I did a part 1 so I owe a part 2. (I’d like to do a series but I don’t think it will all go with this particular title.)
Right. In part 1, I considered whether D’s really believe that the R party is, as Biden suggested in his speech, a standing threat to democracy, due to Trump and MAGA. Douthat (and others) have suggested that D behavior suggests this is a bit of a put-on. D’s don’t seem to be taking the threat seriously. My counter-argument is that if you think there is, like, a 20% threat to democracy from the R’s, that’s hard to deal with coherently. Partly you want to set your hair on fire and run around screaming ‘danger!’, partly you want to just keep calm and carry on. But those responses are cognitively dissonant, which makes you look insincere – probably about the hair-on-fire part. But that’s actually not right. The dissonance fits the uncertain facts.
So let’s turn to the R’s. Do the R’s really believe that Trump and Trumpism is NOT a threat to democracy AND/OR that D’s are actually the real threat to democracy due to ‘Russia Russia Russia hoax’ perpetrating, election-stealing Dark Brandon and his illegal, student-debt-cancelling ways, plus his nefarious son Hunter?
I want to try to be non-polemical, non-abusive about this (not too abusive yet I want to be efficiently dismissive of stuff that’s obviously not true. Life’s too short and all that.) I also want to acknowledge upfront that obviously there is a huge range of opinion and belief. There are paranoid Trump cultists who believe weird shit about Italian satellites stealing votes from Trump. All the Kraken stuff and 2000 Mules stuff. Obviously no one who isn’t seriously in the tank for Trump believes anything of the sort. If there were actual evidence, we’d have seen it by now. So belief in conspiracy theories is motivated reasoning of an extreme sort. So there is something else going on underneath to motivate belief in these weird conspiracy theories; also, a lot of the ‘belief’ has got to be semi-performative, just something you say to express how much you don’t like Biden. But, in order to feel good about yourself, you’ve got to believe the stuff you have to say. It’s tribal. Identity politics. Rather than getting a tattoo, to permanently join the gang, you almost self-induce doxastic scarring. You believe a crazy thing, so you can’t ever get out, because there’s nowhere else to go for people who believe such crazy stuff.
Also, I think that the ‘Russia Russia Russia stuff’ has genuinely succeeded in having an epistemic impact outside the core MAGA cult. This gets us into the world of anti-anti-Trumpers and generally R’s who don’t like Trump but are going to ride along and hope things get better. They have to have a story to tell and a big part of it is: Trump may be bad, but he was also treated real bad over the Russia stuff. So it’s a wash. Or he has an excuse for his behavior. Or something. This is obviously not a sensible assessment of the Russia stuff. But I feel that Russia marks a epistemic divide, with large groups on both sides, either thinking Trump obviously did wrong or thinking he didn’t really do anything wrong, ergo he was done wrong.
But for this point I want to leave all this conspiracy mess at the surface and ask a related, slightly deeper question. When MAGA-types plot to overturn the constitutional order, allegedly to ‘save the constitutional order’, what are they really thinking? What do I think they really think – about Trump, about America? Trump, I think, is a narcissist grifter. He is oddly unpolitical, for a guy who almost succeeded in staging a coup. I think I get Trump. But I really don’t get his followers. On some level, I really don’t. There is such severe cognitive dissonance. The conspiracy stuff is there to make it less dissonant: why am I trying to violently overturn a lawful election if supposedly I want to back law and order and am for ‘election integrity’? It doesn’t compute unless there is some nefarious conspiracy. Ergo there has to be a conspiracy. But the belief in the conspiracy didn’t come first. It was confabulated up because someone wanted to overturn the constitution on behalf of the constitution. So why did THAT contradiction arise?
Here again it’s not exactly a total mystery. You have segments of the population who feel they OUGHT to be dominant AND that they ought to be able to dominate rightfully via the constitutional order BUT that isn’t working out SO it must be their lack of dominance is do to SOMEONE ELSE mucking up the ‘rightful’ constitutional order. And then you color in/back-form the details so that narrative flows. So you end up trying to overturn a lawful election to prevent anyone overturning a lawful election. Every election is a Flight 93 Election except YOU are the hijacker, only you don’t realize you are the hijacker. Because who wants to be the hijacker?
But let’s go a bit deeper.
America, so they say, was founded on an Idea. (On Ideas.) But, in a weird way, America was founded on cognitive dissonance about its own founding ideas. Because the lofty ideals were very imperfectly realized – certainly initially. The sunny, upwards-ascending way to spin it is to say we are climbing ever up to that Shining City on a Hill, hearkening ever more attentively to the better angels and all that. The dark way to put it is: America was born crazy.
So our politics keeps replicating the weird crazinesses that were there at the start. How could you think ‘all men are free and equal’ and yet slavery is ok? It’s nuts. The morally aspirational side of it commits you to all sorts of stuff you aren’t prepared to do, so what ARE you committed to? Here’s a piece I stumbled over a while back – old piece from Heritage from olden days, 2015.
It’s bend-over-backwards apologetics concerning racism and slavery and the Constitution. It’s almost not worth bothering about, but the vast fuss over the 1619 Project, just a few years later, shows what a raw nerve it is. And this is just such a weird thing to say as a defense.
