Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
“If I Had My Way” is one of the great protest songs (aka “Samson and Delilah”). The biblical story of Samson expresses the theme that a primitive and chaotic force beneath protest can escape all restraint. Samson is a destroyer: “He lifted up that jawbone and he swung it over his head / And when he got to moving ten thousand was dead.” No specification of who exactly died is necessary, for it doesn’t much matter with Samson.
We might think the story is a warning, but what makes “If I Had My Way” so electrifying is the chorus celebrating Samson’s destructive spirit:
If I had my way If I had my way in this wicked world If I had my way I would tear this building down
The listener singing along revels vicariously in a rage so deep it has become nihilism: things are so bad I no longer care and just want to tear it all down. The revolutionary intent is clear in the anecdote about Samson in which he kills a lion with his bare hands: “And the bees made honey in the lion’s head.” The symbolism is obvious: lions always represent rulers; the bees are workers; and honey is the sweet life. Samson is the working class’s spirit of vengeance against a condescending and abusive ruling class. It is a spirit that has started to move again in our own wicked world.
I
Let us start with the song of an angry strongman. In the second section, we’ll consider how the nihilistic spirit of Samson has been awakened by a political betrayal of democratic promises. In the final section, we’ll look at philosophical ideas about what we imagine should keep that spirit from waking. First, though, the song.
Most people know “If I Had My Way” either from Peter, Paul and Mary’s 1962 version (from which I quote) or The Grateful Dead’s 1977 “Samson and Delilah.” But the song is a traditional African-American spiritual dating back at least to the early 20th century (three versions recorded in 1927), and maybe all the way to slavery. (The folk music magazine Sing Out! explores the song’s history in a four-part 2019 article: 1, 2, 3, 4.) Rev. Gary Davis brought it into the folk revival of the civil rights era in 1960, and then Peter, Paul and Mary brought it to mainstream audiences on their first album, which was so popular that royalties from it kept Rev. Davis (given copyright credit) financially secure for life (Sing Out!). I take Peter, Paul and Mary’s as the definitive version, in part because it is substantially rearranged to make the protest elements explicit. Read more »
Most of the “better sort” were not genuine Sons of Liberty at all, but timid sycophants, pliant instruments of despotism… —Carl Lotus Becker
It doesn’t take a lot of effort to be a bootlicker. Find a boss or someone with the personality of a petty tyrant, sidle up to them, subjugate yourself, and find something flattering to say. Tell them they’re handsome or pretty, strong or smart, and make sweet noises when they trot out their ideas. Literature and history are riddled with bootlickers: Thomas Cromwell, the advisor to Henry VIII, Polonius in Hamlet, Mr. Collins in Pride and Predjudice, and of course Uriah Heep in David Copperfield.
There are some good words to describe these traits: sycophant, kiss-ass, toady, lackey, yes-man. One of my favorites is the word oleaginous, derived from oleum. It means oily and one of the best examples of this quality is the senator from the oil state, Ted Cruz. That man is oilier than the Permian Basin—oilier than thou!
There is something repulsive about lickspittles, especially when all the licking is being done for political purposes. It’s repulsive when we see it in others and it’s repulsive when we see it in ourselves It has to do with the lack of sincerity and the self-abasement required to really butter someone up. In the animal world, it’s rolling onto your back and exposing the vulnerable stomach and throat—saying I am not a threat.
We have a political class nowadays that is more subservient and submissive than the most beta dogs in a pack of golden retrievers. Most of them live in Washington DC and are Republicans. They are fully grown men and women, some in their autumnal years, still desperately yearning for a pat on the head or a chuck under the chin by President Trump. You see them crowding around him when he signs a bill, straining forward like children and batting their eyes with pick-me, pick-me smiles.
