The Will of The People

What most of don't think about is that our elected representatives are under no obligation to vote in such a way that represents the will of the majority of their constituents. Sure, we can vote them out the first chance that we get, or in some jurisdictions recall them, but as long as they can portray themselves at least as the lesser of two evils, they're going to get elected again...and again.

Two good examples in Nebraska are the attempts to restrict abortion so much that it's effectively outlawed and the bill that is on its way to approval that will provide generous tax credits (not deductions, but credits) to anyone donating to a private school - sending tax dollars by a circuitous route to non-public schools, over which the local school boards and the Department of Education have no jurisdiction. In recent polling, Nebraskans support a legal right to abortion 54-46% and oppose state tax money going to private schools by over 60%. So how is the "will of the people" being so egregiously flouted?

The problem is that most voters are not informed on the issues and cast their ballots for emotional reasons, not rational ones. Emotions are inflamed by lobbying groups who use their resources to tell people what's important and paint anyone who disagrees with them as radical, extremist, traitorous, communist, anti-God. Look at our current governor - who knew what his legislative priorities would be in any detail before the election? Despite refusing to participate in open debates in either the primary or the general election on the grounds that they were political theater, his ads were not much more than him posing with a gun while wearing hunting gear and blathering about "Nebraska values". Any statements that he did make, in safe venues, concentrated on culture war issues, such as Critical Race Theory (which isn't taught in any K-12 schools), accusing the Democrats (as if we had many around here) of being socialists and ranting that "killing babies" had to stop. 

For quite a few years a significant majority of Nebraska voters have elected only Republicans in statewide elections. There's Democrats elected in Lincoln and Omaha, but that's about it. With the Trumpification of the Republican Party, especially in rural areas, Republican office-seekers win in primaries simply by being more Trumpy than the other guy. They don't even need to articulate any kind of vision, just that the Democratic opponent is...a Democrat. Once in, they can do whatever they choose. And since a moderate Republican has become virtually extinct in Nebraska, once they get in, they're going to be more egregiously right wing than previous generations of Republicans. And for the majority of Nebraska voters everything's fine until some of these reactionary laws effect them. 

Warmongers?

Warmongers. That's the current epithet that the Tinfoil Hat Party has been tossing around lately. They like to point out that their guy, President Trump, did not start any wars during his term in office, and incorrectly stated that he was the only one in recent memory to do so. They are accusing Biden of getting us involved in a war in Ukraine against the will of "the American people". 

In principle, I'm not in favor of war. However, I also recognize that sometimes war may be the lesser of two evils. Sometimes it may be absolutely necessary, for instance, if we are attacked. Other times it might not be so clear cut, like when an ally is attacked, or, as in the current war between Russia and Ukraine, support for the recipient of aggression may be the best way to stop the dominoes from falling, to use an old Cold War example. 

Let's take a look first at the claim that President Trump was the first president in modern history not to start a new war. Trump campaigned in part on the promise to end "forever wars". We were still in Afghanistan when he left office, although he had begun the process of withdrawal. When President Biden finished the job, he was criticized by Republicans for doing what Trump had promised to do four years earlier. The military under Trump participated in joint Special Forces actions throughout the Middle East; it went back into Iraq to defeat the Islamic State, assassinated an Iranian general; conducted air strikes in Yemen; conducted a failed Special Forces op in Yemen which resulted in the death of a Navy SEAL (Trump blamed the SEAL for his own death); attacked Syria with cruise missiles; and on and on. This isn't to suggest that any other presidents did any better - President Obama has a similar record, but portraying Trump as a peace-loving de-escalator is pure fantasy. 

When it comes to our nation's participation in war, we have a spotty record. Wars have been started based on lies or misrepresentations. There were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and despite his angry rhetoric, Saddam Hussein was never a threat to the United States. We have also have allowed mission creep to keep us involved well past the achievement of our original goals. Afghanistan is a sad example. Initially we overthrew the Taliban government because they were providing a haven for terrorists, in particular the Al-Qaeda leader Osama Bin-Laden. (Funny how we gave Pakistan as pass when they were sheltering Bin-Laden) Little by little though, we were preoccupied with propping up a succession of corrupt Afghan leaders and became viewed by the populace as foreign occupiers, eventually leaving the same Taliban, who we had driven out 20 years earlier, in charge. There was always going to be an excuse to stay there and there would always be an undefined standard of what "victory" looked like. 