Reading the original Constitution, a visitor from a foreign land would simply have no way of knowing that race-based slavery existed in America. As Abraham Lincoln would later explain:
“Thus, the thing is hid away, in the Constitution, just as an afflicted man hides away a wen or a cancer, which he dares not cut out at once, lest he bleed to death.”
To say that the Constitution is – or conceals – a deadly cancer doesn’t seem like a very good reason to feel good about it. The Constitution conceals a deadly cancer that we should ignore because there’s no way to fix it. Or just generally: you should hide your disfigurements and its rude for others to point them out. With defenders like this, who needs 1619 Project-style critics?
Of course you can also try to be super positive about it: the wise Framers concealed the cancer, hoping a later generation would figure out some way to cut it out. But that’s weird. What OTHER cancers did they hide in this shining document, hoping later generations would figure out how to cut it out?
One of the finest legacies of the American founding and framing is the long tradition of bizarre cognitive dissonance about the founding and framing – which the cognitive dissonance of the founding and framing renders more readily expressible. Perfectist ideals. Dark desire that cannot speak its own name.
The most extreme examples of the genre are antebellum defenses of slavery, couched in the language of liberty and all that good stuff. A few years back I was rereading Louis Hartz on the ‘liberal consensus’ – his once-influential theory that all Americans are ‘born liberal’. I realized that I had no memory of what he had to say about all the slavery stuff, which is kind of a counter-example, seemingly. So, turns out, Chapter 4 of The Liberal Tradition in America is “The Reactionary Enlightenment”, all about all that. He takes the line that Southern defenses of ‘the peculiar institution’ were so implausible philosophically – so cognitively dissonant, due to their need to make the case in ‘liberal’ terms – that they are the exception that proves the rule.
For a feudalism that has once been liberal can never be really feudal, and its impact on the history of a nation is bound to be unique. A false Maistre, a Maistre who only a few years ago was a Jeffersonian democrat, confronts a set of problems entirely his own. He slaughters himself with the traditionalist logic he tries to use, he cannot terrify the men he seeks to terrify, and once he is defeated in war, he is not only likely to be forgotten but he is likely to forget himself. We can call America’s great internal struggle whatever we like, a revolution, a rebellion, or a war, but if we identify the South with the feudalism it sought to imitate, we miss the significance of its social incongruity, of the ties it had to the liberalism it sought to defy, and above all of the swift disappearance of its Gothic dream. For the remarkable thing about the “great conservative reaction” of 1863, instead of being the way it scarred American political thought, was in fact the smallness of the impact it had upon it. Even our historians have pretty much forgotten the Disraelis and the Bonalds of the antebellum South.
It’s true we have forgotten a lot of these names – except for Fitzhugh and Calhoun. But Hartz’ sunny sense of a dominant ‘liberal consensus’ in the mid-20th Century (when Jim Crow was not dead!) seems bizarre.
When we wonder what the hell the likes of the Oathkeepers are thinking today, thinking they are keeping an oath, the answer is that they are part of a hallowed tradition of trying to make out that up-is-down, when it comes to political liberalism and what it demands. Because the Constitution has its Stranger Things-style Upside Down. (No coincidence that a judge recently made a crack about that.)
There are at least two forms of Upside Down here: there’s the denying-the-cancer-while-admitting-the-cancer denialism/not-denialism. You get big mad when someone knocks the Framers, but you don’t deny what they are being knocked for. This is, I think, best regarded as a very volatile state. You could break any number of ways. And one of the ways is the embrace-your-inner-cancer model, as exemplified by the antebellum Southern philosophers – the Fitzhughes and Calhouns.
What Louis Hartz should have said is not that Americans are destined to be liberal but that, if fascism ever arrives, it will come waving an angry copy of Tocqueville.
So, just to tie the thread back: wondering whether MAGA R’s really believe that D’s are a threat to democracy is like wondering whether antebellum slavery apologists believed they were defending the Constitution. Yes. No. It’s too complicated. What they want is a social order that is inconsistent with the highest ideals of the Constitution. But the Constitution is a very perfectionist document, in a way. Certainly the Declaration of Independence is. And perfectionism has a way of not being real. So it can be very sensible to settle for less. But it is then easy to substitute settling for the Upside Down for settling for less.
More later.
{ 29 comments }
Geoff Arnold 09.08.22 at 4:43 am
Recommended reading:
Behold, America: The Entangled History of “America First” and “the American Dream”
Or for a more disturbing assessment, Taxi Driver, Purposeless Jobs and Alienation.
J-D 09.08.22 at 5:40 am
As you rightly point out, this is a complex phenomenon with multiple contributing factors, varying with the individual, and I don’t disagree with what you’re suggesting, but I do want to suggest that one additional ingredient is that for at least some of the people involved a significant factor is that they are being given the opportunity to Aid the Hero in an Adventure!
Alex SL 09.08.22 at 7:32 am
It would really be so much easier all around if the Founding Fathers, the Declaration of Independence, and the Constitution wouldn’t be treated as divinely inspired prophets and holy scriptures.
Sometimes try to imagine that a European nation still had the constitution, state/province boundaries, and electoral system it had in 1789 and considered it sacrilege to replace them with updated ones, and then I either start laughing or shake my head.
