Whereof One Can Speak 🇺🇦

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Category Archives: Politics

We’re Screwed: A Periodic Reminder (Part 2)

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Jamelle Bouie of The New York Times compares today to the early 19th century, when America was ruled by the “Slave Power”. It was a crisis then. It’s a crisis now:

The antislavery politicians of the 1840s and 1850s did not speak with a single voice. . . . What tied the antislavery factions of American politics to each other wasn’t a single view of slavery or Black Americans but a shared view of the crisis facing the American republic. That crisis, they said in unison, was the “slave power.”

The “slave power” thesis was the belief that a slaveholding oligarchy ran the United States for its own benefit. It had ruled the nation for decades, went the argument, and now intended to expand slavery across the continent and even further into the North.

The “slave power” thesis was also a claim about the structure of American government itself. As these antislavery politicians saw it, “the real underpinnings of southern power were regional unity, parity in the Senate, and the three-fifths clause of the Constitution,” the historian Leonard L. Richards writes in The Slave Power. Together, this gave the slaveholding oligarchs of the South a virtual lock on much of the federal government, including the Supreme Court. “Between Washington’s election and Lincoln’s,” Richards points out, “nineteen of the thirty-four Supreme Court appointees were slaveholders.”

For antislavery politicians, the counter-majoritarian institutions of the American system enabled a faction that threatened democracy. The question of the “slave power,” then, was ultimately one of self-government. . . . 

You’ve probably guessed, by now, that this is not an idle history lesson. I am thinking about “the slave power” because I am thinking about the ways that narrow, destructive factions can capture the counter-majoritarian institutions of the American system for their own ends. I am thinking of how they can then use the levers of government to impose their vision of society and civil life against the will of the majority. And I am thinking of this in the context of guns, gun violence and the successful movement, thus far, to make the United States an armed society.

Although there has been, in the wake of the atrocities [in Buffalo and Uvalde], the requisite call for new gun control laws, no one believes that Congress will actually do much of anything to address gun violence or reduce the odds of gun massacres. The reason is that the Republican Party does not want to. And with the legislative filibuster still in place (preserved, as it has been for the last year, by at least two Democratic senators), Senate Republicans have all the votes they need to stop a bill — any bill — from passing.

The filibuster, however, is only one part of the larger problem of the capture of America’s political institutions by an unrepresentative minority whose outright refusal to compromise is pushing the entire system to a breaking point.

Large majorities of Americans favor universal background checks, bans on “assault-style” weapons, bans on high-capacity magazines and “red flag” laws that would prevent people who might harm themselves or others from purchasing guns.

But the American political system was not designed to directly represent national majorities. To the extent that it does, it’s via the House of Representatives. The Senate, of course, represents the states. And in the Senate (much to the chagrin of many of the framers), population doesn’t matter — each state gets equal say. Fifty-one lawmakers representing a minority of voters can block 49 lawmakers representing a majority of them (and that’s before, again, we get to the filibuster).

Add the polarization of voters by geography — a rural and exurban Republican Party against an urban and suburban Democratic Party — and the picture goes from bad to perverse. Not only can Republicans, who tend to represent the most sparsely populated states, win a majority of the Senate with far less than a majority of votes nationally, but by using the filibuster a small number of Republican senators representing an even smaller faction of voters can kill legislation supported by most voters and most members of Congress.

The Senate might have been counter-majoritarian by design, but there is a difference between a system that tempers majorities and one that stymies them from any action at all. We have the latter, and like Congress under the failed Articles of Confederation, it makes a mockery of what James Madison called the “republican principle,” which is supposed to enable the majority of the people to defeat the “sinister views” of a minority faction by “regular vote.”

Rather than suppress the “mischiefs of faction,” our system empowers them. Few Americans want the most permissive gun laws on offer. But those who do have captured the Republican Party and used its institutional advantages to both stop gun control and elevate an expansive and idiosyncratic view of gun rights to the level of constitutional law.

The result is a country so saturated in guns that there’s no real hope of going back to the status quo ante. If anything, American gun laws are poised to get even more permissive. If the Supreme Court rules as expected in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen, it will strike down a law that requires a license for carrying a concealed firearm.

Whether or not the public wants a world of ubiquitous firearms, the [reactionary] majority on the court — which Americans have never voted for and which would not exist without the counter-majoritarian institutions that gave D____ T____ the White House and the Republican Party a Senate majority — seems ready to impose one.

