washington, D.C., for, say, more than five consecutive minutes and go find some arena in which what they do can matter.
People who are philosophically into political conservatism (note that this does not necessarily equate to "Republican Party") have been arguing for some time that the federal government has habitually trespassed on issues that, constitutionally, belong to state or local governments. More than half a century ago, they began crapping up this argument by trying to use it to defend institutional racism in ex-Confederate states, which was a near-fatal fuckup not only on the part of the nation's Bigoted Asshole contingent but every other political type who decided it was OK to get into bed with bigoted assholes if it got the necessary votes. From that point on, merely uttering the phrase "states' rights" was understood as code for "I have a cloak and hood made out of white bedsheets tucked in the back of my closet, and I'm so fucking xenophobic that I'm grossed out by the mere idea of pursing my lips over a water fountain where the lips of a darker-skinned person have also been poised."
And people who are dogmatically into religious conservatism have jumped enthusiastically aboard this "states' right to persecute" bandwagon in the decades since ... except for, of course, the times they had, or thought they had, enough federal legislative power to force their church's tenets into national law, and just maybe they could find some plausible non-Establishment of Religion rationale that the Supreme Court would swallow. So far, their victories have been few and/or brief — tough titty for them, but happy news for all the people who don't belong to a religious-fundamentalist church.
But here's the thing: Scrape off all the shit smeared on the "states' rights" concept by bigots, and there's a real point behind it. Until we can all collectively chill out enough to stop using the law as a blackjack with which to beat people simply for being different enough from us that we're weirded out, we could at least slow the march toward Civil War II by acknowledging that Washington is a piss-poor place to have that fight. (And in fact, it pretty much says so right in the Constitution, which lays out what Congress can and cannot do.)
Instead, try just leaning on any sympathetic U.S. representatives and senators to vigorously safeguard your rights, whether your concept of same is gun ownership, LGTB freedoms, whatever. Then turn your attention and your energies to your local government and your state government; that's where many of the real battles are going on, and no matter what your politics are, I guarantee your opponents are already swinging their swords in those arenas, and maybe winning: If you're a staunch conservative, you've probably already noticed that a solid majority of statehouses are in your camp already and can offer up the victories that have been lacking in D.C.; if you're a diehard liberal, you just as likely know the urban centers are where your allies are, and maybe you should steal the defense of "community standards" from the old-school conservatives and fight for cities' rights.
Granted, it'll be hard to break the members of Congress of their federal-meddling habit. They've long found ways to get around the constitutional limits on what they can legislate; the usual dodge is simply to offer massive funding to states, but only to those states that do what Congress wants them to. If you're old enough, you'll remember one of my favorite examples: the national 55-mph speed limit, imposed (and routinely ignored, eventually weakened, then totally repealed) because we'd had one of our periodic gasoline crises at the time (mid-1970s), and environmentalists swore we'd save a lot of gas (we didn't) if we all cruised our highways at that supposedly maximally-efficient speed. But it'll be easier for Congress to mind its own business if We the People would stop trying to make every fucking issue their business.
If you're a conservative, you've likely been demanding Washington deal with one or more of these issues: "Promote and reward those who share my religious values, and restrict and punish those who don't," "Where business rights and employee/customer rights conflict, protect business rights," "Stop illegal immigration" and/or "Cut my damn taxes." For the first, as I said above, you shouldn't be holding your breath with regard to religion-inspired law, regardless of how the Supreme Court skews ideologically (remember, to the court, "conservative" currently means "strict constructionist" on constitutional matters); the second (business rights) is doable for interstate commerce, and for the rest it's just a matter of ensuring Congress doesn't put business-regulation mandates into its state funding; the third (immigration) is tougher than it looks, since there are even conservatives with reasons for winking at illegals and it'll cost a shitload more money to step up deportations to any realistic extent; and for the last (damn taxes), it's absolutely possible to get them cut, but don't be surprised if the cuts are way smaller than you're expecting, since three-quarters or more of federal spending goes to things you probably like (defense, Social Security, Medicare), while things like foreign aid or funding for public arts and broadcasting actually turn out to be tiny percentages of the budget. (Not to mention that in general, red states appear to get proportionally more federal funding than blue ones do, so maybe the budget cuts will hurt proportionally more.) So maybe, on the federal level, you might want to pick your battles with a narrower focus anyway.
If you're a liberal, your big issues are "Protect those who share my social values, and restrict and punish those who try to oppose them," "Make life fairer for the little person" (though for a vocal contingent on the left, "little person" gets effectively replaced by "only members of the identity groups we've labeled as 'oppressed' "), and "provide and preserve a government-funded safety net for people who fall on hard times." Your first (social values) is achievable provided you stick to civil rights as your social value; even most of the courts will back you there, but anything else is going to run into either constitutional hurdles or the simple fact that you don't have a lot of federal friends right now. The second (fairer lives), I'll admit, is a really broad umbrella; I opened that umbrella simply because liberalism is all about using government, in varied and numerous ways, to achieve "fairness"; the viability of your goals there are basically the same as for upholding your social values (i.e., tough to get nationally given the current political mood, except where civil rights come into play), and if you want to commit to the "oppressed identity group" definition, you've either already recognized that this makes the "non-oppressed" feel excluded and lean toward your opponents, or you never will. The last issue (safety net) is probably the most doable, at least as far as preserving what's there already — I'm pretty sure the conservatives who are ideologically opposed to programs like Social Security are wildly overestimating how many voters would support cutting them — but you might have to retreat to smaller governments if you want to keep welfare-style programs intact. So, again, pick your battles.
Reading over what I've said here, I'm guessing a socially conservative reader is thinking I'm an asshole (and I'm OK with that, because I think social conservatives currently have way too much of the busybody in them); a fiscal conservative is saying "this doesn't go far enough" (but consider that going further fiscally might generate more pushback from your countrymen than you can handle); and the liberals, of all their fiscal and social flavors, are either pissing and moaning or tacking this blog on their "Contains Microaggressions: Never Read Again" shit list.
But bear with me, conservatives: State and community rights are a big part of what your ideology is all about, aren't they? If you're not happy with the idea of enhancing them and backing off federal mandates, then maybe it's time to admit that what you really want is to jam your groupthink down people's throats even in the country's liberal enclaves, to suppress everyone and everything that isn't like you — the very thing liberals accuse you of, and what you suspect they're hypocritically doing to you themselves.
And, likewise, liberals: You're supposed to be for tolerance and diversity, right? Doesn't that include letting conservative regions of the country live their lives their own way? Maybe you'd be believed more on that subject if, say, some leftists didn't prod the ACLU to go running off with court orders every time some high school football players decided they wanted to be led in prayer on the field before the game. (And don't get me started on all the squawking over public holiday Nativity scenes/menorahs/etc. we've had to endure over the years. These are not attempts to impose institutional Christianity on the masses, folks, or at least they're hilariously ineffective ones, since no one's ever found any people who rushed out to convert after any of these incidents.)
What we might find out, if we concentrated on letting lesser governments set more of their own standards, is whose ideas are the best ones — e.g., would more people be happier in "low-tax, business-friendly" areas or "well-regulated, more-public-services" areas? When I'm feeling at my most cynical, I wonder whether that's why so many people want One Big Solution: because maybe if alternative solutions were allowed, theirs wouldn't fare too well in the comparison.
Shit, I hope not. And, really, I usually don't think that; what I do think is that in governance, One Size Fits All often doesn't apply. And that, at least in today's political climate, we're likely better off having lots of little local squabbles than this huge one that's done such a good job eroding our very sense of national unity.
Wednesday, May 17, 2017
The 51 percent problem, Part One
So here we are, more than 100 days into what was promised to be a national transformation, the abandonment of politics as usual and the beginnings of a Return to Greatness. The politics, of course, are exactly the usual gridlocked bullshit on the good days — and worse than usual the rest of the time — and if the Greatness is returning, it hasn't yet come to a theater near me, and probably not one near you either.
If only I could decide if the continued Washington, D.C., gridlock was the good news or the bad news. My consolation is, apparently the United States as a whole can't, either. Polls will bolster the spirits of everyone who hates President Trump by telling them he's got one of the lowest approval ratings at this stage of his presidency than almost all of his predecessors — but polls (and often the same ones) also report that the vast majority of Trump's actual fans love him as much as ever, despite all the reports of presidential misconduct rising, nonstop, toward impeachment-worthy levels. TL;DR: The country is as polarized and divided as ever.
I'm not sure any of us could have expected otherwise, though; just a glance through recent presidential and congressional history is enough to tell a tale of a country that's been at least close to evenly divided among support for those two vague, semi-ideological clusters we call our major parties. Hell, forget recent presidential history: While we like to talk about the "landslide" victories our favorite presidents have won in the past. In the popular votes for president, for as far back as we have records, the best percentage any candidate has ever gotten was a hair over 61 percent (Lyndon Johnson, believe it or not), while by my count 16 people have served as president after getting less than 50 percent of the vote in their favor (i.e., they may have gotten more votes than anyone else, but more people in total still voted for rival candidates). That includes not only Trump but the 2000 win by George W. Bush and both victories by Bill Clinton (in 1992, with upstart-party candidate Ross Perot in the mix, Clinton got a paltry 43 percent of the vote). And except for Ronald Reagan's 58.8 percent in the 1984 race, you won't find anyone's popular-vote percentage getting past the low 50s in any of the past 10 presidential elections.