BenK 09.08.22 at 9:51 am
In a certain sense you are absolutely correct.
The threat to ‘democracy’ that the Democrats represent to the Republicans is Wokeism. For a historical precedence, Wokeism can be compared to many things, but a good solid easy comparison is the Glorious Revolution. The kind of Parlimentarianism embodied in the Glorious Revolution was either a massive leap forward or a wretched extreme, depending on where you thought things had been and should be.
Similarly, if local control, limited federal government, diversity of communities, etc, is the success of America and that it was fairly well realized during the founding but has been pretty badly distorted in various ways, then the Democrats as representing the Woke are a threat to the People. If on the other hand, Democracy was the flaw, the wrong people were in charge at the Founding, really the whole thing was only a good idea in so much as it was the best approximation of Progressive socialism available at the time – that’s pretty different.
Kevin Lawrence 09.08.22 at 11:20 am
There are two threats that I believe conservatives are justified in fearing.
1) The constitution was set up to be Federalist with the states having control of everything that was not explicitly granted to the federal government. The accumulation of powers to the federal government since FDR threatens the very concept of federalism: federal bans on abortion, guns and marijuana; the guarantees of same-sex marriage, equal rights for women and control of energy policy; the government control of commerce, education and (oops!), I forget the third.
The trend is definitely away from States Rights and towards federal control. Someone who believes in the constitution and federalism is right to be afraid of the trends of time. Yes, there was that one time when states’ rights resulted in a Very Bad Thing but ending slavery did not justify tearing up the 10th Amendment. The Commerce Clause, the 14th Amendment ideas of equal protection and the 16th Amendment allowing federal income tax all served to make holes in the idea of federalism and the Ship of State and constitution considered holy by so many conservatives has been holed and appears to be sinking. I think liberals (I am one) should do more to acknowledge that this is happening and that the fear is real and justified.
2) Conservatives and Fox News in particular have done a powerful job of making it appear that gay rights, trans rights, abortion rights, illegal immigration and the threat of their guns being taken away and the coming rule of The Diversity Officers are all a threat to their way of life.
To be clear, I am a liberal and I believe in gay rights, women’s rights, trans rights, immigration, gun control and diversity but imposing them through any branch of the federal government undermines the idea of federalism and it’s not surprising that conservatives are afraid.
nastywoman 09.08.22 at 12:14 pm
‘But let’s go a bit deeper’ –
as 12 years ago –
German TV made a documentary about a bunch of real
‘American Visionaries’ – who had foreseen the Finance Crisis and exploding of the housing bubble in 2008 waaay before any so called ‘mainstream economists’ – and it was… ‘delicious’ how these gals and guys from the housingbubbleblog.com wouldn’t take any bull… from any Financial or Real Estate Tricksters and Grifters and how they identified any trick of the Grifters and Tricksters with amazing ‘akkurat’ -ness and common sense –
AND of their ‘Verbot’ of any Party Political Bickering – and Partisan Nonsense.
BUT THEN!! –
something happened? –
and when you look today at this blog of these – once – amazing ‘Common Sense Americans’- you really, REALLY get confused –
as there are commenters with handles like ‘Deplorable’ or ‘Kyle Rittenhouse’, who predict another American Civil War and kill all ‘communists’ – but then they predict that ‘Russia is winning’ and they call Zelensky a War Criminal and tell you to only trust RT and that the overarching issue by some member of this blog is that a One World Order Cartel is trying to take over the World to bring on a slavery and genocide , and lost of all freedoms.
AND if you ask them –
(as a German who had met them 12 years ago) what happened?
you get responses like:
Germany is a failed nation
and
‘F#ck you, you horse-faced globalist stooge’
and/or the blogs owner –
(who sometimes likes to post, that ‘the election’ was stolen and ‘Biden’ somehow is ‘Brandon’?) – writes:
‘I was thinking about a couple of related issues we’ve encountered recently at the HBB. Let’s say yer a concerned citizen. You have yer own life to contend with. Maybe you also feel similarly about yer family, next door neighbor. After spending time with those, what about the larger community? Elderly who have trouble with food. Homeless, crime. At some point, isn’t there a limit to how much time and energy you can extend over every persons condition and needs? It would seem we require a certain amount of self responsiblilty to move on with our lives. Otherwise one would be consumed with endless angst and not able to live a full life.
Do you know how many poxes are out there? Did you know yer more likely to die from a falling refrigerator than terrorism?
The second is US America freedom. Taxation without representation: an easy enough concept. When the colonist brought up this issue with the crown, they focused in on what it meant. That our freedom doesn’t come from a king. Not a guberment. It’s a divine right and as such up to us to insist on it’s presence. And that right is superior to the wants or demands of the state. That’s a pretty big leap and fundamental to our system of individual liberty.
There is no monkey pox exception to the US constitution or bill of rights.
Now, discussing this with say, a German, it pointless. He won’t understand. He never had freedom, never studied it like we did growing up. Actually he has lived his entire life with the state being the primary concern of the individual. We do not have to debate with Europeans about our freedom in this country. What we do have to do is assert our rights. And our divine right gives us the authority to proceed in ways we see fit. When we hear these Germanic voices from the WEF telling us what will be, they should remember we reserve the right to sever their little heads should they not mind their own business’.
