A Post of Two Thoughts: "Lifelong Learning," and Explaining Politics to People

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What the Dickens?

I just saw a post of a young lady who says that she is a college student, but she's still going to vote for Trump, despite the offer of reduced tuition by the Democrats (and Jill Stein, incidentally).  Her long article addresses most of the issues that concern Trump supporters, including very young ones.  Here they are:

Free College will never work.  Someone will have to pay for it, and of course Trump supporters hate deficit spending, because Trump, well, anyway, because it is bad.  Jill Stein's solution will horrify fiscal conservatives, but seasoned economists will be divided on it.  Some seasoned economists won't be horrified by anything.

The American Dream will stay alive.  (A lot of young people believe that Trump's experience will be their experience, or something close to that.  You can easily see that only affluent teenagers could possibly imagine that, which gives you an idea of where that comes from.)  My personal belief is that The American Dream is a clever fiction: You can succeed if you work hard!!!  A lot more than hard work is needed if the only work you can do is mopping floors.  And that's all some people will be allowed to do.  A more appropriate version of The Dream is that we can succeed a lot better if we work together, something that goes against the legend of the Rugged Individualist, which sells well with conservatives.*

He's Very Accomplished.  Bullshit.

Aren't you tired of politicians?  Well, yes.  But not being a politician does not qualify anyone to be --a politician, though I have come really, really close to saying that I hate politicians sometimes when I'm really, really mad.  But there is skilled work to do as President or a representative in Congress: drafting laws, making compromises, understanding the point of view of people of other beliefs and people from other nations.  A businessman would hire someone (someone, let me tell you, who's really, really good, trust me) to do that stuff--this is what Trump tried to do when selecting a VP: put him or her (him; a lot of Trumpers are suspicious of women) in charge of foreign and domestic policy.

He's Confident.  Well, I don't want to repeat myself.  But some really ignorant people are supremely confident.

His immigration policy really makes sense.  Well, it probably does if your mind has been poisoned into believing that it's foreigners who are the source of all our woes.  I personally think that it is the ethnic and social diversity of US society that is its genius.  But this is a personal issue, not a logical thing.  It tells us just as much about the young lady as it does about Trump.

He's self-funded.  If this means that Trump does not owe anything to anybody, it's probably true.  Even if he did, he wouldn't care; he would do exactly what he wants.  But bear in mind that he would consider that he does not owe anything to those who voted for him, either.

Hillary and Bernie are not the right people for the job.  Hillary is a liar, she says, and Bernie is a socialist.  Hillary is accused of lying, but a recent fact check revealed that she was the most honest in her claims as far as the campaign was concerned.  As far as lying is concerned, a lot of politics has to do with lying; you just can't tell everyone the truth all the time.  In particular, you can't always be telling the truth about security-related information.  The GOP continually tries to "get" Democrats about lying about security-related matters.  But remember that Reagan and both Bushes lied like champions in their time.  The Democrats are just too classy to hound them about it.  (But of recent times, even the Democrats have descended pretty low, and kept harping on poor George W. Bush's lies.)  As for Socialism: once the conservatives rigged the economy and the political system so that the wealthiest citizens pay the lowest taxes in 80 years, it is inevitable that the country should start looking to Socialism to make life possible for the poorest sector of society.  You reap what you sow, and the Conservatives and Reagan sowed this crap.

He'll balance the Supreme Court.  She really means unbalance it.  It's balanced right now.  She should rightly fear what one more liberal justice will do; if people have an irrational fear of a majority of one left-leaning supreme court justice, imagine how the left has suffered under justice Scalia's ideological activism?

He'll make American great again.  What does she mean by America?  What does she mean by Great?  What does she mean by Again?  It's all semantics.

This brings us to my other point.

It is just so impossible to explain politics to young people like this young lady.  There are two problems here.  One thing is, of course, the numerous background assumptions that she assumes are everyone else's assumptions, too.  I can't even begin to list them, but some of them are:

• America was once great.  

Another one is:

• America is no longer great.

Here are a few more:

• a businessman will know what is good for America.
• keeping people out will solve a lot of our problems.
• money spent for anything must come from somewhere.

I tend to partially agree with that last one, but because of the particular type of voodoo economics that is in place, it does not have to be a zero-sum game.  But it sure does need to be close to a zero-sum game.

But another reason this lady appears to be so dense is that modern students have been conditioned from Kindergarten to have everything made simpler for them.  Not only the students, but some of the parents insist that difficult material should not be taught their children, never mind that the sum total of human knowledge has multiplied by many factors since the parents were in school, and of course, wealthy adults were able to manage quite well despite being poor students in grade school, because what ensured success "when America used to be great" was that you could buy success with money.  But now, poor people want to be successful, and teachers trying to present the material that will ensure success for their students get knocked down both by the poorer students, and by the wealthier students, all of whom have parents that can't see the point of difficult school material.  So teaching practice drifts towards easier material constantly.  And the same goes in college: Make It Fun.

Listen.  One of the most important skills an adult can acquire is to obtain satisfaction from teachers of B grade, or even C grade.  If you only accept fantastic teachers, and refuse to get any benefit from a typical teacher, can you imagine how long you're going to have to wait?  If you never read a book, but only wait for the movie, how poor is your experience going to be?

I have long maintained that I only had wonderful teachers.  But it is entirely possible that if any of those teachers were to try to teach a typical high school class today, they would be in tears.  Not because standards of teaching are higher, but because teaching has become more entertainment today.  Kids have low attention spans, and are accustomed to having the teacher do more work for them.  This despite the well-recognized fact that student effort ultimately helps the student more (than teacher effort).  A simple example: students who write their own notes learn the material a lot better than students who get printed notes.  But this doesn't cut any ice with the students; they keep begging for printed notes.  Fine.

Students ought to be able to do a little arithmetic in their heads.  But most students and even adults have a terrible time without a calculator.  The basic tricks you need to use to calculate the tip after a meal at a restaurant are considered beneath the attention of many adults.  Fine.  This is America; we can't be doing arithmetic like penniless Mexicans do.

We can't even operate smart phones like teenagers do.  (Wait . . .)

But I maintain that it serves no one if we encourage our children only to tolerate the highest standards of teaching.  How do students at State Universities (usually accused of having very pedestrian faculty) go on to being fantastically successful in their careers?  Because they train themselves to extract as much as they can out of their courses, encourage their teachers by showing that they're getting it, participating in their classes, doing their preparation--yes, students have to prepare for classes too.

Early in my career, I told a class of students not to wait until the night before a test to study.  I told them to look over their stuff every day after class--at least do a couple of exercises--so that the class material sinks in.  They resented this so much, that they wrote in my evaluations that "Dr. Arch does not understand how American students study."  Unfortunately I knew only too well, and I was trying to head off the disaster at the pass.  I quickly learned that American Students were resentful at being forced to succeed.  "Students have the right to fail," a Dean said a few years later, and that has been my consolation, bitter though it is.

So people have the right to vote any way they want, and to doom the country to the US version of Brexit.  But the intelligence to learn from logic rather than from bitter experience is not found in everyone.  Logic is on the wane, and bitter experience is on the rise, helped along by a very short memory!