There are dozens of theories about a nation as a whole and individuals as separate beings willing to bow and scrape to an authoritarian figure. Hannah Arendt suggested that loneliness had a lot to do with it. She distinguished loneliness from solitude, the former being isolating and disempowering, the latter being a desirable state to think and reflect and meditate on things. Most of us know the paradox of feeling very lonely in certain crowds or with certain people and not lonely at all on our own in the right setting. Read more »
The re-election of Donald Trump has prompted a spectrum of reactions among those who are . . . unenthusiastic . . . at this outcome. One common reaction I’ve observed among progressive friends and those who enthusiastically rather than grudgingly vote Democrat is confusion. Many reactions are understandable: dread about the implications for climate change, concern for the human rights of undocumented migrants in the US, or a low-grade panic over the fact that the Supreme Court has literally vested the office with immunity against legal persecution for assassinations, although apparently Obama’s assassinations of US citizens get a pass. Confusion, however, is only explicable as a consequence of a media ecosystem which rarely manages to coherently discuss many of the serious issues in American society, and crucially the role of policy choices by the government under both Democratic and Republican leadership which either failed to address or directly exacerbated these problems.
As any very stable genius glancing at a red hat in public can tell you, the appeal which won Mr. Trump his first democratic victory is ultimately rooted in nostalgia. But nostalgia for what exactly? Was American really greater in the past than it is now? And if so what changed and why?
Well this is a layered question. There is of course the obvious fact that for a non-negligible share of Trump voters this nostalgia is rooted in a time before the Civil Rights Act extended de jure if not de facto equal rights to non-white, non-christian, non-heteronormative non-men. If nothing else one can look at the day one rescinding of Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Accessibility programs across the federal government and its contractors as an appeasement to that crowd. However, while this discrimination is indisputably a crucial aspect of American society and will continue to severely negatively affect human rights in the US, it is also not the only reason for Trump’s election. This in evidence from the increases Trump made among non-white voters, although the total numbers are still biased towards white men.
For the moment however, I do not want focus specifically on the very important issue of racism and discrimination, and instead look to other causes for support for Trump, although the USA being what it is, it will still permeate the discussion. Let’s start with the short term. Assuming there was a modicum of greatness in Trump’s first term we can look to an April 2024 New York Times / Sienna poll for what voters remembered about 2017-2021. Read more »
Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed— Let it be that great strong land of love Where never kings connive nor tyrants scheme That any man be crushed by one above. —Langston Hughes
Dust Bowl, Oklahoma
The years from 1930 to 1945 were some of the most trying times in American history. Our forebears suffered close to ten years of The Great Depression and then, with next to no pause, were thrust into five years of World War II. It’s no wonder that so many men and women of that generation who survived those struggles came away with a quiet stoicism and other-worldly courage. I have a nostalgia for a time I never saw because I knew many of the people who were shaped by those times, and I miss them.
George Orwell said, “Each generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it.” That’s one affliction I don’t suffer from. I consider the generation that weathered The Great Depression and World War II to be, for the most part, a cut above any generation since. I don’t think it was necessarily their innate character, but rather their mettle shaped by the age.
Having read a number of letters written to the White House during The Great Depression (from a wonderful collection in Down and Out in the Great Depression: Letters from the Forgotten Man by Robert S. McElvaine), I know that the times led to much bitterness and suffering. How could it not? But a tender humility and reserve also runs through much of the correspondence. Many of the writers address the president or first lady as if they were intimate family who might somehow wrangle them a job or free them from their desperate situation. One thirty-one-year-old woman expecting a baby writes,
Dear Mrs. Roosevelt: I know you are overburdened with requests for help and if my plea cannot be recognized, I’ll understand it is because you have so many others, all of them worthy…. We thought surely our dreams of a family could come true. Then the work ended and like “The best laid plans of mice and men” our hopes were crushed again.
A widow with a fourteen-year-old son writes to Eleanor Roosevelt asking if she has a spare coat to get through the winter and even offers to pay for postage if the first lady will send her one. A woman with seven children and just sixty-five cents to her name writes to Franklin Roosevelt asking for help to feed children too proud to beg for lunch.
In reading these letters, it’s clear that many of the writers truly believed Eleanor or Franklin would actually send them a winter coat or give them a job. Read more »
Timothy Snyder’s dictum, “Do Not Obey in Advance,” seems to be everywhere these days. It’s the title of the first chapter of his book out in 2017: On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century, which is worth a revisit along with conformity experiments that back up his concerns and some clarification from a recent podcast.
