The Problem With Liberalism

(This is, by the by, NOT an April Fools prank. Sorry about the timing, I've been working on this for a month...)

(also wik, this is my 2,500th blog post. It's a question if any of us will be here for the 3000th...)

With all of the current chaos in the United States - with trump and his Far Right MAGA brownshirts rampaging through our federal government - there's discernable alarm among the Democratic faithful wondering why the hell their own party leadership - who ought to be opposing trump's smash-and-grabs more forcefully - is publicly playing nice with a conservative Republican party that keeps punching Dems in the metaphorical (and sometimes literal) face.

There's a number of theories why the modern Democratic Party seems so apprehensive in the face of historic destruction by Far Right Wingnuts. I'll throw this one hypothesis out here to give me the excuse to discuss yet another political philosophy (those -isms) of how Liberalism - as a core foundation of modern Democratic Party world-view - is the source of this seeming inaction and timidity.

Liberalism I would argue started as the American world-view, back when it wasn't confined to just one political party. If you look up the term in the Concise Oxford Dictionary of Politics (3rd ed, 2009), liberalism "is the belief that it is the aim of politics to preserve individual rights and to maximize freedom of choice." (p. 306) As a philosophical response to the shifts in the United Kingdom from absolute monarchism - the Divine Right of Kings argument that had led to Charles I's execution and then the end of Stuart rule with James II's expulsion in 1688 - the emerging Enlightenment thinkers like John Locke and John Stuart Mill developed ideologies justifying the actions against the British kings that didn't want to play nice with others.

Locke in particular had a major influence on American political (liberal) thinking. In Locke's First Treatise of Government, he directly countered the Divine Right of Kings - posited in Sir Robert Filmer's Patriarcha - as a form of slavery (from York University's PDF archive):

To make way for this doctrine, they have denied mankind a right to natural freedom; whereby they have not only, as much as in them lies, exposed all subjects to the utmost misery of tyranny and oppression, but have also unsettled the titles and shaken the thrones of princes... However we must believe them upon their own bare words, when they tell us, “We are all born slaves, and we must continue so;” there is no remedy for it; life and thraldom we entered into together, and can never be quit of the one till we part with the other... (p.8)

Locke made this point, against the ill intents of absolute rulers:

The great question which in all ages has disturbed mankind, and brought on them the greatest part of those mischiefs which have ruined cities, depopulated countries, and disordered the peace of the world, has been, not whether there be power in the world, nor whence it came, but who should have it. The settling of this point being, of no smaller moment than the security of princes, and the peace and welfare of their estates and kingdoms, a reformer of politics, one would think, should lay this sure, and be very clear in it: for if this remain disputable, all the rest will be to very little purpose; and the skill used in dressing up power with all the splendor and temptation absoluteness can add to it, without showing who has a right to have it, will serve only to give a greater edge to man’s natural ambition, which of itself is but too keen. What can this do but set men on the more eagerly to scramble, and so lay a sure and lasting foundation of endless contention and disorder, instead of that peace and tranquility, which is the blurriness of government, and the end of human society? (p.69)

Having argued against Divine Right in the First part, Locke dug into the Second Treatise (same PDF source):

To this purpose, I think it may not be amiss to set down what I take to be political power. That the power of a magistrate over a subject may be distinguished from that of a father over his children, a master over his servant, a husband over his wife, and a lord over his slave. All which distinct powers happening sometimes together in the same man, if he be considered under these different relations, it may help us to distinguish these powers one from another, and show the difference betwixt a ruler of a commonwealth, a father of a family, and a captain of a galley... Political power, then, I take to be a right of making laws, with penalties of death, and consequently all less penalties for the regulating and preserving of property, and of employing the force of the community in the execution of such laws, and in the defence of the commonwealth from foreign injury, and all this only for the public good... (p.106)

To understand political power aright, and derive it from its original, we must consider what estate all men are naturally in, and that is, a state of perfect freedom to order their actions, and dispose of their possessions and persons as they think fit, within the bounds of the law of Nature, without asking leave or depending upon the will of any other man. A state also of equality, wherein all the power and jurisdiction is reciprocal, no one having more than another, there being nothing more evident than that creatures of the same species and rank, promiscuously born to all the same advantages of Nature, and the use of the same faculties, should also be equal one amongst another, without subordination or subjection, unless the lord and master of them all should, by any manifest declaration of his will, set one above another, and confer on him, by an evident and clear appointment, an undoubted right to dominion and sovereignty... (p.106)

That is where the basic element of classical liberalism - the rights of an individual compared to the power of the state - takes root. Locke does care to set limits:

But though this be a state of liberty, yet it is not a state of licence; though man in that state have an uncontrollable liberty to dispose of his person or possessions, yet he has not liberty to destroy himself, or so much as any creature in his possession, but where some nobler use than its bare preservation calls for it. The state of Nature has a law of Nature to govern it, which obliges every one, and reason, which is that law, teaches all mankind who will but consult it, that being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty or possessions... (p.107)

There's arguably a lot more I can quote from Locke, but I'll stop here because this is the point where we can see Locke's influence on Thomas Jefferson, whose work on the Declaration of Independence is the keystone of American political philosophy: From which we derived the belief "that all men are created Equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness."

You might notice Jefferson switches out "possessions" or "property" for "happiness", because that created back in 1776 a rather sticky moral conflict with America's UN-Equal system of chattel slavery on Blacks. Which does point to a more subtle yet still potent problem with liberalism as a political -ism that refers to the main problem overall.

What Locke - and Jefferson, and the rest of the liberal movement of the late 18th Century - aimed for was the establishment and reinforcement of the idea of The Social Contract (edited/cited by Alex Tuckness at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy): 

Locke used the claim that men are naturally free and equal as part of the justification for understanding legitimate political government as the result of a social contract where people in the state of nature conditionally transfer some of their rights to the government in order to better ensure the stable, comfortable enjoyment of their lives, liberty, and property. Since governments exist by the consent of the people in order to protect the rights of the people and promote the public good, governments that fail to do so can be resisted and replaced with new governments...

The most direct reading of Locke’s political philosophy finds the concept of consent playing a central role. His analysis begins with individuals in a state of nature where they are not subject to a common legitimate authority with the power to legislate or adjudicate disputes. From this natural state of freedom and independence, Locke stresses individual consent as the mechanism by which political societies are created and individuals join those societies...

Into all of this Locke and other liberals built up the the concept of "The Rule Of Law": 

The Rule of Law comprises a number of principles of a formal and procedural character, addressing the way in which a community is governed. The formal principles concern the generality, clarity, publicity, stability, and prospectivity of the norms that govern a society. The procedural principles concern the processes by which these norms are administered, and the institutions—like courts and an independent judiciary that their administration requires...

In this, Liberalism subsists on a structured, procedural form of governance where the people as is their right elect leaders, the leaders create laws and enforce them, and the courts balance things out by defining the laws. If that system breaks down in any way, liberals - if any were in charge - would make changes to the laws and realign the administration and argue for judicial decisions to keep the system going.

This is how the Founding Fathers - balanced between more "conservative" world-views of business and class culture, with the "liberal" world-views of democratic/republic principles and legal stability - worked themselves from makeshift state-level confederations into a "strong" federal Constitutional system designed to provide the individual freedoms promised by their liberalism while guaranteeing that chaos/anarchy and the threat of European monarchism (the Absolutism of the day) did not threaten the American way of life. 

This is why when arguing about the nature (well, the sins) of Conservatism I disagreed with Frank Wilhoit's contention that Conservatism was the only American -ism. Wilhoit believed Conservatism - the modern, twisted version of it - had driven all other -isms out of the political landscape. My contention is that Conservatism - obsessed with seizing and maintaining political/economic/social control for the elite few - exists today as a counterpoint to Liberalism - the guarantees of individual rights within a shared community - which persists as a primary American ideology because the institutions it built - our entire Constitutional system of checks and balances - remain standing.

The problem with our modern Liberalism is how it has blinded itself to the perpetuation of that constitutional system, even as it is collapsing on itself from Far Right conservative misrule.

That Rule of Law that liberals insist on - believe still functions normally - is under attack as trump and his underlings both in the Executive and Legislative branches work to undo all of it: Either through attacking civil liberties of Americans and legal residents, or dismantling/shutting down federal agencies without following procedure or getting legislative consent as Locke intended. I've said this before: A lot of our constitutional federal system relied a lot on Good Faith, that all parties involved were acting for a common purpose or at least with genuine conviction to do the right thing. Without that, without the "unwritten rules" of governance that our nation's relied on for centuries to make things work within both the letter and the spirit of the law, the system's falling apart.