Does that sound to you as if we've ever had anything close to a true political consensus in this country, when no president since George Fucking Washington has been able to claim the support of more than three out of five fellow Americans at best and "fractionally more than half the voters" as the usual case? That's before we even get into the pissing match over the fact that it's the electoral vote, not the popular one, that actually puts a candidate's ass into the Oval Office's big chair. Thankfully for our historical legacy, a popular-vote loser has only been an electoral winner five times; unfortunately for our contemporary peace of mind, two of those times have been within the past two decades (Bush 2000 and Trump 2016, in case you're really young or just hadn't been paying attention).
Of course, since both of those were Republican victories, Democrats have been really stoked about the idea of abolishing the Electoral College and just electing presidents via the popular vote. With the Dems being into identity-group politics these days, many of them have been trying to taint the electoral system by loudly labeling it as a legacy of slavery. It isn't; it's the legacy of thirteen states that had been separate self-administered colonies for much of their history not wanting to cede power to the central government — especially the smaller states, who were afraid that, say, Virginia or New York would dominate any debate over what the states should do in their "united" configuration. Now hold that thought a second while I digress. (Where slavery did play a part, for a while, was in giving slave states more representatives in the House by adding three-fifths of their numbers of slaves — none of whom, of course, were allowed to vote — to the numbers of their free population. Since each state's allotment of electoral votes is equal to its number of representatives plus its number of senators, that gave the slave states a bonus until first slavery, then Jim Crow voting laws, were abolished.)
OK, back with me? Another, somewhat more cohesive, argument by the Democrats — who are also into the concept of numerical power — is that even now, the number of representatives a state has doesn't necessarily track well with its population relative to other states, since every state is entitled to at least one representative even if its population is less than that of the average congressional district. Add that to the fact that every state gets exactly two senators, and you get a situation where an individual's presidential vote has more impact in a very sparsely populated state than in the really populous ones. Here's where I refer you to my explanation in the previous paragraph that this was seen as a feature, not a bug, by the designers of the U.S. Constitution. And before our urban-vs.-rural division became the dominant element of our current polarization, giving the Republicans an advantage since in the majority of states the rural votes outnumber the urban ones, you'll note Democrats weren't quite so hot for discarding that whole state-oriented Electoral College mishmash.
I'm not picking on the Dems' more vocal members per se. When the Electoral College hasn't been at issue in fights over making the vote for the Head Honcho "more fair," usually the issue is that certain people just shouldn't be allowed to vote in national elections. The political left has generally only had one hobbyhorse here, suggesting that votes should go only to those who have done some (leftist-approved) form of public service, presumably something like a stint in the Peace Corps, or maybe even membership in the kind of activist group where "activist" refers more to noise level than activity level.
The political right, meanwhile, weighed in even before the nation's debut with the notion that only property owners should get the franchise, and that talking point has cropped up repeatedly among rightists since Colonial days. A latter-day counterpart is the insistence that only people who pay taxes should vote, and that one gets hairier as the debate bops around such sticking points as whether to count payroll taxes (which practically everyone with a job pays), or state taxes (which include sales taxes, which, again, practically everyone pays), before settling on federal income taxes, because it pisses rightists off to know that not everyone pays those. (Even that raises questions like "What about nonworking spouses and adult dependents of taxpayers, or no-taxable-income retirees, or families whose mortgage, child and other tax credits wipe out their tax obligation?") And of course there are the counterparts to the "public service" qualification on the right as well, one variation there being the proposition that only military veterans really have the national interest at heart and thus can be trusted with a ballot. (The big question here being "So some schmuck who serves one term of enlistment during peacetime by doing a few years' worth of KP duty at Fort Ass End would count too?")
Two things are noteworthy here: First, no matter what the "more voting fairness" proposal is or who it's from, its intention is always to reduce the number of votes the suggester's political opponents can get. This is not exactly Nobility in Action, is it now? So the rule we've come up with after a hard-fought Constitutional Convention and a couple centuries of amendments — that every citizen at least 18 years old can vote — is probably still the fairest in the sense that it doesn't come with any of the "fergodsakes don't let those people vote" baggage that the other suggestions share.
Second, those constitutional rules about who votes and how, including that electoral-votes-for-president thing, can only be changed with great difficulty. The simple way is to get two-thirds (66.7 percent) of representatives and senators on board to propose an amendment, then get three-quarters (75 percent) of the states' legislatures to ratify it. So, note to all of these angry advocates for "voting fairness": If we can't get more than three-fifths of the voting population to agree on one presidential candidate in the vast majority of elections, how can you possibly even fantasize that you'll be able to change the rules for picking presidents or, for that matter, any other national officeholder?
And if you understand that, as most people at least claim to, why waste so much breath arguing the unwinnable case?
Hell, even if it were winnable, we're still left with the real crux of the 51 percent problem, the one that generates all the animosity: that in any system in which a simple majority is all that's needed to achieve a political goal, and the ideological sides are closely matched in vote-getting abilities, achieving any politically divisive goal is simply a guarantee that just about as many people will be pissed off as pleased.
Solve that conundrum, and they'll probably chisel someone's face right off Mount Rushmore so they can put yours up in its place.
If only I could decide if the continued Washington, D.C., gridlock was the good news or the bad news. My consolation is, apparently the United States as a whole can't, either. Polls will bolster the spirits of everyone who hates President Trump by telling them he's got one of the lowest approval ratings at this stage of his presidency than almost all of his predecessors — but polls (and often the same ones) also report that the vast majority of Trump's actual fans love him as much as ever, despite all the reports of presidential misconduct rising, nonstop, toward impeachment-worthy levels. TL;DR: The country is as polarized and divided as ever.
I'm not sure any of us could have expected otherwise, though; just a glance through recent presidential and congressional history is enough to tell a tale of a country that's been at least close to evenly divided among support for those two vague, semi-ideological clusters we call our major parties. Hell, forget recent presidential history: While we like to talk about the "landslide" victories our favorite presidents have won in the past. In the popular votes for president, for as far back as we have records, the best percentage any candidate has ever gotten was a hair over 61 percent (Lyndon Johnson, believe it or not), while by my count 16 people have served as president after getting less than 50 percent of the vote in their favor (i.e., they may have gotten more votes than anyone else, but more people in total still voted for rival candidates). That includes not only Trump but the 2000 win by George W. Bush and both victories by Bill Clinton (in 1992, with upstart-party candidate Ross Perot in the mix, Clinton got a paltry 43 percent of the vote). And except for Ronald Reagan's 58.8 percent in the 1984 race, you won't find anyone's popular-vote percentage getting past the low 50s in any of the past 10 presidential elections.
Does that sound to you as if we've ever had anything close to a true political consensus in this country, when no president since George Fucking Washington has been able to claim the support of more than three out of five fellow Americans at best and "fractionally more than half the voters" as the usual case? That's before we even get into the pissing match over the fact that it's the electoral vote, not the popular one, that actually puts a candidate's ass into the Oval Office's big chair. Thankfully for our historical legacy, a popular-vote loser has only been an electoral winner five times; unfortunately for our contemporary peace of mind, two of those times have been within the past two decades (Bush 2000 and Trump 2016, in case you're really young or just hadn't been paying attention).
Of course, since both of those were Republican victories, Democrats have been really stoked about the idea of abolishing the Electoral College and just electing presidents via the popular vote. With the Dems being into identity-group politics these days, many of them have been trying to taint the electoral system by loudly labeling it as a legacy of slavery. It isn't; it's the legacy of thirteen states that had been separate self-administered colonies for much of their history not wanting to cede power to the central government — especially the smaller states, who were afraid that, say, Virginia or New York would dominate any debate over what the states should do in their "united" configuration. Now hold that thought a second while I digress. (Where slavery did play a part, for a while, was in giving slave states more representatives in the House by adding three-fifths of their numbers of slaves — none of whom, of course, were allowed to vote — to the numbers of their free population. Since each state's allotment of electoral votes is equal to its number of representatives plus its number of senators, that gave the slave states a bonus until first slavery, then Jim Crow voting laws, were abolished.)
OK, back with me? Another, somewhat more cohesive, argument by the Democrats — who are also into the concept of numerical power — is that even now, the number of representatives a state has doesn't necessarily track well with its population relative to other states, since every state is entitled to at least one representative even if its population is less than that of the average congressional district. Add that to the fact that every state gets exactly two senators, and you get a situation where an individual's presidential vote has more impact in a very sparsely populated state than in the really populous ones. Here's where I refer you to my explanation in the previous paragraph that this was seen as a feature, not a bug, by the designers of the U.S. Constitution. And before our urban-vs.-rural division became the dominant element of our current polarization, giving the Republicans an advantage since in the majority of states the rural votes outnumber the urban ones, you'll note Democrats weren't quite so hot for discarding that whole state-oriented Electoral College mishmash.
