Author Archives: Larry Franz

Trusting Hillary

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Last week, Republican Senator Lindsey Graham, while admitting that his own political party has gone “batshit crazy”, referred to Hillary Clinton as “the most dishonest woman in America”. He was joking – kind of (video here). 

This week, former Republican Presidential candidate Mitt Romney, while attacking one of this year’s candidates, said “a person as dishonest and untrustworthy as Hillary Clinton must not become President” (transcript here).

Obviously, characterizing Clinton as dishonest and untrustworthy is standard song and dance for Republican politicians. What’s been surprising lately is how many Democrats are making similar statements. The Democrats in question are generally the ones who support Clinton’s opponent for the Democratic Presidential nomination, Senator Bernie Sanders. 

I bring this up because “73angelD” posted this comment on New York Magazine‘s site yesterday:

73angelD: “There are many middle-aged female Sanders supporters like myself who do not trust Clinton.”

That type of thing from a liberal or progressive voter who should and almost certainly will vote for Clinton in November raises an interesting question. So I asked it:

PersonaObscura [that’s me!]: “I’m honestly confused. What is it that you don’t trust Clinton to do? Do you think she’ll be remarkably less liberal in office than she says she’ll be? Or her voting record in the Senate indicates? She’s always seemed to be more liberal than her husband, but less slippery.”

Which someone else tried to answer: 

Madapalooza: “We don’t trust her irresponsiblity due to the email scandal, her being a Goldwater Girl, her taking hundreds of thousands from the institutions she “claims” she’s going to regulate, withholding the wall street transcripts, the fact that she not once but twice dismissed black protesters who simply asked her to explain her racial remarks on television, her husband sabotaging the voting polls in Massachusetts on super Tuesday, ect, ect…”

Resisting the urge to comment on those particular “offenses” (and the more powerful urge to correct the “ect, ect”), I replied:

PersonaObscura: “You listed things you don’t like about her or her husband, but trust has to do with what you expect her to do as President. Based on everything she’s said and done in her life, and what we’ve gone through as a nation in recent years, it’s reasonable to expect her policies will be to the left of Bill Clinton’s and to the right of what Bernie’s would have been. This will be our choice in November: a relatively liberal Democrat vs. some right-wing goon.”

The discussion probably went on from there (my policy in these matters is to say one or two things and then exit, often pursued by an angry elephant or donkey).

As we traverse the next eight months, we should all keep in mind that casting a ballot in a Presidential election amounts to making a prediction. Who do we predict will have the most success carrying out policies we endorse? We can’t be certain, so we need to make an educated guess.

In Hillary Clinton’s case, it should be obvious to everyone that she will tend to do her job like President Obama has done his. She won’t govern like a democratic socialist or a reactionary Republican. There is no reason to think she has been hiding her real intentions for the past 50 years. Therefore, we can trust her to govern like Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, not like Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush or his feckless son.

She will try to reduce income inequality, create middle class jobs, move us closer to universal healthcare, reform our immigration policies and protect the environment. She will pay attention to science. She will take a particular interest in issues facing women and children. She will be pro-market but not necessarily pro-big business. She will nominate reasonable people to be judges.

Likewise, she will allow the CIA and NSA to stay in business, authorize drone strikes and allow Israel to get away with very bad behavior toward the Palestinians. We can trust her to do these kinds of things, the good and the bad. That’s the kind of trust that’s relevant.

Saying you don’t trust Hillary Clinton is an easy way to criticize her without bothering to explain what you don’t trust her to do. As President, she will often disappoint us, but who knows? She could turn out to be almost as progressive as the Republicans fear. It’s about time they got something right.

The article referred to above is here. The author’s thesis is that some conservatives are voting for Sanders because they don’t like uppity women. I don’t recommend the comments!

PS:  A few words about Hillary Rodham back when she would have been Feeling the Bern:

In her junior year, Rodham became a supporter of the antiwar presidential nomination campaign of Democrat Eugene McCarthy. In early 1968, she was elected president of the Wellesley College Government Association and served through early 1969. Following the assassination of MartinLuther King, Jr., Rodham organized a two-day student strike and worked with Wellesley’s black students to recruit more black students and faculty. In her student government role, she played a role in keeping Wellesley from being embroiled in the student disruptions common to other colleges. A number of her fellow students thought she might some day become the first female President of the United States….