AND THEN –
there was this unveiling of a Presidential Portrait at the White House yesterday – and there were all these nice and pleasant comments on the Internet – about how nice and pleasant the ‘Obama Times’ truly were – when most Americans were just so much nicer and pleasant to each other – and the German TV team even remembered the tremendously pleasant ‘shoot’ with the nice and pleasant bloggers from 2010 –
and can’t we finally get an (academic?) explanation
about:
What happened to them?
M Caswell 09.08.22 at 12:24 pm
On the Constitution and slavery, I think the best thing ever written is Douglass’ “The Constitution of the United States: Is it Pro-Slavery or Anti-Slavery?” (1860). He argues that the “the blight and mildew” (note the difference in the metaphor!) are not in the Constitution at all, neither concealed nor endorsed, and that the Garrisionians make common cause with the slave-states when they turn against the Constitution.
M Caswell 09.08.22 at 12:24 pm
“Garrisonians”
Chetan Murthy 09.08.22 at 1:03 pm
BenK: “If on the other hand, Democracy was the flaw, the wrong people were in charge at the Founding”
What democracy? Those people had millions of Americans in literal bondage, how is that democracy? I mean, was Apartheid South Africa a democracy? Is Israel a democracy? Maybe ask the ones trod underfoot.
What rubbish.
both sides do it 09.08.22 at 4:56 pm
Isn’t this line of argument undercut by Trumpists not waving around angry copies of Tocqueville? Doesn’t this treat R claims about democracy, the constitution etc as too “real”?
There are no Trumpist think tankers trying to square the ideals of the Constitution with Jan 6. The Trumpist intellectuals – esp Bannon, Curtis Yarvin etc – are not trying to “make out that up-is-down, when it comes to political liberalism and what it demands”, because they aren’t liberals. They don’t believe in pluralism.
The Oathkeepers don’t produce arguments, either for the public or for each other. They don’t have an internally-contradictory theory of society as it relates to the Constitution, because they don’t have any theory; they’re organizing around symbols in order to practice domination.
nominal 09.08.22 at 6:17 pm
“undermines the idea of federalism and it’s not surprising that conservatives are afraid.”
That’s just more cognitive dissonance by conservatives. They have never cared about States Rights, they cared about achieving their goals and for many goals States Rights was helpful. But if the Federal government was helpful to their goals? Fuck States Rights. They’d pass a Federal anti-abortion law in a second if they could, and had no qualms passing hundreds of intrusive Federal laws because they served their interests.
It even predates the Civil War. Fugitive Slave Act, anybody?
They talk about States Rights, but what they really care about (outside of racism, patriarchy, and anti-LGBT policies) is (1) is someone telling me to do something I don’t want to do and (2) other people not doing things I don’t want them to do. Don’t accept their bullshit for their reasons.
politicalfootball 09.08.22 at 6:22 pm
This is also a charitable summary of the problem with the Douthat/Stephens argument. They can’t acknowledge the cancer that has metastasized in the Republican Party, so they ignore that or outright deny it.
politicalfootball 09.08.22 at 8:21 pm
My understanding of Trumpism is informed, in important ways, by the work of John Holbo, who everybody should read carefully, including John Holbo. I have this idea that Professor Holbo would explain Trumpism with Carvillian simplicity: “It’s the epistemology, stupid.”
Oathkeepers care deeply about the Constitution, but what do they believe the Constitution says? The answer is: Whatever they want it to say.
What is democracy? What is the rule of law? The Trumpists have clear, consistent answers, but liberals have a hard time grasping this because they think that consistency requires — at a minimum — the same answer each time the quetion is asked. The Trumpist Truth is not constrained in this fashion, and can change to fit circumstances.
People who haven’t studied Professor Holbo’s work would be inclined to dismiss the Trumpist epistemology as dishonest or stupid. It is neither. It is a choice.
This is why the Trumpists get so offended when you call them racists. They see themselves as having the freedom to not be racists, regardless of their thoughts or behavior.
Pay attention when they use that word — “freedom.” The truth (properly understood) shall set you free! In fact, that’s what the truth is for.
People who don’t understand this will always grope for explanations for why evangelicals overwhelmingly support Trump. But this is no mystery at all. Trump and the evangelicals share an epistemology. This isn’t some marriage of convenience, where they put up with Trump’s shortcomings in order to achieve their policy goals. They love the guy, and they should.
I thought Professor Holbo had a particularly nifty explanation here. He quotes Morpheus:
The Trumpist philosophy is subtle and profound in a manner that is hard for a liberal to keep in mind even after figuring it out. Per Holbo, here it is:
That’s it! Trump’s social network is named Truth Social in order to emphasize the fact that the Trumpist Truth is whatever you want to be. Nobody talks more about the Truth than Trump and the Trumpists, and they are clear on what they mean when they use that word.
This leaves us with some interesting questions about how the Trumpist Truth is applied in the real world. But for liberals, the study of that matter is mainly going to be an empirical study — a matter of observation and not reasoning. If you want the reasoning, don’t talk to a liberal. Go to the Federalist Society — but don’t forget that the answer you receive will be informed by the Trumpist Truth.