I'm not picking on the Dems' more vocal members per se. When the Electoral College hasn't been at issue in fights over making the vote for the Head Honcho "more fair," usually the issue is that certain people just shouldn't be allowed to vote in national elections. The political left has generally only had one hobbyhorse here, suggesting that votes should go only to those who have done some (leftist-approved) form of public service, presumably something like a stint in the Peace Corps, or maybe even membership in the kind of activist group where "activist" refers more to noise level than activity level.
The political right, meanwhile, weighed in even before the nation's debut with the notion that only property owners should get the franchise, and that talking point has cropped up repeatedly among rightists since Colonial days. A latter-day counterpart is the insistence that only people who pay taxes should vote, and that one gets hairier as the debate bops around such sticking points as whether to count payroll taxes (which practically everyone with a job pays), or state taxes (which include sales taxes, which, again, practically everyone pays), before settling on federal income taxes, because it pisses rightists off to know that not everyone pays those. (Even that raises questions like "What about nonworking spouses and adult dependents of taxpayers, or no-taxable-income retirees, or families whose mortgage, child and other tax credits wipe out their tax obligation?") And of course there are the counterparts to the "public service" qualification on the right as well, one variation there being the proposition that only military veterans really have the national interest at heart and thus can be trusted with a ballot. (The big question here being "So some schmuck who serves one term of enlistment during peacetime by doing a few years' worth of KP duty at Fort Ass End would count too?")
Two things are noteworthy here: First, no matter what the "more voting fairness" proposal is or who it's from, its intention is always to reduce the number of votes the suggester's political opponents can get. This is not exactly Nobility in Action, is it now? So the rule we've come up with after a hard-fought Constitutional Convention and a couple centuries of amendments — that every citizen at least 18 years old can vote — is probably still the fairest in the sense that it doesn't come with any of the "fergodsakes don't let those people vote" baggage that the other suggestions share.
Second, those constitutional rules about who votes and how, including that electoral-votes-for-president thing, can only be changed with great difficulty. The simple way is to get two-thirds (66.7 percent) of representatives and senators on board to propose an amendment, then get three-quarters (75 percent) of the states' legislatures to ratify it. So, note to all of these angry advocates for "voting fairness": If we can't get more than three-fifths of the voting population to agree on one presidential candidate in the vast majority of elections, how can you possibly even fantasize that you'll be able to change the rules for picking presidents or, for that matter, any other national officeholder?
And if you understand that, as most people at least claim to, why waste so much breath arguing the unwinnable case?
Hell, even if it were winnable, we're still left with the real crux of the 51 percent problem, the one that generates all the animosity: that in any system in which a simple majority is all that's needed to achieve a political goal, and the ideological sides are closely matched in vote-getting abilities, achieving any politically divisive goal is simply a guarantee that just about as many people will be pissed off as pleased.
Solve that conundrum, and they'll probably chisel someone's face right off Mount Rushmore so they can put yours up in its place.
Thursday, April 20, 2017
Deprincipled
Last post, I argued that part of our modern political dysfunction was rooted in failure to find any consensus in how we in the U.S.A. get to wield political power. This is pretty obvious; what's (relatively) new is that this failure is almost as abject within the major parties as between them. Parties need people, both officeholders and voters, to be loyal to them, and while those loyalties are largely intact — for now — they seem to be in danger as various factions within each party become increasingly doubtful that their intraparty colleagues are still allies and not obstacles.
Why all this disarray? I think it's because a lot of us have gotten hooked on the idea that the goal is for our own individual worldview to beat all the other ones, which is no way to recruit allies who have their own worldviews they could be rooting for. For people to make political alliances, they have to agree on principles. Hard to do when the participants forget their principles every time they might get in the way of beating the other side.
These days, voters of each party don't really appear to have much trust in their party's apparatus, while the parties are having trouble getting their government officeholders to speak civilly to each other. And I suspect the officeholders don't have much respect for their voters, either, though they'd be crazy to say so out loud.
Parties still have platforms that their officeholders and voters supposedly help assemble, and they still give lip service to those platforms. But what do you make of it when one party says it believes government is corruptible, so power should rest with individuals who interact via free markets — but it turns out its legislators have whole lists of ways they'd like Big Government to mess with individuals, while its voters distrust the people on top of those "free markets" as much as their opponents do? And on the flip side, the party that supposedly believes that the market is corruptible and needs government intervention in order to protect society won't actually intervene in any significant way because it's hard to do right without serious risk of breaking the country, and the party apparently hasn't got the wherewithal to find enough of the right ways, so it'll tinker with the "society" end of the equation instead, even if it means to hell with individual rights. And these parties aren't ignoring their own rules just to fuck with us; they do it because their major goal, and the goal of their voters and officeholders, is really to score enough points. Screw your principles, man, we want a solid win!
How else to make sense of it when the U.S. Senate filibuster is sacred to the party in the minority and an unfair obstacle that the majority party needs to remove — so when party control of the house changes, so do the parties' positions? Or that "states' rights" are a thing worth fighting for only when your party doesn't have the votes to impose a policy at the federal level but does in its local-level strongholds? Is the president abusing his powers; are the courts overreaching? Only when they belong to the other party; if they're yours, you'll wave away the same kinds of actions you'd been screaming about before.
We don't even have "opponents" anymore; we just have political enemies, and we're gradually shortening that to simply "enemies." Politically charged people have always suspected bad things about the Other Side, but mostly things like "their flawed policies will make our country unsafe/poor/unjust/immoral/tacky"; the crazy stuff usually didn't get said out in public forums. Now that every asshole is potentially his or her own public forum (said the blogger!), we can feed our own righteous indignation through Internet echo chambers, viral memes and "fake news" served up to eager audiences via equally bogus social-media likes, and we seem to actually compete to level the most outrageous possible accusations of evil against the Others: If They win this vote, it will be the last true election America will ever see! They will strip away all our rights and gleefully impose on us a terrible ideology of the sort we've fought world wars and Cold Wars against! They will turn all our legal systems over to an oppressive theocracy (either radical Muslim Sharia or fundamentalist Christian Leviticanism; take your pick)! They will even round up our innocents and send them to death camps! Death camps, for Christ's sake. I cannot believe I've heard that bit of bullshit from both lefty and righty hysterics, but dammit, I have.
And that's maybe the worst betrayal of principles possible: For those who actually believe the bullshit, they've given up the principles of basic common sense in exchange for the piss-poor return of having someone they can enjoy fearing and hating; for those who know they or their fellow-travelers are talking bullshit but let it ride because it's a great rallying point for the faithful, they've abandoned all pretense to claims of honesty or morality.
Right now, if you're reading this you're probably a few heartbeats away from a stroke because it sounds like I'm "asserting a false moral equivalence" — that I'm saying you're as just bad as your enemies, while missing the whole point that you're right. But save your tantrum, because you're missing the point, too. First, you really ought to understand "they did it too" doesn't fly with actual grownups; this is one of those Things We Were Supposed to Learn in Kindergarten. Second, is an argument that boils down to "Hey, we suck less than the other guys!" honestly supposed to win anyone over? Do you think it's impressive? Last, who cares whether you're right if you're also ineffectual because you can't play well enough with others to get things done?
Maybe it would be a good idea if we all just, for one minute, shut up and took a deep breath?
Thing is, as much as we like to gripe about "them" — even when we're talking about our supposed allies — all of these people are us. We love to gripe about parties, blocs, corporations, bureaucracy and other abstractions, but all of these abstractions are just collections of people, and really, it's a rare person who doesn't belong to some grouping that other people complain about (or belong to a grouping that they themselves complain about, cognitive dissonance being in no short supply among human beings.) We invent principles not because they're feel-good "noble" but because they're statements that are as much about means as about ends, so that other people will not only know where we stand but where we're willing to go.
And that's where the conversation starts. "Shut up and lose already" is where it ends.
Why all this disarray? I think it's because a lot of us have gotten hooked on the idea that the goal is for our own individual worldview to beat all the other ones, which is no way to recruit allies who have their own worldviews they could be rooting for. For people to make political alliances, they have to agree on principles. Hard to do when the participants forget their principles every time they might get in the way of beating the other side.
These days, voters of each party don't really appear to have much trust in their party's apparatus, while the parties are having trouble getting their government officeholders to speak civilly to each other. And I suspect the officeholders don't have much respect for their voters, either, though they'd be crazy to say so out loud.
Parties still have platforms that their officeholders and voters supposedly help assemble, and they still give lip service to those platforms. But what do you make of it when one party says it believes government is corruptible, so power should rest with individuals who interact via free markets — but it turns out its legislators have whole lists of ways they'd like Big Government to mess with individuals, while its voters distrust the people on top of those "free markets" as much as their opponents do? And on the flip side, the party that supposedly believes that the market is corruptible and needs government intervention in order to protect society won't actually intervene in any significant way because it's hard to do right without serious risk of breaking the country, and the party apparently hasn't got the wherewithal to find enough of the right ways, so it'll tinker with the "society" end of the equation instead, even if it means to hell with individual rights. And these parties aren't ignoring their own rules just to fuck with us; they do it because their major goal, and the goal of their voters and officeholders, is really to score enough points. Screw your principles, man, we want a solid win!