That summer, [after graduation] she worked her way across Alaska, washing dishes in Mount McKinley National Park and sliming salmon in a fish processing cannery in Valdez (which fired her and shut down overnight when she complained about unhealthful conditions). [Wikipedia]

Physics: A Brief Psychological Note

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I brought the remains of a drink home last night. I tossed the ice cubes onto the street to melt.

This morning, the sun was rising and there were beautiful diamonds where the ice cubes had been. The sunlight passing through them made them glow.

Too Ironic to Resist: An “Establishment” Republican on Trump

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It’s a good thing I don’t write this blog in order to make my four readers happy. If I wanted to make you happy, I wouldn’t write the word “Trump” ever again.

So, here in this vale of tears, someone named Peter Wehner published a nicely-written article in the New York Times pointing out that he and his fellow evangelical Christians shouldn’t support Trump. It’s hard to disagree:

This … man humiliated his first wife by conducting a very public affair, chronically bullies and demeans people, and says he has never asked God for forgiveness. His name is emblazoned on a casino that features a strip club; he has discussed anal sex on the air with Howard Stern…He is a narcissist appealing to people whose faith declares that pride goes before a fall.

Mr. Trump’s character is antithetical to many of the qualities evangelicals should prize in a political leader: integrity, compassion and reasoned convictions, wisdom and prudence, trustworthiness, a commitment to the moral good.

When Bill Clinton was president, evangelicals ranked moral probity high on their list of leadership qualities. Supporters of Mr. Trump, a moral degenerate, justify their support by saying we’re electing a president rather than a pastor. Why a significant number of evangelicals are rallying round a man who exposes them as hypocrites is difficult to fathom.

Part of the explanation is that many evangelicals feel increasingly powerless, beaten down, aggrieved and under attack. A sense of ressentiment, or a “narrative of injury,” is leading them to look for scapegoats to explain their growing impotence. People filled with anger and grievances are easily exploited….

Enter Donald Trump, alpha male.

Mr. Trump’s evangelical supporters don’t care about his agenda; they are utterly captivated by his persona. They view him as the strongest, most dominant, most assertive political figure they have ever seen. In an odd bow to Nietzschean ethics, they respect and applaud his Will to Power. And so the man who openly admires tyrants like Vladimir V. Putin and praised the Chinese crackdown in Tiananmen Square because it showed “strength” has become the repository of their hopes.

Set aside the fact that Mr. Trump is a compulsive and unrepentant liar. Set aside, too, that he has demonstrated no ability for statecraft or the actual administration of government and has demonstrated much incompetence at business to boot.

Bracket for now the fact that Mr. Trump has been more erratic, unprincipled and proudly ignorant when it comes to public policy than perhaps any major presidential candidate in American history.

What stuns me is how my fellow evangelicals can rally behind a man whose words and actions are so at odds with the central teachings of our faith. They overlook, rationalize and even delight in Mr. Trump’s obsessive name-calling and Twitter attacks, his threats and acts of intimidation, his vindictiveness and casual cruelty (including mocking the disabled and P.O.W.s), all of which masquerade as strength and toughness. For some evangelicals, Christianity is no longer shaping their politics; with Mr. Trump in view, their faith lies subordinate.

Aside from his misreading of Nietzschean ethics (Nieztsche would presumably regard Trump as a dangerous buffoon, not an Übermensch) and his misguided attack on Planned Parenthood (which I deleted), Mr. Wehner makes a pretty good case. Trump is more antichrist than Christian. 

But getting back to Mr. Wehner. According to the Times, Mr. Wehner, the professed Christian, “served in the last three Republican administrations”.

The last three Republican administrations? That would include Presidents Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush and George W. Bush! Talk about three men who lacked “integrity, compassion and reasoned convictions, wisdom and prudence, trustworthiness [and] a commitment to the moral good”! Who exposed evangelicals as hypocrites and exploited people’s feelings of anger and fear! Who demonstrated a lack of interest and competence! Oh, brother.

Wehner rightly refers to the following as “Trumpism”:

[It’s] a purposeful effort, led by a demagogue, to incite ugly passions, stoke resentments and divisions, and create fear of those who are not like “us”…

Yet it’s the modern Republican Party, which stopped being the Party of Lincoln decades ago, that has succeeded in poisoning our politics with a strategy built on inciting ugly passions, stoking resentments and creating fear. The top Republicans are masters of demagogy and division.

Looking back on his long career serving Republican Presidents, Wehner should know all about making his faith subordinate to his politics. In embracing the Republican Party, he and other professed Christians “are doing incalculable damage to their witness”. Trumpism is Republicanism writ huge.