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*This paragraph is an instance of one that could be completely misunderstood by some people.  Here it is again, written so that it is a little easier to follow.  Additional text is in color:

The American Dream will stay alive.  (A lot of young people believe, mistakenly, for the most part, that Trump's experience will be their experience, or something close to that.  You can easily see that only affluent teenagers could possibly imagine that, which gives you an idea of where that comes from.  If a teenager from an ordinary family were to imagine that they will be as successful as Trump with as little work, we have to think that that teenager is extremely foolish.)  My personal belief is that The American Dream is a clever fiction.  It says: You can succeed if you work hard!!!  A lot more than hard work is needed if the only work you can do is mopping floors.  And that's all some people will be allowed to do, if they live among prejudiced or racist people, if they do not have a college degree, if they cannot afford to commute to a location where there are employment opportunities, if they are a single mother or father.  A more appropriate version of The Dream is that we can succeed a lot better if we work together, something that goes against the legend of the Rugged Individualist, which sells well with conservatives.  This is a different dream, a cooperative dream, not a competitive one.  Many individuals, newly come to the Conservative philosophy, regard such a dream as un-American.

The Minimum Wage, and the Theory of Value

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I wish this were a reasoned and knowledgeable analysis of the problem, but it isn't.  Someone smarter than me has to do it.

Conservative economists have claimed that the true value of a thing is the price someone is willing to pay for it.  Applying that principle to the wages in the US (which are admittedly higher than those in many other countries), we must conclude that US labor, in occupations that actually involve work, is not worth much.  Since employers set the price of labor, in the eyes of employers, the labor of people earning the lowest wages is not worth much at all.

But the hue and cry against raising the minimum wage is centered on the claim that certain businesses cannot sustain the higher wages called for: the restaurant industry, unskilled labor, student workers, certain categories of nurses' aides, farm workers and migrant agricultural workers, highway construction workers.  Does US business have an answer to the statement that US unskilled workers are worth so little?  How is it that this labor is so critical for so many businesses?  It seems to me that critical labor has to be worth more.

Over the decades, all US businesses have become accustomed to higher and higher profit margins.  Unless the profits are enormous, these businesses aren't content to stay in business.  They would rather go into bankruptcy than continue to provide the service they have provided thus far, and to deny payment to their suppliers.  (If that sounds familiar, it probably is.)  This sort of greed, though deplored by the ignorant population, is endorsed by the culture within the business community.

It appears that the rule is: if you want to live a life of service for your brother man, go into a profession.  If you want to exercise your greed, go into business.  Some members of certain professions, too, realize after a while that the satisfaction they get out of their service is not enough, and greed raises its ugly head.  There are certain businesses that offer to help out, to make a business out of the service:  these are available to those in the medical profession, in law, dentistry, etc., etc.  There is a range of occupations that have been "commercialized".  Once the members of these professions begin earning enough to have to pay higher taxes, they become hostile to taxes of any kind, and become conservatives or libertarians!

Consider the restaurant industry.  Admittedly, a successful restaurant is likely to be located in a high-rent part of town, which means that a large proportion of its income goes to enrich some landlord.  The success of a restaurant also depends on low prices, which almost forces the wages they pay their staff to be low.  If every waiter has to be paid $15 an hour, we're all going to have to pay more for eating out.  On top of that, if the opportunistic landlords raise their rent, they're going to put many restaurants out of business.  This means that some commercial real estate is going to be vacant, the landlord will offer the space at a promotional low rent for a new hopeful restaurant owner, who may or may not offer quality meals.  But at the end of the promotional low-rent period, there's another opportunity for this restaurant, too, to go out of business.

The theory of economics indicates that the landlords must learn to balance their ambition with their experience of the disadvantage of having vacant rental spaces.  But landlords have ever been more greedy and less wise.

Perhaps it is true that, over the long run, if nothing changes, everyone, businesses and workers, will learn the true value of everything --because, obviously, the true value has to be arrived at after many oscillations about some mean value-- and landlords will learn not to raise rents too much, and entrepreneurs will learn not to flock to the restaurant business as an easy one to get into, and customers will learn to pay more for eating out.  But that situation will not come about until a lot of people are deeply unhappy about everything, and the blame will fall squarely on the higher minimum wage.  Just be prepared.

A similar situation, with some significant differences, happens in law enforcement.  Because of the escalating violence in encounters between law enforcement and minorities, the distrust escalates, the lives of police are in increasing danger, and soon municipalities will have to offer higher wages for their police officers.  When police work becomes a high-stakes occupation, high-wage and high-risk, it will begin to attract men and women who are attracted to danger.  This will increase the danger, and the distrust, and the nature of the police profession.  In at least one way, this is good: police deserve good pay.  We need a higher caliber of individual in the police.  But police are an easy target for anti-social youth, so eventually police will have to be issued body armor, and soon begin to look like storm troopers from Star Wars, and appear strongly dehumanized.  This will be the beginning of horror.  Only nihilists can welcome such a terrible transformation of our society.

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Day IV: Oo, more exciting speakers! And Hillary Clinton accepts the Nomination

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Not to keep anyone in suspense, Hillary Clinton, dressed in an all-white suit, accepted the nomination with a powerful speech.  Earlier in the evening, these are a selection of what we heard:

Pennsylvania Governor Tom Wolfe --the only Democrat governor who was elected in 2014-- gave a calm, reasoned speech that I was pleased to see and hear.  I know very little about this man, not having TV in our household, so it was good to get to know him a little better.

Former Michigan Governor Jennifer Granholm gave a super enthusiastic speech, laced with a lot of humor.  This is one crazy gal, and I can hardly believe that the staid Michiganders could have elected her as Governor.  She danced up to the microphone, and blasted the audience with an incisive, yet humorous, criticism of Donald Trump.  Hillary Clinton is such a reasonable choice for President that not a lot that is new can really be said in her favor.

Then came two consecutive speeches by Republicans.  One, who had been a member of the Reagan administration, gave a careful speech in which he outlined the reasons why he chooses to vote with Democrats this year.  Few things at this Convention cheered me up more than this speech and the next.  Democrats with no opposition in Congress can be dangerous to both the country as a whole, and to themselves.

The second republican who spoke was a woman called Jennifer Lim, who echoed the sentiments of the previous speaker, and probably did more than anyone else to moderate any remaining hostility towards the Republican Party among the Democrats.  I must try and figure out exactly what the philosophical differences are between the people in the two major parties who are driven by philosophical matters rather than emotion.  Most of that is obvious to those who have watched the political scene for a long time, but for me, I have to study this thing carefully.  As expected, both speakers were received graciously, and cheered quietly.  I was impressed that the speakers themselves appeared confident to expect nothing less.

Dallas Sheriff Lupe Valdez.  An important thing to bear in mind is that immigrants from the southern US border, whom we describe as Hispanics, are also of Native American blood.  Obviously not a native English speaker, Sheriff Lupe struggled to express her compassion and her dismay at the growing suspicion between the police and minorities, without framing it in terms of gun possession.

This was the first time I saw Chloe Grace Moretz, an increasingly popular actress.  She was a relentless onslaught of earnest cuteness, and I am embarrassed to confess that I have forgotten most of what she said.  In my defense, I think cuteness is the major weapon in Ms. Moretz's arsenal, and until she grows into her adult self, her cuteness will obscure the serious points she would like to make.  I went back to view her speech on Youtube, and it was mainly addressed to the youngest voters, encouraging them to register and vote this November.

Katy Perry gave a performance that was received well.  She spoke a few sentences on behalf of Hillary Clinton, with whom she has been on the campaign trail, evidently.

Chelsea Clinton gave a protracted speech about growing up with the Clintons, and introduced her mother, Hillary.  (It is very possible that Chelsea will hold national office someday, and I have a feeling in my bones that it might be at a very dark time for the US.)

That brings to a close the Convention, except for commentary from various sources, notably Trevor Noah, and Stephen Colbert.