How else to make sense of it when the U.S. Senate filibuster is sacred to the party in the minority and an unfair obstacle that the majority party needs to remove — so when party control of the house changes, so do the parties' positions? Or that "states' rights" are a thing worth fighting for only when your party doesn't have the votes to impose a policy at the federal level but does in its local-level strongholds? Is the president abusing his powers; are the courts overreaching? Only when they belong to the other party; if they're yours, you'll wave away the same kinds of actions you'd been screaming about before.
We don't even have "opponents" anymore; we just have political enemies, and we're gradually shortening that to simply "enemies." Politically charged people have always suspected bad things about the Other Side, but mostly things like "their flawed policies will make our country unsafe/poor/unjust/immoral/tacky"; the crazy stuff usually didn't get said out in public forums. Now that every asshole is potentially his or her own public forum (said the blogger!), we can feed our own righteous indignation through Internet echo chambers, viral memes and "fake news" served up to eager audiences via equally bogus social-media likes, and we seem to actually compete to level the most outrageous possible accusations of evil against the Others: If They win this vote, it will be the last true election America will ever see! They will strip away all our rights and gleefully impose on us a terrible ideology of the sort we've fought world wars and Cold Wars against! They will turn all our legal systems over to an oppressive theocracy (either radical Muslim Sharia or fundamentalist Christian Leviticanism; take your pick)! They will even round up our innocents and send them to death camps! Death camps, for Christ's sake. I cannot believe I've heard that bit of bullshit from both lefty and righty hysterics, but dammit, I have.
And that's maybe the worst betrayal of principles possible: For those who actually believe the bullshit, they've given up the principles of basic common sense in exchange for the piss-poor return of having someone they can enjoy fearing and hating; for those who know they or their fellow-travelers are talking bullshit but let it ride because it's a great rallying point for the faithful, they've abandoned all pretense to claims of honesty or morality.
Right now, if you're reading this you're probably a few heartbeats away from a stroke because it sounds like I'm "asserting a false moral equivalence" — that I'm saying you're as just bad as your enemies, while missing the whole point that you're right. But save your tantrum, because you're missing the point, too. First, you really ought to understand "they did it too" doesn't fly with actual grownups; this is one of those Things We Were Supposed to Learn in Kindergarten. Second, is an argument that boils down to "Hey, we suck less than the other guys!" honestly supposed to win anyone over? Do you think it's impressive? Last, who cares whether you're right if you're also ineffectual because you can't play well enough with others to get things done?
Maybe it would be a good idea if we all just, for one minute, shut up and took a deep breath?
Thing is, as much as we like to gripe about "them" — even when we're talking about our supposed allies — all of these people are us. We love to gripe about parties, blocs, corporations, bureaucracy and other abstractions, but all of these abstractions are just collections of people, and really, it's a rare person who doesn't belong to some grouping that other people complain about (or belong to a grouping that they themselves complain about, cognitive dissonance being in no short supply among human beings.) We invent principles not because they're feel-good "noble" but because they're statements that are as much about means as about ends, so that other people will not only know where we stand but where we're willing to go.
And that's where the conversation starts. "Shut up and lose already" is where it ends.
Wednesday, April 5, 2017
Power, basically
Ever get the feeling, as you watch the endless series of cheesy Seventies pro wrestling bouts that now passes for political wrangling, that a whole bunch of the combatants aren't sure what the goal is anymore? Sure, they remember which tag-team they belong to, they know who's supposed to win each match in the current tour according to the script — but when the "prize" money gets paid out at the end of the night, they can't quite remember whether they and their buddies were supposed to use it to grab a gallon of booze, score some coke, send out for call girls, mail it home to their families to pay the bills or donate it to Save the Young Cute Mammals Inc.
If so, it ain't just you and me; a few of the pundits have been wondering aloud if a big partisan realignment is on the way, shaking the players into new alliances, even if some of the old names persist. One popular prediction is that the new sorting-out will be between "populists" vs. "technocrats," which sort of disheartened me because the way these groupings were defined, I'd be just as hard-pressed to choose one of them as my "own" party as I've been between our two current clown cars.
When shit starts getting this confusing, I try going back to basics. Not quite to the Descartes level — I'll take all the "I think, therefore I am" crap as given — but just strip away all the layers everybody's added to some concept (including the terminology involved and all its connotations) and look at the bare mattress below to see if I can spot whatever's been poking me in the back at night and sweep it off. So:
First, we're wrestling over power, pure and simple. Now there are many kinds of power, including the basics that every moving, growing creature has such as strength, skill, ingenuity and, to put it "basically," attractiveness. Let's just say anything is "power" if it enables you to make changes in the world around you, emphatically including your fellow creatures. Because we're a species with the capacity to communicate among ourselves, "persuasiveness" also gets added to the list. And, because (outliers aside) we're one of the social species, we've got "numerical power," too; that is, we can band together in sufficient numbers to accomplish a change that no one could pull off singly.
Last, because we can deal in abstractions, practically every human society develops the notion of saving, storing and trading various kinds of power — if it's an English-speaking society, the method of storage is called "money" — and in more sophisticated societies, members are capable of adding to their money by learning ways to manipulate the money itself, leading to a whole extra form of power; for our purposes let's just leave out the true technical terms with their connotations and simply call this "monetary power." If one way to measure a society's complexity is to see how many variations and embellishments on monetary power it has, then by this measure the 21st-century world is complex enough to induce aneurysms in the unwary.
Given all that, what shapes a society is how the power is held, and distributed, among its members. Many people hold the "nice" idea that we each have our unique abilities, talents, gifts — i.e., powers — in some way that balances out, but this idea can be proved false with practically a glance at any collection of people. Whether it's nice to acknowledge this or not, some people are simply more powerful than others in ways that matter. Doesn't matter if it's nature or nurture, the fiat of the society or the will of God, it's unalterable fact.
What is alterable is what we do about it. That's where those peculiar human abilities of persuasion power, numerical power and monetary power factor in. We make balances of power beyond what we each individually start out with, and we've done so since the days when every society was merely a small tribe, and through all the variations on "Strong Smart Man will use his brains and brawn to help us eat better if we promise to obey him and not band together to kill him" as well as all the ways we've invented to dilute or divide responsibilities when we get sick of oligarchy.
But since this isn't a sociology paper, let's skip forward to present-day America and look at how things are balanced. We've got two big tribes that between them control almost all of our politics, and for the past century or so, one tribe has been united by the belief that numerical power should always be ascendant over individuals' power ("numerical" not necessarily meaning "majority power," just the power of a group), while the other tribe champions individual power (including any additional "monetary power" those individuals have), with numerical power strictly a supporting framework. Broadly speaking, people who are confident they're above-average in individual power will be in the latter tribe, while people who gain power by membership in a group will favor the former, and each tribe believes their position conveys moral superiority (say, the "united" vs. the "successful") over the misguided/less moral others (e.g., the "whiny losers" vs. the "grasping bullies").
Take a moment to throw aside the judgmental adjectives, though, and you can make a case for either idea being "fair" or "just" ... while at the same time you can find flaws in either approach, as well as myriad inconsistencies in the ways they're put into practice. (For space reasons, I'm not going to summarize those in this post, but we can all, at minimum, list the problems with the philosophies we oppose, while the opponents are equally eager to share their own list of faults regarding our own positions.) If you're fed up enough by the flaws and inconsistencies, you can find other approaches to support. For example, if you believe fairness and justice are impossible when one party is wielding power over another, maybe you envision a situation where we all agree no power-wielding will ever happen between individuals, and each interaction between people will be an equal-sided contract. Or maybe your idea is that we all should agree to share everything equally right from the outset, with only the group as a whole having power over itself. People have been attracted to these concepts, too, the only problems being that (1) just to start such a society, each would require a unity of purpose we'd never be able to achieve among any workable number of people, and (2) each flies in the face of human nature so utterly that it could never last anyway. At least not without some outside entity to enforce the deal; and let's face it, if Earth is ever invaded by a superior alien race of benevolent Anarcho-Libertarians or Anarcho-Communists, we'd probably unite, for the first time in human history, for the war to drive them off the planet.
Whichever ways we want power to be wielded, though, we have to get together with enough like-minded people that we can set up, and enforce, the rules that enable those ways. Hence the political parties. But what happens when none of the parties is aimed in the direction we want to go? What if they can't, because the things we want contradict each other?
One basic problem with human nature is in how many of us hate to be told what to do — but love to tell other people what to do. That inconsistency is what makes us long for improbable or impossible political options; even as we recognize the people talking them up are being impractical, we'll still say to ourselves, "But, you know, they have a point." The best we'll ever be able to do, though, is find some semi-stable way to pit those opposing human traits against each other so we can work together when necessary while still not feeling so oppressed by that work at day's end that we're led to chuck the whole deal away.
And the irony is that we've got that system, if we can keep it.