(While you’re here, check out John Oliver’s campaign to make Trump “Drumpf” again: drumpfinator.com might make you happy.)

Update:  Or if happiness is out of the question, read “Trump Might Not Be a Fascist, But He’s Merrily Leading Us Down That Path”, originally posted here. It’s long, but important, especially the second half or so.

Pro-Market or Pro-Big Business?

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“Donald Trump, Crony Capitalist” is a nice little article by Luigi Zingales, a professor at the University of Chicago’s business school. He analyzes one aspect of Trump’s surprising presidential campaign: the fact that Trump presents himself as a critic of big business, even though he’s a long-standing member of “the pro-business establishment”.

One of the best parts of Zingales’s article is his explanation of the difference between big business and the free market. He says the Republican establishment has spent years obscuring that difference, claiming to be champions of the free market while serving as “big business’s mouthpiece”.

Supporting the market means being in favor of competition and against concentrated economic power. Zingales cites Theodore Roosevelt, a Republican President from a century ago. From Wikipedia:

One of Roosevelt’s first notable acts as president was to deliver a 20,000-word address to Congress asking it to curb the power of large corporations (called “trusts”). He also spoke in support of organized labor to further chagrin big business … For his aggressive use of United States antitrust law, he became known as the “trust-buster”. He brought 40 antitrust suits, and broke up major companies, such as the largest railroad and Standard Oil, the largest oil company.

Being pro-market means you’re against monopolies (in which one company controls a market) and oligopolies (in which a few companies do). It also means you’re in favor of government regulations and policies that help make markets competitive. A fair, properly functioning market requires that the playing field be level, not slanted to the advantage of insiders or the powerful.

Big business, however, is totally in favor of special advantages when it increases profits. As Zingales says, “business executives are only pro-market when they want to enter a new sector”. But:

[Once] they become established in a sector, they favor entry restrictions, excessive licensing, distortive regulation and corporate subsidies. Those policies are pro-business (in the sense that they favor existing businesses), but they are harmful and distort a competitive market economy.

Zingales points out, for example, how rare it is for Republican politicians to call for antitrust enforcement, the prosecution of white-collar criminals and pro-market policies like fostering competition in the market for prescription drugs. That’s because the men who run the Republican Party are in the business of protecting big business, not the market.

Many of his supporters think Trump is fervently pro-market, but:

As a businessman Mr. Trump has a longstanding habit of using his money and power aggressively to obtain special deals from the government… He is, in short, the essence of that commingling of big business and government that goes under the name of crony capitalism.

Anyway, it’s a good little article that’s worth reading even if you’re sick of hearing about the Republican freak show currently touring the country.

Parting thought:

The Bill of Rights would have been better if the Second Amendment, including its call for a properly-regulated militia, had never been written. In its place, we could have had an amendment like this:

A well-regulated Market, being necessary to the prosperity of a free State, the right of the people to enjoy the benefits of fair competition shall not be infringed except to benefit the Nation as a whole.

Meaning Is a Many-Splendored Thing, Part 2

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Roy Scranton’s “We’re Doomed. Now What?” begins with a different premise than Charlie Hueneman’s “Everything Is Meaningless – But That’s Okay” (which I went on about two weeks ago). Scranton thinks that global warming, escalating violence or a combination of the two will one day put our species out of its misery:

Today, as every hour brings new alarms of war and climate disaster, we might wish we could take Nietzsche’s place. He had to cope only with the death of God, after all, while we must come to terms with the death of our world….

We stand today on a precipice of annihilation that Nietzsche could not have even imagined. There is little reason to hope that we’ll be able to slow down global warming before we pass a tipping point….The West Antarctic ice sheet is collapsing, Greenland is melting, permafrost across the world is liquefying, and methane has been detected leaking from sea floors and Siberian craters: it’s probably already too late to stop these feedbacks, which means it’s probably already too late to stop apocalyptic planetary warming. Meanwhile the world slides into hate-filled, bloody havoc, like the last act of a particularly ugly Shakespearean tragedy.

It’s fair to say that without a major technological breakthrough on one hand or the collapse of the carbon-based global economy on the other, the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere will continue to increase. That could have horrific consequences. A “runaway” greenhouse effect may have given Venus its thick atmosphere of carbon dioxide and average surface temperature of 842 degrees.