Over the years, historians have been divided on the “slave power” thesis. . . . The slaveholding South may not have been as political unified as charged, but the institutions of American democracy were slanted toward slaveholders who really did capture the state for their own ends. As much as possible, they used the power of the federal government to further their interests and stymie opposition, with the help of a like-minded majority on the Supreme Court that did not hesitate to act on their behalf.

What must be understood is that the institutions that enabled this subversion of self-government are still with us, a practically indissoluble part of our constitutional order. To say that it is possible for a narrow faction of ideologues to weaponize the counter-majoritarian features of our system against the “republican principle” is, basically, to describe the current state of our democracy. It is, in other words, to state the crisis.

We’re Screwed: A Periodic Reminder

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With so many Americans willing to vote for today’s radical Republican Party, it’s hard not to conclude this country is over. It’s like we’re up an extremely treacherous creek without a paddle. Jamelle Bouie of The New York Times highlights one reason we may be even more screwed in the future:

For much of the past decade, the Republican Party’s ability to win power in Washington has rested on the counter-majoritarian institutions of American politics. There is no President D____ T____ without the Electoral College [or Pres. George W. Bush in 2000] and Republicans would not have such a firm grip on the United States Senate if not for its unequal representation, which gives as much weight to the sparsely populated states of the Great Plains and the Mountain West as it does to states like New York, Illinois, California and Texas.

The Republican Party, in other words, does not need to win majorities to win control.

One result of this is that Republicans have developed a set of ideological justifications for why it is a good thing that the American political system violates basic principles of political equality, most commonly expressed in the assertion that the United States is “a republic, not a democracy.”

Another result is that Republicans, having embraced counter-majoritarianism as a principle, are now looking for ways to extend it. You see this in the emergence of the lunatic “independent state legislature” doctrine, which would give state legislatures total power to write rules for congressional elections and direct the appointment of presidential electors, unbound by state constitutions and free from the scrutiny of state courts. Under this doctrine, a Republican legislature could — with sufficient pretext (like “voter fraud”) — unilaterally assign the state’s presidential electors to the candidate of its choice, above and beyond the will of the voters.

Some Republicans want to extend the counter-majoritarian principle down to the state level as well. In 2019, the chairman of the Arizona Republican Party, Kelli Ward, floated the idea of an “Electoral College type system” at the state level. More recently, the Republican nominee for governor in Colorado, Greg Lopez, has promised to eliminate “one-person, one-vote” for statewide elections and institute a system where the votes of rural voters are given significantly more weight than those of voters in the state’s cities and metropolitan areas. He outlined his plan at a campaign stop earlier in the week:

“One of the things that I’m going to do, and I’ve already put this plan together, is, as governor, I’m going to introduce a conversation about doing away with the popular vote for statewide elected officials and doing an Electoral College vote for statewide elected officials,” Lopez said. Lopez said his Electoral College plan would weight counties’ votes based on their voter turnout percentage to encourage turnout. “I’ve already got the plan in place,” Lopez said. “The most that any county can get is 11 Electoral College votes. The least that a county can get is three.”

Under this plan, according to the local CBS affiliate, Republicans in the state would have easily won the previous governor’s race, in 2018, despite losing the popular vote by 10 percentage points.

It’s unlikely that this will happen. First, Lopez would have to be elected . . .  Second, he would have to persuade the legislature to go along with the plan. And third, it would have to survive judicial review, specifically the precedent established by the court in the early 1960s, which held that such schemes were unconstitutional. (Although, given this court’s contempt for voting rights and indifference to extreme gerrymandering, I’m not so sure that it would uphold that decision.)

But this proposal isn’t noteworthy because it’s likely to happen; it’s noteworthy because of what it says about the ideological direction of the Republican Party. It’s not just that Republicans have rejected majority rule . . . [It’s that, when they lose,] it’s just time to change the rules.

Who We Are

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Thoughts on who we are as a country — and who we could be instead — from three of us:

From sociologist Kieren Healy:

A first communion inducts a child into one of the sacraments of the Church, having them take a step towards adulthood in expectation of the regular re-enactment of the event throughout the rest of their lives.

Sociologists like me often highlight these rituals of childhood in our writing and teaching. One of the founders of our field, Émile Durkheim, made them the centerpiece of his work. Institutions, he argued, are rituals that bind people to one another as a group. In a ritual, each person finds their place and does their part, and expects everyone else to do the same. Crucially, those involved all see one another participating in the event. By doing so, they enact their collective life in view of one another, demonstrating its reality, expressing its meaning, and feeling its pulse in their veins. That, Durkheim thought, is at root what a society is.