When I first read this book seven years ago, it seemed like a concern for a far off future that would surely not happen in my lifetime. But it has lately reemerged as a prescient warning, and now there are more obvious signs that we need a path through potential political ruptures. In the first few pages, Mr. Snyder points out the power we have in avoiding acceptance of tyranny and the danger we fall into if we do obey:
“After the German elections of 1932, which permitted Adolf Hitler to form a government, or the Czechoslovak elections of 1946, where communists were victorious, the next crucial step was anticipatory obedience. Because enough people in both cases voluntarily extended their services to the new leaders, Nazis and communists alike realized that they could move quickly toward a full regime change. The first heedless acts of conformity could not then be reversed. …As the political theorist Hannah Arendt remembered, ‘when German troops invaded the country and Gentile neighbors started riots at Jewish homes, Austrian Jews began to commit suicide.'”
It’s the mere act of going along that could determine if we lose another mass of people in heinous ways, divided apart from among us in one way or another. We’re seeing that unnerving agreement already in some political speeches and pretty mainstream news outlets.
Mr. Snyder writes about Stanley Milgram’s attempts to “show that there was a particular authoritarian personality that explained why Germans behaved as they had” with his shock experiments conducted on hundreds of people. Instead, when most of his participants shocked another person until their perceived death, “Milgram grasped that people are remarkably receptive to new rules in a new setting. They are surprisingly willing to harm and kill others in the service of some new purpose if they are so instructed by a new authority.”
This experiment was one of many that came after WWII to try to figure out what could possibly have compelled regular people to participate in the rounding up and gassing of millions of people. Hitler couldn’t have done all that on his own, but he was able to sway the masses to join in. We need to be aware of this stark reality to ensure we, ourselves, don’t end up passively agreeing to harm others or allow harm to come to others. Read more »
People who have never been to sleepaway camp, don’t get it. They tease me when I speak about memories that are decades old, as if I am recalling a past life that never happened. They find it strange that I view my many years at camp as not merely summer vacations but as forces that helped to make me who I am. These camp memories visit me more deeply when the winter sky sets early, fooling me into believing that 4:30 pm is really past midnight. If I am roaming, I wonder if it is already time to go home. I linger. Yes, my summer camp taught me to roam physically—and in my imagination. It was free and free-range.
I’ll tarry briefly where many good tales begin. In the middle: My teenage years, as a camp clerk and then as babysitter for a camp director and finally, as a counselor. These summer jobs were woefully underpaid. But the fringe benefits were great: Opportunities to break rules that were often not enforced, anyway.
I smoked my first joint, out in the open, sitting with friends on a large rock by the lake, right after a late summer sunset. If caught by a camp director, we would have been fired. I don’t think they wanted to catch us. They were somewhere else, smoking their own joints. Romance, along with pot, seemed to be part of the plan for young employees, particularly in regard to the kitchen boys over whom we swooned. My camp, socialist at its core and run by lefty social workers, did not believe in waiters. To check out a kitchen boy, campers and staff had to go to one of several pantries to pick up or deliver food, plates and utensils. A chore made joyful.
In regard to specific romance, I remember the night I spent with a slightly older male counselor, sleeping with him in his tent—and not doing much more than sleeping. (Maybe it was the pot). Before dawn I shoved him awake and said: “I have to go, I will get into trouble.” He laughed a sleepy laugh, perhaps a stoner laugh and said: “Barbara, this is Wel-Met. Nobody gets in trouble for sleeping with someone.” Read more »
Photo from the publication “Curtis Cuffie.” Scot Portnoy, Robert Snowden, Ciarán Finlayson (eds.); Katy Able, Carol Thompson, Curtis Cuffie, Michael Galinsky, Margaret Morton, and Tom Warren (photos), 2023.
I recognized the corner immediately: it was right next to Cooper Union, on Lafayette Street in downtown Manhattan. There used to be a large parking lot on the other side of the street, where passers-by occasionally happened upon a colorful bricolage cobbled together from stuffed animals and clothes, discarded household items, deformed umbrellas, and battered car parts. These strange and playful conglomerations looked as though the bric-a-brac and refuse had been plucked together by some invisible furious force to house a spirit or daemon. They were, of course, carefully composed works by the late African-American artist Curtis Cuffie, one of the many ephemeral assemblages he created in the streets of downtown New York in the 1980s and 1990s.