So what's the deal with our escalating support for Ukraine? Most of the wars and other military actions of late can be boiled down to civil wars. The Russian invasion of Ukraine is different. While not a NATO member, it's arguable that we have an interest in preventing Russia from rolling over their neighbors - if Putin succeeds in his revanchist and irredentist ambitions in Ukraine, what's to stop him from reclaiming hegemony over Poland, Hungary, Slovakia, Czechia? Not much. One of the arguments that some Republicans are making is that it's Congress, not the President, which has the authority to declare war. That's true, yet since World War II, no military operation has been accompanied by a formal declaration of war, including such operations, such as the Korean and Vietnam Wars that were very clearly wars. There have been, "authorizations for the use of force" - generally vague pronouncements of support for limited military operations that have been interpreted quite broadly by presidents of both parties to use force as they saw fit. 

Ideally, the president and Congressional leaders could get together and debate the best course of action. House Republicans are accusing President Biden of acting unilaterally against "the will of the American people". But is that what's happening? While President Biden is taking the lead on our support of Ukraine, every penny of aid to Ukraine has been approved by Congress...something to note in an especially obstructive Republican majority in the House of Representatives and an equally obstructive Senate minority not afraid to use the filibuster to gum up the works.  It's plain that a majority of Congress is in favor of at least the level of support that we have been providing. 

In their never-ending quest to say things that they hope we don't check the facts about, the Republican far-right caucus has been claiming that Ukrainian President Zelensky is "threatening" us, by claiming that Americans need to fight and die to defend Ukraine. Is that what he said? Nope. What he did  say was that if Ukraine was defeated, it was likely that Russia would not stop there, and we would be treaty-bound to defend fellow NATO nations if they were attacked. Of course, once this was pointed out to them, their follow up response was declare that we were not bound by international treaties (which, as required by the Constitution, was ratified by the Senate) and should not step in to defend our NATO allies. It sounds like a page from Losin' Donnie's playbook - who thought nothing of unilaterally withdrawing from international agreements, disparaging our allies, and treating our NATO obligations as a mere financial arrangement. 

While there should be an open and honest discussion regarding how involved we should get in Ukraine's defense, and I'm surely not suggesting we take everything Biden says at face value, I'm certainly uninterested in listening to the misrepresentations, exaggerations, and lies from the Tinfoil Hat Brigade. 

Woke

"Woke" is an adjective derived from African-American vernacular English meaning "alert to racial prejudice and discrimination". It's use can be traced back to the 1930's in Black communities but became more generally known during the Black Lives Matter protests in the mid 2010's. It was coopted by many White people to signal their support for Black Lives Matter, and eventually for progressive concerns in general. It was corrupted by its use by the right wing as a pejorative for their straw man version of progressive concerns.

Right wing politicians have been using the term "woke" to describe virtually anything that they don't like from the liberal/progressive side of the aisle. Conservatives decry "wokism" and pass "Stop Woke" laws, despite there being no such thing as "wokism", in that there is no universally agreed upon tenets that everyone who might describe themselves as "woke" would agree upon, although common ground would include equal rights for all, including gay and transgender people. 

Conservatives are adept at taking a term that progressives use, defining it in terms of a caricature of its most extreme or unpopular components, further demonizing that extreme position, then lumping in broad swath of progressive positions as part of that straw man definition. Once they have implanted that false, distorted definition in people's minds, the hard work is done. From that point on, all they have to do is call anything vaguely liberal as "woke" and they have a built-in opposition. This frees them from realistically framing and debating the actual issues and allows them to move right to the torches and pitchforks phase.  
 

National Divorce

Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, who I not-so-affectionately refer to as Marjorie Tinfoil Hat, has proposed a "National Divorce" separating the "red sates" from the "blue states", and shrinking the size of the federal government. Some days her idea sounds a bit like the secession that sparked the Civil War, other times it reads more like a return to the Articles of Confederation. For someone who claims to support The Constitution, it's a pretty unconstitutional plan. 

A lot of the opposition to her idea centers on the fact that red states receive more federal money than they contribute - and it's the opposite for blue states. In my opinion that's all beside the point. 

One thing Greene gets right is that Americans are not of one mind about how this country should be run. There is a great difference of opinion on what is best for the nation as a whole. What she gets wrong is that it's not merely two antagonistic points of view, it's a continuum. Not every conservative is a racist or a Nazi and not every liberal is a far-left radical. (Although I would be remiss if I didn't acknowledge that today's Republican Party, at least on the national level, seems in thrall to its most extreme members). Most people's political opinions are a combination of self-interest and ideology (which may be in opposition to self-interest), and both of those change according to time and circumstance. 