Cheez Whiz 09.08.22 at 11:13 pm
What exactly is this “threat” everyone’s so het up about? On one side, the threat is a reversal of free and fair elections based on assertions of undetectable widespread vote fraud, and an armed incursion into the Capital to stop the transfer of power. On the other, the threat is widespread undetectable vote fraud overruling the will of the people, based on nothing but assertions by unreliable narrators and universally debunked examples. So, which is the Mexican/Italian vs. tire rims/anthrax in these dining options? I am biased, but its not a hard choice.
This whole brou-ha-ha is because Trump is The Mule from Azimov’s Foundation trilogy. Since Nixon, Republicans have been gradually gaming the political system to maximize advantage and it has been working according to Hari Seldon’s schedule. Gerrymandering, vote suppression, and abuse of norms are all legal enough and kept parity with Democrats in power sharing. Trump has simply accelerated the schedule by feeding the paranoia of the base the party has managed for decades, ignoring filters and limits that politicians who come up through the system have pounded into them. The plan was to get government small enough to drown in the bathtub, not some apocalyptic battle that burns Washington to the ground. But Trump would rather rule from Mar-a-Largo than the White House anyway.
DCA 09.09.22 at 12:39 am
One thing is, the whole election denial is incredibly contingent on Trump’s personal pathology. Suppose, two days after the election, Trump had “a fit of apoplexy” and became clearly disabled or worse. I’m almost certain that Pres. Pence would have accepted what Bill Barr was telling him, that Biden had been elected. Of course there would have been people in the farther reaches of the internet claiming that it was all a conspiracy, but would we have seen large fractions of the Senate and House, on Jan 6, objecting to the results?
J-D 09.09.22 at 1:01 am
There have been many developments since 1788 which weren’t imagined then. Some of them are beneficial developments which should be welcomed (do I need to give examples?). Others are dangerous and threatening developments (again, do I need to give examples?) which it is justifiable to fear, but the justification for fearing them is not that they were not imagined in 1788. The growth of US federal power in the last two centuries was not imagined by the people who wrote the US Constitution, but that is not a justification for fearing it.
JPL 09.09.22 at 6:37 am
What is this “democracy” anyway that everybody is talking about being in danger of losing? When we use the term ‘democracy’ we ought to be intending to refer to the ongoing (and thus open-ended) struggle to bring ethical principles into line with principles of governance and to bring principles of governance into line with ethical principles. This is what people are doing; this is the project this country has supposedly taken on for itself for the benefit of humanity, even though probably only half the polity is engaged in the project at any level. This struggle is primarily a quest for understanding; but putting understanding into practice is difficult, because for that we have to get both the engaged and the unengaged parts of the polity on board; somehow so far we have managed to get a bit of it instantiated in the laws that effectively govern the land. But when we’re talking about that other unengaged half of the polity, especially the “MAGA” voters, or even including all the conventional-minded people out in the rural areas who are incapable of breaking free and voting for anybody other than the Republican Party, do they really understand “democracy” or “ethical principles”, what those terms mean and refer to? I don’t think they do. This is not a new phenomenon; it’s why we could have both the attempt to express the truths that we hold to be self-evident and at the same time the idea that it’s OK to allow slavery. If, eg, people who call themselves Christians demonstrate in their expressed conceptions of people who are “not like them” that they don’t understand the good Samaritan principle, then they also demonstrate that they don’t understand the idea of ethical principles. Another term the media uses all the time seemingly without ever clarifying what it means or refers to is “the rule of law”. The expression should be used to refer to a certain fundamental principle of governance that can be called the “rule of law principle”, which can be expressed as, among many other equivalent possible expressions, the principle that all citizens are equivalent with respect to the application of the laws that effectively govern the land. We had the extraordinary case the other day of a federal judge admitting explicitly that her ruling violates the rule of law principle, without realizing that this violation vitiates her judgment in the ruling. Even if you are operating in bad faith, you should realize that you can’t just substitute power play for adherence to this fundamental principle without evoking protest. Conversely, any law whose application results in systematic inequivalence in the distribution of benefit and harm to different independently definable subgroups of citizens, such as Jim Crow laws or laws resulting in voter suppression or vote nullification, violate the rule of law principle. People who engaged in the “alternative elector” schemes after the last election: didn’t they realize that they could not just push these through by power play without just discarding the rule of law principle, and that this would not be allowed to stand by the other part of the polity?
So my proposal is that socially responsible philosophers give us a hand here for a change, and try to clarify these central ideas like ‘democracy’ and ‘rule of law principle’ in places likely to be noticed by (and understood by) the Republican electorate, whose primitive but conventional tools for responding to basically economic threats and injustices (which will never be addressed or alleviated by the plutocratic Republican party) are proving maladaptive. Anyway, we all need to have a better understanding of these ideas.
lurker 09.09.22 at 8:13 am
@nominal, 11
Also the Dredd Scott case. If a setting foot in a free state did not make you free, could a state really even abolish slavery?
J, not that one 09.09.22 at 5:17 pm
Cheez Whiz says what I thought: there is a huge asymmetry here. It parallels the asymmetry, I think, between thinking one’s opponent’s ideology is opposed to democracy, and observing that they have taken actions destructive of democracy.