Photo from the publication “Curtis Cuffie.” Scot Portnoy, Robert Snowden, Ciarán Finlayson (eds.); Katy Able, Carol Thompson, Curtis Cuffie, Michael Galinsky, Margaret Morton, and Tom Warren (photos), 2023.
Cuffie installed his improvised ensembles of found objects on fences, window grilles, sidewalks, and traffic signs in Cooper Square, the Bowery, and elsewhere; they were always temporary, and only a few of his works have survived. Cuffie periodically lived on the streets around Cooper Square and his homelessness must have made his emotional tie to the treasures he found and wheeled around in shopping carts all the more urgent. Most of the works he created from this repertoire of materials were abstract, shrines that seemed to grow out of the flotsam and jetsam of a city in constant transformation; seen from a passing car, they flashed in the sideview mirror like otherworldly apparitions. But there were also figurative sculptures: ragged garments strung on wire and string and adorned with hats or wigs became animated spirits on a secret mission. Today, the few remaining works by Cuffie that were not taken down and destroyed by the police or street cleaners are shown and sold in the pristine white spaces of uptown Manhattan galleries, stripped of their context and also, perhaps, a good deal of their meaning. Read more »
On September 1, 2004, a middle-aged Russian journalist named Anna Politkovskaya boarded a plane in Moscow on her way to Ossetia to cover a hostage crisis in the town of Beslan. During the flight, she drank a cup of tea that almost killed her. After she drank the tea, she became disoriented, began to vomit, and ultimately lost consciousness. She was taken to a hospital in Rostov-on-Don, where doctors concluded she had been poisoned.
Politkovskaya had been reporting on the human rights abuses in Russia and Chechnya for some time and was a harsh critic of Vladimir Putin. In one of her books she had written, “If you live in Russia, you cannot help but notice that Putin’s Russia is a world of violence, lies, and injustice.”
Throughout her career, Politkovskaya received death threats and was heavily surveilled by the Russian government. But the intimidation didn’t stop her, and she wrote hundreds of articles for the independent newspaper Novaya Gazeta and several books highly critical of Putin. In her 2004 book, Putin’s Russia, she bravely wrote about the corruption, human rights abuses, and oligarchy in Russia with an unflinching style.
In short, she was a daring, hardworking investigative journalist who risked her life to write about the cruel and criminal aspects of Russia. She was assassinated in the elevator of her apartment building on October 7, 2006—Vladimir Putin’s birthday. Read more »
It’s a book about how our political system fell into this downward spiral—a doom loop of toxic politics. It’s a story that requires thinking big—about the nature of political conflict, about broad changes in American society over many decades, and, most of all, about the failures of our political institutions. (2)
Where to begin fixing our dysfunctional society is about as contentious a question as there is. Lee Drutman’s 2020 book Breaking the Two-Party Doom Loop: The Case for Multiparty Democracy in America confronts it head-on. Chapter 1, “What the Framers Got Right and What They Got Wrong,” goes straight to the heart of the matter: what the Founding Fathers got wrong is political parties. They understood the threat of tyranny that parties (“factions”) posed, but they misunderstood the benefits and inevitability of parties. They structured our government to discourage parties, instead of to accommodate them. As Drutman explains, those structural weaknesses have finally caught up with us in today’s toxic partisanship.
Like the Founders, Drutman gets important things right and wrong. He says, “At its core, my argument can be distilled into two words: institutions matter” (4). Political parties are the institutions he defends and criticizes. What we need parties to provide are substantive choices, not coercive conformity or destabilizing toxicity. This focus on parties is one of the many, many things Drutman gets right in his well-written, informative, and important book. When he turns from diagnosis to solution, though, he gets one big thing wrong. Read more »
In fiction, there is one story that never gets old: the good man or good woman who is imprisoned or abused, but through strength of character and the force of justice retakes their rightful place in the world. It can be the story of a woman violated by a man or degraded by her envious sisters, a giant of a man lashed down by Lilliputians, a patriot wrongly accused of a crime he didn’t commit or an entire town poisoned by the effluence of a shameless company.
What we love about these stories is the painful sense of injustice followed by a courageous walk to redemption. The dirtier the crime against our hero, the more delicious his or her comeback.