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Day 3: Less Exciting, but still in Great Style

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It is difficult to keep featuring fabulous speakers, but the DNC (Democratic National Committee/Convention) is managing to come close.  Here is a selection of the speeches, the few that I happened to actually see and hear.  [I try to give a fuller description of who these people are, due to the fact that, inexplicably, some of our readers appear to be Russian]:

Joe Biden [Vice President, and former senator from Delaware].  After several minutes of explaining why Hillary Clinton deserves the nomination, Joe Biden (as expected) gave a scathing criticism of the character and the style of Donald Trump.  Many on the Left (which is very center left, at the moment) find Donald Trump so hard to take that their complaints tend to be increasingly emotional and incoherent.  But Biden was a lot more reasoned, even given that the hall was filled with people who could be assumed to agree with him anyway.


Michael Bloomberg [multi-term mayor of New York City, millionaire businessman, and presently a political independent]:  Announcing that he was an independent, Bloomberg listed why he supported Hillary Clinton, both because of how suitable she was for the job, and, not least, because of how unsuitable Donald Trump would be, both from the point of view of temperament and experience.  He said that, being a successful businessman himself (who, unlike Trump, did not have an enormous financial boost from his parents), he knew just how poorly Trump's businesses were run, and why his promises meant little or nothing, and why his threats were ridiculously inappropriate.  (Special attention paid to the phrase "You're fired!" from Trump's reality TV show, The Apprentice.)

Tim Kaine [former senator from Virginia, and Vice Presidential Candidate]:  Choosing to essentially repeat his speech from Florida, at his introduction as Hillary Clinton's running mate, Tim Kaine also repeated many of his phrases at least twice!  We must hope Kaine gets over being overwhelmed to be the VP pick quickly, and begins to speak to a wider range of issues.  The problem is that the two speeches were too close together in time, and there were no events to respond to between them.  But this endless repetition has to stop.  On the plus side, he did make mention that the Republican Party had grievously strayed from its roots as the Party of Lincoln, and that many Republicans and former Republicans (including his in-laws) are dismayed at what is happening to that party.  He said that the Democrats will give disenchanted Republicans a home.

Sharon Belkofer [private citizen]:  She introduced herself as the mother of a fallen serviceman, whom Obama had comforted after she had been informed of her son's death.  She had been inspired to run for the local school board, and get into public life.  She was a good speaker, well able to stick to her points and keep her cool.

Barack Obama [US President, 2008-Present]:  Obama walked on stage (after a slightly embarrassingly romanticized documentary of what it was like to have been president for the last eight years).  He framed his speech of support of Hillary Clinton in terms of what it took to be president of the US, our foreign policy, what remains to be done in terms of domestic policy, especially fiscal policy, health and economic justice, gun violence, and immigration.  He also made several closely argued remarks about the candidacy of Donald Trump.

I can hardly imagine what more the DNC has to offer tomorrow, the day on which Hillary Clinton accepts the nomination.  I suppose Chelsea Clinton will speak, but there will not be a great deal of star power on the closing day of the Convention.

CNN chose to fact-check many of the speakers at the DNC, and you can read for yourself how much the statements by various speakers were supported by the CNN investigations.  This is interesting, because it sheds a great deal of light and supplies an enormous amount of detail about the claims concerned.

Among other things, Trump has now conceded that the minimum wage must go up.  Trump is slowly changing his mind on several issues.  But he has no problem about being flaky on issues at first, and studying them later.  In other words, he seems to be pandering to guys who like to carelessly shoot off their mouths, implying that now they will have a president just like them, in that way endorsing careless speech, a sort of extension of anti-PC-ness in public discourse.

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"Privacy" in the 18th Century: An instance of ignorance of the Evolution of Language

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In a blog post from February this year, Thom Hartmann puts forward the accusation that it serves the Conservative cause for the population to be ignorant of history.  Why would the GOP (for example) want people to be clueless?

It is a long and complicated argument, but at least in one area, he appears to have a point: the place of privacy among the liberties listed in the Constitution.

Here's the story.  First of all, why is the concept of privacy so pivotal, from a legal point of view?  It so happens that some rulings of the supreme court, both in 1965 and more recently a decade or so ago, it turned out that  the defense of the search of the bedroom of a couple in which some evidence had been gathered had been challenged as illegal.  Now, by modern standards, of course, a forced entry into a bedroom would be considered an outrageous invasion of privacy.  But some members of the Court argued that there was nothing in the Declaration of Rights about the right to privacy.  (Needless to say, it was a conservative justice who protested the invocation of the concept of a right to privacy, in 1965, as well as Justice Clarence Thomas more recently.)

Thom Hartmann argues that the use of the word privacy in the modern sense was only a 19^th century notion, traced back perhaps to the invention of modern indoor plumbing equipment.  The earlier meaning of privacy was to use the bathroom.  Hartmann argues that the right to use the bathroom has never been in question, and so the Right to Privacy has never been deemed necessary to enshrine in the constitution (as well as other rights, such as the right to breathe, and so on, which might really come into play very soon).  The closest Right that would have a bearing to the modern concept of privacy would be, he says, the Right to Liberty.  Liberty subsumed privacy.  If people were ignorant of history to the extent of not realizing the subtleties of the use of the term privacy, even a Supreme Court justice could either mislead the court, or willfully deceive the court into believing that no right to privacy was contained in the Constitution, or any of its amendments.

To go further, Harmann argues that human beings had rights regardless of whether they were present in the Constitution, simply by virtue of being human beings.  It is not the Constitution, he says, that grants those rights; the Constitution simply lists certain ones that might not have been recognized, in order to limit the powers of the Government.  Only a religion, or a despot grants rights.  In a Republic no one's rights are at anyone else's disposal.  So we have many more rights than are listed in the Constitution; they are simply listed there for easy reference, and to set out how far the government can go.

A fascinating illustration of the power of education is given in a letter of Thomas Jefferson to James Madison, quoted in the blog post:  "And say, finally, whether peace is best preserved by giving energy to the government, or information to the people."  Jefferson gives a beautifully reasoned, easy-to-follow analysis of the question and its solution, which I as usual leave you to read fully; paraphrasing the writing of the founding fathers does no service to my readers.  Read it for yourself.

Common sense is certainly good; but the record of the application of the common sense by the wise men of the past is better, and that is part of our history.

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Day 2

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The second day of the Democratic National Convention was a little less interesting than the first day.  The outstanding--for me--features were: the roll call vote for the candidacy, which Hillary Clinton won by a large margin, and a wonderful speech by Bill Clinton.

When Bill Clinton talks, one begins to believe that, (1) given the huge influence that Business has on American culture, society and the American economy, and (2) given the way in which American uniqueness and supremacy dominates American public discourse, and (3) given the way in which hate of Socialism is ingrained into American consciousness and thinking patterns, the future of progress in the US lies with the Democratic Party, at least for the near future.  Anything that seems to suggest communal steering of its objectives is easy to laugh off (e.g., most recently, Healthcare).  It is nothing short of a miracle that Bernie Sanders was able to get as far as he did, and he would have got a lot further, if not for the fact that the Rules of the Democratic National Committee, and its leadership, acting on behalf of the anti-Socialism culture from within, worked actively to sabotage the chances of Bernie Sanders being nominated to be their candidate.

It was sort of a game-theoretic setup.  If Bernie Sanders were to be nominated, the goals of many of the Democrats would be championed by him, but there was a reasonable expectation that Trump would prevail, capitalizing on the "un-American" philosophies of the Sanders platform.  Championing the underdog, uplifting the poor, allowing the same freedoms to people of alternate lifestyles and for people of the wrong ethnicity as those allowed to the majority white "Christians", these were all horrible things to suggest.  Free education for the poor?  (Doom our poor white kids to be in classrooms way past the tenth grade?  Why would they want that?)  The world does not realize that the population in parts of America is far more ignorant than the vast majority of the population of the earth.  It is an American's right to remain ignorant, and to believe in fairy-tales, even if the rest of the world believes in a secular explanation of the universe.