Scranton implies that we’re doomed because four common responses to the global warming crisis are seriously misguided. He says “denialists” deny the problem exists, “accelerationists” think more technology is the answer, “incrementalists” favor the kind of modest changes already being made, and “activists” argue that “we have to fight, even though we’re sure to lose”. He thinks “we respond according to our prejudices”.

He then calls attention to what could be thought of as a fifth type of response, except that it’s closer to no response at all. Scranton thinks nihilism “defines our current moment”. Too many of us believe that “if all is already lost, nothing matters anyway”. What he apparently has in mind is the point of view sometimes referred to as “existential nihilism”. That’s the idea that life, whether individual lives or human life as a whole, lacks meaning, purpose or value.

What evidence is there for this increasing nihilism? Scranton mentions four television programs (I’ve watched two of them – they’re very good). Maybe more convincingly, he says “you can see it in the rush to war, sectarianism and racial hatred”. There is also the advance of “scientific materialism”, which has been undermining religious beliefs since at least the 17th century.

But war, sectarianism and racial hatred aren’t examples of nihilism. Nobody goes to war because they think everything is meaningless. People don’t divide into sects because they lack purpose. Racists value some people more than others for no good reason. That’s stupid, but not nihilistic. Science conflicts with some religious doctrine, but people who take science seriously aren’t generally amoral. So, putting aside the issue of nihilism for the moment, what does Scranton say we should do?

Oddly, by the end of the article, Scranton has declared himself to be a kind of “activist”. He believes some of us will survive global warming. Our species isn’t due for extinction. Therefore:

…it’s up to us … to secure the future of the human species. We can’t do it by clinging to the progressivist, profit-seeking, technology-can-fix-it ideology of fossil-fueled capitalism. We can’t do it by trying to control the future. We need to learn to let our current civilization die, to accept our mortality and practice humility. We need to work together to transform a global order of meaning focused on accumulation into a new order of meaning that knows the value of limits, transience and restraint.

In other words, we need to find meaning in taking care of the planet, not in the all the stuff we can get from burning carbon. We can’t wait for the global carbon-based economy to collapse. If we want to keep the planet habitable for human beings (a few of us anyway) and other living things, we need to immediately cut back our use of fossil fuels.

I’m sure Scranton would like to explain how we can accomplish this. How will it come to pass that so many people will change their way of looking at the world, of valuing what oil and coal do for us? Global warming isn’t such an obviously imminent crisis that the powerful or the mass of humanity will quickly reorient their thinking. It’s not as if a planet-destroying asteroid is heading our way. Nor are we in danger of running out of fossil fuels in the foreseeable future. There are billions of tons of the stuff just waiting to be extracted.

But all that Scranton offers as a way forward is to cite Nietzsche. The German philosopher set forth a position known as “perspectivism”. It’s not exactly clear what he meant by that (clarity wasn’t one of his strengths), but the general idea is that we each have our own perspective on the world; none of our perspectives give us access to the world as it really is; so the best we can do is view the world from as many points of view as possible. Adopting more and more perspectives can get us closer to the truth, even though we can never attain absolute, completely objective, non-perspectival truth about anything at all.

At least that’s how Scranton interprets Nietzsche. Life may be meaningless. The planet is probably doomed. But human beings have a tremendous capacity to find meaning in all kinds of situations. We need to use that capacity to view the planet’s future from as many perspectives as possible, human and non-human:

We need to learn to see not just with Western eyes but with Islamic eyes and Inuit eyes, not just with human eyes but with golden-cheeked warbler eyes, coho salmon eyes and polar bear eyes…

If we can manage that, difficult as it may be, we may be able to stop the Earth from becoming another Venus.

Perhaps you agree about adopting new perspectives, but I think it’s highly unlikely that the world’s leaders or the mass of humanity will ever stop finding most of life’s meaning in the here and now, based on their own particular points of view. Denialists will continue denying there’s a problem. Technologists will continue looking for technological solutions. Incrementalists will advocate or settle for incremental change. Activists like Scranton will propose new ways of finding meaning, while nihilists won’t think it matters what happens.

My own view is that the human race may get lucky but probably won’t. We should, however, still make intense efforts to stop burning so much carbon, while making life as decent as possible for those of us who are already here, including the fish of the sea, the fowl of the air, and everything that travels or grows upon the earth (except maybe mosquitoes and poison ivy). We have to balance the near future in which life is hard for so many and the more distant future in which life may not be possible at all. We will probably fail, but it’s the right thing to do.