And yet, our current Democratic liberal leadership - that should be in active opposition to the damage trump and the radical Conservative Far Right are inflicting on that system - are still acting - almost deluding themselves - as though the political norms can still be upheld. They're so beholden to the Liberal ideology of the Social Contract that they're opening themselves to manipulation by their Conservative opponents to accelerate the constitutional system's collapse.

The likes of Minority Leader Schumer, and half the state governors planning to run for the Presidency in 2028 - as though a corrupt trump won't shut down elections altogether to seize power permanently - are going through the motions like the political norms they're used to will still be there after trump and the wingnut conservatives have burned it all down. They don't see the urgency or dangers of the moment, because they want to believe the liberal foundations of our nation will somehow survive even without action or defense on their part. They don't want to act in ways that would upset their understanding of that Social Contract: those unspoken norms, those natural rights.

The other problem with adhering to those norms of The Social Contract - that individual rights are upheld through the law, and with justice for all - is how uneven how unequal the enforcement of that Social Contract can be. Even as liberalism as an ideology demands equality for all as a right, in practice our liberal systems have a hard time enforcing or even defining those equal rights because even liberalism desires stability - a status quo - over change. 

You have to remember, even the liberal Founding Fathers compromised on the American system of Black slave labor to get the Declaration approved and the Constitution enacted. The liberalism of early American politics, business, and culture allowed slavery to thrive and spread to where it threatened our nation's well-being by the 1850s, and did little to stop the steady march towards Civil War when the spiritual and political harm of slavery could no longer be tolerated. It became the breaking point of the Social Contract, one that required a full Reconstruction and amendment reforms to repair... and which was left unfinished by the 1870s once the Social Contract (between White leaderships) was reimposed, leading to a century of Jim Crow inequality requiring another round of Civil Rights reforms by the 1960s to achieve even a modicum of justice under the Rule of Law. (All now threatened by a very anti-liberal trump regime undoing every Civil Rights act and social shift of the last 60 years)

Even as that Civil War allowed more left-leaning progressives among the liberal powers to enact major reforms involving education, agriculture, business, and law, and even as the Civil Rights movement attempted even further reforms, those reforms were not equally enforced to ensure the liberal system lived up to its own ideals. This is Liberalism's darkest flaw: It relies on a shared agreed-upon social order that bends too much to the corrupt world-view of more conservative, self-serving ideologues.

This is why there's a power struggle between traditional (classical) Liberals and more progressive (socialist) elements of the Democratic Party pushing for radical reforms and stronger equality for all to undo the damages of conservative elites eager to bring back Divine Right of trumps Kings to dominate us all: Liberals are wary of even incremental changes to the political system if it throws their understanding of the Social Contract into chaos.

There are other elements of Liberalism - such as the early adoption of Capitalism as an economic reform against the authoritarian corruption of mercantilism, without realizing how greed undermined Capitalism like any other economic -ism - that would require more discussion, but I've spent too long trying to hammer this essay out and I need to refocus on other outrages and observations of the current train wreck(s) we're enduring.

In short: Liberalism's problem isn't that it's weak, or vacillating when confronted by conservative or even fascist opposition. It's a genuinely well-informed, well-founded -ism compared to the other more destructive political beliefs that rise and fall with the cycles of history. Liberalism's problem is that it holds too much faith in a Social Contract that's too easily shredded and requires the same repatching over and over. At some point, our modern system of liberalism (neoliberal, I think) has to reposition itself on the chessboard and realize a more profound, truly just system of equality and opportunity has to be forged.

A Book On Isms

 I warned you this was coming: My National Novel Writing Month project this year is going to be a non-fiction work examining American -Isms.

I've already done the introductory chapter, and starting into the first -ism I want to examine: Liberalism (you may remember when I bashed Conservatism on this blog awhile ago that I argued Liberalism was the primary ideology of our nation, and that Conservatism a reaction against that).

So I will not be blogging extensively this month. I need to focus on this project (and get one DONE for once!). I do have two other book projects on hand to finish up as well: I need cover artists, dammit!

If I do blog here this November, it will have to be in response to a major breaking news item like oh donald trump pleading GUILTY on one of his 91 criminal indictments.

Good luck on your writing projects, y'all. NOW GET TO TYPING!!!

The Sins of Conservatism

In my ongoing rants against -Isms, I came across a tweet back in May 2022, realized I was due to rant about this, then got distracted by other news cycles, and kept referring back to this while expanding my -Isms outrage into a book project:

 

I need to fcking tag this quote. https://t.co/Xvl5LXlxx1

— Witty Librarian For Ukraine (@PaulWartenberg) May 5, 2022

There is only conservatism. No other political philosophy actually exists; by the political analogue of Gresham's Law, conservatism has driven every other idea out of circulation.

There might be, and should be, anti-conservatism; but it does not yet exist. What would it be? In order to answer that question, it is necessary and sufficient to characterize conservatism. Fortunately, this can be done very concisely.

Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect...

That interpretation of Conservatism by Frank Wilhoit was pretty much spot on, but confusion rose up as to which Frank Wilhoit it was. Early interpretation was that it was (Francis) Wilhoit the political sciences professor, but instead it turned out to be Wilhoit the musical composer (who also posts comments on a lot of blogs including this one, hi Frank!).

Wilhoit the Composer may not be a certified expert on politics like Wilhoit the Professor, but his insight on Conservatism fits absolutely everything we've seen out of Conservatives since... well, the dawn of American politics.

If I'm bringing this back up now, a year later in 2023, it's because we're at yet another moment where American Conservatives - represented today by the Republican Party - are poised to wreak economic and social cruelty across every corner of the nation.

Right now, a lot of Republican-controlled states are passing anti-abortion laws that would punish women and doctors for even natural miscarriages, and forcing women to suffer through medical crises that could kill them. The Republicans are passing gender laws to punish trans teens (and even adults) as well as force gay/lesbian teens to hide from public view, all to uphold their conservative "gender role" bullshit. Republicans are ensuring easier access to firearms and easier public displays of guns especially around children, ensuring more gun violence and fear in our streets. 

At the federal level, the Far Right factions controlling the House GOP are making demands on Biden's administration to gut his own infrastructure and spending bills passed last year, putting chainsaws to Social Security and Medicare, and insisting on making the massive deficit-inducing tax cuts for the rich the GOP passed in 2017 are made permanent (they're set to expire in 2025 I believe). Otherwise they'll use the Debt Ceiling hostage AGAIN to force the U.S. government to default (causing a global economic meltdown).

And I'm not even getting into the viciousness the Conservatives aim at immigrants.

None of these things, by the way, are popular with the majority of Americans. Most Americans are okay with women having the right to choose. Most Americans are okay with gays and lesbians nowadays - having shifted to acceptance under Obama - and don't want to see trans teens abused by the states. Most Americans want gun reforms like universal background checks, safety locks to protect kids, and bans of military-grade assault rifles. Most Americans don't want tax cuts for the rich, Most Americans do want the social safety net working, and Most Americans don't want a public default to kill the global economy. 

Which is the problem with modern Conservatism. As Wilhoit noted, conservatives don't care what the majority wants, they care what they want at the expense of that majority.

Jamelle Boule at the New York Times spelled it out as the Four (Anti-)Freedoms (link provided as a gift, this may be temporary):

...All across the country, Republicans have passed laws to do exactly that wherever they have the power to do so, regardless of public opinion in their states or anywhere else. The war on bodily autonomy is a critical project for nearly the entire G.O.P., pursued with dedication by Republicans from the lowliest state legislator to the party’s powerful functionaries on the Supreme Court.

You might even say that in the absence of a national leader with a coherent ideology and agenda, the actions of Republican-led states and legislatures provide the best guide to what the Republican Party wants to do and the best insight into the society it hopes to build...

There is the push to free business from the suffocating grasp of child labor laws. Republican lawmakers in Arkansas, Iowa, Missouri and Ohio have advanced legislation to make it easier for children as young as 14 to work more hours, work without a permit and be subjected to more dangerous working conditions...

Elsewhere in the country, Republican-led legislatures are placing harsh limits on what teachers and other educators can say in the classroom about American history or the existence of L.G.B.T.Q. people. This week in Florida, Gov. Ron DeSantis signed a bill that bans discussion in general education courses at public institutions of “theories that systemic racism, sexism, oppression and privilege are inherent in the institutions of the United States and were created to maintain social, political and economic inequities.” He also signed a bill that prohibits state colleges and universities from spending on diversity, equity and inclusion programs beyond what is necessary to retain accreditation as educational institutions...