Even if you can lump all Americans in one of two sharply defined ideological/political camps, the split is cannot be drawn as neatly as the state boundaries on a map. The idea of a red or a blue state comes from how a majority of a state's electorate votes most of the time. For some states, that's pretty consistent, in others, it's more of a tossup. Some states, like Georgia, have sent two Democrats to the Senate, while electing Republicans as Governor as well as other statewide office. In other states the winners prevail by less than 1% of the votes, with half of the state supporting the losing party. In general, states where a majority of the population live in rural areas or small towns tend to vote Republican, while states where the majority cluster in urban areas vote Democratic. But there are always stretches of rural voters in blue states (see New York and California) and pockets of urban blue voters in red states. Does Greene's "divorce" account for the disenfranchisement of rural voters in blue states or urban voters in red states? One of her recent remarks suggested that blue state residents should move to red states, but be prohibited from voting for five years, until they absorb the local values. 

Another thing that Greene is missing is that, while there is a lot that the national government can do, there is plenty of action that state and local government can do as well. Throughout the country Republican governors and legislatures are taking extreme action to push their own agenda, even when they have a razor thin majority, or even when their legislative majority is due to gerrymandering. The federal government is powerless to prevent Florida Governor DeSantis from his push to force his own ideology on all Floridians: taking over education or punishing businesses that criticize him. My own state of Nebraska is well on its way to outlawing abortion, even though recent polls show that a majority of Nebraskans support its legality. On the other side of the coin, many blue states have legalized marijuana, despite it still being illegal nationally. 

Earlier I called Green's rantings "a plan" and "an idea", when it's really neither. It's a provocation, and a poorly thought-through provocation. 

How Do You Take Shelter From a Shit Storm?

I like to stay informed. I like to stay educated. I listen to people with differing opinions. When I see something online that seems kind of fishy, I look for sources that will confirm or debunk. Heck, when I see something that I very much want to be true, I seek out sources that will confirm or debunk. Not everything that I agree with turns out to be true and not everything that I disagree with turns out to be a lie. But lately it seems like there is just to much to keep up with. Of course, this is a feature, not a bug, of our political conversation. Steve Bannon, who, as repugnant as he is, is refreshingly honest about his malign intentions, called it "flooding the zone". So much misinformation and disinformation is churned out that you barely have time to figure out what the true story really is before you're hit with something else. The targeted undermining of mainstream media, especially over the last six years or so, has contributed to this problem. 

I'm not going to pretend that any media source is perfect. I'm also not going to pretend that there is a monolithic entity called "The Media". Every media outlet, from the long established to the newly sprung up, has its biases. It's not that difficult to determine what that bias consists of and allow for it. For the big kids, like The New York Times, or The Washington Post, the bias generally reveals itself in the opinion pages - editorials and columnists, as well as in what events and issues that they choose to cover and what to highlight. Very seldom, and by very seldom I mean "almost never" are the specific facts that one of these papers report on proved to be wrong. Then we have "fact checkers", who are also maligned by the people who subscribe to alternative facts. Most fact checking sources do more than just declare something true or false, they back up their pronouncements with checkable sources. If a politician says "ABC" and a fact checker declares it false, it usually presents evidence to debunk "ABC"; you can follow the breadcrumb trail yourself to verify. With both the fact checkers and most mainstream media reporting, they are not making unsupported assertions. 

With low confidence in the mainstream media, it's easy for anyone to spread disinformation, as long as it supports a narrative that people are predisposed to believe. There's no credible counterweight. 

The world of politics is one where the people in charge have to make tough decisions on a regular basis, and sometimes...a lot of the time...those decisions don't turn out the way they were envisioned. There's unintended consequences, there's unbelievable complexity. Look at two huge decisions that had to be made in the last few years: how to handle the Covid pandemic and what to do about our involvement in Afghanistan. When it first hit, Covid deaths were spiraling out of control. The transmissibility and lethality were both largely unknown. What we did know changed as time went on. What do you do about it? There was a variety of ways in which was handled across the country. Some methods of control turned out to be less effective than thought at first. There were, indeed, unintended consequences. Would there have been fewer deaths if controls had been tighter? Would fewer businesses have gone under if controls had been looser? We can guess, but we really don't know. By 2021 we have been embroiled in a seemingly endless, fruitless war in Afghanistan for 20 years. Presidents Obama and Trump elected to keep us there, utilizing different strategies. President Biden got us out. There was chaos and more than a dozen troops were killed in a terrorist attack on our way out. What would have happened if we had stayed? Was the a better way to handle the withdrawal? We can speculate, but we really don't know. It's pretty easy, however, to look back and pontificate about how it should have been handled differently. 