But to do that, we have to be able to remember that the definition of "winning" is not necessarily "beating someone else." Hell, if Charlie Sheen could do it while all drugged up, we should be able to.
If so, it ain't just you and me; a few of the pundits have been wondering aloud if a big partisan realignment is on the way, shaking the players into new alliances, even if some of the old names persist. One popular prediction is that the new sorting-out will be between "populists" vs. "technocrats," which sort of disheartened me because the way these groupings were defined, I'd be just as hard-pressed to choose one of them as my "own" party as I've been between our two current clown cars.
When shit starts getting this confusing, I try going back to basics. Not quite to the Descartes level — I'll take all the "I think, therefore I am" crap as given — but just strip away all the layers everybody's added to some concept (including the terminology involved and all its connotations) and look at the bare mattress below to see if I can spot whatever's been poking me in the back at night and sweep it off. So:
First, we're wrestling over power, pure and simple. Now there are many kinds of power, including the basics that every moving, growing creature has such as strength, skill, ingenuity and, to put it "basically," attractiveness. Let's just say anything is "power" if it enables you to make changes in the world around you, emphatically including your fellow creatures. Because we're a species with the capacity to communicate among ourselves, "persuasiveness" also gets added to the list. And, because (outliers aside) we're one of the social species, we've got "numerical power," too; that is, we can band together in sufficient numbers to accomplish a change that no one could pull off singly.
Last, because we can deal in abstractions, practically every human society develops the notion of saving, storing and trading various kinds of power — if it's an English-speaking society, the method of storage is called "money" — and in more sophisticated societies, members are capable of adding to their money by learning ways to manipulate the money itself, leading to a whole extra form of power; for our purposes let's just leave out the true technical terms with their connotations and simply call this "monetary power." If one way to measure a society's complexity is to see how many variations and embellishments on monetary power it has, then by this measure the 21st-century world is complex enough to induce aneurysms in the unwary.
Given all that, what shapes a society is how the power is held, and distributed, among its members. Many people hold the "nice" idea that we each have our unique abilities, talents, gifts — i.e., powers — in some way that balances out, but this idea can be proved false with practically a glance at any collection of people. Whether it's nice to acknowledge this or not, some people are simply more powerful than others in ways that matter. Doesn't matter if it's nature or nurture, the fiat of the society or the will of God, it's unalterable fact.
What is alterable is what we do about it. That's where those peculiar human abilities of persuasion power, numerical power and monetary power factor in. We make balances of power beyond what we each individually start out with, and we've done so since the days when every society was merely a small tribe, and through all the variations on "Strong Smart Man will use his brains and brawn to help us eat better if we promise to obey him and not band together to kill him" as well as all the ways we've invented to dilute or divide responsibilities when we get sick of oligarchy.
But since this isn't a sociology paper, let's skip forward to present-day America and look at how things are balanced. We've got two big tribes that between them control almost all of our politics, and for the past century or so, one tribe has been united by the belief that numerical power should always be ascendant over individuals' power ("numerical" not necessarily meaning "majority power," just the power of a group), while the other tribe champions individual power (including any additional "monetary power" those individuals have), with numerical power strictly a supporting framework. Broadly speaking, people who are confident they're above-average in individual power will be in the latter tribe, while people who gain power by membership in a group will favor the former, and each tribe believes their position conveys moral superiority (say, the "united" vs. the "successful") over the misguided/less moral others (e.g., the "whiny losers" vs. the "grasping bullies").
Take a moment to throw aside the judgmental adjectives, though, and you can make a case for either idea being "fair" or "just" ... while at the same time you can find flaws in either approach, as well as myriad inconsistencies in the ways they're put into practice. (For space reasons, I'm not going to summarize those in this post, but we can all, at minimum, list the problems with the philosophies we oppose, while the opponents are equally eager to share their own list of faults regarding our own positions.) If you're fed up enough by the flaws and inconsistencies, you can find other approaches to support. For example, if you believe fairness and justice are impossible when one party is wielding power over another, maybe you envision a situation where we all agree no power-wielding will ever happen between individuals, and each interaction between people will be an equal-sided contract. Or maybe your idea is that we all should agree to share everything equally right from the outset, with only the group as a whole having power over itself. People have been attracted to these concepts, too, the only problems being that (1) just to start such a society, each would require a unity of purpose we'd never be able to achieve among any workable number of people, and (2) each flies in the face of human nature so utterly that it could never last anyway. At least not without some outside entity to enforce the deal; and let's face it, if Earth is ever invaded by a superior alien race of benevolent Anarcho-Libertarians or Anarcho-Communists, we'd probably unite, for the first time in human history, for the war to drive them off the planet.
Whichever ways we want power to be wielded, though, we have to get together with enough like-minded people that we can set up, and enforce, the rules that enable those ways. Hence the political parties. But what happens when none of the parties is aimed in the direction we want to go? What if they can't, because the things we want contradict each other?
One basic problem with human nature is in how many of us hate to be told what to do — but love to tell other people what to do. That inconsistency is what makes us long for improbable or impossible political options; even as we recognize the people talking them up are being impractical, we'll still say to ourselves, "But, you know, they have a point." The best we'll ever be able to do, though, is find some semi-stable way to pit those opposing human traits against each other so we can work together when necessary while still not feeling so oppressed by that work at day's end that we're led to chuck the whole deal away.
And the irony is that we've got that system, if we can keep it.
But to do that, we have to be able to remember that the definition of "winning" is not necessarily "beating someone else." Hell, if Charlie Sheen could do it while all drugged up, we should be able to.
Tuesday, March 28, 2017
Mouse trap
When it comes to U.S. politics over the past decade — hell, the past generation — the only thing we've been consistently able to agree on is, of course, that we can't agree on anything.
That probably shouldn't come as a surprise. Let's face it; all the easy legislative work got done right out of the gate, a couple centuries ago. "Murder? Theft? Yeah, we probably ought to put those down under 'felonies.' All in favor? Right. OK, we're done for the day. Let's go down to the pub and grab some Sam Adams." And everybody was happy, except possibly for Samuel Adams. And hey, maybe he liked the attention.
What's really telling about all this divisiveness is how, over the course of the past several presidential elections, the focus of the division has sharpened until no one, no matter which misleading kinds of straw men (sorry, straw persons) they'd built to represent their opponents or allies in the past (remember "soccer moms"?), no one can now deny the principal characteristic that divides us.
Urban vs. Rural.
That's right. All this political angst boils down into a bad — and I mean "grade-school theatrical adaptation" bad — retelling of "The City Mouse and the Country Mouse." Just fucking wonderful. That's what's gotten us so upset that, on the left and on the right, there are growing numbers of people arguing primarily about who'll get to secede from whom.
I can see where simply breaking the nation up into the Red country and the Blue one might be tempting. Only problem is, it's not even remotely possible, and I don't just mean the constitutional legalistics and the negotiations about custody of, say, the armed forces and the nuclear arsenal.
You can find a slew of red-vs.-blue maps scattered across the Net, based on the voting patterns of the elections of 2016 and earlier. Some are the basic news-network state-by-state tallies showing how the Electoral College votes broke down ... and those are misleading as hell for secessionist plotters. More ambitious maps show which counties the Red or Blue candidate won ... and those are almost as misleading, since (1) how each county in a given state went has nothing to do with how many electoral votes (or popular votes, for that matter) went to each party's stooge, um, candidate, and (2) counties vary even more in population than their parent states do, ranging from Los Angeles County's 10-million-and-change to the fewer than 90 people living in Kalawao County, Hawaii, which apparently is, honest to god, a former leper colony. (Leaving aside those poor bastards, whose situation is definitely unique, the next smallest counties are largely prairie-state acreage with fewer than 500 residents each, not counting their livestock, so the point still stands.)
The better election maps do two things to earn the distinction: They use a color spectrum including various shades of purple in the middle (pure red indicates a Republican landslide, pure blue a Democratic one, and pure purple indicates a near-50-50 split) for each county, and/or they include indicators of how populous each county is. My favorite source for this is the work website of Princeton University professor Robert J. Vanderbei, who's broken down presidential elections using one or both of these methods going back to the Kennedy-Nixon title bout of 1960. Here's his page for 2016, which yields this graphic showing county-by-county breakdowns for both votes and populations:
Note how red, broad and flat (i.e., unpopulous) the rural heartlands are; how towering and blue the teeming megacities; how confusingly and wishy-washily purplish the suburban counties and smaller cities.
Now tell me we can split the country into Red and Blue subdivisions. Because those are the lines we'd have to draw to give each squabbling side its own sovereign nation. Ever since anarcho-libertarianism caught on in the science fiction realm, writers have had major fun imagining micro-governing systems with little or no dependence on geographic boundaries, but none of them have borne much resemblance to anybody's "America."
So what we need is not secession but a system in which no one feels that need.
Funny thing is, we've already got one, at least on the national level.