Last but certainly not least is the Republican effort to make civil society a shooting gallery. Since 2003, Republicans in 25 states have introduced and passed so-called constitutional carry laws, which allow residents to have concealed weapons in public without a permit. In most of those states, according to the Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence, it is also legal to openly carry a firearm in public without a permit...

What should we make of all this? In his 1941 State of the Union address, Franklin Roosevelt said there was “nothing mysterious about the foundations of a healthy and strong democracy” and that he, along with the nation, looked forward to “a world founded upon four essential human freedoms.” Famously, those freedoms were the “freedom of speech and expression,” the “freedom of every person to worship God in his own way,” the “freedom from want” and the “freedom from fear.” Those freedoms were the guiding lights of his New Deal, and they remained the guiding lights of his administration through the trials of World War II.

There are, I think, four freedoms we can glean from the Republican program.

There is the freedom to control — to restrict the bodily autonomy of women and repress the existence of anyone who does not conform to traditional gender roles.

There is the freedom to exploit — to allow the owners of business and capital to weaken labor and take advantage of workers as they see fit.

There is the freedom to censor — to suppress ideas that challenge and threaten the ideologies of the ruling class.

And there is the freedom to menace — to carry weapons wherever you please, to brandish them in public, to turn the right of self-defense into a right to threaten other people.

Roosevelt’s four freedoms were the building blocks of a humane society — a social democratic aspiration for egalitarians then and now. These Republican freedoms are also building blocks not of a humane society but of a rigid and hierarchical one, in which you can either dominate or be dominated...

Again, fitting Wilhoit's original observation: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect...

How did America's Conservativism even reach this point? Through long hard work, that's how. Decades of building up an agenda to achieve political power and then keep it at the expense of those they oppose. 

I've noted this before, when Conservatism in the United States early on bent to the whims and needs of the upper-class slaveowners of the South, who as a major faction in the Democratic Party pushed and fought against the more liberal ideologies - like the newly formed Republicans in the 1850s that called for abolition of slavery - to where they ruled and ruined the federal government into Civil War. 

For a time post-War conservativism was split between economic and social beliefs, uniting to maintain Jim Crow segregation but otherwise without a coherent banner to rally around. However, the dynamics of the liberal New Deal during the Great Depression of the 1930s, the rise and strength of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s, and international pressures of the Cold War forced the conservatives to gain a foothold in the 1960s to the Republican Party as reimagined by Barry Goldwater, and brought to power by 1980 by Ronald Reagan. A radical shift within the parties by the 2000s - pushed by the first stage of the Culture War in 1992 - made Republicans into hard conservatives with almost no true Moderate or Liberal left among their ranks, making it so much easier for the modern Republican Party to fulfill Wilhoit's definition.

Making it worse in all this was how Reagan brought to the Conservative movement the religious evangelicals - something even Goldwater refused to do - empowering the Republicans into an absolutist, God-given belief structure that doubles down on the "We are the TRUE Americans and all power should be OURS" world-view turning this into a power struggle between the "righteous" and the "dread Other" who must be purged from the (Christian) national body like a disease. Never mind the corruption and violence that comes with such a world-view.

If Conservatism is so corrupting, so prone to self-empowering to the point of self-destruction, so intent on denying any power-sharing (or wealth-sharing) with others to where it never holds a true majority of people, how can it still be popular enough to hold any semblance of power in the first place?

Well obviously, Conservativism appeals to those who seek power and influence and wealth. They will buy into such an -Ism in the hopes they will profit from being in the elite few. This is why you will see women, Blacks, Latinos, other ethnic and gender minorities align themselves to a conservative movement that would deny basic human rights to their own. Because they believe they are in - or can conform to - the upper class - an elite made of money, of celebrity - protected by other conservatives.

But how can such Conservatism - defined by that elitist world-view - appeal to those still outside of that upper elite class? Why are there a vast number of those in poverty - such as the rural regions of the Midwest or the Deep South - in the lower classes still willing to vote for something against their own economic and legal interests?

Because that Conservatism still tells those among the lower classes that their social status - defined by racial ethnicity - grants them higher standing over others in the same economic levels. Yes, the low-income voters making up the Republican Conservative base are driven by racism, and that's what empowers the Culture War cruelty that the Republican leaders are inflicting on their own states.

The shortest, most polite way to describe Conservatism in America: It is a sociological, economic, and political philosophy that insists on maintaining a racist Status Quo that benefits those on the "right" side of the racist dividing line (White, Male, and/or Rich, preferably all three).

There's a lot more to be said about Conservatism - for one, I would argue against Wilhoit's point that there are no other philosophies, because I believe Conservatism is a reaction against Liberalism - but that's where my book project comes into play. More on that hopefully later when I find time to effing write it past the outline stage (the research is mostly done).

One of the things I argue about -Isms is how they are competing and oft-times conflicting ideologies, burdened by the reality that all of them can be wrong about the Human Condition in any given moment but will insist on being absolutely right. Conservatism is no different: It will insist on its own philosophical purity while ignoring the damage it does even to its own adherents.

The problem with modern Conservatism - at least here in the United States - is that conservatives are fully aware of the damage they can do and still push their agenda. The whole argument of "The Cruelty Is The Point", and what Boulle details as the Republican agenda to grant only themselves the Freedoms for their own power, proves how dangerous this -Ism has become.

Taking a Break February 2023 Edition

I'm going to avoid blogging for this month of February so I can focus on a novel project I really REALLY want to get done: A book on American political ideologies (aka the -ISMs). I'm focused on this because  my nephews and niece are now in their 20s, and I'm a little worried their political belief structures are going to get overwhelmed in this age of misinformation.

That means I'm re-reading what I know about Liberalism and Conservatism, and gearing up to tear apart Libertarianism - I'll probably just quote verbatim from that book about bears - as well as a quick explanation why Socialism never worked out here in the states the way it did in Europe.

I'm going to have to figure out how to fit Moderate - which has a function in politics but not its own party - into a chapter. Can Moderatism (see, I get a redline spelling warning, that's not a real word dammit) fit into the -Ism model? Maybe conflate with Pragmatism?

I've already read through a number of books, but got about five more to crunch into the coming weeks. Busy already.

Stay safe out there, blog readers.

(Having promised this, watch as prosecutors in Georgia, New York, and DC file criminal charges on trump this month. ...sigh)

Update: Okay, yeah, the whole Chinese Spy Balloon Saga got waaaaaay too silly but what the hell, they'll be partying in Surfside Beach, SC this weekend celebrating the shootdown!

Well Ain't This A Kick? My Subtle Decades-Long Influence On the Political Discourse

So here I am, reading up on books on the various political ideologies - the Isms as I call 'em - so I can write a book on American Isms to pass along to my nephews and niece to ensure they don't get suckered in by the worst of dogma out there (slightly worried I may be too late as they've mostly finished college, and my twin brother had a copy of Atlas Shrugged in his house, dammit man how could you?!?!).

I've gotten a few books on liberalism already - Liberalism and Its Discontents by Francis Fukuyama is incredibly concise and easy to read, by the by - and a book on conservatism which was kinda meh, and today through the Interlibrary Loan system a copy of Moderates: the Vital Center of American Politics from the Founding to Today by David S. Brown, which I sat down to read after dinner when I got home from work today.

So I get to the Introduction of the book, and there's a quote about "Moderate" as a definition on the Urban Dictionary website. UD is an informal, oft-times sarcastic, blunt, and vulgar open source dictionary, been around since the heady early days of the Internet. There can be honest and insightful entries on Urban Dictionary, and the "Moderate" definition could well be considered one.

When I saw that quote, I muttered to myself "That looks damned familiar..."

So I hopped onto Urban Dictionary, something I hadn't done since 2006 I think, and looked up that quote, and goddammit I was the one who wrote it.

This was almost 20 years ago!!!

It's the top ranked definition on the site, which may explain Brown's willingness to quote it. Still, it's getting quoted by professors in their political science/history books. I'm getting the "Mark Twain Pithy Snark" Treatment over here, and damn my ego won't stop jumping up and down.

Now all I need to know is if my edits to the Wikipedia articles on "The Gunfight at the OK Corral" are still up. (checks) Nope, nope they all got edited out years ago. /deep sigh

I am ever so thrilled that my world-view on moderates as a political ideology has had some influence however meager on the discourse. I am a little miffed Brown didn't quote me by name: Dude, it's right there in the byline! Best I can figure, if Brown tried reaching to me through my UD account, it was on an old Selfin.org email I had when I lived in South Florida, and I lost that login ages ago (SEFLIN Freenet shut down by the time I left from there in 2003). By the time this book got published in 2016, he probably had no way to know where I was on the Intertubes. 