The most interesting aspect of Bill Clinton's address, describing in far greater detail than anyone had thus far done, the history of Hillary Clinton's involvement in public welfare (in the broad sense) was when he summarized at the end.  He observed that it was difficult to reconcile the person he had just described, and the person reviled in the Republican Convention, and on the Republican campaign.  Yes, it was, and one of those Hillary Clintons was real, and one was made up.  It is amazing how much personal hostility the Republicans have against the Clintons; it is as if they recognized that the Clintons were a greater threat to the Republican Party than had ever existed before.  A conservative columnist, on behalf of the Republican machine, actually crafted, and the Republican Party polished the myth of the Clintons as liars and perjurers, deceitful and unreliable.  Numerous specific charges of lying were leveled at them, and none of them substantiated--except for one, about an affair with an intern.  (Disingenuous to harp on this by a party in which large numbers have married multiple times, but apparently the crux of the matter had to do with where the affair was conducted, hallowed ground for Republicans, apparently.)

The Democrats, at least some of them, should find this difficult to understand.  Why would the Clintons be considered so dangerous?  They are moderates; Bernie Sanders's agenda must have left the Clintons horrified.  Nobody knows.

Hillary Clinton seems driven by compassion: bring education to children, bring healthcare to the poor, bring security and safety to women.  She has only come lately to justice.  She is determined, and not angry.  In contrast, Bernie Sanders has been angry, at the economic disparity between the extremes of the economic spectrum, at the disproportionate power wielded by the affluent, the contrast in the opportunities available to the rich versus those available to the poor.  But Hillary Clinton (and Bill Clinton before her) have generated far more anxiety in Conservative hearts than Bernie Sanders ever did.  Bernie Sanders's ideas could, the conservatives must believe, be attacked using the good old standby of being almost communism.  On the other hand the Clintons offer such reasonable, almost business-friendly steps to a better America, that Conservatives really cannot build up steam for a real defense against them, and must resort to manufacturing personal scandals and pretended outrage.  (Make no mistake: the Democrats' outrage against what Donald Trump says is also mostly pretended.  The man has always been crude, and there's just so many times that we can pretend outrage at variations on the same old theme.  My outrage muscles are fatigued beyond imagining.)

The campaign strategy (as many could see months ago) should be one of forcing Hillary Clinton to set aside her tunnel vision, and to make her absorb a little of the anger of the Bernie Sanders campaign.  But it isn't going to happen; once again I see the anger fading, and the complacency returning.

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Tone Contrast: Democratic National Convention 2016, Day One

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To anyone who hasn't understood what tone is, all you have to do is compare the RNC and the first day of the DNC.  Despite the terrible effect of the Wikileaked Emails.  Despite that Bernie galvanized an enormous number of young people who had never participated in politics before, all of whom were disappointed for the first time.  Despite the fact that Hillary Clinton had to scramble hard to address the fact that the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) had been poisoned by various demagogues, including Bernie Sanders, who is the most wonderful demagogue of recent times.

I have struggled hard to see anything positive in the political rhetoric of the last year or so.  Last night, on the very first day of the Democratic National Convention, about half the speakers focused on the disastrous values of the GOP candidate.  But the other half--I would say, even more than half--focused on the positive.  First of all, the fact that in many ways the condition of the country is distinctly better than is reported by the GOP.  Secondly, that Democrats have set their eyes on more noble achievements, that the Democrats have more faith in the good will of its members, and that the representatives of the Democrats are driven by a spirit of service.  The best the GOP can do is to put themselves forward as the ones who will facilitate the self-interest of the individual voter.  Each man, woman and child for himself; that, they say, is America at its best.  The ideological battle the Democrats have faced since the Great Depression is that most of the problems faced by the USA have social solutions, if not socialist solutions.

It is hard to tell whether the Democrats settled on the contrasting battle cry of "Stronger Together" as a response to the GOP, or whether it is a natural outgrowth of Hillary's old motto: "It takes a village," but the expression highlights for me the fundamental difference between conservatives, who are typically skeptics, and often cynics; and liberals, who are occasionally just as cynical, but who are generally more idealistic than conservatives are.  That is the essence of the difference.

Often, striking a higher tone has to do with ignoring details, and going for the Big Picture, at least in terms of aspirations.  A negative tone is the opposite: of squinting at the terrible trees, rather than gazing at the beautiful woods.  This election season, though, the GOP has managed to find doom and gloom in both the trees and the wood.  Repeatedly, Newt Gingrich insisted that crime and violence being down is not important; the fact that people feel that crime and violence is up, and that they feel unsafe, that's what important!  Donald Trump keeps chanting the mantra that things are terrible.  The state of business is terrible.  Family life is terrible.  These are not specifics, these are imaginary woods, completely devoid of any trees based in reality.

Perhaps the Democrats must stop falling back on appealing exclusively to their traditional power base: educated urban folks, accustomed to a multicultural society, aware of the richness of opportunities that are available today.  Typically, Democrats swim in the water that is modern technology, freely available information, the subtleties of modern life.  But it may be time to reach out to the power base that has made Trump so successful: rural, working class older white Americans, who are an easy target for those who want to persuade them that they have been disenfranchised.  Unfortunately, the Democrats really do not have anything to offer them: there are none so blind as they who would not see.  You can tell them that it is a good world, and a great country, and they will insist: no, it isn't, not any more.  Nothing, they will complain, works the way it used to.  (This is something everyone has to get over.  It's not as though Trump is going to replace all the jazzy technology in stores with old-time, American made black and white TVs.)  People don't behave like they used to.  (You can't go around slapping up your spouse anymore; they fight back.  Well, time moves on; it isn't as though Trump will come by and make sure your spouse stays slapped. Kids will continue to text; adults will continue to tweet nonsense.)  Gays and lesbians are getting married.  (The sad thing is that this does not hurt die-hard traditional straight folks at all, except the thought that gays and lesbians are finally enjoying themselves without restriction. It is no longer reasonable to supervise the private lives of consenting adults.)  Anything that society can promise conservative older white males as a way to improve their lives can easily be trivialized (by someone like Trump).  A major step the Democrats are proposing is to allow everyone, 55 years old or older, to get Medicare.  Even that is likely to be seen as a mere nothing; older conservative white males wear their ill health like a badge.  For them, being sick, but out of the clutches of a doctor is fun.

What Trump promised older white conservative rural males is revenge.  Ironically, this is precisely what ISIS is promising its younger conservative religious fanatics.  Trump's followers--despite their hostility toward fanatical Islamic men--have a lot in common with these fanatical Islamists.

Whether or not the Democrats are able to deliver a Congress that can move us a significant distance in the direction of the type of progress that many of us want, at least they hold out the promise that the DNC will be a lot less doom and gloom, despite the frustration of the Bernie Sanders troops, some of whom have never felt political frustration before.  What the Democrats must recognize is that the agenda is not entirely in the hands of Hillary Clinton; it is just as much in the hands of the hundreds of Congressmen up for election in November.  It is just that Hillary will not stand in the way of progress--at least we hope not--but Trump certainly would.

Here is a summary of the speeches that I heard; I'm sure that there were good ones that I missed.

Michelle Obama, First Lady, 2009-2016:
Hers is the speech that most excited the faithful, and to be honest, the one that I cheered for the hardest.  You can probably get a summary of her speech almost anywhere.

Senator Elizabeth Warren, D-Massachusetts:
Senator Warren listed the actual parts of the platform that she was most interested in, which of course were also the planks that Bernie Sanders was most interested in: controlling Wall Street and the Big Banks, and People's United.