I recently read Foundation for the first time and I think the Mule is a lot smarter than Trump is. But what struck me was that the science was in large part (not totally) a mirage. Everything was (arguably) controlled by the humanities-educated people who were so advanced they don’t even use language anymore. They just sit around a table and agree with one another, and every so often one of them, I don’t know, burps meaningfully, and someone goes out to suppress a new technological discovery.
CarlD 09.09.22 at 6:12 pm
My default on all these things is that people are doing complexity management. The more there’s complexity, the more the critters get confused and overwhelmed and anxious. The feels drive cognitive compression until the world gets small and familiar enough to live in without constant terror and with some sense of effective agency. The details just track that familiarity and the agency it affords.
nastywoman 09.10.22 at 12:56 am
and from the author of ‘The Chaos Machine’ – Max Fisher:
‘That democracy is declining more or less everywhere now. Not necessarily in every country but in every region, in rich and poor countries, old and new democracies. And the decline is incremental but steady, which means that the scale of the change isn’t necessarily obvious until you start looking at the data.
We tend to think of democratic decline as something that happens in big dramatic moments — a coup, a government collapsing, tanks in the streets. But that’s not typically how it happens anymore.
What happens is more like what has occurred in Venezuela, say, or Turkey or Hungary. Elected leaders rise within a democracy promising to defeat some threat within, and in the process end up slowly tearing that democracy down.
Each step feels dangerous but maybe not outright authoritarian — the judiciary gets politicized a little, some previously independent institution gets co-opted, election rules get changed, news outlets come under tighter government control.
No individual step feels as drastic as an outright coup. And because these leaders both promote and benefit from social polarization, these little power grabs might even be seen by supporters as saving democracy.
But over many years, the system tilts more and more toward autocracy.
That doesn’t always end up leading to full-on dictatorship. But that pull toward elected strongmen rulers is something we see happening in dozens of countries. By the sheer numbers, according to a democracy monitoring group called V-Dem, more democracies are in decline today than at any other point in the last century.
KT2 09.10.22 at 1:26 am
John Holbo said: …”It was confabulated up because someone wanted to overturn the constitution on behalf of the constitution. So why did THAT contradiction arise?” … “And then you color in/back-form the details so that narrative flows.”
How does the narritive flow to other minds? How is the colouring in and back form details promoted?
Neetwork effects -news feeding social feeding news – and a missing “what” along with who.
politicalfootball says “Per Holbo, here it is:
“[W]hat is it you are sure to want to believe? You will want to believe you took the red pill.
“That’s it! Trump’s social network is named Truth Social in order to emphasize the fact that the Trumpist Truth is whatever you want to be.
*
So we need the purple pill. Which everyone is presented along with the red & blue pill. Seems we just like in dichotomies and forget infinities.
Johann Hari suggests “we might want to own the information pipes together, because we are getting the attentional equivalent of cholera and the political equivalent of cholera.” said Johann Hari;
…: We need to just say that a business model premised upon discovering the weaknesses in your attention in order to hack it and sell it to the highest bidder is fundamentally immoral and inhuman like leaded paint, and we will not allow it.
Sean Illing
“What would replace it?
[ CT with moderators and more Twigs & Branches ]
Johann Hari
“I remember saying to Aza and many of the other people who argue this to me, “Okay. But let’s imagine we do that, what happens the next day when I open Facebook, does it just say, ‘Sorry guys, we’ve gone fishing”? And they said, “Of course not.” What would happen is they would move to a different business model. And we all have experience of two possible alternative business models. One is subscription and everyone knows how platforms like Netflix and HBO work.
“Another model that everyone can understand is something like the sewer system. Before we had sewers, we had shit in the streets, we had cholera. So we all paid to build the sewers and we all own the sewers together. I own the sewers in London and Las Vegas, you own the sewers in the city where you live. So just as we all own the sewage pipes together, we might want to own the information pipes together, because we are getting the attentional equivalent of cholera and the political equivalent of cholera.
“But whatever alternative model we adopt, the crucial thing is to understand in this different model, your attention is no longer the product they sell to the real customer, the advertiser. Suddenly, you are the customer.
“In that world, Facebook and other social media companies have to ask, “What does Sean want?” Oh, Sean wants to be able to pay attention. Let’s design our app not to maximally hack and invade his attention and ruin it, but to help him heal his attention. “Oh, Sean wants to be able to meet up with his friends offline — let’s design our app to facilitate him meeting up with people online instead of endlessly arguing with people about bullshit.” I would argue that we need an attention movement to reclaim our attention and focus. And it requires a shift in perspective. When I couldn’t focus and pay attention, I would blame myself. I’d say, “Oh, you’re weak. You’re lacking in willpower.” We need to stop doing that. This is being done to all of us.
“It’s like we’re having itching powder dumped on us all day and then we’re being told, “You know what, buddy, you might want to learn how to meditate, then you wouldn’t scratch so much.” We need to get out of this psychology and remind ourselves that we’re not medieval peasants begging at the court of King Zuckerberg for a few little crumbs from his table.”
https://www.vox.com/vox-conversations-podcast/2022/2/8/22910773/vox-conversations-johann-hari-stolen-focus
politicalfootball 09.11.22 at 12:01 am
When I first read 1984 many years ago, the concept of doublethink didn’t resonate with me. It struck me as a polemical device rather than a description of human behavior. I know better now. Liberals want it to be complicated, but it’s not.