Alas, as time flows from then to now...

(long contemplative thought)

OKAY NOW BACK TO READING THAT BOOK! THIS RESEARCH AIN'T GONNA READ ITSELF! FOR THE HORDE!!! LET'S SEE IF BROWN QUOTES FROM RUDE PUNDIT NEXT!!!

Upcoming Projects for 2023

Couple of personal notes intermixed with the blogging: 

Driven by the need to have a printed book to apply Royal Palm Literary Award stickers on the covers, I will be putting together key articles from this blog for publication. I did it before with Surviving the Age of Obstruction back in 2016, and I figure a good follow-up to that would be articles about the rise of trump and the destruction he wrought upon the world for 6-plus years.

...

I shall not use the obvious title "Surviving the Eternal Shitgibbon" since I don't own the trademark on "Shitgibbon," so I DO need a better title to market the damn thing. The subtitle "A Diary of the Trump Years" I think is unavoidable.

I may pull the first book from print, though. It never sold - it had to be the weak title I gave it, and publishing through a bad POD service didn't help - and I want to start fresh.

The other project on my mind is writing a book on American -Isms. Having blogged a bit about libertarianism and pragmatism, I figure I need to define the other major -isms - liberalism, conservatism, socialism, fascism, populism, racism - in our nation's political forums. I want to do this for my niece and nephews, all of whom are in their early 20s and I worry about the disinformation floating out there threatening to suck their brains dry.

So I may be busy this Saturnalian weekend as well as the early months of 2023 getting projects done.

I do know I need to keep blogging here. After all, tomorrow Monday promises to be a busy day.

Still In a 2016 Nightmare, Searching for a Wakeup Call in 2022

Saw this on Twitter today from Emma Lord (the Tumblr is from Deadnightguard but I can't find the original post so):

this tumblr post deserves to be put in history textbooks pic.twitter.com/FNf8NgwZNk

— emma lord (@dilemmalord) January 18, 2022

And GODDAMMIT THE WHOLE THING MAKES SENSE.

Looking back, everything went to hell the moment donald trump came down that escalator to a paid crowd announcing his Presidential campaign.

I mean, we can look back at when it happened in June 2015, the sheer madness of it seemed like it would quickly go away like a bad fart. I can still remember how Rude Pundit described the scene (seriously NSFW). I can't even sharequote from that, as brilliant as it was, due to the sheer vulgarity. Not from Rude's vivid descriptions, but from the reality that trump himself WAS THAT VULGAR to begin with.

And yet, the absurdity of trump never dissipated. Lacking any political record to run on, he ran on himself, his own racism and sexism and vulgar consumption. trump overwhelmed the election cycle, running on the sheer fact that the mainstream media - some of them controlled by his closest allies like Jeff Zucker, who turned out to share trump's sexism and amorality - gave him free coverage 24/7 that he fed from like a soul vampire.

Everything in my life still feels like it's been on hold since 2016, since that dark election result where Hillary still won the Popular vote but the Electoral vote was rigged in favor for trump. I can't be the only one who feels this way, even in 2022. Even with trump officially out of power, even with Biden sitting in office trying to get this nation back on track.

All because trump hasn't gone away. The remnants of his January 6th Coup Attempt haven't ended, the ongoing investigations revealing just how deep the rot sank into trump's White House, trump and his allies are still threatening to call out for more violence, and the Republican Party is pretty much running on this madness for their 2022 Midterms (and beyond).

None of that madness is going to end until trump himself is in handcuffs for his criminal bullshit, and even then THAT will trigger the Far Right violence we can all sense is right there on the edge of our nightmares.

Thing is, we dare not look away. We dare not pretend we can avoid that nightmare. We dare not - not as a nation, not with the danger to our individual rights - ignore the Far Right Fascist storm that's coming. 

We may be stressed out by six (or seven) years of trumpian disaster, but the disaster isn't over and it's threatening to get worse. We need to steel ourselves, prepare for the moment when destiny stares us in the eye, and we have to stand up and keep everything that's right about America - our families, our friends, our personal honor, our best selves - from getting taken away or burned in the firepits of fascism. 

It's all hard work. But our liberty and our rights are worth fighting for. Thomas Paine told us that centuries ago:

THESE are the times that try men's souls.

The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly: it is dearness only that gives every thing its value. Heaven knows how to put a proper price upon its goods; and it would be strange indeed if so celestial an article as FREEDOM should not be highly rated.

Those lessons have not changed. Our rights as Americans - our need to express ourselves by vote, by voice, by conviction, by community - are still a celestial good, and dare not let it get stolen by that Eternal Grifter trump.

The Greatest Threat to Rugged Libertarianism? Bears

Every time I see an article on Libertarianism failing on a grand scale, my Pragmatism radar goes off and I go arunnin' to see what the fuss is.

Shared through Lawyers Guns and Money, there is this report in The New Republic (behind a firewall for some of you, I need to start noting which sites are fee-based) by Patrick Blanchfield reviewing a book by Matthew Hongoltz-Hetling about how Libertarians took over a small town in New Hampshire to build their Utopia:

...This is the so-called Free Town Project, a venture wherein a group of libertarian activists attempted to take over a tiny New Hampshire town, Grafton, and transform it into a haven for libertarian ideals—part social experiment, part beacon to the faithful, Galt’s Gulch meets the New Jerusalem. These people had found one another largely over the internet, posting manifestos and engaging in utopian daydreaming on online message boards. While their various platforms and bugbears were inevitably idiosyncratic, certain beliefs united them: that the radical freedom of markets and the marketplace of ideas was an unalloyed good; that “statism” in the form of government interference (above all, taxes) was irredeemably bad. Left alone, they believed, free individuals would thrive and self-regulate, thanks to the sheer force of “logic,” “reason,” and efficiency. For inspirations, they drew upon precedents from fiction (Ayn Rand loomed large) as well as from real life, most notably a series of micro-nation projects ventured in the Pacific and Caribbean during the 1970s and 1980s...

Particularly important for the story is one John Babiarz, a software designer with a Krusty the Klown laugh, who decamped from Big-Government-Friendly Connecticut in the 1990s to homestead in New Hampshire with his equally freedom-loving wife, Rosalie. Entering a sylvan world that was, Hongoltz-Hetling writes, “almost as if they had driven through a time warp and into New England’s revolutionary days, when freedom outweighed fealty and trees outnumbered taxes,” the two built a new life for themselves, with John eventually coming to head Grafton’s volunteer fire department (which he describes as a “mutual aid” venture) and running for governor on the Libertarian ticket.

Although John’s bids for high office failed, his ambitions remained undimmed, and in 2004 he and Rosalie connected with a small group of libertarian activists. Might not Grafton, with its lack of zoning laws and low levels of civic participation, be the perfect place to create an intentional community based on Logic and Free Market Principles? After all, in a town with fewer than 800 registered voters, and plenty of property for sale, it would not take much for a committed group of transplants to establish a foothold, and then win dominance of municipal governance. And so the Free Town Project began. The libertarians expected to be greeted as liberators, but from the first town meeting, they faced the inconvenient reality that many of Grafton’s presumably freedom-loving citizens saw them as outsiders first, and compatriots second—if at all. Tensions flared further when a little Googling revealed what “freedom” entailed for some of the new colonists. One of the original masterminds of the plan, a certain Larry Pendarvis, had written of his intention to create a space honoring the freedom to “traffic organs, the right to hold duels, and the God-given, underappreciated right to organize so-called bum fights.” He had also bemoaned the persecution of the “victimless crime” that is “consensual cannibalism...”

That Libertarianism has room to accept cannibalism is a problem shared with Far Right Conservatives, but we'll save that discussion for another time. Meanwhile, back in Socialist Hellhole San Francisco Libertarian Heaven Grafton:

While Pendarvis eventually had to take his mail-order Filipina bride business and dreams of municipal takeovers elsewhere (read: Texas), his comrades in the Free Town Project remained undeterred. Soon, they convinced themselves that, evidence and reactions to Pendarvis notwithstanding, the Project must actually enjoy the support of a silent majority of freedom-loving Graftonites. How could it not? This was Freedom, after all. And so the libertarians keep coming, even as Babiarz himself soon came to rue the fact that “the libertarians were operating under vampire rules—the invitation to enter, once offered, could not be rescinded.” The precise numbers are hard to pin down, but ultimately the town’s population of a little more than 1,100 swelled with 200 new residents, overwhelmingly men, with very strong opinions and plenty of guns...