In any given week in America, you can watch as a different ritual of childhood plays itself out. Perhaps it will be in El Paso, at a shopping mall; or in Gilroy, at a food festival; or in Denver, at a school. Having heard gunshots, and been lucky enough to survive, children emerge to be shepherded to safety by their parents, their teachers, or heavily-armed police officers. They are always frightened. Some will be crying. But almost all of them know what is happening to them, and what to do. Mass shootings are by now a standard part of American life. Preparing for them has become a ritual of childhood. It’s as American as Monday Night Football, and very nearly as frequent.

The United States has institutionalized the mass shooting in a way that Durkheim would immediately recognize. As I discovered to my shock when my own children started school in North Carolina some years ago, preparation for a shooting is a part of our children’s lives as soon as they enter kindergarten. The ritual of a Killing Day is known to all adults. It is taught to children first in outline only, and then gradually in more detail as they get older. The lockdown drill is its Mass. The language of “Active shooters”, “Safe corners”, and “Shelter in place” is its liturgy. “Run, Hide, Fight” is its creed. Security consultants and credential-dispensing experts are its clergy.

My son and daughter have been institutionally readied to be shot dead as surely as I, at their age, was readied by my school to receive my first communion. They practice their movements. They are taught how to hold themselves; who to defer to; what to say to their parents; how to hold their hands. The only real difference is that there is a lottery for participation. Most will only prepare. But each week, a chosen few will fully consummate the process, and be killed.

A fundamental lesson of Sociology is that, in the course of making everyday life seem orderly and sensible, arbitrary things are made to seem natural and inevitable. Rituals, especially the rituals of childhood, are a powerful way to naturalize arbitrary things. As a child in Ireland, I thought it natural to take the very body of Christ in the form of a wafer of bread on my tongue. My own boy and girl, in America, think it natural that a school is a place where you must know what to do when someone comes there to kill the children.

Social science also teaches us something about how rituals end, although not enough. The most important step is to kindle a belief that there are other ways to live, other forms that collective life can take. That can be surprisingly hard to do, because a side-effect of ritual life is that participation in it powerfully reinforces its seeming inescapability . . . .

It’s traditional to say that there are “no easy answers”, but this is not really true. Everywhere groups face the problem of holding themselves together. Every society has its enormous complex of institutions and weight of rituals that, through the sheer force of mutual expectation and daily habit, bring that society to life. But not every society has successfully institutionalized the mass shooting. Only one place has done that, deliberately and effectively. The United States has chosen, and continues to choose, to enact ritual compliance to an ideal of freedom in a way that results in a steady flow of blood sacrifice. This ritual of childhood is not a betrayal of “who we are” as a country. It is what America has made of itself . . .

Next, from Paul Waldman of The Washington Post:

. . . This is exactly who we are. We are the place with more guns than people, where tens of thousands are murdered every year, and where arguments over parking spaces end in death. We’re the place where much of the gun legislation that passes ensures that almost anyone can take guns almost anywhere. We’re the place where candidates for office show their cultural bona fides by popping off rounds in campaign ads.

We’re not England or France or Canada or Denmark or Japan or Portugal or any other country. . . . Here in the United States, an entire generation has grown up doing drills in case someone enters their school and tries to kill them. They huddle in closets, barricade doors, hear lectures about what they might throw at an armed killer to slow him down. . . .

The roots of this insanity go back far, but today it is maintained by the party that has leveraged its minority rule to make sure virtually no limits are imposed on guns, which it fetishizes and worships and celebrates. . . .

Just two weeks ago, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals struck down a California law that forbade anyone younger than 21 from buying a semiautomatic rifle. In a 2-to-1 decision, two judges appointed by Trump wrote passionately of the importance of allowing 18-year-olds to buy AR-15s:

America would not exist without the heroism of the young adults who fought and died in our revolutionary army. Today we reaffirm that our Constitution still protects the right that enabled their sacrifice: the right of young adults to keep and bear arms.

. . . Behold the insane logic of the perpetually armed society: We must let everyone have guns because so many people have guns. . . . 

Republicans who keep us living in this nightmare would certainly prefer it if the lies they knowingly tell about guns were true. They’d be happy if bad guys with guns really were stopped by good guys with guns, if more guns did make for less crime, and if all these guns made us the safest society on earth.