Senator Cory Booker, D-New Jersey:
This was a politician I had never heard of until yesterday.  He is most certainly an orator, and it was both heartening and thrilling to hear old time political rhetoric once again.  However, like Barack Obama himself, it is evident that Senator Booker is a man not only of words, but also of principles.  This was a defining moment for this convention.

State Representative Joe Kennedy, D-Taunton, etc:
I'm not sure whether this is a member of the great Kennedy Dynasty (and I wouldn't be that excited if he were, except that many wonderful leaders have come out of there, and we could certainly use some more), and the part that I watched was simply him introducing Elizabeth Warren.

Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, D-New York:
This lady is just too blushing and wholesome-looking to be taken seriously as a politician.  Apparently she appeared on the Daily Show (perhaps with Jonathan Stewart), and I should go watch that, to get a feel for what she is like.  She certainly is a refreshing contrast to the likes of Rudy Giuliani, that populated the RNC.

State Representative Diane Russell, of Maine:
There were two representatives, one each from the Clinton campaign, and the Sanders campaign, who participated in an offshoot of the Rules Committee to ensure that the process of selecting delegates in future years will be more fair.  Diane Russell, a refreshing breeze just when the disruption of frustrated Bernie supporters was getting obnoxious, was jolliness personified.  She was obviously delighted to be addressing the DNC, and she reported her facts with great enthusiasm, from the Bernie camp.  Most memorably, she quoted Albus Dumbledore (a character created by J. K. Rowling, the author of the Harry Potter series) who said that it took courage to stand up to one's enemies, but even greater courage to stand up to one's friends, a remark that appeared to resonate with the younger Bernie supporters.

Eva Longoria:
The popular actress addressed the Convention as a supporter of Hillary Clinton, but also as a Hispanic native of Texas, among those who were vilified by Trump.  Memorably, she declared that her family never crossed the border, but that the border crossed them; a reference to the fact that Texas was originally a part of Mexico.

Senator Al Franken (D-Minnesota), Sarah Silverman:
Al Franken made the important point that the Convention would certainly result in a lot of motivation and enthusiasm.  But the real work, he reminded his audience, would begin on the Friday after the convention.  Only 102 days of furious canvassing would succeed in getting Hillary Clinton the Presidency.  Sarah Silverman addressed the noisy Bernie Sanders supporters, and told them that they were being ridiculous.  (She had the right to say this, as a Bernie supporter herself.)

Postscript:
What is the deal with Hillary Clinton?  My suspicion about this is that Hillary Clinton was getting ready to try for the Presidency, after paying her dues to the satisfaction of everyone she could imagine.  But Bernie Sanders was becoming utterly frustrated with business as usual in Washington--as we all are--and the increasing income gap and wealth disparity, that he took it upon himself to make one final attempt to bring some sort of  income redistribution, or something on those lines, by running for the Presidency.

Unfortunately, Hillary felt that Bernie was an obstruction, and being as ambitious as she was, and confident in her own qualification for the job (in fact overqualified, as many speakers at the DNC day 1 remarked), Hillary was annoyed and frustrated by the Bernie campaign.  On the third side, the Democratic Party was, to no one's surprise, more eager to get a Democrat in the White House at any cost, and, betting all their money on the Clinton horse, they, too, saw Bernie Sanders's campaign as playing into the GOP's efforts to wrest the Presidency away from the Democrats.  We must realize that, while the Democrat Party, as an entity, has values and a soul, the professionals who are in charge of the day-to-day work of the party side of the campaign is usually completely ruthless and unfeeling, and devoid of political judgment.  As the Wikileaked e-mails show that the strange ideas and suggestions all originated with party officials, and not with either candidate.  Bernie Sanders just got in the way of Hillary Clinton's reasonable, but intense, ambition.

I'm sure most people have arrived at the same conclusion.

Arch

Whoa: Tim Kaine! Who Knew?

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It was only a few minutes ago that I took the time to watch Hillary Clinton introduce Senator Time Kaine as her running mate, in Miami.

Oh my word, what an awesome campaigner!  I finally have the confidence that the Democrats have a winning combination for this election, as well as someone who will give Hillary Clinton the strength to stand up to those special interests that get in the way of giving help to those who are most in need of help, especially among poor, elderly white Americans who have desperately turned to Donald Trump.  Nothing is more desperate than anyone who seeks solace with Donald Trump; if you get the chance to watch this video, you will hear for yourself why this is true.

I am baffled as to why people consider Barack Obama deceitful, untrustworthy or ineffective.  Given the circumstances of someone running for office in this US of ours, I can hardly imagine someone any more honest than Obama.  But this Tim Kaine comes across as possibly even more honest and forthright.  There is absolutely no doubt that they are a winning ticket; what is in doubt is whether they will be given an opportunity to do what they would like to do, to put forward some of the ideals of the Bernie Sanders campaign, and to build upon Obama’s work in immigration reform and health reform.  And finally, whether they will have the guts to push through an act that reverses People’s United; it must not be left to the Supreme Court.

We have to face the fact that Tim Kaine is more of a moderate than Hillary Clinton, though one wonders whether that’s possible.  He could only have made positive changes in Virginia as Governor if he had ways of bringing Republicans on board, which means compromise.  It does not bode well for the sorts of reforms that Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren have been fighting for.  But at least it seems more likely that it will be a Democratic White House for next year.

In sharp contrast to Trump (in some ways; Trump has not said that he is hostile to Mexicans here legally) Tim Kaine has worked in Honduras, and appears fluent in Spanish.  He even spoke Spanish a half dozen times in his speech.  This is great; it would be tempting to pander to the Hispanicophobia that Trump has set in motion, but Kaine has utterly rejected it.  Truly, the US is greatest when it swallows down its fear of immigrants and embraces them.  But any sort of immigration law is always a compromise between admitting aliens, and keeping them out.  But at least, keeping immigrant families together is something that will be among the least painful choices.  Keeping the border as impervious as possible whilst calling for a moratorium on forced repatriation of parents can be something all sides can agree on.  The question is whether it can be accomplished without appearing to reward Mexicans who manage to successfully sneak across.  (To be honest, we laymen are unlikely to be able to dream up a plan that doesn’t have logical holes in it.)

Well, things certainly look better in the afternoon!

Arch

I sincerely hope that they can get Democrats elected into the House and the Senate.

‘’“”—’

Things Are Always Better In the Morning, Most Mornings

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Last week, the Republican National Convention nominated Donald J. Trump to be their candidate for President, a nomination which he —thankfully— accepted.  For those of you who misguidedly get all your news from me, here is a sort of executive summary¹ of the events at the Convention:

On the first day of the Convention, the large component of those opposed to Trump attending the Convention requested that candidates be allowed to vote their conscience, without being bound to vote according to their State primaries.  A voice vote was called, and the chair voted out the changes, to the fury of the “Never Trump!” movement within the GOP, all on National TV.

On the second day, Mrs. Melania Trump spoke on behalf of her husband, in a beautifully phrased speech, with at least two paragraphs taken from the speech of Michelle Obama of four years earlier.  This got the nitpickers into a tizzy.  The main thing that I see here is that Melania’s speech contained (in addition to unwarranted praise for, and faith in, her husband) some very universal aspirations; elements of which would have appealed to the more moderate members in the GOP, and many Democrats as well.  But her audience at the Convention was composed of men who weren’t accustomed to taking speeches by women seriously, and women who were more attuned to Melania’s style and delivery rather than her content, and so the speech was a roaring success.  But we have to wonder whether the principles she presented have anything at all to do with Trump’s agenda, or whether even Trump’s usual speeches have anything to do with his agenda.  Or whether he has an agenda at all.

Mayor Rudolf Giuliani gave a speech filled with furious animus against the usual targets of Trump’s speeches, but otherwise completely useless as a basis for serious thinking.