If the Libertarian vision of Freedom can take many shapes and sizes, one thing is bedrock: “Busybodies” and “statists” need to stay out of the way. And so the Free Towners spent years pursuing an aggressive program of governmental takeover and delegitimation, their appetite for litigation matched only by their enthusiasm for cutting public services. They slashed the town’s already tiny yearly budget of $1 million by 30 percent, obliged the town to fight legal test case after test case, and staged absurd, standoffish encounters with the sheriff to rack up YouTube hits. Grafton was a poor town to begin with, but with tax revenue dropping even as its population expanded, things got steadily worse. Potholes multiplied, domestic disputes proliferated, violent crime spiked, and town workers started going without heat. “Despite several promising efforts,” Hongoltz-Hetling dryly notes, “a robust Randian private sector failed to emerge to replace public services.” Instead, Grafton, “a haven for miserable people,” became a town gone “feral.” Enter the bears, stage right...

You hear that, Ed? Bears. Now you're putting the whole station in jeopardy.

Back to Blanchfield:

What was the deal with Grafton’s bears? Hongoltz-Hetling investigates the question at length, probing numerous hypotheses for why the creatures have become so uncharacteristically aggressive, indifferent, intelligent, and unafraid. Is it the lack of zoning, the resulting incursion into bear habitats, and the reluctance of Graftonites to pay for, let alone mandate, bear-proof garbage bins? Might the bears be deranged somehow, perhaps even disinhibited and emboldened by toxoplasmosis infections, picked up from eating trash and pet waste from said unsecured bins? There can be no definitive answer to these questions, but one thing is clear: The libertarian social experiment underway in Grafton was uniquely incapable of dealing with the problem. “Free Towners were finding that the situations that had been so easy to problem-solve in the abstract medium of message boards were difficult to resolve in person.”

Grappling with what to do about the bears, the Graftonites also wrestled with the arguments of certain Libertarians who questioned whether they should do anything at all—especially since several of the town residents had taken to feeding the bears, more or less just because they could. One woman, who prudently chose to remain anonymous save for the sobriquet “Doughnut Lady,” revealed to Hongoltz-Hetling that she had taken to welcoming bears on her property for regular feasts of grain topped with sugared doughnuts. If those same bears showed up on someone else’s lawn expecting similar treatment, that wasn’t her problem. The bears, for their part, were left to navigate the mixed messages sent by humans who alternately threw firecrackers and pastries at them. Such are the paradoxes of Freedom. Some people just “don’t get the responsibility side of being libertarians,” Rosalie Babiarz tells Hongoltz-Hetling, which is certainly one way of framing the problem...

This is where I point out the thing I learned from studying 19th Century Literary Utopias back in college: One of the obvious flaws in any Utopian attempt is how conflict inevitably arises between people arguing over what that Utopia should actually be. The paradox of Libertarianism - the obsession that the Individual is all that matters - becomes self-defeating when those Individuals try to impose their singular world-view upon other Individuals who might not see it the same way, and are following their own agendas. Who is going to stop Doughnut Lady, who is expressing her Libertarian ideal of co-existing with pastry-loving ursines? Someone else's problem after all, isn't it?

Back to Blanchfield:

Pressed by bears from without and internecine conflicts from within, the Free Town Project began to come apart. Caught up in “pitched battles over who was living free, but free in the right way,” the libertarians descended into accusing one another of statism, leaving individuals and groups to do the best (or worst) they could. Some kept feeding the bears, some built traps, others holed up in their homes, and still others went everywhere toting increasingly larger-caliber handguns. After one particularly vicious attack, a shadowy posse formed and shot more than a dozen bears in their dens. This effort, which was thoroughly illegal, merely put a dent in the population; soon enough, the bears were back in force.

Meanwhile, the dreams of numerous libertarians came to ends variously dramatic and quiet. A real estate development venture known as Grafton Gulch, in homage to the dissident enclave in Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, went belly-up. After losing a last-ditch effort to secure tax exemption, a financially ruined Connell found himself unable to keep the heat on at the Meetinghouse; in the midst of a brutal winter, he waxed apocalyptic and then died in a fire. Franz quit his survivalist commune, which soon walled itself off into a prisonlike compound, the better to enjoy freedom. And John Babiarz, the erstwhile inaugurator of the Project, became the target of relentless vilification by his former ideological cohorts, who did not appreciate his refusal to let them enjoy unsecured blazes on high-wildfire–risk afternoons. When another, higher-profile libertarian social engineering enterprise, the Free State Project, received national attention by promoting a mass influx to New Hampshire in general (as opposed to just Grafton), the Free Town Project’s fate was sealed. Grafton became “just another town in a state with many options,” options that did not have the same problem with bears...

Blanchfield does step back to review the state of the state of New Hampshire itself, where the political conflicts between ideologies have collapsed into a clogged unresponsive mess. Decades of mismanaging and underfunding the agencies that do exist that should handle the bear threat (but can't) has contributed to the current crisis.

A lot of that mismanagement stems from the human urge to follow, the need to live up to, whatever philosophy (our own -Ism) drives us. A lot of the problem with bears isn't the bears, it's us.

The bear just wants to fucking eat donuts. That's the only -Ism the bear knows.

Predicting Character: Bernie As Constant Curmudgeon

Okay, this has taken me a little longer to write than I'd hoped, mostly because I am trying to keep a promise to myself to make this as unbiased and professional a review as possible.

SO CAN YOU BERNIEBROS SHUT UP ABOUT YOUR PRECIOUS FEE-FEES ABOUT NOT GETTING YOUR WAY WITH THE DNC RULES FOR A MINUTE HERE?! Ahem. Sorry. Let's try to keep it cool, okay self? Okay.

Next up on the candidate reviews - based on James David Barber's model of Presidential Character - is a fellow we've have guest-star before, this Senator from Vermont by the name of Bernie Sanders. (Insane amount of cheering from Facebook rises up) For heaven's sake, BernieBros, can I get through this without ANY interruptions?! (boos echo through the blog) Too bad, shaddup, and read on.

This is what I wrote before in 2015 during the build-up to that election cycle:

Positives: Has electoral experience for decades serving as a congressman and then Senator.  Has a political agenda that pushes hard Left after decades that most agendas pushed hard Right (the Age of Reagan), meaning a decent chance to shift the goal-posts of the national dialog back to the center.
Negatives: As much as the Far Far Right candidates like Cruz, Rand Paul, and Huckabee (announcing very soon) are poison to the general voting electorate, Sanders is too Far Far Left.  Half of his platform will reek too much of a Socialist agenda too many Americans still despise.  Comes from a small-population state that will not help as a base of voter support.   There is a question that as an independent (not really in the party) that he may not qualify on enough state ballots to count (his campaign is going to have to work overtime to make those ballots).
Chances: Slim.  He's determined, and has a reason to run this thing as far as possible.  But the Democratic Establishment types would be horrified if he gets the nomination: the Wall Street forces will rally like mad for the pro-business candidates like Hillary and could well swamp Sanders' campaign with too much money/power (which ironically will prove Sanders correct about the corruption of campaign money). And he may not appeal across the individual states - especially the more centrist, Red/Purple states in the South and West - he'll need to win primaries.
Character Chart: Sanders' socialist agenda is aggressively behind using the powers of the federal government to the fullest extent of the law, and that government can be used to improve the economy, improve jobs and wages, and uphold broad civil liberties.  On that, Sanders has the look of an Active-Positive (views government as an effective means of change).  However, Sanders displays many of the Active-Negative traits of being Idealistic and Uncompromising: he will not bend on the issues.  The only thing I can be certain of: he will be an Active President if elected.

Ever since I put up that Character assessment, I got to see more of Bernie in action. Or to be more specific, I got to see more of his followers in action.

This is where my ire and distrust about them kicked in...

Here's the deal, Bernie followers: Hillary's supporters are NOT sheep nor sheeple. A majority of Hillary's followers have solid reasons to side with her this 2016 election, and they have reasons not to share the worldview you've got that make you side with Bernie with such fervor.

In your pursuit of defending your candidate, you're going out of your way to insult fellow Democrats and Left-leaning centrists who are still a vital part of the Democratic party's chances to win big this 2016.

As much as you feel alienated from having a Far Left / progressive agenda get shot down for 40-plus years since the rise of Nixon and the Republican Southern Strategy, you're not helping by alienating the more moderate, pragmatic party members who aren't going to be in the mood for your denunciations and scorn...

Look, you can argue for Bernie Sanders. Argue on the merits, argue about the need to fight income inequality. Get ahead on the issue about the growing crisis in rental and homeowning costs for a majority of Americans. Go loud and strong on dealing with the massive personal debt crisis that got ignored by the Big Banks and Wall Street.