America is deep in the midst of this story. What we love about this country—its possibility to reinvent itself, its original aspiring words about freedom and equality, its grand universities, its thousands of life-changing inventions, its artists and scientists—is in the midst of being degraded and defiled by a bunch of craven, shrill, fake patriots. They’re called MAGATS.
Like many Americans, I tried hard to understand their complaints about the world after Donald Trump got elected in 2016. I read books and articles about how America’s rural states were ignored, about how the flyover states were being left behind, and about how the coastal elites were conspiring to create socialism under a deep state. I’m a bit of an empath so I really tried to walk in the MAGAT moccasins.
I took consideration of the fact that it’s really hard, if not impossible, to lead the old American life of raising a family on one income. I took consideration of the increasing disparities of income between the bottom quintile and the top one percent. Some of the complaints are legitimate, but MAGAT politicians show little interest in alleviating those things and mostly bring forth legislation that makes things worse. Read more »
Slaughterers of ideals with the violence of fate Have cast man in the darkness of labyrinths intricate To be the prey and carnage of hounds of war and hate. –Ruben Dario, Nicaraguan Poet
Daniel Ortega in his Younger Years
Between my junior and senior years of college, I spent part of a summer in Costa Rica studying Spanish in the capitol city of San Jose. This was 1987 when the war was still going on in neighboring Nicaragua between the Sandinistas and the Contras. I met a young Texan studying Spanish at the same school and he and I hit it off and became friends. We were both interested in the war going on in Nicaragua and decided we’d fly up there for a few days to see what was really going on. On the day we were supposed to fly from Costa Rica to Managua, my friend called me and said he had decided not to go. I had a moment of hesitation, but having bought a plane ticket and very eager to see Nicaragua I decided to go on my own.
As our plane descended into the Managua airport, I saw a lot of military vehicles along the runway and began questioning my judgment: Americans were, after all, giving military aid to the Contras, the army fighting the newly established government under Daniel Ortega. Why on earth would the customs people let me into their country? But they did.
At the time visitors were required to exchange about $400 US for Nicaraguan currency and that amounted to a huge cellophane-wrapped package of Nicaraguan bills. In those days with the war going on, there was no easy way to line up lodging or transportation, so I walked out of the airport on a dark night with a huge package of currency in my hands and no idea where I was going to spend the night. Read more »
At dawn on February 24, 2022, Russian President Vladimir Putin announced a “special military operation,” in Ukraine—a euphemism for war, if ever there was one. Since that morning, the fortitude of the Ukrainian people has resounded, even as the Middle East vies for our attention. For me, evidence of this grit—as fertile as Ukraine’s soil—arrives weekly, if not daily, in messages from a young woman in a western city. She writes from Ternopil, a relatively safe place. But from her I have heard that no place in Ukraine is truly safe.
I have also heard that its people are determined to stay, survive and rebuild.
My contact is not a war correspondent. She is an English language instructor, a teacher, a college administrator and the mother of two small children. In other words: A regular citizen. Her name is Oksana Fuk and we have been corresponding since hours after that terrifying dawn, almost two years ago, when Russia invaded her country.
We may have met in person years ago, when she was an internationally-recruited counselor at a camp for developmentally disabled children and adults in the upstate New York Catskill Mountains. What we are sure about is that she knows our elder son, Daniel Mulvaney, who has non-speaking autism and attended this camp for many summers.
On February 24, 2022, as I was searching for more news about the invasion—my mother was born in Ukraine—Oksana’s name popped up on my Facebook feed. I saw that she had worked at Dan’s camp.
When we first connected it was 4 p.m. on Long Island where I live. By then the invasion that morning had been front page news worldwide. It was 11 p.m. in Ternopil. Read more »
“It is not often that you see life and fiction take each other by the hand and dance.” ―Lawrence Thornton, Imagining Argentina
Argentine President Javier Milei
Watching the recent elections in Argentina makes an arm-chair economist like me face-palm myself. The country that was once one the richest in the world, the country that has an embarrassingly large assortment of riches—wheat, oil, soybeans, cattle, olives, grapes, minerals and the like–can’t get out of its own way when it comes to retaking its place as a wealthy nation.
