American un-Exceptionalism

I once lived in Guinea. It's a West African country that has been independent for a shorter period of time than my parents have been alive. It has had 3 coups d'état, multiple dictatorships both military and civilian and a fair degree of electoral and social violence seeded by ambitious, divisive politicians. It's only really been democratic - and it's debatable to what degree - for about a decade.

A Guinean friend of mine just reached out saying he wanted to see if I was safe after what he's been following on the news and that he would be praying for God to save my country.

This is Trump's America: people who live in fragile, nascent semi-democracies are concerned for us Americans.

They are also a lot better human beings than we are. They are concerned about human beings who live halfway around the world. Our perverse notion of "liberty" means many of us don't even care about the human beings who live around the block.

The achilles heal of liberal democracy

Camus said "totalitarian tyranny is built not on the virtues of tyrants but on the faults of (classical) liberals."  We are in an illiberal time helped in part by the fault of classical liberals.

One of the bases of liberal democracy is that the way to change behavior is more public and civic education (not solely in the schooling sense). It's based on the premise that failure to make wise decisions is based on lack of information or lack of credible information and can be remedied simply by filling that void. 

 

What liberal democracy responds to poorly is situations like the country and world are in now where credible information and misinformation or deceptive information are widely accepted as being equally valid. 

 

I'm constantly recalling an essay in The Guardian describing Trumpism as reminiscent not of 1984 but of Brave New World. We suffer not from an absence of information but an overload of it making it harder to know what to believe). 

 

This occurs when widespread trust in public institutions declines precipitously. What happens - and we are certainly seeing this with the rise of conspiracy theories - is that people have legitimate and well-founded concerns (such as malfeasance by big corporations) but decide to make the leap from "X is plausible" to "X must be true" when there's little or no specific evidence to actually make that leap. 

 

It can't simply be remedied by official sources offering "education" because those official sources lack the trust on the part of the people who really need to hear it. This is why I've been advocating for key systemic reforms for years. Best to avoid getting here in the first place because liberal democracy not well equipped to deal with this situation once we get here.

Broadband internet and rural economic development

The juxtaposition of a story about New York state's failure to deliver broadband internet to the North Country and the story about the closure of Dannemora and Watertown prisons is insightful.

State prisons were added in the north country in the 1980s by the current governor's father and Republican Senator Ron Stafford as a rural economic development program.

Now with the prisons being closed as the inmate population plummets, the state and localities have to come up with a sensible and sustainable rural economic development plan(s). Broadband internet is essential to any such plan.

With the pandemic (and terrorism concerns before that), many people have been looking to get out of densely populated urban areas. The Adirondacks' stunning natural beauty is a great draw. But they're not going to move somewhere without access to high speed internet... even less so when they are working and their kids going to school from home.

The electoral college has always been controversial

Everything old is new again.

One minor but interesting point from this podcast I listened to about the 1796 presidential election.

 

A contemporary conceit is that hostility toward the electoral college's purposefully anti-democratic structure is based on the ignorance of a modern society that is clueless about the wisdom of our sacred and omniscient Founding Fathers (capitalized, of course).

But this podcast points out that so-called "faithless electors" - who tried actually implementing the electoral college's precise purpose - were controversial even back in 1796... among the generation that actually wrote and adopted the Constitution.

A better idea than Court packing

There's chatter among Democrats of changing the size of the Supreme Court if they win the Congress and the presidency. Just like Republicans talked about changing the size of the Court in 2016 if Hillary Clinton won.

Obviously, this is naked power politics, but that doesn't mean there shouldn't be some kind of reform.

I'm intrigued by what New York state does for appellate level courts: terms last 14 years and judges have to retire when they are 70 (I think this age limit applies to elected trial court judges too). I believe a term can be renewed but it is not automatic and has to be approved by the state senate.

I think this lessens the power of the presidency and the SCOTUS-stakes of a presidential election - which distort the race - because in this system, every presidential term is going to get a couple of picks.

And you don't have justices clinging on to a lifetime seat when they should be able to retire (especially if they're ill) because they want to see if a better president/replacement selector is chosen.

Obviously, both ruling parties like the current system because their policies and actions are terrible and indefensible and controlled by corporate money; SCOTUS fear-mongering is a great motivator  that prevents them from having to engage in representative governing.

Removing this excuse for corruption and facilitating some real accountability is perhaps the best reason for such a change to be made.

White supremacy has always served the rich

"When I give food to the poor, I'm called a saint. When I ask why they are poor, I'm called a communist." -Archbishop Dom Helder Camara.

I am working my way through the brilliant PBS documentary on Reconstruction Dr. Henry Louis Gates.

It is not news that white supremacy was and remains America's original terrorism. But it's interesting how social issues and economic issues, often treated as separate, are usually inter-connected.

What I did not know is that after the Civil War, poor whites and poor blacks worked together to wrest some degree of political and economic control from the plantation class. Hundreds of black men were elected to various offices throughout the south, until disenfranchisement in the 1890s. Aggressive promotion of white supremacy and racial caricaturing was a way to drive a wedge into that alliance and thus for the rich to preserve economic and political power.

Lynchings, which were inevitably triggered by fabricated accusations of the rape of white women, were not random. They specifically targeted black men who ran businesses or who were otherwise economically successful.

White supremacy was way to divide and conquer poorer people. It still is.

 

Stop living in fear!

I hear a lot of people saying that if you take reasonable, minimal precautions during a global pandemic which has killed hundreds of thousands of people, you are living in fear. 

So don't live in fear. 

Drive without a seat belt. 

Ride without a helmet.

Disable the brakes in your car/bike/motorcycle.

Jump off a cliff.

Science says these are bad ideas but can you really trust science? It's just controlled by Big Seat Belt (the richest lobby in DC). I mean isn't gravity just a "theory"?

 Don't live in fear by letting the tyrannical laws of physics suppress your freedom.

Without accountability, we have a police state

We've all seen countless stories of police abuse - many more disturbing than this one - in recent days.

I think most people accept that the police deserve the benefit of the doubt.. But what we're seeing is too many agencies wasting that benefit of the doubt by essentially proving the claims of the protesters. This is not new, it is just being more widely filmed.

Police often have a difficult job, but so do soldiers and firefighters and social workers and nurses. Those workers have accountability when they screw up. The benefit of the doubt CANNOT be a blank check. Especially not here. Police without accountability is a police state.

Most would agree that most cops are good cops. There's a saying that nobody hates bad cops more than good cops. But until bad cops are consistently held accountable - ie: systematically and not just when protests erupt - all cops will be tainted.

Police reform - in whatever guise it takes - is the human rights issue of our generation. We have been avoiding dealing with systemic racism for 400 years. Enough's enough.