But stop with the insults and dismissal of your fellow Democrats. THEY ARE YOU AND YOU ARE THEY both on the same side of social justice and economic fairness, despite all the stuff about Hillary being in bed with Wall Street. At the end of the day, Hillary is still talking about making things work the way Democrats want things to work...

My ongoing exposure to the Bernie fanbase has been a continuing spectacle of a fervent group who believe THEY are the true voice of Dem voters fighting against an "Establishment" party that's trying to retain enough cohesion to fucking win a Presidential election. Again. Yet it's that failure of purity that's already driving some of the more publicly-known pro-Bernie supporters to say they won't support any other Democratic candidate in 2020. Just like they promised not to for Hillary in 2016. Essentially, they're extorting the Democratic party into accepting Bernie or else suffer low turnout guaranteeing a second trump term.

In other words, the BernieBros are promising to be assholes. Again. (Booing increases from the corners of the Internet where they reside) I'm not WRONG, you jerks. Look at yourselves... Sheesh, anyway...

The current drum-beating from the BernieBro elements are that the other major candidates - Biden, Harris, even Warren - are insufficiently Progressive enough to win them over if they get the nomination. Worse, they're convinced that none of the other candidates can appeal to the coveted "working whites" voting group that went for trump in 2016, as though that voting bloc is ever attainable for Democrats in 2020. Never mind the facts - same as in 2016 - that a Democratic administration if they win would support - and even pass - enough of a Far Left platform to make the United States more secure on key issues for progressives like better wages, repairing the damage of climate change, ending trump's human rights abuses on immigration, and more.

The Bernie voters - like any Idealistic extremist world-view - want their Utopia. To them, "Merely Good" is NOT "Perfect". And only Bernie can deliver "Perfect".

So what the hell IS "Perfect" for a Bernie supporter? In short, a radical redesign of American political and social philosophy, away from Capitalism and fully attuned to Socialism (based on what Bernie calls a Democratic Socialism akin to Scandinavian nations).

I can re-argue the problem of Utopian thinking in detail (Again), but the most obvious argument here is that a majority of Americans - many of them AREN'T as Left-leaning as the Progressives want to believe - are NOT going to support a Bernie agenda that on paper looks to change everything we know about how America works. 

When people vote For or Against anything, the biggest concerns they will always have are What do I gain from this, and What will this cost me? A massive revamp of even healthcare away from the Obamacare system (which supports the current Capitalist view) to a Medicare-For-All system (which forces wholesale changes that even its supporters can't fully explain) will scare enough honest voters (even the ones who would benefit the most) away from supporting that.

This is where Bernie differs from much of the primary field. Even Warren - who is closest to Bernie when it comes to Progressive issues - is more focused on reforming the systems we have instead of massive change. In this regard, Warren is more an FDR New Deal supporter - which kept Capitalism but heavily regulated it - than an outright Henry Wallace-type of Far Left candidate.

And if you know your history, Henry Wallace really did not appeal to most Americans when he had his chance. For all the changes to how Americans view full-out Socialism today (especially among younger voters), there still are a lot of voters who won't accept it. Even among solid Liberal Democratic voters sympathetic to those goals.

This lack of actual support for an openly Socialist agenda is leading into the other problem: Bernie is not doing so great in the primaries this time. Last time, against Hillary and minor candidates, Bernie was the clear alternative to the juggernaut that was the Hillary campaign. But that was then. Today, Sanders is part of a field of 24 - no, wait, it's dropped down to 16 finally thank the Gods - to where there isn't a dominant Establishment figure (Hillary) against whom a single candidate could run (the Not-Hillary). This time, there's one dominant Establishment figure (Biden) against whom there are three viable Not-Bidens (Bernie but also Harris and also Warren) to split the opposition vote. Bernie cannot rely on a solid 40-45 percent of Democratic voters in the primaries, he has to fight for them vs. Warren and Harris.

Just to repeat meself: Bernie's not doing a very good job of winning over that voting base this time. Sanders' Uncompromising behavior is a big reason why (via Peter Hamby at Vanity Fair):

Sanders might be 77 years old and “salty as ever,” as CNN’s Kate Bolduan said on-air Tuesday after his announcement, but he’s still a central figure in the dialectic of the Democratic Party, its most uncompromising ideological figure, and best fund-raiser. Like Trump, Sanders didn’t get there by climbing the ladder in Washington like his fellow senators now in the presidential race; he did it by tapping into common-sense ideas about economic fairness and raising oceans of small-donor cash online in the process. He delivered his message using non-traditional media and waited for the green-room journalism crowd to catch up. A democratic socialist, Sanders might have chosen to run in 2016 as a third-party liberal in the mold of Nader. But instead, he smartly decided to disrupt the Democratic Party from the inside by seeking its presidential nomination, all while never calling himself a Democrat. Sanders became the liberal folk hero of the last campaign, the subject of graffiti murals, hipster endorsements, and D.I.Y. merch, the cool grassroots signifiers that swirled around Nader a decade and a half earlier...

Sanders’s biggest failure in 2016 was not building coalitions. He found it difficult to expand his reach beyond liberals, white workers, and young people, to win over the older women and African-Americans who eventually gave their votes to Clinton. But on CBS, Sanders told Dickerson that unlike in 2016, he can plausibly win the nomination without cobbling together a majority of Democrats. “In some ways it makes it easier,” Sanders said. “When you’re running against one person you know you gotta have 51 percent of the votes. Now who knows what you need? Thirty, thirty-five percent...?”

Sanders seems like he’d rather watch a 10-hour Bachelor marathon, Clockwork Orange–style, than do the same. He is permanently averse to playing the inside political game, gabbing with power brokers on the phone, or charming the media off-the-record. His sequel campaign will test whether those choices matter anymore, whether big speeches, lofty policy ideas, and social media alone can carry the day. This might be a Very Bill Simmons Hot Take, but Sanders is the James Harden of politics. He’ll get you 30 points a night, but it’s hard to see how he wins a championship without getting his teammates involved. Either way, he’ll still be in the conversation...

The short gist: Sanders will lead the Democratic Party but he won't work with it. Compromise is a dirty word to him. If I need to say something positive about this, I could call him an Idealist deeply committed to an alternative world-view of America as a Socialist Utopia. As much as an Idealist Bernie is, we've seen Idealists in action before: Of previous Presidents, Sanders IMHO would follow in the footsteps of Woodrow Wilson, whose ambitions and agendas surely capped the Progressive Era of early 20th Century... only to have everything crash and burn due to his stubborn ideology. And if you've read my blog enough, you know what I think of Utopias...

Add to that this bit from a Jeva Lange article I dug up from The Week back in 2015:

"Bernie's an a--hole, but he's our a--hole," one unnamed Vermont politician explained to Boston Magazine. Sanders' campaign field director put it more gently: "Bernie is a very demanding guy. He has very high expectations, and he expects people to meet them."

Chris Graff, a journalist who has covered Sanders for the past two and a half decades, expressed similar sentiments. "Bernie has no social skills, no sense of humor, and he's quick to boil over," he said. "He's the most unpolitical person in politics I've ever come across." Likewise, following Bernie's threats to walk off the stage when Black Lives Matter protesters interrupted him in Phoenix, Vermont's Seven Days newspaper described the move as "exasperating and classic Bernie... Man of the people treating the people like tiresome children, telling them what the issue is, instead of listening to what their issue, our issue, America's issue is right now."

"Bernie is so certain that what he represents politically is unquestionably correct, therefore everyone should agree," Susan Boardman Russ, the former chief of staff for Vermont Sen. Jim Jeffords, told Boston Magazine. "Not much room for compromise... it was, 'Play in my sandbox, or get out.'"

If you've read this blog enough - especially the Presidential Character stuff - you'll know the second I apply Uncompromising to describe someone I'm labeling that person Active-Negative. It's the key trait for A-Ns - just as Adaptive is for Active-Positive and Congeniality is for Passive-Positive and Duty is for Passive-Negative - where their ambition to achieve their goals outweigh their ability to actually reach those goals. Or if they do reach those goals, they fail to realize the costs - before AND after - those goals require.

If I had to redraw the Character description for 2020, it'd look like this:

Bernie Sanders - Senator, Vermont
Positives: Has electoral experience for decades serving as a congressman and then Senator. An engaging and driven personality. Aggressively pushes for a Left-leaning populist agenda that may appeal to key voting blocs. Has developed a dedicated fanbase that should provide a solid voter base in the primaries.