In November, Argentina elected Javier Milei, the self-described anarcho-capitalist, as its new president. Milei has a little of everything—a dash of Brazil’s ex-president Bolsonaro, a dash of Trump, and a dash of Elon Musk. He’s like one of those fruitcakes passed around at Christmas with all the colorful little radioactive bits that you can’t quite identify.
Milei was a blasphemous candidate, calling Pope Francis—himself an Argentine– an hijo de puta (son of a bitch), calling the president of Brazil (Argentina’s second biggest trading partner) a corrupt communist and even taking a shot at Micky Mouse, comparing him “…to every Argentine politician because he is a disgusting rodent whom everybody loves.” He’s also a climate-change denier who believes the sale of human organs should be legal and even dithers on the sale of children, saying that it’s essentially context-dependent. Read more »
If you submitted yourself to the idiotic torture over last week’s battle to elect the speaker of the house for the 118th Congress, then you deserve a break from that idiocy and the chance to think about something else. American politics at the national level make toxic uranium dumps seem like tea gardens. The petulance and pettiness of many of our politicians make daycare centers seem like bastions of diplomatic protocol.
But there are things to think about in this great land that are a salve and rampart against the most cretinous of our congresspersons: the many efforts of Americans to steward lands back to health.
Let’s not mince words: in a few hundred years on this continent, we have trashed millions of acres and imperiled thousands of species. From Seattle to Tampa, from Galveston to Fargo, and even in parts of Alaska, what we’re facing is the aftermath of a resource-eating orgy. Now we face the unpleasant hangover and picking up all the broken bottles. But some Americans with pluck, eternal optimism, can-do, and deep allegiance to the land are doing it. Read more »
“It is certain, in any case, that ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have.” —James Baldwin
The election a couple of weeks ago came as a relief to many of us. It was not a feeling of happily getting back on track again but rather a sense of relief that we hadn’t entirely lost our democracy to shrill lunatics intent on building a bargain-bin version of American fascism. The Republican Party today is unrecognizable even to rock-ribbed Republicans. When someone from the Cheney family threatens to leave the party for its cowardice and extremism, you know you’re dealing with a party that has completely lost its way.
A Republican used to be someone like Dwight Eisenhower, a moderate who worked well with the opposing party, even meeting weekly with their leadership in the Senate and House. Eisenhower expanded social security benefits and, against the more right-wing elements of his party, appointed Earl Warren to be the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. Warren, you’ll remember, wrote the majority opinion of Brown v Board of Education, Miranda v Arizona, and Loving v Virginia. If Dwight Eisenhower were alive today, he would be branded a RINO and a communist by his own party. I suspect he would become registered as unaffiliated. Read more »
I’m not sure what Americans were like in the 18th and 19th century, but they have to have been a lot tougher, less whining, less self-important and paradoxically more exceptional without thinking they were exceptional than Americans of today.
Even Americans born well into the 20th century had a stoic quality and a modest sense of their own importance that seems to have been washed out of our culture. Not many WWII veterans left, but the ones I’ve met spoke about their battles at Normandy or in the South Pacific as just something that needed to get done. The people I knew who lived through The Great Depression said it was tough but made light of their own hardships.
Much of our citizenry today resemble loud spoiled children, whining and whingeing at every inconvenience, and trotting out opinions on the most complex matters—with zero formal training or any in-depth research. I fear that to other countries we look like one of those screaming toddlers having a fit in a very public place. Sort of an international cringe.
The recent melt-down over gas prices is a prime example of American petulance. Does the increase in gas prices affect the average American family? Yes it does. Are the fits over gas prices in proportion to the issue and do most Americans understand how gas prices are set? No and no. Read more »
“I consider it completely unimportant who in the party vote, or how; but what is extraordinarily important is this–who will count the votes and how.” –Joseph Stalin
In the game of chess, there are dramatic moves such as when a knight puts the king in check while at the same time attacking the queen from the same square. Such a move is called a fork, and it’s always a delicious feeling to watch your opponent purse his lips and shake his head when you manage a good fork. The most dramatic move is obviously checkmate, when you capture the king, hide your delight, and put the pieces back in the box. But getting to either the fork or checkmate involves what’s known in chess as positioning, and for the masters, often involves quiet moves long in advance of the victory.