Ebenezer Scrooge 09.11.22 at 2:08 pm
On at least one dimension, it is unfair to compare slavers to Trumpies. Fitzhugh and Calhoun were really smart guys! They were masters of high-grade doublethink. Who do the Trumpies have? Steve Bannon and Curtis Yarvin? At best halfthink.
nastywoman 09.12.22 at 11:14 am
so
when
of ALL people
Americans start to believe
that
‘Hitler’
is somebody who warns them about
‘Hitler’
It’s the End of the American Empire –
https://youtu.be/K6NbXilHhck
Raven Onthill 09.13.22 at 2:40 am
“One of the things that I have emphasized in my writing is how many southerners and northerners in 1776 thought slavery was on its last legs and that it would naturally die away. You can find quotation after quotation from people seriously thinking that slavery was going to wither away in several decades. Now we know they couldn’t have been more wrong. But they lived with illusions and were so wrong about so many things.” – Gordon S. Wood, interviewed, https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2019/11/28/wood-n28.html
The whole thing is just, if I understand the history correctly, weirdly complicated; people in the 18th century were just as confused and ambivalent as they are in our day.
If you read Wood’s The Radicalism of the American Revolution, he will explain (and I’m pretty sure he’s right) that what the people who wrote the constitution expected and what actually happened once it was signed were entirely different, so much so that I will say what Wood did not, the Constitution utterly failed of the ideals of its authors, who died embittered. The founders had limited predictive tools; sociology, psychology, and economics had yet to be invented. They were remote from the centers of learning and their knowledge of the classical world they loved and thought they were using as a model was limited and filtered through Enlightenment philosophy.
The MAGA believers, if I read correctly, are the heirs to the order that actually emerged after the Constitution was signed, rather than the one its authors envisioned. They are losing power and are horrified to discover that their intentions matter no more than those of its original authors.
More thoughts on this at https://adviceunasked.blogspot.com/2022/08/a-democracy-not-republic.html.
anon/portly 09.15.22 at 5:32 pm
When MAGA-types plot to overturn the constitutional order, allegedly to ‘save the constitutional order’, what are they really thinking? What do I think they really think – about Trump, about America? Trump, I think, is a narcissist grifter. He is oddly unpolitical, for a guy who almost succeeded in staging a coup.
I find parts of this post congenial to my own thinking, but other parts bewildering.
One thing I think a lot of them think is that “sure, you could say that an activity I am engaged in amounts to “plot[ting] to overturn the constitutional order,” but since this has 0% chance of actually coming to fruition, what I am really doing is signalling my allegiance to Team Trump.” (Or something like this).
If you go back to the 1920 – 1950 era, there were various people who became convinced the Soviet Russia was the future, right? And some of those people could maybe have been said to be “plot[ting] to overthrow the constitutional order.”
I’d say they were in the grip of an ideology, and maybe that is true for many “MAGA-types?” That it is such an impoverished ideology (in my view) doesn’t change that, or necessarily make them so different from people from other eras who were also in the grip of (also impoverished, if perhaps more intelligible) ideologies.
Being in the grip of an ideology (or cult) can be exciting, fun, give life meaning, serve to validate one’s existence or goodness, etc.
anon/portly 09.15.22 at 6:23 pm
This is very good:
Every election is a Flight 93 Election except YOU are the hijacker, only you don’t realize you are the hijacker. Because who wants to be the hijacker?
But perhaps this is just an elaborate insult?
Here again it’s not exactly a total mystery. You have segments of the population who feel they OUGHT to be dominant AND that they ought to be able to dominate rightfully via the constitutional order BUT that isn’t working out SO it must be their lack of dominance is do to SOMEONE ELSE mucking up the ‘rightful’ constitutional order.
The “Flight 93” thing isn’t about “we should be dominant,” it’s about “the common man in the heartland is getting the shaft.” They’re doing it for the kids….
It’s (in my view) crap, so it’s not like I don’t want to insult them myself, but I think we should very much “want to try to be non-polemical, non-abusive about this.” Throwing them in the “basket of deplorables,” however elaborately argued, just doesn’t do it. (And the MAGA-types who belong in the “basket of criminals,” does it even matter if they’re also “deplorables?”).
Glen Tomkins 09.15.22 at 7:13 pm
The Ds have to remain in their current state of cognitive dissonance on the question of the danger the Rs present to democracy because, for better or worse, we are not prepared to outlaw the R party. We can see that 1/6 was an insurrection, an attempt to overthrow the govt, but we have to deny that it presented a clear and present danger of succeeding at overthrowing the govt, or at least we have to believe that the danger has passed, because if there is still a clear and present danger, then the public advocacy that is now necessary to be an R public official for the idea that Trump Really Won, is the crime of sedition.
Prosecuting for sedition has, quite justifiably, acquired such a bad reputation in its history in the US that we don’t even call it that anymore. It’s still a crime, only we now call it ‘Advocating Overthrow of the Govt” (USC 18, 2385). We still have “Seditious Conspiracy as 2384, but that requires planning specific acts with specific other people that further the overthrow of the govt. Plain vanilla sedition is the crime of the public advocacy of some or other theory that justifies the overthrow of the govt that is so effective in the moment that it creates a clear and present danger that such an overthrow will be attempted and might succeed.