There are many variations on that old tale, "The City Mouse and the Country Mouse," going all the way back to Aesop's Fables, but most of them run along these lines: The City Mouse visits his country cousin and finds there a place where life is quiet and pretty dull, the food available for scavenging is plain and sometimes sparse, but the few dangers are easily avoided. Then the City Mouse plays host in turn, and the Country Mouse gets a taste of a much more bustling and exciting world with varied and plentiful food to feast on ... and deadly, nerve-racking hazards around every corner. The moral of the story is usually either "everything in life's a trade-off" or just "to each his own."
And when the post-Revolutionaries finalized their design for this country as the "United States of America" back in 1789 (c'mon, folks — the year the Constitution took effect), they did so knowing they were knitting together not just cities and country settlements but a widely disparate collection of communities, and deliberately rigged things to give those communities, for better or worse, the freedom to stay as they were as much as possible. The powers assigned to the federal level were a little vague but limited to the sorts of things that weren't practical on a state level: diplomacy, defense, interstate commerce, etc. They made this more explicit with the Tenth Amendment, the one that reads "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."
And, with a few exceptions, later amendments have generally stuck to that principle, with most of the exceptions being in another area — the rights of American citizens — that can only really be dealt with at the federal level. (I'm not going to get into the permanent pissing contest over the one authorizing the national income tax other than to note that without it, the feds would be stuck with the relatively pissant revenues available from things like excise taxes, and we'd have to wave goodbye not just to social programs but, say, a fighting force capable of modern-day combat.)
In fact, the biggest bonehead move we've yet made in amending the Constitution was when enough people got their panties twisted over liquor that we banned it nationwide in 1919. And fourteen years later, when we repealed that amendment with another one, the replacement specifically included language allowing states and their communities to stay dry if they so wished. Some of those communities still do (even though their mini-Prohibition was already a joke in an era when anybody looking to tie one on can get across damn near any county line in less than an hour).
Honestly, the only way you could give the various flavors of Americans any more legal leeway in being who they want to be is if you were somehow able to single-handedly amend every state's constitution to end with "the powers not delegated to this state by its constitution, nor superseded by the United States Constitution, are reserved to its municipalities respectively, or to the people."
So it's not going to come as any surprise to readers of future posts here if I sway in the direction of states' rights, and people's rights, when trying to hash out ways to soothe our national neuroses. It comes as a bit of a surprise to me, mind you; for much of my adult life, if I thought of balances of power at all I tended to lean slightly federalist, if only because that seemed more efficient while state- and community-level lawmaking felt kind of archaic.
But if Prohibition didn't serve as an illustration for us all that acting at the federal level can be a serious overreach, it should've; if the lesson had been learned, Congress would never have tried to pull constitutional fast ones like the "Defense of Marriage Act." (While I'm on that subject, let's clarify that civil rights issues are still the kind that belong at the federal, not state or community, level, the shitty tainting of "states' rights" as a cloak for "legalized bias" notwithstanding. And if you're still up for restricting rights of people based on things like sexual orientation, be honest and attentive enough to see that you're already behind in that battle, and based on how your fellow Americans' beliefs have been shifting, your final defeat appears to be nigh.)
That mouse story would've sounded bizarre if it ended with the City Mouse and the Country Mouse each marshaling all their resources for a culture war to impose one mouse's values on the other one. Why the fuck doesn't that ring false in real life?
That probably shouldn't come as a surprise. Let's face it; all the easy legislative work got done right out of the gate, a couple centuries ago. "Murder? Theft? Yeah, we probably ought to put those down under 'felonies.' All in favor? Right. OK, we're done for the day. Let's go down to the pub and grab some Sam Adams." And everybody was happy, except possibly for Samuel Adams. And hey, maybe he liked the attention.
What's really telling about all this divisiveness is how, over the course of the past several presidential elections, the focus of the division has sharpened until no one, no matter which misleading kinds of straw men (sorry, straw persons) they'd built to represent their opponents or allies in the past (remember "soccer moms"?), no one can now deny the principal characteristic that divides us.
Urban vs. Rural.
That's right. All this political angst boils down into a bad — and I mean "grade-school theatrical adaptation" bad — retelling of "The City Mouse and the Country Mouse." Just fucking wonderful. That's what's gotten us so upset that, on the left and on the right, there are growing numbers of people arguing primarily about who'll get to secede from whom.
I can see where simply breaking the nation up into the Red country and the Blue one might be tempting. Only problem is, it's not even remotely possible, and I don't just mean the constitutional legalistics and the negotiations about custody of, say, the armed forces and the nuclear arsenal.
You can find a slew of red-vs.-blue maps scattered across the Net, based on the voting patterns of the elections of 2016 and earlier. Some are the basic news-network state-by-state tallies showing how the Electoral College votes broke down ... and those are misleading as hell for secessionist plotters. More ambitious maps show which counties the Red or Blue candidate won ... and those are almost as misleading, since (1) how each county in a given state went has nothing to do with how many electoral votes (or popular votes, for that matter) went to each party's stooge, um, candidate, and (2) counties vary even more in population than their parent states do, ranging from Los Angeles County's 10-million-and-change to the fewer than 90 people living in Kalawao County, Hawaii, which apparently is, honest to god, a former leper colony. (Leaving aside those poor bastards, whose situation is definitely unique, the next smallest counties are largely prairie-state acreage with fewer than 500 residents each, not counting their livestock, so the point still stands.)
The better election maps do two things to earn the distinction: They use a color spectrum including various shades of purple in the middle (pure red indicates a Republican landslide, pure blue a Democratic one, and pure purple indicates a near-50-50 split) for each county, and/or they include indicators of how populous each county is. My favorite source for this is the work website of Princeton University professor Robert J. Vanderbei, who's broken down presidential elections using one or both of these methods going back to the Kennedy-Nixon title bout of 1960. Here's his page for 2016, which yields this graphic showing county-by-county breakdowns for both votes and populations:
Now tell me we can split the country into Red and Blue subdivisions. Because those are the lines we'd have to draw to give each squabbling side its own sovereign nation. Ever since anarcho-libertarianism caught on in the science fiction realm, writers have had major fun imagining micro-governing systems with little or no dependence on geographic boundaries, but none of them have borne much resemblance to anybody's "America."
So what we need is not secession but a system in which no one feels that need.
Funny thing is, we've already got one, at least on the national level.
There are many variations on that old tale, "The City Mouse and the Country Mouse," going all the way back to Aesop's Fables, but most of them run along these lines: The City Mouse visits his country cousin and finds there a place where life is quiet and pretty dull, the food available for scavenging is plain and sometimes sparse, but the few dangers are easily avoided. Then the City Mouse plays host in turn, and the Country Mouse gets a taste of a much more bustling and exciting world with varied and plentiful food to feast on ... and deadly, nerve-racking hazards around every corner. The moral of the story is usually either "everything in life's a trade-off" or just "to each his own."
And when the post-Revolutionaries finalized their design for this country as the "United States of America" back in 1789 (c'mon, folks — the year the Constitution took effect), they did so knowing they were knitting together not just cities and country settlements but a widely disparate collection of communities, and deliberately rigged things to give those communities, for better or worse, the freedom to stay as they were as much as possible. The powers assigned to the federal level were a little vague but limited to the sorts of things that weren't practical on a state level: diplomacy, defense, interstate commerce, etc. They made this more explicit with the Tenth Amendment, the one that reads "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."
And, with a few exceptions, later amendments have generally stuck to that principle, with most of the exceptions being in another area — the rights of American citizens — that can only really be dealt with at the federal level. (I'm not going to get into the permanent pissing contest over the one authorizing the national income tax other than to note that without it, the feds would be stuck with the relatively pissant revenues available from things like excise taxes, and we'd have to wave goodbye not just to social programs but, say, a fighting force capable of modern-day combat.)
In fact, the biggest bonehead move we've yet made in amending the Constitution was when enough people got their panties twisted over liquor that we banned it nationwide in 1919. And fourteen years later, when we repealed that amendment with another one, the replacement specifically included language allowing states and their communities to stay dry if they so wished. Some of those communities still do (even though their mini-Prohibition was already a joke in an era when anybody looking to tie one on can get across damn near any county line in less than an hour).
Honestly, the only way you could give the various flavors of Americans any more legal leeway in being who they want to be is if you were somehow able to single-handedly amend every state's constitution to end with "the powers not delegated to this state by its constitution, nor superseded by the United States Constitution, are reserved to its municipalities respectively, or to the people."
So it's not going to come as any surprise to readers of future posts here if I sway in the direction of states' rights, and people's rights, when trying to hash out ways to soothe our national neuroses. It comes as a bit of a surprise to me, mind you; for much of my adult life, if I thought of balances of power at all I tended to lean slightly federalist, if only because that seemed more efficient while state- and community-level lawmaking felt kind of archaic.
But if Prohibition didn't serve as an illustration for us all that acting at the federal level can be a serious overreach, it should've; if the lesson had been learned, Congress would never have tried to pull constitutional fast ones like the "Defense of Marriage Act." (While I'm on that subject, let's clarify that civil rights issues are still the kind that belong at the federal, not state or community, level, the shitty tainting of "states' rights" as a cloak for "legalized bias" notwithstanding. And if you're still up for restricting rights of people based on things like sexual orientation, be honest and attentive enough to see that you're already behind in that battle, and based on how your fellow Americans' beliefs have been shifting, your final defeat appears to be nigh.)