I wouldn’t compare Republican operators to a Garry Kasparov or Magnus Carlsen, but in several swing states that could determine the 2024 presidential elections, they are playing their own version of a quiet game and positioning to win the election by hook or by rook. As opposed to a Kasparov or a Carlsen, there’s nothing elegant about their strategy, and what they’re attempting to do is really an end-around any form of democracy. It involves the chess equivalent of mid-level pieces—bishops, knights, and even pawns–and in some cases, political positions you’ve probably never heard of.
The Republicans have taken a clinical look at the demographics, the voting trends, and the results of the 2020 election and concluded that a traditional play of just big money and ugly ads won’t do it next time. Yes, there will be a lot of ads with dark music, photoshopped images (using the darkening and contrast feature), and the menacing voice-over saying, “Candidate X wants to free all the criminals, raise your taxes to Venezuelan levels, and concede Texas to Russia.”
But to win in 2024, Republicans are working to change basic electoral rules, install vote counters and election judges, and make it much more difficult for those who would vote against their candidate to vote. You don’t have to be a grandmaster of politics to understand the plan and to see it happening in plain sight. But I fear that the average American voter, due to either the hazards of having a real life or lacking interest, is missing the beat. Read more »
We tend to think of democracy as a set of governmental institutions. We see it as a political order characterized by open elections, constitutional constraints, the rule of law, freedom of speech, a free press, an independent judiciary, and so on. This makes good sense. These institutions indeed loom large in our political lives.
However, political institutions differ considerably from one purportedly democratic society to the next. Voting procedures, representation schemes, conceptions of free speech, and judicial arrangements are not uniform across societies that are widely regarded as democratic. In some of these countries, voting is required by law and military service is mandatory. In others, these acts are voluntary. Some democratic countries have distinct speech restrictions, others have different and blurrier boundaries. And the ancient Athenians appointed their representatives to the Boule by lot, instead of by vote. Given these variations, how can these societies all be democracies?
This leads to the thought that although certain institutional forms are characteristic of democracies, democracy itself should be identified with the kind of society those institutions realize. We hence can see how two societies with distinct constitutions nevertheless can be democratic.
This prompts the obvious question: What kind of society is a democracy? Read more »
Human beings are rather silly creatures. Some of us cheer billionaires into space while our planet burns. Some of us think vaccines cause autism, that the earth is flat, that anthropogenic climate change is not real, that COVID-19 is a hoax, and that diamonds have intrinsic value. Many of us believe things that are not fully justified, and we continue to believe these things even in the face of new evidence that goes against our position. This is to say, many people are woefully irrational. However, what makes this state of affairs perhaps even more depressing is that even if you think you are a reasonably well-informed person, you are still far from being fully rational. Decades of research in social psychology and behavioural economics has shown that not only are we horrific decision makers, we are also consistently horrific. This makes sense: we all have fairly similar ‘hardware’ (in the form of brains, guts, and butts) and thus it follows that there would be widely shared inconsistencies in our reasoning abilities.
This is all to say, in a very roundabout way, we get things wrong. We elect the wrong leaders, we believe the wrong theories, and we act in the wrong ways. All of this becomes especially disastrous in the case of climate change. But what if there was a way to escape this tragic epistemic situation? What if, with the use of an AI-powered surveillance state, we could simply make it impossible for us to do the ‘wrong’ things? As Ivan Karamazov notes in the tale of The Grand Inquisitor (in The Brothers Karamzov by Dostoevsky), the Catholic Church should be praised because it has “vanquished freedom… to make men happy”. By doing so it has “satisfied the universal and everlasting craving of humanity – to find someone to worship”. Human beings are incapable of managing their own freedom. We crave someone else to tell us what to do, and, so the argument goes, it would be in our best interest to have an authority (such as the Catholic Church, as in the original story) with absolute power ruling over us. This, however, contrasts sharply with liberal-democratic norms. My goal is to show that we can address the issues raised by climate change without reinventing the liberal-democratic wheel. That is, we can avoid the kind of authoritarianism dreamed up by Ivan Karamazov. Read more »
Where I live in Colorado there are unstable elements of the landscape that sometimes fail. In severe cases, millions of tons of rock, silt, sand, and mud can shift, leading to massive landslides. The signs aren’t always evident because the breakdown in the structural geology often happens quietly underground. The invisible changes can take hundreds or thousands of years, but when a landslide takes place, it is fast and violent. And the new landscape that comes after is unrecognizable.