Chris Christie’s speech on Day 2 was a sort of theatrical indictment of Hillary Clinton, using his best law court style.

Other speeches were given, by the mother of a marine killed in Benghazi, the father of a high-school football player killed by a gang, one of whose members was an illegal Mexican immigrant, minor Republicans, Speaker Paul Ryan, and Mike Pence of Indiana.

In other words, nothing said at the Convention really gives us any insight into how the campaign will proceed from now on, except for the Trump women, whose values seem to bridge the differences between the Republican Party and the Democrats.  Ivanka trump declared that she and her father would fight for equal pay for men and women, a principle that has never been popular within the GOP, and Melania Trump expressed an interest in education, something we have not heard from Trump himself.  Whether these ideas have anything to do with what goes on in Trump’s head is anybody’s guess!

A huge problem we have to deal with is the principle that is becoming increasingly current everywhere, namely that any sort of excitement is good.  As many have observed with disapproval, these national conventions have become nothing more than pep rallies.  Adults of all walks of life are reaching back to the excitement they remember from their youth, and are grasping at the pep rallies that preceded important football games.  So that’s what these conventions are deteriorating into: media events to turn out the vote.  And we can anticipate that, in the future, no one will vote without a massive pep rally to encourage them.  Oh, it is not restricted to politics.  Some students in college, for instance, will not pay attention to a lesson unless it is made more exciting by some video.  Other lessons must contain an exciting game.  Sometimes it involves colorful T-shirts that are handed out.  Gold Stars.  Candy.  Some professors can’t get motivated to give a lesson unless there’s something really exciting in it.  If the professors aren’t excited, you can bet that the kids will be bored, too.  Meanwhile, students in numerous poor countries are paying attention at lessons that have zero candy content.  Trump’s infamous short attention span is not remarkable in the least; he represents a huge sector of the population with short attention spans.  This is good, because his speeches are all arranged in tiny snippets of thought.

So we have no idea what Trump stands for at all, except that he wants to take a firm stand about illicit immigration.  Despite the indignation of the Democrats, this is something they want as well; the US policy has always been centered around a sort of Maxwell’s Demon principle: only admit high-quality immigrants.  Some Democrats would prefer a more liberal policy, but they seem to be in the minority.  It is very risky for the US to adopt an open door attitude towards immigration unilaterally, because the consequences would be to place an enormous burden on the already overburdened Social Welfare system here, which was never very robust to begin with.

Is his incendiary rhetoric just window-dressing, or does it reflect what he really wants?  Is it deceitfully intended to attract a racist sector of the population that has so far stayed out of politics, but whom Trump does not intend to support once in office?  Or are the messages from his wife and daughters intended to mollify the more moderate Republicans, with ideas he has absolutely no intention of following up with?  In other words, does Trump cynically believe that he can say and do anything in order to get elected, and then proceed to do something entirely different once he is in office?

Trump’s son (Eric?) said in an interview that Trump was seeking a Vice President who would take charge of both domestic and foreign policy, leaving Trump with the main task of making America great again.  In other words, he wants an apprentice to do all his work for him, whom he can fire, if he (the Apprentice) does not perform according to specification.  I don’t think the Presidency works quite like that, though who can say, since it’s never been tried?  It may work for Trump, but probably not for the rest of us.

Worst of all, the relentless gerrymandering that the GOP State houses have indulged in over the last two decades makes it very difficult to elect anything but a Congress that is highly Republican.  If the GOP were hoping that Congress will restrain any Trumpian excesses, they’ve outsmarted themselves; if the GOP congressmen who get elected on Trump’s coat-tails are Trump disciples, no excesses will be restrained whatsoever.  Gerrymandering is one of the most vile procedures dreamed up by Americans, and its inventors should burn in hell for all eternity.  I sincerely hope that Democrats do not retaliate with counter-gerrymandering.

Now let’s look at Hillary Clinton.  It is possible that she would make a wonderful president, but, again, the Republican advertising machine has systematically worked hard to discredit both the Clintons over the last 25 years.  All the Whitewater, Lewinskigate nonsense was a huge PR stunt to blemish the Clinton brand, so much so that even Democrats have got into the habit of believing that the Clintons are lying, thieving opportunists.  (Jimmy Kimmel performed an experiment on video in which random people declared that they had know about completely fake Hillary Clinton accusations.)  In actual fact, the Clintons are fairly typical of politicians of any persuasion, except for the fact that they are particularly sympathetic to the plight of demographics that are viewed as underdogs.  But they are —or have been— loath to make any moves that would be viewed as hostile to business.  But that could change; the fiasco of 2007 should give them sufficient ammunition to be firm with the banks, if they aren’t scared by their close business friends into believing that an intimidated Wall Street is bad for the economy.  Wall Street has a short attention span.  Not to worry.

So, contrary to popular belief (even among Democrats), Hillary Clinton is likely to make a wonderful president, with possibly an unfortunate tendency to be lenient with Banks and Big Business.  Under her, the initiative to moderate environmental pollution, seek clean energy, protect Social Security and Health care, are likely to inch forward, but more likely to succeed.  I predict that she is more likely to be successful at formulating a robust immigration policy than Trump would be, but we will never know, since both of them aren’t going to be president at the same time.  Unfortunately, ignorant people across the country are likely to be resentful of practically everything she does, and if we get a progressive Congress and Senate, they will have an uphill battle trying to combat the antipathy to Hillary Clinton.

The takeaway, I guess, is that everyone should get out and vote.  (I have a big media event planned for just before the election date, where I will be dressed as a cheerleader, and we will give away lots of prizes.  Maybe.  But get out and vote anyway.)  Trump supporters will be voting like mad, because it will be a totally new experience for them.  Never Trump people will be out trying to sabotage Trump, possibly by voting for the Libertarian candidate, who certainly appears to be a little more sane than Trump, or at least intends to approach the Presidency in a more professional way.  So the outcome can be anything from a total Trumpocalypse, which will just be grandiose dysfunctionality, to a sort of lame-duck Hillary Clinton presidency, to a wildly successful Clinton administration, depending on the outcomes of the Congressional and Senatorial races.  Some initiatives will not wait: the environment, clean energy, income inequality, health reform.  Another four years of Democratic administrations will at least be fair, having endured the GOP for so long.  Things are not going to look that good on the morning after the elections, unless at least some of us go to the blessed polls.

Arch

¹ Executive Summary: A brief overview of a report or article for those whose reading skills have declined over the years.
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Dallas: Black Lives and Blue Lives Both Matter

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Whoever the idiot is who came up with this "X Lives Matter", whatever X is, has really not done anyone a service.  As we have learned, it is sometimes understood to imply, rhetorically, that only X lives matter.  The intention of the original slogan is ambiguous, and in this environment of "Dog whistle" political speeches, the slogan may indeed mean different things to different people.  Some sectors probably relish the ambiguity, and the endless opportunity for vilifying certain public figures.

Jon Stewart, of Comedy Central fame, and his successor, Trevor Noah, have both made very eloquent videos that say that being against violence towards Blacks does not imply that one cannot be at the same time against violence towards the Police.

Some of the massacres, of course, are perpetrated by opportunists, who capitalize on strong public feeling to either justify their actions (presumably even terrorists want to be thought well of by certain people), or to make their actions easier.  All terrorists are despicable, and opportunistic, cowardly terrorists are even more despicable.  This issue should be addressed independently of the fact that the availability of assault weapons is a factor.  We must accept that the culprits of yesterday's Dallas shooting carried it out not because they could, but because they wanted to.

More information is needed before we can get really furious against anyone; who were the snipers, and why exactly did they shoot?  Were they African Americans taking revenge on the Police, or were they some other group more interested in making scapegoats of the protesters?  Was it a calculated atrocity, or was it a stupid action by a fringe group not based on a calculated agenda?  My sympathies are definitely with the Dallas Police, in this event, but I would certainly like to have more information.