Sedition must remain a crime, however much it has been abused prosecuting people like Eugene Debs or the American Communist Party, whose advocacy presented exactly zero danger of overthrow of the govt, because advocacy that actually creates such danger creates it by inspiring whole groups and classes of people to action overthrowing the govt, without needing any specific arrangements for some of them to do this, and others to do that. There may well have been planning prosecutable as seditious conspiracy involved in the 1/6 insurrection, but what got almost all of that mob to the Capitol that day ready and willing to overthrow the govt was the sedition of high public officials, the president and R senators and House members and governors who advocated for weeks prior for the idea that Trump Really Won. If Trump was guilty of sedition, then so were the 14 R senators and over half their House caucus that voted to reject Biden EV tallies, and detaining that many Rs (at a minimum, there were plenty of other public advocates for Trump Really Won) was, for better or worse, way too rich for out blood.
On 1/7 it certainly seemed that the danger was no longer present. Plenty of Rs still voted to reject Biden EV tallies, but otherwise everyone seemed to have abandoned Trump Really Won after it resulted in the events of 1/6. Prosecuting for sedition for 1/6 seemed completely unnecessary, because the idea that Trump Really Won seemed thoroughly refuted and powerless to persuade any sizable body of people to any action.
Ha, ha, ha. Joke’s on us. In the weeks and months that followed, this dissipation of the immediate danger of overthrow let the Rs drift back towards what has since become their universal fealty to Trump Really Won. At this point, we couldn’t successfully prosecute just Trump, or just his chief aides, even for seditious conspiracy, much less sedition, because there are way too many Rs in the jury pools and among the judges in the line of appeal. The Ds would have to do what the US did in Maryland and Missouri in 1861, and round up all the judges, state legislators, journalists, and other influential citizens who subscribe publicly to the seditious creed. Almost all of them were released after the danger of overthrow of the govt had passed. Prosecuting them was not a viable option because, if you can successfully prosecute sedition, then sedition must be so universally unpopular that the creed advocated clearly does not present any danger of overthrow whatsoever. Secessionism was way too prevalent in Missouri and Maryland to allow the usual processes of the law to work unhindered, because those processes would have not worked. The usual processes of the law worked in the case of Eugene Debs only because war hysteria was such a consensus in the US at the time that every juror and judge at all likely to be involved in prosecuting him could be trusted to go along with the nonsense idea that advocating against the draft posed any danger at all that the govt would be overthrown.
For better or worse, the Ds are waiting for some more overt act than 1/6, something that creates a clear danger as still present, before they treat the threat to democracy presented by the Rs with the appropriate seriousness.
The Rs in turn are far more accustomed to the cognitive dissonance of haivng really extreme core, working beliefs, while feeling it necessary to pay lip service to ideas for which they actually have never respected. Trump Really Won is powerful among them because they have never accepted that non-Anglos should actually enjoy the franchise, and that even if maybe it is acceptable for at least some urban voters to vote, D urban political machines of course steal votes hand over fist, have done so forever in the past , and will do so forever into the future unless stopped. Trump Really Won is just one instance of the general rule that Rs have really won every election for as long as anyone can remember. Rs who have gone along with the pretense of Ds having won fairly for decades were engaged in necessary equivocation, doing what they had to do to survive. If they actually have accepted the tyranny of D and Deep State election steals, they must be RINOs. If you object that there is no proof ever offered in a court of law of this massive D/RINO/Deep State conspiracy to steal elections wholesale over decades, that just shows that you refuse to acknowledge the scop of the conspiracy. The conspiracy has such control, over judges, over election officials, and at least in intimidating even R legislators, that of course it can cover up its crimes. The best way to rob a bank is to own the bank, and the Rs imagine that the conspiracy owns the bank.
Well, the Rs aren’t taking it anymore. They all say that Trump Really Won, because if they don’t publicly advocate that idea, they are forced to walk the plank like Liz Cheney. There is still this point of equivocation, cognitive dissonance, and/or compromise with reality, that most of them will not follow the axiom that Trump Really Won out to the inescapable theorem that they must overthrow the D tyranny right now. What passes for Team Normal among them has come up with a better idea. Just as the best way to rob a bank is to own the bank, the best way to steal an election is to own the electoral process, as, in the US, the states mostly do. The nuclear version of their plan involves getting SCOTUS to go along with the independent state legislature idea, but that measure is only necessary for states where state law prohibits their red legislatures from ignoring election results, and state judges can be trusted to enforce those laws. Within a few months of 1/6 about a half dozen of these red states passed legislation facilitating this legal steal of future elections, and that is probably enough states to get the job of stealing every federal election done all legal-like, with no need for messy actual overt violence.
That’s where we stand right now. The Ds are waiting to use their control of the govt against the R threat to democracy until the Rs commit some more overt act that revives a clear and present danger of the overthrow of the govt. The Rs in turn are going for counter-stealing all future elections from the imagined long-standing D/RINO/Deep State conspiracy in a way that will avoid the need for any further overt acts of violence. The battleground is going to be over the “perfectly legal” means of stealing future elections by owning the mechanisms of taking and counting the votes.
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