That mouse story would've sounded bizarre if it ended with the City Mouse and the Country Mouse each marshaling all their resources for a culture war to impose one mouse's values on the other one. Why the fuck doesn't that ring false in real life?
Monday, March 6, 2017
The view from our navels
Back on my original website, I once did a running series called "The Seven Deadly Bullshits," on the various flavors of irrationality and illogic that suppress our primate instincts toward forming working community interrelationships and bring out that other instinct for flinging feces at each other. Just as with the Seven Deadly Sins I was ripping off, there was one flavor that I tagged as the "original sin" of bullshit, and that one I called "Solipsism."
There were a lot of essays I wrote on that site that, if I had to do them over again, I'd have had to tweak, or overhaul or throw out. But I still think, more than ever, that I was onto something with that "Solipsism" essay.
If you're not familiar with the term "solipsism," it comes from philosophy and metaphysics, where the literal meaning is the argument or belief that only you yourself truly exist (well, from my perspective, it'd be "only I myself truly exist"), and everyone and everything else that appears to be around you is essentially a figment of your imagination.
Obviously, literally believing this to be true leads to results like being fitted for jackets that fasten in back and being liberally fed whatever medication is in vogue for treating major psychosis. There's a less literal sense of the word, though, defined as "extreme preoccupation with and indulgence of one's feelings, desires, etc.; egoistic self-absorption," and that one comes closer to what I've been seeing.
To be clear, I'm not dragging this term out as a five-dollar synonym for "selfishness"; that's a somewhat different thing as far as I'm concerned. Selfishness and self-interest are built into our DNA (and into the genes of every other species with a survival instinct) — we're all geared up to maximize success at surviving for ourselves and the others we identify with, whether they be family, demographic group or just the folks who share our chosen obsessions. And if you identify with a group that doesn't remind everyone else of, well, you, you'll often get the benefit of being labeled "selfless," even if you're still trying to stick it to the groups you don't identify with. So when you get down to it, the differences between "selfishness" and "selflessness" can frequently just depend on which vantage point you're observing them from.
No, what I'm talking about is something more akin to what rationalists and logicians call the "typical mind fallacy," the belief that your worldview is the way everyone else perceives things too. If you're running this particular bit of junk code in your headspace, then when you run into other people who appear to perceive things differently, you'll tend to assume that either it's just a observation error ("There must be part of that story that I'm not seeing, and if I did, I'd immediately identify with what's going on"), or a glitch on their part ("This'll all be smoothed out if I just explain this to them my way"), or, more ominously, a wrongness in the world that you need to stamp out real soon.
And the other reason I focused on the label of "solipsism" is this notion I see more and more in people's heads that, while it may not be literally true that you're the only one who really exists, the people around you are supposed to be behaving as if you are — that everything they do ought to be done for your benefit. You can see at least one yutz of this type on any given season of any reality-competition TV series: the person who's about to be voted off the island or whatever and is absolutely flabbergasted that even apparent allies might be voting or working against them. "Wait, how could they do that to me? It's ... it's ... almost as if they wanted to win the million-dollar prize themselves rather than rig things so I could win it! What were they thinking? How could that be?"
Or, a little more topically considering how much bickering is still going on over the last Election Day ... well, you think I'm going to pick on the people who are upset that their Chosen Candidate didn't win (even if their party did), or the ones who get upset when, despite the victory by their side, they realize they're still not going to get everything they want. And I'll get to them someday, but in the meantime, they're already being verbally ass-kicked by plenty of snarkmeisters. But what about all those people we meet or hear about who've decided they aren't even going to vote anymore because "my vote just doesn't make a difference," the usual translation of that turning out to be "I don't pick winners often enough"? Let me get this straight: With somewhere around 225 million people eligible to vote in the U.S. — or, to get real, the 132 million or so who actually did it last fall — there are people out there who expect that their ballot choice for president should make a noticeable difference to the result, and if it doesn't, that means "the system is broken." I can't imagine a more thorough rejection of the concept that Other People Exist than this right here, that someone can be incapable of accepting that in a nation of hundreds of millions, made up mostly of states with populations in the millions, the vote of a single person is always, and should be, just one drop in the waterfall.
A society, any society, is a consensus of its members; otherwise, it's a civil war in progress. When you start to realize there are a large and growing mass of people who aren't even equipped to perceive the other members, much less accurately understand how they tick, it becomes a lot easier to understand why we're having such trouble keeping our society running reasonably smoothly these days.
While it might be fashionable to lump this latter-day navel-gazing as one of the Things We Can Blame on the Internet, let's face it; we've been heading in this direction in this country for a long time, possibly since World War II ended. That was the last era when events actively conspired to throw us together with people who were our fellow nationals but otherwise might be nothing like us. Since then, our neighborhoods, our upbringings, our workplaces and our interests have been busy pressing Like together with Like, and sifting the various Unlikes apart from the others. Hell, the interactive parts of the Internet might actually be introducing people who share one common interest but differ on all the others ... at least until they bring up some social or political stance and all its opponents scream out allcaps obscenities and flee to friendlier comment threads elsewhere.
And it's the solipsistic outlook that drives the speed of that flight; that puts us in situations where we think things have been "worked out" if 51 percent win what they want while the 49 percent remainder get the friendly suggestion to go fuck themselves; that makes us forget that there's even such a thing as a "positive-sum" solution, an outcome that goes beyond "I win, you lose" to reach "we've all won something more than what we had, even if nobody won everything they craved."
So how do we get past that outlook and start striving again for more than win/lose zero-sum outcomes? I'm not entirely sure, but I know it's the topic I'll keep coming back to on this blog, because, like I said, it's our Original Bullshit, the one that will sicken and kill us if we're unable to flush it.
Note One: You'll notice I didn't take any political stances here myself. That's because which stances any given yutz is yammering about are irrelevant to how we might stop yammering and return to negotiating. And also because I don't believe there are any saints out there, politically speaking. I'll no doubt sum up my own beliefs eventually, if only for the public service of giving anyone who's reading here an accurate sense of why I piss them off, but for now let's just say my political philosophy boils down to "I'm everyone's asshole, and I'm fine with that."
Note Two: In case anyone's curious about what my original list of Seven Deadly Bullshits included, they were: Solipsism, Inconsistency, Pretension, Overgeneralizing, Oversimplifying, Inflexibility and Intolerance. Read into each one whatever you want; it's not worth recycling that whole series here just to explain how I chose and defined each one.
There were a lot of essays I wrote on that site that, if I had to do them over again, I'd have had to tweak, or overhaul or throw out. But I still think, more than ever, that I was onto something with that "Solipsism" essay.
If you're not familiar with the term "solipsism," it comes from philosophy and metaphysics, where the literal meaning is the argument or belief that only you yourself truly exist (well, from my perspective, it'd be "only I myself truly exist"), and everyone and everything else that appears to be around you is essentially a figment of your imagination.
Obviously, literally believing this to be true leads to results like being fitted for jackets that fasten in back and being liberally fed whatever medication is in vogue for treating major psychosis. There's a less literal sense of the word, though, defined as "extreme preoccupation with and indulgence of one's feelings, desires, etc.; egoistic self-absorption," and that one comes closer to what I've been seeing.
To be clear, I'm not dragging this term out as a five-dollar synonym for "selfishness"; that's a somewhat different thing as far as I'm concerned. Selfishness and self-interest are built into our DNA (and into the genes of every other species with a survival instinct) — we're all geared up to maximize success at surviving for ourselves and the others we identify with, whether they be family, demographic group or just the folks who share our chosen obsessions. And if you identify with a group that doesn't remind everyone else of, well, you, you'll often get the benefit of being labeled "selfless," even if you're still trying to stick it to the groups you don't identify with. So when you get down to it, the differences between "selfishness" and "selflessness" can frequently just depend on which vantage point you're observing them from.
No, what I'm talking about is something more akin to what rationalists and logicians call the "typical mind fallacy," the belief that your worldview is the way everyone else perceives things too. If you're running this particular bit of junk code in your headspace, then when you run into other people who appear to perceive things differently, you'll tend to assume that either it's just a observation error ("There must be part of that story that I'm not seeing, and if I did, I'd immediately identify with what's going on"), or a glitch on their part ("This'll all be smoothed out if I just explain this to them my way"), or, more ominously, a wrongness in the world that you need to stamp out real soon.
And the other reason I focused on the label of "solipsism" is this notion I see more and more in people's heads that, while it may not be literally true that you're the only one who really exists, the people around you are supposed to be behaving as if you are — that everything they do ought to be done for your benefit. You can see at least one yutz of this type on any given season of any reality-competition TV series: the person who's about to be voted off the island or whatever and is absolutely flabbergasted that even apparent allies might be voting or working against them. "Wait, how could they do that to me? It's ... it's ... almost as if they wanted to win the million-dollar prize themselves rather than rig things so I could win it! What were they thinking? How could that be?"