Meanwhile, we have to look carefully at the assumptions behind various statements we make.  For instance:

We can always trust the police.
This is what I taught my infant daughter.  The alternative, at the time, was too terrible to contemplate.  The police are there to help little girls in trouble, and they are there to protect us.  But the assumption was that the police would never shoot an innocent person.  They are trained to give a person every possible chance to establish their innocence.

The police will never shoot an innocent person.
Behind this assertion is the assumption that a policeman is supremely confident about his own safety.  All civilians will give way to the police, so a policeman never needs to act out of fear.

A policeman or policewoman is never afraid.Well, sure; who else carries a gun?  Well, usually only police carry guns, but we know that anyone can carry a gun, provided they have a license.

Anyone can carry a gun, provided they have a license.
Well, we know all about this assumption.  Most people likely to use a gun on the street are not likely to have a license.  On the other hand, this Orlando kid did appear to have a license.  The licensing process permits all sorts of psychos to own guns.  Half the population is adamant that psychos should not have guns, but the other half is not happy with the inconvenience of having a person establish that he or she is not a psycho.

So, the upshot is that, since a frightened policeman is more likely to shoot an innocent civilian than a policeman who is not afraid of the civilians he is likely to encounter, the killings by policemen, accidental, or unintentional, or whatever, is probably by a police officer scared to death, or, less likely, pretending to be scared to death.  Fear breeds mistakes.  But that's life.  As long as everyone has the right to carry guns, the stakes are now high, high stakes breeds fear, fear breeds mistakes, and prejudice aggravates mistakes and fear.  The gun companies probably do have a vested interest in the fear of the general population.  But, according to the interpretation of the constitution by the late idiot Justice Scalia, this is what the founding fathers wanted, a sort of modern day Wild Wild West.  It's good for business.

I, for one, want to know more before I get really mad.

Arch.

OK. That's enough; this has GOT TO STOP

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[You might have guessed this, but the original post was written in a fit of hurried frustration, and many thoughts are hard to follow.  I’m going to try and clarify it as much as I can.]

I know I’m not the first one to notice this, but I’m one more person to get mad at what I’m seeing.  Of course everyone is angry at everything they see, especially when things in Britain go horribly awry.  Why?  Because though US politics is a lot more frustrating, many of us are accustomed to seeing more sanity and reason in Britain. What has happened?  Let’s first take a second to reflect on what we consider to be politeness.  As we understand it, it means that when something unpleasant is seen or heard, we simply keep our immediate negative reactions to it under wraps, and don’t blurt out in horror.  (For instance, in my case, I get really frustrated when I see a pregnant woman smoking.  The way I was brought up —and don’t get me wrong: my upbringing was fairly typical; that that’s the point— I just don’t go and yell at the woman.  Chances are, the woman already knows that smoking while pregnant harms the fetus, but has a compulsion to smoke nevertheless; I would be wasting my breath, and embarrassing the woman.  Evidently smokers consider themselves martyrs to their habit, and already deplore the fact that the occasional quick smoke is a must.)  Part of the deal is that we somehow go on to purge our anger at the distressing incident, and don’t let it fester inside us for a lifetime.  Of all the thought-habits we teach ourselves—and this one is almost definitely something that’s self-taught—this habit of grinding down our anger at whatever upset us, is probably the most important.  There’s a descriptive phrase for it that came out of the movie Frozen: Let It Go.

One writer, Maya Goodfellow, puts it like this:

One of Britain’s national myths is that it’s a tolerant and accepting nation. This simply isn’t true. To buy into that idea is to erase a history of hate: go back to the 1950s and 60s, when signs reading “No blacks, no Irish, no dogs” were stuck up in landlords’ windows, and people of colour were told to go home.

Britain has been an overtly racist and xenophobic country before, and those prejudices were, to some extent, put in a box and left to fester. Now we’re seeing the consequences.

Ms. Goodfellow goes on to analyze further, saying that the word tolerance implies putting up with something you don’t like.  It takes a lot more emotional work to grind down the dislike one initially feels to a level of what I would call true tolerance, which requires a significant amount of empathy, and other factors, including our personal experiences, such as becoming familiar with minority individuals and families, actually getting to know them well, and hearing their stories.

The vitriol—even when disguised as reasonable observation—coming out of Donald Trump makes his own constituents angry at the world.  It has the effect of releasing their suppressed feelings out of the “boxes” into which they (the feelings) might or might not have been stuffed.  This is the effect that Donald Trump desires; his strategy is to attract the sort of people who have felt pressured, thus far, not to display their hostility to minorities and blacks.  The remarks also make the rest of us angry, simply to watch Trump undermine in a few short months what decent people have been trying for decades to accomplish: to teach people that ethnicity has very few implications about the quality of a human being.  We’re finding out that the lesson was never learned, as Ms. Goodfellow implies: the resentment was simply driven underground.  So now, the Trump-ites wear their anger on their sleeves, and we’re frustrated at what’s happening.

But then, people who share my opinions and (broadly) my political and social values respond in kind.  You must have seen the vitriol coming out of liberal sources.  One fellow whose fB feed I receive is Brandon Weber, who friended me a couple of months ago.  To my frustration, some of the memes he posts are critical of the Right to the point of viciousness.  Now, of course a vicious post can be taken with some humor, and set aside.  And that’s pretty much what I have had to do.  But this spirit of philosophical fighting back is not the solution.  I’m probably guilty of the same offense, and now’s the time to be careful.  The best way, or rather the only way, to combat escalating rhetoric is systematic, relentless de-escalation.  You can’t fight fire with fire.  You can politely disagree; you don’t have to pretend to agree with whatever is being said.  But joining in a heated argument—certainly at this point in the game—will be counterproductive.  I have had the good example of dozens of people that I admire, who have never taken the bait in a shouting war, and I have missed it.  I made the mistake of thinking that they did not have ready ripostes.  No, they just buttoned their lips for the sole purpose of not alienating those on the other side permanently.

Bernie Sanders was very critical about everyone whom he viewed as opposing his campaign: both Donald Trump, and Hillary Clinton.  He was very angry, and very articulate.  I think he went just about as far as anyone should go, and one reason that I don’t put him in the same category as Donald Trump, in terms of inflammatory rhetoric, is that I agree with most of what he said!  Even the British agree with the thrust of Bernie Sanders’s claims, saying that the ambition of the Big Banks drove the world economy over the edge, and in the case of the Brits, the sector of society that the Big Banks serve—the extremely wealthy—are still trying to ride that cruel train that runs roughshod over the members of the poorer classes.  But I don’t see hate in Bernie’s speech, only indignation and determination.  When he talks about the Supreme Court, and the Congress and the Senate, we see something closer to hate, but it doesn’t quite cross the line.  It is the anger of the prophet.  Unfortunately that’s the problem with Bernie Sanders’s candidacy for President: a prophet seldom makes a good King.

Nigel Farage and Boris Johnson, the twin British politicians who whipped up the population into voting for leaving the European Union, have both resigned.  Mercifully, we in the US were not subjected to the rhetoric that they generated, some of which was evidently racial.  If the British need someone at whom to vent their hostility, they’re a good target.  But Jeremy Corbyn, who represents those who are neither racist nor eager to leave the EU, steadfastly sticks to facts.  He criticizes relentlessly, but I’m yet to detect viciousness in his tone.