But in the end, the fact that all those things are false does not change their minds. Tens of thousands of suicides and homicides committed with guns every year, punctuated by regular massacres of men, women and children are just the price they believe we have to pay for their version of “freedom.”

Even if most of us don’t agree, those who do can leverage their power to keep the slaughter going. And that’s what it will take to change things: power. Acquiring it and being willing to use it.

Change will not come because we looked into our national heart and found goodness lying therein. The heart of America is not one thing. It is sometimes kind and generous and wise, but it is also dark and hateful and murderous. That is who we really are — all of it.

Finally, from Jennifer Rubin, also of the Washington Post:

The Constitution allocates two senators to the most sparsely populated red states (but none to the District of Columbia), and the Senate filibuster provides gun absolutists with a veto over reforms.

If this were only true on guns, one might be able to make an argument in favor of the present system. But the result is the same for a range on matters, including abortion, immigration, climate change and virtually any other mildly controversial topic. The rigid GOP parlays the anti-democratic Senate and filibuster into an iron grip of minority rule. When legislation on nearly every critical issue can be thwarted by an extreme minority, we have “democracy” in name only. . . .

If the Democratic Party — the only party that still supports democratic values and at least tries to solve problems — can muster the discipline and the will, it can run in 2022 and 2024 on ending the stranglehold of unhinged, minority rule. It must electrify its supporters, pledge to tame if not eliminate the filibuster and make clear that, without Democratic victories, we would face an America few would hope to bequeath their children.

The Republican obsession with controlling women, unlimited gun ownership, white grievance and other deadly ideologies must be identified, denounced and defeated. Democrats should be clear about the choices: white nationalism or tolerance; gun massacres or reasonable gun restrictions; control of women’s bodies or respect for women’s autonomy.

Insanity Again

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How long would this list be now? From July 24, 2012:

Insanity

1999 – Columbine – 12 dead, 21 wounded.

2007 – Virginia Tech – 32 dead, 17 wounded.

2008 – Northern Illinois – 5 dead, 21 wounded.

2009 – Fort Hood – 13 dead, 29 wounded.

2009 – Binghamton – 13 dead, 4 wounded.

2011 – Tucson – 6 dead, 14 wounded.

2012 – Tuscaloosa – 18 wounded.

2012 – Aurora – 12 dead, 58 wounded.

“A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”

We don’t have a well-regulated militia. Instead, we have the unregulated sale of dangerous weapons.

Either weapons of war like the AR-15 assault rifle should be illegal or we should all be able to purchase surface-to-air missiles. It’s one way or the other.

Or, as a Republican Supreme Court justice said back when Republicans were  conservatives, not radicals:

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And what normal countries do:

Sexual Morality, Republican Style

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If you’ve avoided the fascist sewer that Republican politics has become, you may not have heard they’re now referring to Democrats as the party of pedophiles and groomers. The principal “basis” for this claim is the existence of sex education in public schools. The “idea” is that after learning about sex or hearing that not all healthy people are heterosexuals, it’s only a matter of time before our children become prey to nasty Democrats or turn all gay or something. In similar fashion, Republican senators tried to paint Biden’s new Supreme Court nominee as “soft” on pedophilia. You can read more about this recent shift in right-wing propaganda here, here, here or here.

I wasn’t going to mention this new development in American politics until I read about an online list of Republicans who either are, or have been accused of being, sexual predators. I don’t know who is maintaining the list, how far back the incidents go, or if the list is completely reliable, but, just as our former president loves to project his own illegal or unethical behavior onto other people (“lock her up”), it shouldn’t be a surprise when the “family values”/”moral majority”/”real Americans” crowd accuses their political opponents of sexual bad behavior.

Item 1 on the list is:

Donald Trump is accused of sexual assault by multiple women (and has admitted doing it). He is accused of raping a 13-year-old girl and bragged of walking in on underage girls at pageant. (Wikipedia).

Item 415 (yes, 415) is:

Man linked to Trump transition charged with transporting child pornography (Washington Post).

Item 828 (that’s right, 828) is:

Tesla rich guy Elon Musk, who recently announced he’s a Republican, was accused of exposing himself to a SpaceX  flight attendant (Business Insider).

This proves nothing, of course, but projection is a well-known psychological phenomenon and, as some clever person once said, “where there’s smoke, there’s something else”.

PS:  And wouldn’t you know? The Houston Chronicle reports today:

Bombshell 400-page report finds Southern Baptist leaders routinely silenced sexual abuse survivors.