Or, a little more topically considering how much bickering is still going on over the last Election Day ... well, you think I'm going to pick on the people who are upset that their Chosen Candidate didn't win (even if their party did), or the ones who get upset when, despite the victory by their side, they realize they're still not going to get everything they want. And I'll get to them someday, but in the meantime, they're already being verbally ass-kicked by plenty of snarkmeisters. But what about all those people we meet or hear about who've decided they aren't even going to vote anymore because "my vote just doesn't make a difference," the usual translation of that turning out to be "I don't pick winners often enough"? Let me get this straight: With somewhere around 225 million people eligible to vote in the U.S. — or, to get real, the 132 million or so who actually did it last fall — there are people out there who expect that their ballot choice for president should make a noticeable difference to the result, and if it doesn't, that means "the system is broken." I can't imagine a more thorough rejection of the concept that Other People Exist than this right here, that someone can be incapable of accepting that in a nation of hundreds of millions, made up mostly of states with populations in the millions, the vote of a single person is always, and should be, just one drop in the waterfall.
A society, any society, is a consensus of its members; otherwise, it's a civil war in progress. When you start to realize there are a large and growing mass of people who aren't even equipped to perceive the other members, much less accurately understand how they tick, it becomes a lot easier to understand why we're having such trouble keeping our society running reasonably smoothly these days.
While it might be fashionable to lump this latter-day navel-gazing as one of the Things We Can Blame on the Internet, let's face it; we've been heading in this direction in this country for a long time, possibly since World War II ended. That was the last era when events actively conspired to throw us together with people who were our fellow nationals but otherwise might be nothing like us. Since then, our neighborhoods, our upbringings, our workplaces and our interests have been busy pressing Like together with Like, and sifting the various Unlikes apart from the others. Hell, the interactive parts of the Internet might actually be introducing people who share one common interest but differ on all the others ... at least until they bring up some social or political stance and all its opponents scream out allcaps obscenities and flee to friendlier comment threads elsewhere.
And it's the solipsistic outlook that drives the speed of that flight; that puts us in situations where we think things have been "worked out" if 51 percent win what they want while the 49 percent remainder get the friendly suggestion to go fuck themselves; that makes us forget that there's even such a thing as a "positive-sum" solution, an outcome that goes beyond "I win, you lose" to reach "we've all won something more than what we had, even if nobody won everything they craved."
So how do we get past that outlook and start striving again for more than win/lose zero-sum outcomes? I'm not entirely sure, but I know it's the topic I'll keep coming back to on this blog, because, like I said, it's our Original Bullshit, the one that will sicken and kill us if we're unable to flush it.
Note One: You'll notice I didn't take any political stances here myself. That's because which stances any given yutz is yammering about are irrelevant to how we might stop yammering and return to negotiating. And also because I don't believe there are any saints out there, politically speaking. I'll no doubt sum up my own beliefs eventually, if only for the public service of giving anyone who's reading here an accurate sense of why I piss them off, but for now let's just say my political philosophy boils down to "I'm everyone's asshole, and I'm fine with that."
Note Two: In case anyone's curious about what my original list of Seven Deadly Bullshits included, they were: Solipsism, Inconsistency, Pretension, Overgeneralizing, Oversimplifying, Inflexibility and Intolerance. Read into each one whatever you want; it's not worth recycling that whole series here just to explain how I chose and defined each one.
Thursday, February 23, 2017
Foreword, backwards
This is your basic intro post, which — this being a blog — will gradually be buried underneath more recent posts, so I'll eventually have to put this info somewhere more accessible for those who're wondering what the hell this thing is supposed to be about.
So what the hell is this thing supposed to be about?
For a bunch of years I posted an increasingly occasional series of longish essays collectively called "D.O.O.M. Sayings," so named not because I'm a pessimist but because they were on a parody business site for "Defecatory Obfuscation Options Management" I put together via Genuine Hand Coding back in the earlyish Web 1.0 days. The gag was that D.O.O.M. was in the business of creating, managing and otherwise dealing with bullshit for its clients; and the only thing the D.O.O.M. Sayings essays really had in common was in reacting to all the varieties of socio-political bullshit we bury ourselves in.
Then my equally Web 1.0-era host, an ISP, decided to get out of the business of hosting personal websites, evicting Defecatory Obfuscation Options Management and all its other tenants.
It was just as well; I hadn't posted anything new there for a couple years. Though I had a lot of fun writing snarky social commentary, each essay took a while to write, and I wasn't always able (or interested enough) to devote the necessary time. I eventually decided it might be better to dial it back to typical-blog-length posts ... and now I'm finally trying that out.
The other thing I came to realize as I got older is that snark is fine for throwing rocks at sacred cows but doesn't do anything constructive and, in large doses, merely encourages divisiveness. And God knows we've already got all the divisiveness we can handle.
So while I'm probably not going to entirely eschew the snark and cynicism, seeing as the heart of a smartass sonofabitch still beats in my graying chest, my goal this time is to try to stumble toward a way forward for this symphony of grumbles and screams we're calling a society. I doubt I'll find a way that'll resonate with enough other people to accomplish anything, but I figure it's got to be better than just adding to the grumbles and screams.
The "Gray Matters" part of the theme reflects my growing belief that hardly any issue breaks down into stark black-and-white, no matter how much we'd like our own arguments to be the tidy, short Definitive Answer. This influenced enough of my later D.O.O.M. Sayings that this time around, I might as well get it up front in the blog title that I'm becoming biased away from being four-square in favor of or against any one-sentence stance or "solution."
Some housekeeping notes: This blog has the adult-content warning simply because I'll likely toss out some shits and fucks from time to time; I'm not planning to post porn or anything.
Also, while I'm considered a competent editor by those I've edited for, I'm not great at editing myself, so forgive me when I ramble away from the point or sneak in some snark that might detract from said point. When I was doing this on a personal website, I was able to hide some of the rambling behind a little icon that readers could click or mouse over to see the ramble, but good old Blogger.com filters out the coding that made that trick work. (Discovering this while playing with Blogger pried some of those aforementioned shits and fucks out of me.)
Last, while I'm going to leave comments enabled at least to start with, I don't guarantee that if I get any I'll ever read them, much less moderate them. I'd love to have the kind of blog that draws only thoughtful and civilized commenters, but that kind of blog probably only exists in Mark Zuckerberg's opium dreams.
OK, I think that's it. We now return you to the shitfest already in progress.
So what the hell is this thing supposed to be about?
For a bunch of years I posted an increasingly occasional series of longish essays collectively called "D.O.O.M. Sayings," so named not because I'm a pessimist but because they were on a parody business site for "Defecatory Obfuscation Options Management" I put together via Genuine Hand Coding back in the earlyish Web 1.0 days. The gag was that D.O.O.M. was in the business of creating, managing and otherwise dealing with bullshit for its clients; and the only thing the D.O.O.M. Sayings essays really had in common was in reacting to all the varieties of socio-political bullshit we bury ourselves in.
Then my equally Web 1.0-era host, an ISP, decided to get out of the business of hosting personal websites, evicting Defecatory Obfuscation Options Management and all its other tenants.
It was just as well; I hadn't posted anything new there for a couple years. Though I had a lot of fun writing snarky social commentary, each essay took a while to write, and I wasn't always able (or interested enough) to devote the necessary time. I eventually decided it might be better to dial it back to typical-blog-length posts ... and now I'm finally trying that out.
The other thing I came to realize as I got older is that snark is fine for throwing rocks at sacred cows but doesn't do anything constructive and, in large doses, merely encourages divisiveness. And God knows we've already got all the divisiveness we can handle.
So while I'm probably not going to entirely eschew the snark and cynicism, seeing as the heart of a smartass sonofabitch still beats in my graying chest, my goal this time is to try to stumble toward a way forward for this symphony of grumbles and screams we're calling a society. I doubt I'll find a way that'll resonate with enough other people to accomplish anything, but I figure it's got to be better than just adding to the grumbles and screams.
The "Gray Matters" part of the theme reflects my growing belief that hardly any issue breaks down into stark black-and-white, no matter how much we'd like our own arguments to be the tidy, short Definitive Answer. This influenced enough of my later D.O.O.M. Sayings that this time around, I might as well get it up front in the blog title that I'm becoming biased away from being four-square in favor of or against any one-sentence stance or "solution."
Some housekeeping notes: This blog has the adult-content warning simply because I'll likely toss out some shits and fucks from time to time; I'm not planning to post porn or anything.
Also, while I'm considered a competent editor by those I've edited for, I'm not great at editing myself, so forgive me when I ramble away from the point or sneak in some snark that might detract from said point. When I was doing this on a personal website, I was able to hide some of the rambling behind a little icon that readers could click or mouse over to see the ramble, but good old Blogger.com filters out the coding that made that trick work. (Discovering this while playing with Blogger pried some of those aforementioned shits and fucks out of me.)
Last, while I'm going to leave comments enabled at least to start with, I don't guarantee that if I get any I'll ever read them, much less moderate them. I'd love to have the kind of blog that draws only thoughtful and civilized commenters, but that kind of blog probably only exists in Mark Zuckerberg's opium dreams.
OK, I think that's it. We now return you to the shitfest already in progress.
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