Hillary Clinton has been the target of an enormous proportion of the voting population.  She, if anyone, could be excused for shooting back.  But if you listen carefully, her speeches are seldom actually hate-inspired.  Obviously, she hates Trump, and criticizes him when she gets a chance.  But in side-by-side viciousness tests, Hillary is the soul of diplomacy compared to Donald.  Her opponents may think that she is spreading hate towards Trump with a honeyed tongue, but I don’t agree.  However, I seem to remember that some of what she said about Bernie Sanders bordered on the unreasonable.  If I were she, I would not have made such remarks.

Some of the memes (pictures circulated on the Internet) we are seeing are truly horrible, comparing Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump to zombies.   They presumably suggest that the Libertarians, under the leadership of Gary Johnson, have the best candidate this time around, but I just can’t bring myself to support a party that wants to privatize public education.

To return to my point, we must all teach ourselves and our children not only tolerance, but the wisdom to change our attitudes.  [This thought is so unclear, I cannot even now remember what I meant.  I believe I was thinking about racism and xenophobia specifically, but I may have been thinking about changing combative attitudes towards public debate to more civilized ones.]  Out there, far from the Halls of Education and Reason (which I say with tongue in cheek) are those who have successfully resisted the pressure to accept foreigners in their midst.  They must have said: well, if we have to have African Americans in our country, and now, an African president, too, and god knows whether he is a citizen, well, we’re willing to be civil, temporarily, but we don’t want them doing (x, whatever x is).  But we absolutely draw the line at Mexicans.  No sirree Bob.

I don’t think I have the skills to persuade anyone who is truly xenophobic, or is a died-in-the-wool racist, to give up his or her evil ways.  This post is aimed at those whose values are close to mine.  The big challenge, even before the challenge of clean energy and the environment and education and acceptance of LGBT and open restrooms and transportation and gun violence and narrowing the gap between rich and poor, is the de-escalation of our hate language.  Political discourse is grinding to a halt.  Those we’re electing to Congress and the State Houses, maybe even those who carry our political positions, seem to be also those who are willing to escalate the rhetoric.  Arguably, the young fellows coming forward to hold political office do not even know how to deal with verbal hostility with any sort of class.  The content of education now must have an important new component: How to deal with hate speech of all sorts with civility and reason.  In theory, dealing with hate speech was supposed to be a sort of by-product of the “broadening of the mind” that we all assumed took place in college.  But no; even professors today have such intense political feelings that they, too, indulge in thinly disguised hate speech.

Learning mere historical facts, and scientific methods is easy, compared with the difficulty of responding to absolute nonsense with some class.  In the past, college professors (and, to be sure, many high school teachers) were the one who taught this, without this skill being necessarily a recognized part of the curriculum.  But many faculty have either never realized that this was something they had to model, or have forgotten to model it.  It becomes incumbent, now, on every adult, to transcend the possible limitations of their educational experience, and show how it is done.  And the Internet should probably be one of the first lines of attack.  There is no silver bullet that will bring civil discourse back into the US tomorrow.  If we work at this, civil discourse may return someday in the distant future.

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Rising Chaos in Britain

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The 2016 British referendum whether to leave the European Union seems to have been a great misstep.  British Prime Minister David Cameron (a Conservative thoroughly disliked by all except the most affluent and the most chauvinistic of Brits) suggested the referendum, in response to a general wave of xenophobia among certain sectors of the population.  Neither David Cameron, nor Jeremy Corbyn, the leader of the Labour Party (a Left-er of center party, which was dragged pretty far to the Right in the time of Tony Blair, of Invade Iraq fame) were in favor of leaving the European Union.  They obviously never expected the Brexit referendum to turn out in favor of Leaving.

Britain in the European Union, as far as us casual observers in the rest of the world can see, was in almost every way a good thing: it gave the entire Mediterranean region a sort of stability (stability here means that small external --or even internal-- influences did not upset the EU very much).  It permitted freer flow of people of various national origins and ethnicities throughout the region, encouraging a gradual lessening of the insularity that holds back a lot of the cultural development in any country.

What we are seeing is that, while the upper and middle classes were to some extent comfortable with ethnic diversity increasing in Britain, the poorer sectors of society (encouraged by political troublemakers) were acutely uncomfortable with it.  The same is happening in the USA, where in addition, as some social-historical observers have pointed out, there has been deliberate suspicion created by wealthy landowners about a century and a half ago.  It was convenient for landowners in the mid-1800s and earlier to prevent poor whites and poor blacks joining together against their masters and employers.  This highly successful effort has borne fruit today, in certain working-class whites being deeply suspicious of everyone else.

In Britain, the Labour Party being divided into Pro-Brexit and Anti-Brexit camps, one of the few sane voices in the Labour Party, Jeremy Corbyn, has lost his base of support, which has to be seen as a tragedy from the point of view of liberals in the USA and elsewhere.  For decades, it was the British Labour Party that was the model for any socialists that wanted to hold positions that did not cross the line into Communism.  The British welfare state made life admirably good for the British working class, out of which arose numerous gifted voices, artists, writers and poets.  The upper classes, however, were dissatisfied with the taxes they had to pay.  George Harrison, of the Beatles, complained of having to pay too much tax in his famous song Taxman, where he claimed that he was only permitted to keep 5% of his earnings.  The tax structure that enabled his family to maintain a certain lifestyle while in poverty, was perceived as oppressive when he earned enough to be put in a much higher tax bracket!  So the Labour Party finds itself in a leaderless position.  In a recent blog by Thomas G. Clark, the blogger says:

Jeremy Corbyn was one of the only ones who spoke to the public as if we're adults. He didn't speak in simplistic black and white terms, because things are never black and white. Agree with him or not about the EU, he was one of the only ones who spoke to the public as if we're adults, rather than simple-minded idiots who can be swayed one way or another with fearmongering threats or by a load of spectacularly unrealistic spending pledges.

What people are saying when they criticize Jeremy Corbyn for "not campaigning passionately enough" is that in modern British politics, honesty and rational considerations are rubbish debating tactics. That Jeremy Corbyn was politically naive to try to speak to the electorate like we're adults, and that he should have assumed that we're all a bunch of intellectually lazy halfwits and pushed some crude absolutist propaganda at us.

Meanwhile, the Scottish National Party which represents the Scots --who, incidentally, voted to Remain in the EU-- is the largest party outside the government that has remained largely intact.  They now have demanded to be the official leaders of the Opposition, which brings them certain benefits.  They have considered creating a coalition with the remnants of the Pro-EU Labour Party, and the Green Party (an aggressively pro-Environmental group), which just possibly may become the nucleus of a more vigorous, and philosophically robust, socialist party.

Amusingly, stock brokers and money managers and other Wall Street types, know little beyond investing in good times.  They do not fully understand the implications of political activity anywhere; they only know to panic.  It is laughable that so many hand their financial resources to these jokers, whose real understanding of economic forces is rudimentary, if anything.  After an initial dive, stocks throughout the world sort of settled down.  Every new thing that happens will initially result in a dive of stocks from now on, after which they will crawl back up.  The thing to do is to get your money out of externally managed funds, and just settle on any old stocks you have, and slap away the hands of anyone who tries to "help" your investing.  In an environment where most stocks are falling and rising together, there's nothing really clever you can do that won't make the stocks fall even more.

At the moment, the only political leaders in Britain who are feeling their oats are the least intelligent, ultra-populist, chauvinist troublemakers.  I hear names like Nigel Farage, and Hilary somebody, and of course, the redoubtable Boris Johnson.  I heard rumors that Johnson had resigned.  British politics will be in disarray for a time; the nature of the Parliamentary System is complex, and it takes some time for things to settle down, and they can settle down in surprising ways.  However, the day to day government is managed by a supposedly apolitical civil service (the bureaucracy), in which political interference is somewhat less than in most countries.

We can only wait until things become clearer.  You can read the CNN take on matters here.

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