Democracies, like landscapes, take time to erode and the erosion isn’t always obvious to those living within its structure. Seemingly small things like villainizing the press, vicious attacks on political candidates, gerrymandering districts, voter suppression, and allowing vast amounts of money to enter the campaign process are all erosive forces that, taken individually, don’t seem like much. But taken together, over time, they break down democracies and invite darker forms of government.
When you start to speak about democracy in this country, it can get wispy and abstract in a hurry. Most of us were taught about democracy as school children in breathless, fabled terms. It’s hard to get past the myths of our founders and our founding to consider both how young and how clunky our democracy really is. For perspective, the oldest tree in the country is a bristlecone pine named Methuselah that sits in eastern California and had its beginning as a seed over 4,000 years before the convention in Philadelphia that hot summer of 1787. We think of our democracy as about 230 years old from the time when the Constitution was signed and George Washington first took office. But it’s only been 156 years since African Americans were freed and only about 100 years since women were guaranteed the right to vote by the Nineteenth Amendment. So our true democracy, at least on paper, is really only about 100 years old, closer to the lifespan of a cottonwood tree. And yet just 100 years into it, since the day when everyone was theoretically given the right to vote, things in the United States are wobbling and teetering. Read more »
It doesn’t take a lot of effort to be a bootlicker. Find a boss or someone with the personality of a petty tyrant, sidle up to them, subjugate yourself, and find something flattering to say. Tell them they’re handsome or pretty, strong or smart, and make sweet noises when they trot out their ideas. Literature and history are riddled with bootlickers: Thomas Cromwell, the advisor to Henry VIII, Polonius in Hamlet, Mr. Collins in Pride and Predjudice, and of course Uriah Heep in David Copperfield.
There is something repulsive about lickspittles, especially when all the licking is being done for political purposes. It’s repulsive when we see it in others and it’s repulsive when we see it in ourselves It has to do with the lack of sincerity and the self-abasement required to really butter someone up. In the animal world, it’s rolling onto your back and exposing the vulnerable stomach and throat—saying I am not a threat.
It’s a book about how our political system fell into this downward spiral—a doom loop of toxic politics. It’s a story that requires thinking big—about the nature of political conflict, about broad changes in American society over many decades, and, most of all, about the failures of our political institutions. (2)
A Republican used to be someone like Dwight Eisenhower, a moderate who worked well with the opposing party, even meeting weekly with their leadership in the Senate and House. Eisenhower expanded social security benefits and, against the more right-wing elements of his party, appointed Earl Warren to be the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. Warren, you’ll remember, wrote the majority opinion of Brown v Board of Education, Miranda v Arizona, and Loving v Virginia. If Dwight Eisenhower were alive today, he would be branded a RINO and a communist by his own party. I suspect he would become registered as unaffiliated. 
I’m not sure what Americans were like in the 18th and 19th century, but they have to have been a lot tougher, less whining, less self-important and paradoxically more exceptional without thinking they were exceptional than Americans of today.
In the game of chess, there are dramatic moves such as when a knight puts the king in check while at the same time attacking the queen from the same square. Such a move is called a fork, and it’s always a delicious feeling to watch your opponent purse his lips and shake his head when you manage a good fork. The most dramatic move is obviously checkmate, when you capture the king, hide your delight, and put the pieces back in the box. But getting to either the fork or checkmate involves what’s known in chess as positioning, and for the masters, often involves quiet moves long in advance of the victory.
Where I live in Colorado there are unstable elements of the landscape that sometimes fail. In severe cases, millions of tons of rock, silt, sand, and mud can shift, leading to massive landslides. The signs aren’t always evident because the breakdown in the structural geology often happens quietly underground. The invisible changes can take hundreds or thousands of years, but when a landslide takes place, it is fast and violent. And the new landscape that comes after is unrecognizable.