Which brings me to the zone that's flooded with shit. Social media, television interviews, partisan rallies, are all spewing out lies and distortions on a daily basis. We're still treated to assertions that the 2020 presidential election was won (by "a lot", by a landslide) as well as the more recent insistence by the loser of the Arizona governor's election that the courts should "declare her the winner", accompanied by accusations that the real winner, Governor Hobbs, is laundering money for Mexican drug cartels. Every action, and I mean every action by President Biden is attacked as evidence that he hates America, or that he is suffering from dementia, even if those same actions would have been mainstream Republican positions only recently. 

It's exhausting. 

Just Say You're A Bigot & Be Done With It

One of the things that the anti-Drag Queen crowd likes to say is that they're not ant-gay, but that they resent someone else's sexuality being "thrown in their face". They wonder aloud why someone has to define themselves publicly by who they have sex with, how their whole public identity centers around sex. Let's take a moment to debunk tat whole line of thinking. 

In the days when it was illegal to be gay, when it was perfectly acceptable to most of society to shun a gay person, gay people didn't have the option of publicly celebrating their sexuality. It was heterosexual society that defined them entirely in terms of who they had sex with. It was "straight" people who chose to focus on and demonize gay people for whom they had sex with. Even today, it's the heterosexual bigots who insist on making everything a gay person does about sex. Every gay person that I have ever met was a fully-formed, multi-faceted, complex person who never in my presence discussed their sex life. In my own experience I was much more likely to hear heterosexual men discuss, or even brag about, their sex lives (or lack of the same). 

These days, when there is (at least in most places) societal opprobrium at anti-gay bigotry, the homophobes have developed new ways to slip it in. Based on new laws that have passed, most notoriously in Florida, the legal assumption is that any mention or acknowledgement that someone is gay, or that gay people exist is equivalent to bringing up sex. The scolds on the right have justified this by claiming that since (in their minds) recognizing that gay people exist is discussing sex, and that it is inappropriate to discuss sex with young children, any mention of gay people, whether it's the school teacher mentioning in passing her wife, or reading a book with gay characters, is banned. Is a crime. They go further by claiming that by introducing what they call sexual topics to young children they are "grooming" them for sexual abuse by adults - pedophilia. The fact that a male teacher can casually refer to his wife, or that books can be read that include parents where one is male and one is female, or that "straight" characters (who, if adults, surely have sex lives) are assumed to not be promoting sex, pretty obviously shows how the problem is with the existence of gay people, not that anyone is really trying to sexualize or "groom" little kids. 

Reference to gay people is assumed by the bigots to be harmful, while similar references to heterosexuals is assumed to be innocuously "normal" - that says it all. Homophobia is still alive and well in the U.S.A., they're just covering it up with a thin veneer of care for the children. 

Arguing With Idiots

Occasionally I'll see some right wing politician vow to ban "CRT" in the schools and some well-meaning progressive will chime in with some variation of "Foolish Republican, no high school is teaching CRT" as if the argument was won. But what does a right winger mean when they refer to Critical Race Theory?

Critical Race Theory is a specialized college level "...cross-disciplinary examination...of how laws, social and political movements, and media shape, and are shaped by social conceptions of race and ethnicity". See the Wikipedia article on Critical Race Theory for more information. It is assuredly not a monolith of beliefs about race, and critiques liberal views as well as conservative. It's a process, not a belief. And the hypothetical progressive cited above is right, Critical Race Theory isn't being taught in any elementary or high school, and in very few colleges. So what do Republicans and rightists mean when the say Critical Race Theory, or CRT?

Most people, no matter their political views, have no real idea what CRT is, but right wingers have constructed a straw man version of CRT. To them CRT is an insidious plan to convince White children to hate themselves because they are White, to paint all White people as racists and that there's nothing good or admirable about American history. They then lump anything that suggests that slavery was anything but a passing anomaly in American history, or that racism persisted into and beyond Reconstruction into their fantasy version of CRT. The straw man CRT is any courses that shine a spotlight on Black achievement or that even suggest that racism exists. For the right, it's a blank canvass on which to paint anything that's race-related. They have framed CRT as dangerous, using their own incorrect definition, then connected everything race-related to that distorted definition. They don't know what it is, so they construct their own imaginary definition, then cram in everything that they don't like about race relations into that definition. This allows anyone with the power to determine school curriculum to remove references to post Reconstruction disenfranchisement of Blacks or even the 1960's civil rights movement, just by calling it "CRT". 

So, just proclaiming that "no school is teaching CRT" doesn't go far enough. We have to address what they're actually saying, because they're not saying that they want to ban something that doesn't exist, they're really saying that they want a fairy-tale version of whitewashed history, and to not address very real horrors that took place in this nation.