Negatives: Even in an election cycle where the Democratic candidates are more Progressive than ever (outside of Biden and a handful of other second-tier candidates), Sanders is still too far a Far Left figure. For all his years - since the 1990s! - at the federal level, does not have an extensive success track record with legislation: Very few sponsored bills getting passed or even voted on. Still does not show many signs of playing well with others. .

Chances: Slim. Bernie started off as the marquee name this primary cycle but was eclipsed by Biden the second Joe threw his hat in. Bernie's also been overtaken by Warren whose progressive bona fides - and more positive campaign style - has claimed a lot of the followers he had in 2016. He's determined (as already noted), and has a reason to run this thing as far as possible. But this time he doesn't have the Outsider cachet, he doesn't have the Progressive Warrior banner to himself, and this time he's worn out his welcome.

Character Chart: Before, I had little awareness of Sanders' performance and world-view outside of his stated platform. I couldn't tell then if he were Positive (politically engaged and viewing Presidential power as a means for helping others) or Negative (dedicated - obsessed even - with a particular agenda as a form of personal success). Having seen him in action since 2016, I've gotten a better understanding of how his Uncompromising stances on his Democratic Socialist agenda makes him too Active-Negative a figure to be Adaptive to the challenges any President will face. Sanders wants to be the one to turn the United States away from a Capitalist political-economic society towards a Socialist one. That's one hell of an ambitious agenda, but speaks to a world-view that will chafe against the restrictions of a Federalist system. A Sanders administration - even with a Democratic-controlled Congress - will be a bar brawl every step of the way.

The United States cannot afford four more years of trumpism. It can't even afford one more DAY of Mitch McConnell selling out our Senate to the NRA and Putin. The only way this can get solved is by backing the Democratic Party across all ballots, all elected offices. THAT'S how this nation can recover and rebuild. If the candidate is Biden, so be it, VOTE. If the candidate is Harris, so be it, VOTE. If the candidate is Warren, so be it, VOTE. If the candidate is Bernie, so be it, VOTE. If the candidate is Gabbard... okay, fucking thing's been rigged, WTF Putin even THAT would be too obvious a hack.

But here's the problem: I am not hearing from a lot of Bernie supporters that if the choice ends up being Biden or Harris or Warren they'll still vote Dem. I'm getting the vibe, hearing too much feedback that the pro-Bernie faction will - again - sit out the vote in protest and let trump and those crooks continue destroying our world.

"I will vote FOR the Democratic nominee for President in 2020." That's an easy thing to say and do, Bernie supporters. Recognize and support the Democratic candidate most likely to fulfill an agenda that makes the world close to what you want it to be. It won't be PERFECT, but it'll be better than it is now. Please and thank you.

Next up on the Presidential Character preview for 2020: Oh you better believe there's a plan for that.

A Brief Foray Into Pragmatism

If you all had been reading this blog for some time - hi, my regular 8 readers! - you might have noticed I occasionally rail against the "-Isms" of the world. By that, I mean the philosophical ideologies that drive people to commit to certain acts and thoughts towards themselves and others.

I made a big deal ranting against Libertarianism from time to time, for example.

One of the reasons why I don't ascribe to an -Ism (even though I probably do, everyone has at least one -Ism) is that it can force a person to adhere ENTIRELY to that belief system - almost like a religious faith - to where they exclude any rational thought or healthy skepticism (uh-oh) that could help them out of a philosophical argument they can't get out of. A person can become an Absolutist about an -Ism to where they deny the Reality that -Ism can't resolve.

That is where planned Utopias go to die: the -Ism becomes more important that the practicalities of daily living and the tiny moral (and amoral) compromises that one requires to survive.

I even argue that Pragmatism has its' flaws. Yeah, I went there.

But what exactly is Pragmatism in the first place? Good question, self.

This is coming up by the by because of a brilliant article by PM Carpenter about American Pragmatism and the Republican Party's current logical dilemma of backing an outright fraud like Trump, even though supporting him AND denying him would destroy their party no matter what. He mentioned a fellow I hadn't heard of before - William James - and that peaked my interest.

Anyway, just to start off, Pragmatism is (thank you Merriam-Webster) "a reasonable and logical way of doing things or of thinking about problems that is based on dealing with specific situations instead of on ideas and theories." Another explanation would be that a Pragmatist would focus on the problem-solving required of an idea rather than reflect over or promote the idea itself.

It has - much to my delight - an American origin as a philosophy, beginning in the 1870s by the likes of Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, and John Dewey (not the guy who invented the Dewey Decimal, that was Melvil you fools).

Let's focus on James as Carpenter refers to him directly:

That phrase, "whatever works," is often embraced as the essence - the singular essence - of American Pragmatism. The embrace, however, is a degradation of the ism. William James would be appalled to see his seminal philosophy reduced to the practical politics of enduring a human blight such as Trump.

(James) meant, in his early 20th-centiry lectures and writings, to locate an intellectual space between Idealism (often, Dogmatism) and rootless Materialism. He borrowed from both, which is to say, he and another principled pragmatists saw their philosophy of practicality as one nonetheless endowed by human decency, human values, even by what I'm reluctant to call human morality (possibly inspired by the ethereal). What's more, none of it was worth a bucket of warm whatever if it wasn't geared toward the humanly productive.

And nothing could be less conceptually productive than the incontestable horror of a President Trump - the very definition of blighted humanity...

I'm with Carpenter about the subversion of "whatever works": that passes more as an excuse for "expediency" which usually results in a sloppy, half-hearted patch job that falls apart when its logical fallacies bump up against the Real World. A Pragmatic solution is one that thinks towards long-term resolution, something that when fixed stays that way, or is open to further revisions down the line.

One of the elements of Pragmatism - if we refer to Peirce's founding practices - requires the use of the "Scientific Method": That is, Observation, Measurement, Testing, and Modification of a hypothesis towards establishing a theory, rule, or law. Most other -Isms won't even look at modifying anything if it meant disrupting the core principles of that -Ism. It gives Pragmatism a flexibility other ideologies don't have.

Where James comes into the equation is his application of his career in psychology - Peirce and Dewey were mathematicians and logicians - over establishing Truth and Facts: That the mind would accept certain things about Reality but not others. James' version of "the Pragmatic Theory of Truth" which differed from Peirce's went like this:

(James) begins with a standard dictionary analysis of truth as agreement with reality.  Accepting this, he warns that pragmatists and intellectualists will disagree over how to interpret the concepts of “agreement” and “reality,” the latter thinking that ideas copy what is fixed and independent of us.  By contrast, he advocates a more dynamic and practical interpretation, a true idea or belief being one we can incorporate into our ways of thinking in such a way that it can be experientially validated.  For James, the “reality” with which truths must agree has three dimensions:  (1) matters of fact, (2) relations of ideas (such as the eternal truths of mathematics), and (3) the entire set of other truths to which we are committed.  To say that our truths must “agree” with such realities pragmatically means that they must lead us to useful consequences.  He is a Fallibilist, seeing all existential truths as, in theory, revisable given new experience...

How would this apply to Carpenter's invoking James to rebuke the current Republican disillusionment? Carpenter tells us:

In brief, authentic pragmatism can't always mean "whatever works." It must be grounded in principles. And not even Herr Hegel (note: never mind him, he's an Idealist) could synthesize Trump's boundlessly unprincipled character with Republican strategists' exultation of others' fundamental principles. These just can't be squared. Trying to square them or defend the attempt is unproductive, which further means pragmatically oriented, Trump-tolerating Republican strategists are, paradoxically, being quite un-Pragmatic.

Contrast what the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy article says to what Carpenter points out: "They must lead us to useful consequences" vs. "the attempt is unproductive".

A real Pragmatist among the Republican ranks would not be trying to twist him/herself into knots defending the indefensible. The Pragmatists would be working on fixing the whole damn Republican Party to ensure this sort of shit - preventing the hater factions from seizing control of the primaries, adding regulatory practices to campaign financing to clamp down on the rampant greed that consumed most of their candidates (and their managers), end the constant lying to themselves and the public by popping that hermetically-sealed media bubble of theirs - never happens again.

But how many Pragmatists are left among the Republican ranks? The Idealists - the Utopian-driven fanatics worshiping at the Altar of St. Ronnie - have done such a masterful job driving out the more moderate and skeptical members of the party - where most of the Pragmatists would reside - over the last twenty-five/thirty years.

This is where -Isms suck: the fighting over ideology that disregard more practical matters at hand. And we as a nation allowed the Idealists of one party - hi, Republicans! - to take control of the car, driving it over that cliff into the ocean all because their -Ism told them so.

As been said before, we will be lucky to live through this...

...

Okay, so I hate all -Isms, what negative things can I say about Pragmatism?

The biggest dissent against it revolves around "What IS Truth" in the first place. The more Progressive/Left philosophers of the 20th Century also attacked Pragmatism because it "fails to offer significant moral and political resistance to the existing set of social and institutional relations. For (Randolph) Bourne and his followers, pragmatism came up short when it came time to articulate new values and new ideals in response to that system. Pragmatism, in its insistence on the practical cash value of ideas, had reduced ideas to mere expediency..."

I think Carpenter and myself would disagree about the "expediency" part (the current Republican dilemma is a clear example), as long as the Pragmatists remained dedicated to the process of modification and problem-solving. As far as "cash value" - that is, the Real-World Experience of the -Ism - being a millstone, I would argue the Left-leaning critics were - like any other adherent to a Utopian ideal - ignoring the practical realities to pursue a potentiality.

Damn. I *am* defending an -Ism here. Quick, slap me with a trout, see if that resets my leanings towards Skepticism!

Ferris Bueller Movie is 30 Years Old This Weekend

Esquire magazine just reminded me Ferris Bueller's Day Off is 30 years old this weekend.

To all my fellow Gen-Xers (those born between 1965 and 1977) lemme just say this:

AHHHHHHHHHH WE'RE OLD WE'RE OLD WHERE THE HELL DID OUR HIGH SCHOOL YEARS OF WACKY HIJINKS GO?!?!?!?!?!

At some point nostalgia gets horrifying.

I can only hope that we're ready now - with our collective disdain for Isms that Ferris taught us - that my generation can become leaders on the global stage and save you all from evil Boomer plans.

At least we know our culture has left a lasting impact on future generations.

Chicka-chicka.

Let Us Rid Ourselves Of These Illusions

This is what I get for reading too many comic books back in the 1980s and 1990s:

From Infinity Gauntlet #5, copied from F-ck Yeah Thanos tumblr

I just like that final paragraph: Let me be rid of all illusions.

I'd like to think I can live with that as part of my moral code, that I will not let myself get deluded by misplaced ideology or twisted perspective of the real world around me.

Thing is, I keep seeing others refusing to give up their illusions, and it gets painful to watch them founder and wallow.

Take, for example, the media elites who keep pining for some Republican Savior to rise from these Beltway streets. Per Anne Laurie at Balloon Juice:

One should never dismiss any possible development in the multi-ring circus of American politics, especially in this particular cycle. And surely every American is entitled to his or her very own political Theory of Everything, whereby the sufficient application of correct thought to the perfect handcrafted artisan unicorn candidate will CHANGE THE CONVERSATION such that everyone lives happily ever after. But the latest media proposals by the usual batch of Media Village Idiots, reliably wrong ‘pundits’, and ambitious careerists gunning for earned media don’t even rise to the dignity of a couple of tinfoil-hatted cranks taking up floor time at local meetings and wall space on public buildings (or Facebook) to promote the Independent Union of Patriotic National Americans for Responsible Freedom…

Another take is from Alexandra Petri with the Washington Post - whose snark is attention-getting, this post about the DC Metro is one of the best satire works I've seen in regular print - who notices that the Republican Party leaders are twisting themselves up into knots trying to avoid saying they'll back Trump:

...But fortunately for senators in tough, competitive seats, there is another option. You don’t have to endorse Trump. You can just support the Nominee of the Party.

These are not the same thing at all! They are quite different. The Nominee is everything Trump isn’t.

Here’s Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) talking about Trump: “I have strong disagreements with Mr. Trump.”

Here’s McCain talking about the Nominee: “The nominee of the party, the party of Ronald Reagan and Teddy Roosevelt, has my support.”

Sen. Kelly Ayotte (R-N.H.) won’t endorse Trump. In February, she said, “There’s no place in our society for racism and bigotry, and I found Mr. Trump’s response to David Duke and the KKK disgusting and offensive.” But she will support the nominee...

It is good that there is this third option. The Nominee sounds wonderful.

He seems to have a strong base of support. Senators who have nothing positive to say about Trump at all speak glowingly of the mysterious Nominee.

Very little is known about him, apart from the fact that he is probably statesmanlike and definitely not embarrassing to have at the top of the ticket, and probably Reagan would have liked to have a beer with him, or something, but what more do you need to know?

You can see it - just like Petri does - between the lines: these are people - politicians, pundits, pollsters - still pining that somehow they can turn this Con Artist Trump into a "respectable" mimic of their One True Reagan, or better still find a "pure" True Conservative (tm) to stop Trump with the purity of Burkean Thought and then crush Hillary driving all Democrats before him while the women lament.

As Anne Laurie notes:

But wherever could they find such a New Hope - a candidate of sterling conservative credentials, telegenic enough for the cruel media spotlight, someone who doesn’t mind risking the considerable chance of ending up as a nation-wide punchline? Cometh the hour, cometh the man...

That's the thing, isn't it? The Republicans and their pundit allies have been looking for this One True Conservative Savior (tm). Where the hell is he?

When this whole 2016 circus started back in 2012 - I am not kidding, the second Karl Rove had a meltdown over Ohio the entire party was planning for this - the buzz among the Republicans was that "we're going to have a strong selection of candidates" for this cycle. But by 2014 the signs were there that whatever bench of talent they had, the GOP really didn't have all that deep or imposing or charismatic a roster. And look what we got.

This year's roster - a group of weak unpopular governors, weak unpopular senators, and how-the-hell-did-they-show-up set of amateurs - was weaker than 2012's, made up of weak unpopular governors and senators and congresspersons and amateurs. And THAT election cycle was weaker than 2008's, made up of weak unpopular governors and senators and congressmen and barely one popular senator in McCain who still blew it on a ramshackle platform blown apart by a collapsing economy blamed in part on Bush the Lesser's poor oversight.

There's been a downward spiral in True Conservative (tm) Heroes to rally to.

What we're getting is this ongoing fantasy, this wish fulfillment, among the Far Right pols and pundits desirous for The Return Of The Reagan Heir: the Prince That Was Promised. We're talking about a set of people pining for the days when it was 1985: when Reagan stomped the hell out of Mondale and his dirty hippie librul army of Electoral College no-shows, Bipartisanship meant Democrats paid for the bar tabs, Capitalism was ascendant, Soviets were getting blown up in Afghanistan, Wall Street was peaking, Grenada was pacified, MTV gave us endless loops of "Money For Nothing", and it was safe for decent honest hard-working folk to openly declare they were proud to be Republicans Americans.

These pundits and pols still don't get it: that was all an illusion.

Even Reagan wasn't really Reagan. For all his "heroics" of tax cuts, union-busting and deregulation, Reagan really raised taxes again when the early cuts in 1981 made things worse, didn't go after the social safety nets like Medicare and Social Security like promised, and eventually played nice with the Soviets on getting nuclear weapon bans in place.

All Reagan really had was a skill set at being charming and congenial and communicative, which created his appeal to the general population. But that didn't make a True Conservative (tm) the way his hagiographers believe to this very day.

When the modern Republican Party is pining for a Savior, they're really pining for a candidate who can be this Passive-Positive person, someone likable and pleasing to the audience. Which was why a lot of pundits kept falling in love with these photogenic types like Marco Rubio or Scott Walker. But that person doesn't exist anymore. And for one very good reason.

The Republican Party doesn't HAVE anyone anymore who is genuinely likable or congenial. The Far Right has driven everyone out who can be open-minded and receptive and appealing on a personal level. They've created an environment within their party ranks that every member HAS to support a dogmatic agenda - restrict or kill a federal government they view as "bad" - that can only be backed by Active-Negative types of dour and sour politicians. That type of agenda can only attract that type of candidate, no matter how hard they try to fake empathy.

Any hope they have of a Republican even pretending to be the same as Reagan - or Eisenhower, or Teddy Roosevelt, or Lincoln - is a fool's hope.

This is it, Republicans. This is it, Bill Kristol and Erick Erickson and David Brooks and others raging against the oncoming storm that is Trump. No more lies, no more illusions. The reason you're getting Trump as your banner-carrier is because all your efforts the last 30 years to build a new Reagan has instead built a toxic stew of racism, sexism, anti-Establishment anarchy, and failure of leadership within your own ranks.

There is no one coming to save you, Conservatives. There is not enough fairy dust to make this wish come true. You as Republicans are utterly screwed, and you made it that way. No excuses.

The best we can hope for now is that there's enough American voters fighting to save themselves at the ballot box able to drive out this toxic Party of John C. Calhoun into the gutters where Eisenhower feared it would go. Get out the vote, America, go vote this November and for the Love of God don't vote Republican, they have neither deserved nor earned our vote for decades now...